Playing through the new Pokemon Violet (I didn't pay for it) and it's one of the most back and forth games in terms of opinion I've had of a game. I think in a lot of ways, it's doing stuff way better than Sword/Shield and Arceus. The general story/open world stuff feels better here and could be decent. It's not an amazing open world setup, but its fundamentally fine.
On the other hand it has way more consistently bad performance than either of them. This is embarrassing even for a series known for cutting corners. Visually it's a mess, filled with lots of pop in, or bad framerate, and things like NPC's getting choppy animation if they are more than 30 feet away from you which looks jarring in certain scenes that happen. They also cut character customization in half practically with less hair and makeup stuff and then outright removed jackets, shirts, and pants from the game, because you are forced to wear 1 of 4 school uniforms, all ugly. You can change socks, shoes, gloves, hats, etc, but it's all going to clash with the uniforms for the most part. So if you thought it would be similar to SW/SH, that's not happening unless they are planning to bring that back with DLC or the expansion, which is very likely. They did something like that for the Sword/Shield expansion if I remember right, adding some customization options to the game that should've been in the main release.
And from what I'm reading, they screwed up the "choose your own path" setup, where they wanted you to more generally explore things sorta how you want, it's a big open world setup handled in essentially a "donut" shaped map, and you are given a choice of direction from the start to handle it how you want. The problem is, if you take one path, focus on stuff for awhile, get really leveled and then go back to the other path you could've gone on, everything is still low leveled, even the gyms and other missions you are supposed to do, making the fights super easy, no scaling. So I think I'm going to forced to essentially go back and forth across the map to keep myself overleveling an area, which funny enough runs counter to the games entire main plotline.
It's all a problem of them cutting corners and rushing these games out. Both Arceus and SW/SH had their own issues that stemmed from this. This game needed at minimum another full year of development to properly flesh the game, get it running right, add more depth and options and to properly realize this game. I'm just glad I didn't pay for it as I'm borrowing it from a family member when they aren't playing, because I knew this would happen. I'd get a Pokemon game that I would be able to functionally enjoy as a Pokemon game, but get annoyed at everything that is either jank or missing.
So frustrating because I keep wanting to love Pokemon again, but Let's Go had the motion control and capture annoyances , Sword/Shield suffered from a lot of problems, Arceus was more fun for me, but had its own issues, and now all the issues with this one. It's super annoying for a series that could have all the budget and development time it wants, but will just never get that, so instead we get rushed developments and cut corners.
