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This thread is as good as any to eject my thoughts into. It'll just be a tl;dr for most people, but it'll feel cathartic to actually get my thoughts out.
I'm so frustrated with Scarlet and Violet. The game is so close to being good from a design perspective (nowhere near technically speaking because it's a fucking buggy mess that needed like an extra year in the oven), and you can see the outline of a really good game, but there's so much wrong shit in the game. The sense of freedom is great and I like that there's three different storylines you can pursue in whatever order you want, but why is the game so allergic to doing things conducive to actual discovery and adventure? There's nothing to find in the world. Nothing I wanted to explore because I saw some landmark out in the distance or some weird phenomena I wanted to check out. There's nothing like PLA's alpha pokemon to be drawn to. They don't even have a way to mark your map aside from one single destination marker that disappears when you arrive; all the stuff you can find is just picking shit off the ground as busy work.
Gym tests are quarter-baked shit things over in 30 seconds. They moved away from PLA's ability to manually initiate all wild encounters, jacked up the number of tiny pokemon that spawn, and the pop-in is so bad that they appear 2 feet in front of you, so moving through the game world is fucking obnoxious because you're tripping over tiny pokemon every two seconds until you unlock the ability to just jump and glide over everything. Towns are empty with nothing to do. There's no interiors to any of the buildings. They introduced a completely worthless currency in LP. It's an in-game day and night cycle with no way to advance it manually, so you just have to wait for like 40 minutes if you want something during a certain time. There's nothing to do in the post-game. I don't feel like I'm hunting anything because spawns are just vomited across flat plains.
I wish it was better.
