Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Pokemon Scarlet/Violet's Launch Controversy

For a modern family-friendly game like Pokemon Scarlet/Violet on Switch, a game being plagued with bugs and technical issues including inappropriate looking ones is unacceptable. As the latest game in the main series, it has tons of ambitious features like sending out your Pokemon to attack whatever wild Pokemon in range without needing to encounter one yourself, making things look real-time as opposed to traditional turn-based battle, having your own Pokemon to follow you in your adventure, organizing a picnic, riding the extraordinary Pokemon like Miraidon for instance and the presentation of Pokemon battle being more modern than before. There's no screen transition effect like the previous Pokemon games used to have when encountering a wild Pokemon or challenging a trainer/gym leader for instance but I don't know if that effect still exists or not in Pokemon Scarlet/Violet. Unfortunately, that kind of ambition for bringing Pokemon to later generation had already posed a bigger game development challenge for Game Freak.

Game Freak and Nintendo were already aware of the situation and looking forward to fix the bugs and technical issues in the game via future patches while adding additional features. Despite the game's messy launch, the amount of copies sold was ridiculously huge. Certain fans already demanded a refund because of such technical issues. The issues ranged from low-res textures, plagued graphical details, frame rate drops in certain areas, invisible objects, character bone motions looking awkward and one Pokemon that appears and clips through a character on a relative spot it's not supposed to land on.

In my opinion, there's no excuse for a modern family-friendly game on Nintendo consoles with 3D graphics to be plagued with bugs and technical issues as those can ruin the fun. Since the serious mistake from Game Freak, Nintendo and Pokemon Company occurred and Tommy of Intellivision had an insulting remark on Switch on the forum at the time, his shills being proud of this mistake happening can essentially mean that fans of Nintendo consoles and games including Pokemon franchise were more displeased over that mistake than they were over the previous controversies Nintendo caused.