2. Pokémon Scarlet, dev. Game Freak
Wait, am I sure about this?
I was not originally to play this game. My feeling about Pokémon has been ambivalence at best for a long time now. I thought Pokémon Sword was extremely boring, and honestly was more more thrilled by Pokémon Moon. Let's Go Eevee was fantastic four years ago, but that almost does not count because it was a remake of Red and Blue. The reviews for the new games, Scarlet and Violet, were also quite poor. On Twitter, these games were receiving Cyberpunk 2077-levels of mockery. You do not need to look hard to find compilation videos of the most hilarious glitches. Really, Pokémon has not felt 100% healthy to me since X and Y on the 3DS almost a decade ago. I skipped the Gen 4 remakes, I skipped the Legends: Arceus game, and was probably going to skip Pokémon Scarlet too until... something happened...
And that something was Fuecoco. Who can say "no" to Fuecoco? It's a little baby gator with a big dumb mouth and a gormless expression indicating no intelligence of any kind. Fuecocos have never had a thought in their lives other than "I will bite you" or "I will give hugs before I bite you". They are wonderful. So Santa Claus brought me Pokémon Scarlet this Christmas because I was a good boy in 2022. Naturally Fuecoco had to be my starter. He is now my perfect first-born. I love my hopeless idiot son.
Fuecoco got me through the door, but if having a cute starter is all a Pokémon game needed, every one of these would be stone-cold classics. Gen 9 has a solid collection of great Pokémon like my chubby whale Clodsire and my hammer death girl Tinkaton. However, so did Gen 8 (I love you, Morepeko). No, something else was working here for me.
It was not even the open world focus this time. Or at least not entirely. Despite the game's reputation, I found that Pokémon Scarlet ran very well. I am not terribly picky about slow-down, and the only glitch I encountered was a single crash. My Switch is never docked anymore, so the handheld experience was more acceptable. Why would I need a turn-based game to run at 60 FPS? Frankly, I'm a bit disappointed, I could have used a laugh.
Still, if the general performance was fine, there were still issues. Scarlet's region, Paldea, is not exactly overflowing with beauty. This game was clearly compromised to fit on the Switch and only a handful of locations actually stand out to me. In addition, the structure is less free than promised. Yeah, you can go anywhere and do anything,, but you're not going to. This is still a stat-heavy RPG, so you're just going to complete the eighteen boss fights (eight gyms, five giant monsters, five Team Star leaders) in the order of their level. No point in skipping straight to the Ice Gym early when Grusha has an unbeatable statistical advantage over your level 6 Fuecoco. It also makes the towns less interesting when they're in no way major landmarks anymore, they lack special events or story moments. The real issue is that Pokémon's battle system feels slow and ancient compared to the attempts at modernity everywhere else. All the vast open adventuring is undercut when every battle has to be this slog of repeated text boxes and frustrating luck-based effects.
What the heck is Pokémon Scarlet doing so high on my list anyway? I had a lot of trouble figuring it out while playing. My argument so far shows why Scarlet should an Honorable Mention and nothing more. Am I sure that this is better than Pentiment?
Well, here's the thing: I beat Pokémon Scarlet and did not want to put it down. I went through all the post-game content I could find: re-beat all the gym leaders, and played two rounds of the bonus tournament arc. I wish they had announced DLC at the Nintendo Direct this past Wednesday so I could be playing more right now. Give me more Paldea!
Pokémon Scarlet feels like a proper adventure in a way the previous games just have not. Even if the open world concepts are undercooked, there is still a grandeur to being here in Paldea. Sword's open world sections were gray foggy emptiness, depressing, almost Stalker-like environment. In Paldea there's a dazzling wonder of just being out in the fields which are teaming with many forms of adorable life. You can march along, riding your living motorcycle, and pass by whole families of Psyducks in the river. Sure, the ecosystems are shallow, the wild Pokémon do not interact with each other, and it's really annoying to be riding along and accidentally touch a tiny nigh-invisible Nymble on the ground and suddenly have to fight an encounter. But... it's Pokémon all around! A splendor of cute little guys in all directions.
What helps too is that I actually came to really like the characters. Many of the side characters and rivals in the past decade have been these awful little brown-nosers who fuse themselves to your hip whether you want them there or not. Hop, leave me the heck alone, you creep me out. Whereas the rivals in Scarlet, other than Nemona, only warm up to you in time as you complete their quests. You're not just handed guys and told they're your best friends, you develop relationships with the rivals over the course of the campaign. You help Arven's dog, you fix Penny's issues with Team Star, and they both prove to be remarkably competent trainers too. The last act of this game sees you and your friends explore this exceptionally creepy deep crater called Area Zero, straight out of the anime Made in Abyss. This time it feels like The Zone intentionally. I was stunned to find I cared about this party of humans around me as much as I cared about the party of monsters. Even Nemona, who is love at first sight with you, has more to her than being too cheery and too supportive. She says she loves battling, she's Pokémon Goku, and she can back up that claim with a solid team. It also helps the story ends on a dramatic and intense final boss. The presentation in that last hour is top-notch.
Finally, Pokémon Scarlet has a ridiculously good soundtrack. Toby Fox helped work on it with GameFreak and the results are jaw-dropping. This is the best soundtrack of the year, maybe the best Pokémon has ever sounded. There are a dozen truly great songs in this score. Area Zero, the gym leader fights, the post-game tournament fights, Cascarrafa Town, Nemona's battle theme, PENNY'S BATTLE THEME, it goes on. It sounds like the Final Fantasy IV battle theme is sampled in the Elite Four music. I'm nerding out so hard about that!
Sure, there's a million more things you could want with Pokémon Scarlet: more interactions with the world, a battle system that does not need to remind you every motherfucking turn that its still raining, better frame rates, whatever. It's always nice to ask for more. But, ultimately, Pokémon Scarlet is the first time since maybe back on the Game Boy that Pokémon has felt like this vast world full of possibility for me. It feels alive again, free from the rigid patterns of structure that had grown stale in the Obama Administration. For the first time in forever, I'm exciting about where this series can go, versus dreading its next release.
Also, you can little picnics with your Pokémon anywhere and that's the best thing ever.
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