Officially released this Friday, November 18, 2022, Pokémon Violet and Pokémon Scarlet are making a lot of noise on social networks. If many players evoke with passion the revival of this franchise which has finally taken the step of the open world, others point the finger at the technical shortcomings of which the game shows. It is the latter who have massively made known their dissatisfaction by visiting the game’s Metacritic page. At the time of this writing, the game obtains a user score of 2.9/10 for nearly 1,700 reviews. The press Metascore has dropped by one point since the tests were put online, dropping from 77% to 76%. For many, releasing a game in this state proves that Pokémon Purple and Pokémon Scarlet were not ready for the holiday season and that Game Freak should have been given time to polish its title. It is true that the studio must be struggling, he who had to release two episodes of Pokémon the same year (one in February, the other in November), knowing that they had to upset the formula. A complicated task for a studio probably exceeded by the magnitude of the task.
It is true that since Pokémon Legends Arceus, we had seen the limits of the Game Freak studio, not necessarily comfortable with such ambitions. The game was semi open world, but for Violet and Ecarlate, the whole playing field is open, causing a number of pretty mind-blowing bugs, when it’s not the frame-rate that is in the straws. Since this weekend, videos relaying bugs that Nintendo is not used to have been making the rounds on social networks, some of them being quite hilarious. If the game was patched on the day of its release, there are still major technical problems which obviously recall what happened with Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3 and Assassin’s Creed Unity.