Enlarge / Winding up to catch a ninth (!) generation of Pokémon.
Andrew Cunningham
The Pokémon franchise has been nudging closer and closer to a fully open world since Sword and Shield appeared on the Switch in 2019. Those games and their DLC packs introduced a few dedicated free-range areas where you could roam around mostly at your leisure, but towns and caves and other areas were still strictly linear.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus came even closer. Nearly all of its world map was a free-roaming open area, but the sections were still cordoned off from one another by way of a central hub town. More importantly, progression was still largely linear—the game still introduced you to each area in a set order based on the story quests you had accomplished.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, both coming to the Switch on November 18, finally make the transition to a fully open world. After accomplishing a handful of introductory quests, the vast majority of the world map opens up to you, and you can accomplish most of the game’s quests in whatever order you want.
The result is a game that feels wide-open, welcoming, and ambitious, though the catching and battling mechanics feel like a step back from Arceus in some ways. The main problems are mostly technical—the Switch’s 5-year-old tablet hardware openly struggles to render the Paldea region, and in some ways these problems are even more noticeable and distracting than they were in Arceus.
