7.5/10 – 26 hours
Addendum 2026:
Don’t think this game is as refreshing now, just due to the passage of time. Revisited it after the Switch 2 Upgrade came out and tried the DLC which was fun, but the game is still lazy in so many aspects.
Review as written on 11/27/2022
It deserves to be called out. it deserves criticism. but it does not deserve hate. Even with its issues, this is an extremely refreshing and enjoyable entry in the long running series. The most fun I’ve had with Pokemon in YEARS.
Yes, I’m a huge Pokemon fan, and its easy for me to be lenient with the games due to this, but I still don’t let bad game design slide. My expectations remained low for the whole teasing cycle for this game, extremely skeptical that this game was coming the same year as Legends Arceus, which was already good. So I was afraid that SV would be the place where they would skimp.
Which is half true.
I’ll address the stinky dookie in the room. This game, as of the time of this review, runs like absolute dogshit. It is inexcusable that Pokemon, the single highest grossing media in the world, produces games that look and run like Destiny 2 on your school laptop. I’ve never seen anything so poorly optimized, and I am usually VERY forgiving when it comes to choppiness, so long as it does not persist or ruin gameplay. This game does those things, unfortunately. Battles suffer from this especially, as commands and animations take quite a while to be processed and executed, like baby’s first Python game. Any sort of weather or minor computational load makes the game grind to a halt, and many Pokemon spawn inside floors or walls.
Putting this aside, there really is a lot to love. When the game wasn’t breaking, I found myself more engaged in my journey in Paldea than any other Pokemon adventure in recent memory. The world is alive, chock full of Pokemon, landscapes to explore, and items to find. Movement and exploration are, to be honest, better than top tier games like Xenoblade. There’s more to find, and the movement is much better. Pokemon riding has been PERFECTED; It’s so easy, and makes every corner of the map reachable. Except when you softlock by landing in a weird way.
Each mon gets a new coat of paint via new textures and animations, and many old mons like Girafarig and Bisharp get cool new evolutions. The new mons in general are high quality, and all have a cool gimmick or just a plain good design, my favorites are Kingambit, Scovillain, Clodsire, Baxcalibur, Skeledirge, Tinkaton, and the paradox mons.
Those paradox mons are a product of one of the coolest ideas Game Freak have had in AGES! What starts out as a normal looking journey blossoms into a deep dive into the history of Paldea and the characters, all of which are a huge step up from recent blunders seen in Gens 6 and 8. Area Zero is awesome as well as the story that takes place there, and the journey leading up is fun as you unlock more movement for your legendary and grow with your Pokemon. Accompanied with wonderful battle and ambient themes, this is the quintessential adventure.
The biggest gameplay flaw outside the graphics, however, is even more glaring. The game lets you tackle each storyline in any order, but does not bother to scale the levels of the battles. You will either steamroll a fight designed for the start of the game, or get ass blasted by a late game battle. How does this happen? Did nobody at Game Freak think about this??
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