Pokemon Scarlet & Violet's Indigo Disk DLC Takes Flight, And Cranks Up The Difficulty With Double Battles

gamespot.com:

The second half of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's expansion DLC takes you to a high-tech academy with some of the toughest opponents yet.

By Steve Watts on

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet introduced some of the most radical changes to the mainline Pokemon formula in years, most notably with a wide-open world to explore and free-roaming Pokemon to capture. For the first of its two-part expansion, The Teal Mask, you ventured away from the massive landmass of Paldea and into a new, self-contained biome--a sort of miniaturized version of the open world. Based on a brief hands-on, the second part, called The Indigo Disk, seems to echo this approach, albeit with more challenge for experienced Pokemon masters.

The Teal Mask introduced us to the land of Kitakami during its Festival of Masks, where we uncovered a long-buried secret about its culture while befriending two of the locals, Carmine and Kieran. Though it wrapped up its own Kitakami story, it also ended on a cliffhanger for the second half of the expansion to pick up. In Indigo Disk, you're a visiting student at Blueberry Academy, where Carmine attends school.

Blueberry Academy is a high-tech, expensive-looking place attended by the best and brightest trainers, and its major feature is a massive terrarium at its center. This is essentially a wild area with free-roaming Pokemon, but it's notably denser than the open world found in Paldea. To capture the variety of biomes, the terrarium is separated into quadrants with different environment types, like snow or canyons. These quadrants are separated by glowing gates that look like Mario Kart's Rainbow Road.

This means that if you're still on your quest to catch 'em all, you can easily explore a wide variety of environments and their