“These are games that anyone that has ever considered themselves a Pokemon fan deserves to play; but not today, and not in this state. One can only hope that a day will come when that recommendation can come easily; I’d like nothing more than to be able to do so.”
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When I first reviewed Pokemon Scarlet and Violet in 2022, I was equal parts heartbroken and enamored; ever since, I’ve maintained that potentially the best game in the entire series was waiting in there somewhere, even while the inexcusable technical aspects of the game on the original Nintendo Switch compounded with bugs to deliver perhaps the most embarrassing AAA release of all time. Yet even with that embarrassment I dared to hope that some day there could be a version of those same titles that I could well and truly recommend.
There’s no point in rehashing what Pokemon Scarlet and Violet did for the series – I already reviewed the games as they were 3 years ago, and what the new Nintendo Switch 2 versions of the game deliver doesn’t drastically change any individual piece of the puzzle outside of the presentation and performance. If you were like me, you always saw what these games could have been with some extra polish, and perhaps some stronger hardware. They were always ambitious, and it was that same ambition that kept me playing even through the DLCs. What Switch 2 does for the games is what you would expect from a generational upgrade; gone is the 720p, usually around 20 FPS in handheld mode. Players can now expect 1080p with a (mostly) stable 60FPS. Some textures have been slightly improved; draw distance tweaked. Pokemon spawn more plentifully, and load times are drastically improved across the board.
In many ways, I expected my takeaway from the inevitable performance boost of the games running on stronger hardware to be considerably more mired. I never expected a framerate boost outside of a more steady 30FPS; at most I’d hope for the docked mode resolution to be represented in handheld mode. I didn’t expect any core gameplay changes, nor any deliberate boosts to the game while the system was docked. I tried to keep my expectations calibrated, knowing that the same company that ultimately allowed the original state of the game to be released would be calling the shots on what sort of upgrades we might expect.
If you own a Nintendo Switch 2 and a copy of Pokemon Scarlet or Violet, this update is nothing less than transformative. You can, and we perhaps should, still criticize the state of the game on the original Nintendo Switch. Everything I said about the original release, with the exception of several years of bug fixes, remain. The games still look and run terribly on original hardware; even with the Switch 2 update, I hesitate to call the games good looking. Outside of now warranted praise for how clean the image quality looks in both docked and handheld play, it’s still the same game underneath that was riddled with compromises to even attempt to render on the original Switch. That original launch will always remain, and nothing about this release fixes what players have already had access to.
That all being said – just as I said 3 years ago, there was potential for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet to be the best games in the series. While I wish it could’ve come sooner, I won’t hesitate to sing the game’s praises, now that there’s a version of them that I can actively recommend. If you own a Nintendo Switch 2, forget Mario Kart: World; Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are the true killer app for Nintendo’s shiny new system. Whether you’ve been waiting for such a day to start your adventure in Paldea, or to return to it, I couldn’t be happier to see the games finally reach their true potential.
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