As you may have noticed from the amount of posting I did, I was a big fan of Pokemon Arceus, despite its imperfections. The game obviously had a lot of rough edges but I really admired the direction the game had gone. The open-world format and the RPG like gameplay elements. It was finally the more modern Pokemon adventure that I was hoping we would get for many years.
It was unusual to see Arceus release on its own without a second game to match with it. I thought this may have just been Nintendo putting more focus on giving players the best all in one experience, but that was wishful thinking! That doesn’t mean the announcement of Pokemon Scarlett and Violet are not exciting pieces of news.
What Do We Know of Pokemon Scarlett and Violet Gameplay?
Very little it seems! We have the reveal trailer which gives away a few nice things about the game. For starters, it looks considerably better than Arceus which was rough around the edges.
The first part of good news comes from the games developer, game freak. The same team that created Arceus. Either Arceus was a tech demo for Scarlett that turned out to be very good so they decided to release it and Scarlett will become an improved version. The alternative is Arceus was a failed idea for the next major release (Scarlett and violet) but they felt there was enough content there to release Arceus anyway.
I feel the former will likely be the case. A lot of effort was put into building the open-world mechanics we saw in Arceus. They needed some further tweaking for sure but it looks like it may have been an early plan for the next pokemon game that deviated too far. They will surely make use of all of the mechanics they built for Arceus…but who knows. We may be just as surprised that the game returns to the old format just as surprised as we were that they changed it for Arceus in the first place.
Pokemon Are Roaming Freely
This is the part that has me feeling the most excited for the next Pokemon game. There are several scenes from the wilderness that have wild Pokemon roaming freely across the land. This is without a doubt the most exciting part. We saw the wild area in the Sword and Shield, which was a lot of fun but not quite as fun as Arceus.
We have to assume that there will be a lot more of the wild area style open-world content in this game. As to the size of this, it is hard to guess but again, the trailer shows us several examples of large open areas. You can see what look like Pokemon centres scattered across these areas which do suggest they are open areas for the player to explore.
We will have to wait until we get some proper gameplay footage to fully confirm or deny whether this game is going to be a new and improved version of Arceus or whether Pokemon is going back to the same old format it has been using for years.
Check out the announcement trailer for yourself to get an idea of whether this is going to be the true evolved form of the next Pokemon title.
