Opinion Pieces

Having gone into a generalized look at Scarlet and Violet's ★ Starfall Street ★ story arc and given my thoughts on that in the last part, I’m now moving onto the two most important characters of this path, namely Cassiopeia (Penny) and Clive (Clavell). Cassiopeia serves as the “brains” behind Operation Starfall, while Clive fulfills more of a support and diplomatic role. The player, of course, is expected to be the muscle.

Now, we come to the third and final of the three main story arcs of Scarlet and Violet, ★ Starfall Street ★. In this arc, the player is blackmailed into helping out a mysterious hacker who goes by Cassiopeia into defeating the five Bosses of Team Star in order to disband that organization. Along the way, the player meets up and is helped by the extremely hip and stylish Clive, who is definitely not a disguised Director Clavell.

Pokémon was my queer awakening. I had silly little crushes on male and female characters alike, and I resonated with many of the designs of the series’s more gender nonconforming designs. Pokémon has always had a wink and a nod to queerness: Jessie and James’s genderbending antics, Beauty Nova in X and Y, Blanche from Pokémon GO… the list goes on. But with Scarlet and Violet, queerness shines bright as celestial stars.

It’s time for a deep dive into the second of the three major paths you’re presented with in Scarlet and Violet, the Path of Legends. This path starts out with Arven, who is now all buddy-buddy with you after having been fairly abrasive the last time you saw him, attempting to convince you to help him track down the Herba Mystica, five extremely rare condiments that are said to have magical healing powers beyond the conventional Potions, Pokémon Centers, etc. The catch is that each of these plants is guarded by a Titan Pokémon, and, in order to pick the plant, you need to defeat the Titan.

The story of Scarlet and Violet can be broken into five storylines; the introduction, Victory Road, The Path of Legends, ★ Starfall Street ★, The Way Home, and the post-game. I’ll be going over each of the four major arcs and the post-game in their own articles, to make sure each gets the time and attention it deserves. Today, I want to briefly talk about the introduction, and then take my time discussing my thoughts on the Victory Road storyline.

I realise that so far in this series it probably seems as though I dislike Scarlet and Violet, and that, in general, I have nothing positive to say about those games. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. While I am dubious of the insane release schedule for new Pokémon games, and the subsequent detriment that was caused due to the overambitious goal of creating the first fully open world Pokémon game, there are many redeeming qualities about the games themselves. Let’s start with the basics. I really love a lot of the characters introduced in these games. Standout characters for me are Nemona, Arven, Clavell, Hassel, and Larry, but there are plenty of other characters that I love as well. I could probably write an entire article for each character, just gushing about how much I like them, but I’ll settle for just doing a single article on them all together and just hit the highlights.

Buckle up, folks, because it’s about time for me to address the elephant in the room. In my previous article, I concluded that, given the limited development time, going for the open world gimmick was a detriment, and only ended up contributing to eating up a lot of dev time unnecessarily. So now let’s talk about the release schedule for new core series Pokémon games in more detail, as well as why I feel the release of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet was completely botched as a result of madcap deadlines and an overly zealous release schedule.

In the previous article, I discussed my initial reaction to the whole “open world” gimmick in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. While I understood the developers hopes of bringing a bit of fresh air into what many considered to be a stale franchise, I had plenty of concerns concerns with Pokémon trying to hop aboard this particular train. Now, it's time to talk about how that open world actually ended up in practice.

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have been out for almost nine months now, and, with the imminent release of the first DLC, I figured it was about time for a bit of reflection on the base games themselves.

As you may have heard, several competitors at the recent 2023 Pokémon World Championships were disqualified due to using hacked Pokémon. The logical question to then ask is: why? Much like in regular sports, we see cheating happen among top players who clearly already have the skills required to win - surely they wouldn't need to cheat, right? For Pokémon, though, the cheating is not compensating for lack of skill, but for lack of time, and this is an issue the series has faced for a while.

The recent announcement of the release date for Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl and the upcoming Nintendo Direct has sharpened minds as to the content of these already-familiar games, but any established Pokémon fan will be able to tell you that it's far from an exact science to predict the changes, additions and subtractions of a remake relative to the original titles. Nevertheless, we've taken a stab at predicting a handful of features we'd love to see in the return to Sinnoh.

Earlier this month, John Walker wrote an article for Kotaku entitled “Pokemon Go's Eggs Aren't Lootboxes, They're Fun Presents”. In this article, John in effect tried to convince readers that something that walks like a Psyduck, quacks like a Psyduck, and holds its head in pain like a Psyduck, is in fact not a Psyduck. It didn’t take long until for the article to attract appropriate derision for its arguments, including from gaming luminaries like Jim Sterling. But what really concerns me is that John’s arguments also attracted a large defence force of people who, quite frankly, seemed to take personal offense at the idea that a mechanic they used in a game they enjoyed could possibly be a loot box. So with that in mind, I think it’s time we all had a bit of a chat about Pokémon GO’s various forms of loot boxes, why John’s claim that they're not loot boxes is just flat out wrong, and why these being loot boxes is something we shouldn’t be in denial over.