Pokemon Scarlet & Violet's Character Designs Are Giving Me The Heebie Jeebies
Pokemon games have never looked especially good. They’ve often been hampered by lacking hardware and thus rely on art design for the aesthetic to shine through, but even the switch to the Switch hasn’t helped much. Legends: Arceus looks like a PS2 tech demo with its bland environments and lacking textures, but it also pushed the series’ formula forward enough for us to forgive its visual misgivings.
Well, perhaps not enough for me because I still didn’t enjoy it, but for others, it was a breath of fresh air Game Freak should have given us decades ago. Scarlet & Violet is set to continue this evolution, but it doesn’t feel like enough development time has been afforded to help realise its obvious ambition. This is a game with a true open world, multiple storylines, several new mechanics, and who knows what else yet to be revealed. It also looks weird.
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The environments are vast, varied, yet lacking in the usual level of detail - but I’m still ready and willing to explore them. My trepidation sits with the human characters this time around, who exude a level of uncanny realism we’ve not seen from Pokemon before. For decades the games have always replicated the stylings of the anime series, with each new generation bringing an updated approach to graphics that has never once gone outside the box. That all changes with Scarlet & Violet, and it’s giving me flashbacks to cartoons like Code Lyoko.
I don’t think any of the characters' designs look bad or lazy, if anything I’m already taken with quite a few of them. Professors Sada and Turo have me simping, while Mela could breathe new life into rival teams that for so long have existed in the
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