If nothing else, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet certainly feel big. I recently played Scarlet for a little over an hour, dropped in by my home village with a team of Pokémon around level 25 – made up entirely of newcomers like Cetaitan, Wiglett, Farigiraf, Armorage and Bellibolt – and given a choice of three tasks. I could take on a gym battle on the Victory Road story path, battle the titan Pokémon Klawf on the Path of Legends, or take on some Team Star grunts and a boss fight in the Starfall Street path. In the space of an hour I managed to do almost none of that, instead getting distracted, lost, allured and slightly baffled by Pokémon’s first properly open world.
I say first properly open world, but there will be some caveats here. Pokémon Legends: Arceus (that was this year!) was sort of open, more of a Monster Hunter-like game of distinct open areas separated off from one another. Scarlet and Violet are open, it seems, like an Elder Scrolls game is open, with the whole main world seemingly accessible to you more or less from the off, but some loading screens separating you from major cities like Mesagoza, which act as their own discrete areas. Wild Pokémon and trainers’ Pokémon don’t level scale with you, so for the most part I was dashing about squashing Lvl.3 Lechonks, and that adds a curiously old-school RPG vibe to a game that is, otherwise, deeply focused on simplicity and ease of access.
Many friction points of old Pokémon games, or even just quirks that might not have added much friction at all, have been sanded down and removed. The Poké Balls that contain items and have dotted the regions of Pokémon since Red and Blue now have little glowing vertical beacons, making them easily visible from far off – and they seem to be everywhere. Experience Candy, a new item from Sword and Shield earned from Max Raid Battles that you could use to level up your Pokémon gradually, seems to be discoverable in those overworld items, making it more readily available than before. Trainer battles are now entirely optional – you walk up to a character and interact with them if you want to battle, with none triggering automatically on ‘eye contact’ like before. Even the Poké Balls you throw to catch Pokémon do their little three-time-rock at twice the speed, seemingly to make blasting through encounter-battle-catch-fests faster – albeit, in the wake of Arceus’ much more fluid, interruption-free process of just lobbing balls in the overworld, it’s not as fast as it could have been.
Source – eurogamer.net
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