Pokémon Scarlet / Pokémon Violet - DF Tech Review - Incredibly Poor Visuals + Performance

How does the highest grossing franchise on the planet look like a N64 game

It's forgivable to have a game that looks bad but runs great. It's harder to forgive a game that looks great but runs bad. To look bad AND to run bad is as horrible as it is embarrassing.

I'd honestly just prefer Let's Go or Gen 4 remake style graphics than this. Stays true to the original formula while looking great

How does this look worse than sword and shield, this is just embarrassing

7 months on anything major update wise for this game?
I love Nintendo games and love Pokemon but refuse to buy it before its in a playable state and I know GF largely does not care because the game will remain at full price forever as Nintendo games tend to, but if they never patch it to a semi acceptable state this will be the first Pokemon game I actually skip. And its a shame as I hear a lot of good about the game from the Pokemon community but its always "if you ignore the unacceptable performance then......."
If it was an indie game or something but this is the largest franchise in the world. I know my support means very little to them in the grand scheme but im staying firm on it until either a patch that actually fixes it or a Switch 2 comes out and they just lazily port this game over and just boost performance the lazy way by revving the engines. Or I just skip this whole generation for once.

All of that. Another thing that bugged me was the color of the grass in „normal“ terrain. Why did they choose to make it the same unnatural green as playdough?

This seriously looks like an N64 game. How does the Pokemon series not have a high enough budget to make it look better than this?

Pokémon arceus is technically not open world, since there’s loading screens and smaller separate regions, this changes things performance wise (for the better)

I hate outing myself like this butttt im emulating it on pc and it has a solid 30fps with AA enabed and 2k res. Looks so much better

The only talked about the environments . Bad review. The pokemon themselves look great and so do the character models. They actually have texture now

This game visually looks almost identical to sonic 06 sometimes

That’s horrible, especially considering the fact that this is the single most successful franchise in existence

Pikmin 4 makes this game look like a game made by a 14 year old

after playing fenyx immortal rising on the switch and it was fine borderline miracle, played well even and ported by freaking UBISOFT. this is 1000% a dev issue.

some parts of the environments look straight up out of Mario 64

It's really sad that Pokemon is just too big to fail. This game looks dreadful and was a Cyberpunk 2077-level technical failure, yet it still sold millions and reviewed well. It didn't matter when this launched and it won't matter when it comes to pre-orders for the next instalment either

World of Warcraft Vanilla from the year 2004 looks better.

This game seems to both give a damn, and also not give a damn.

EDIT: Arceus flew so that Scarlet/Violet...could be put in a pan and roasted.

This is unacceptable. Also, Nintendo had to approve this being released...unless they dropped that completely and you can release anything within "reason".

If you really want to play these games, buy used! Never buy digital. This way Nintendo and Game Freak will not see a cent for this inexcusable state for a video game.

the fact that tears of the kingdom can run for the most part 30fps throughout the entire game, makes this inexcusable for this game to look this way. they dont even care and fans will repeatedly eat it up. its like Pokémon fans don’t care about anything as long as a new Pokémon game releases

Wow this game actually looks atrocious wtf

i love how the game is so bad that they start reviewing breath of the wild instead

And people will still defend this game 😅

1 year later it still runs horribly

At the risk of beating a dead Horsea, Gamefreak has zero excuses for the games to look and run as bad as they do a year on.

The Switch has first party titles and third party ports in: Mario Odyssey, Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, Borderlands, Witcher 3, Immortals: Fenyx Rising, Monster Hunter Rise, Xenoblade Chronicles, Dragon Quest XI, No Man's Sky, Shin Megami Tensei V etc. all open world games with vastly cleaner visuals and stable performance that blow Scarlet/Violet out of the water and into the stratosphere where they belong.

It's maddening that they've actually made cutbacks to no real avail and are pushing DLC.

I loved these games but I can’t be mad when they get cooked lol

I will say i bought this game bc i wanted to try it and my god is it a fun game but if they would just fix the textures and frame rate it would be so much better

Never supporting another Pokemon game ever. Thankfully I did not buy this garbage.

This game was the last straw for me. I didn’t buy the dlc and I won’t be buying anymore Pokémon games until I see the quality improves

There are PS2 games that look better than this. The fact that SO many people actually defend this.. this is why we continue to get these half hearted excuses for a game. Completely unacceptable for a $60 game developed by a billion dollar company. And then people wonder why Palworld was so celebrated.

Damn

Considering the fact that Game Freak took 20 years to acknowledge the mere existence of a right analog stick, I can conclude that they haven’t updated their Dev Kits since the time they were still competing with the PSP.

Anime graphics and attractive sex dimorphic character designs should be the standard.

Scarlet and Violet barely run, but I still had a lot of fun! Hopefully running them on the eventual Switch 2 will fix the frame rate issues at least.

We grew up in a generation where everything is pixilated and the Pokémon stood like statues in battle and you’re ;$-@)3&3 about visuals! Go buy and Atari if you’re gonna complain about visuals!

It looks bad and performs badly, but it's surprisingly quite fun. Complete open world, no loading into arenas pokemon game.
The vision is great, but the technology held it back.
I hope the switch 2 is backwards compatible and can improve base switch games. This game deserved better.

Sword and shield looked better

There was a public announcement saying there would be improvements. Any chance we can get an update video roasting their effort?

So, fun fact: A lot of the assets used for texturing for Scarlet/Violet are reused from X/Y. Games released *10 years ago*.

This looks like a genuine joke... Community projects look better then this... Community projects looked better then this 10 years ago...

The UI also affects the lighting, the Tera icon in the menu during battle can sometimes cast a shadow lmfao

Scarvio also has a memory leak that never got patched

Technical Masterclass from Gamefreak 😅

first time I returned a pokemon game

this is SHOCKINGLY unfinished. Like holy fuck this is years away from being done

awful graphics; boring, uninspired, lazy and unimaginative animations - especially battling and moves (for things like astonish, your pokemon literally turns around and that’s it!!!); no voice acting; empty, lazy, uninspired, uninteresting, boring and barren open world; poor shaders and textures; game runs at like 20fps normally and like 12fps in busy areas, and 5fps in areas where it REALLY struggles; lazy, repetitive and uninspired design; no animations; no video sequences; no facial animation, expression and features; lazy cuts and blackouts/whiteouts instead of scenes; performance issues; crashes; bugs and game breaking issues.

I just can’t believe it. This is ONE of the biggest and biggest grossing video game series and franchises in history, ever!!

awful graphics; boring, uninspired, lazy and unimaginative animations - especially battling and moves (for things like astonish, your pokemon literally turns around and that’s it!!!); no voice acting; empty, lazy, uninspired, uninteresting, boring and barren open world; poor shaders and textures; game runs at like 20fps normally and like 12fps in busy areas, and 5fps in areas where it REALLY struggles; lazy, repetitive and uninspired design; no animations; no video sequences; no facial animation, expression and features; lazy cuts and blackouts/whiteouts instead of scenes; performance issues; crashes; bugs and game breaking issues.

I just can’t believe it. This is ONE of the biggest and biggest grossing video game series and franchises in history, ever!!

2025 considered getting it now but looks like there's no real fixes so meh

i can handle bad graphics but the low framerate pissing me off