Gamefreak pulls a dud?

 Mistakes were made

There is a certain breed of game developer out there that is condemned to make nothing but the exact same game over and over for years on end. This is the same sort of developer that will bleed and grow new employees over the space of the surrounding twenty or so years, only to stagnate as the years go by and their jobs become a repetitive task over and over. Yes, you can change the world, research new cultures to base the art off, smack into your head over and over that this time you're doing something new and interesting, but if it's going into the exact same sort of game that you were making last year, there's no real way that your end product isn't going to progressively grow worse and worse. It's fatigue, wear and tear, and artistic stagnation all rolled up in one, bound by the purse strings of corporate greed. And that is the hell that Game Freak have been in for the longest time.

Under the Pokémon Company, Game Freak have been almost single-handily tasked with ensuring the world has a Pokemon game to play almost every year since the franchise launched; keeping the property fresh in the minds of all comers as the primary source of enjoying the Pokemon world. Card collecting comes and goes in popularity, the TV show has to contend with viewership seasons, the video games are the one constant which can ensure the franchise is never far from people's minds. But as video games become bigger and more involved productions, it seems the workload of Game Freak has only increased upon itself, to the point where in this year alone Game Freak were expected to release and maintain two high quality Pokemon games of significantly different style at the beginning and end of this year.

Now we know that Legends: Arceus has actually been worked on in the background for quite some time before release and Game Freak have proven themselves to be a big enough company to create more than one project at the same time; but that doesn't mean the toil of developing two independent video games simultaneously whilst committing to an asinine bi-yearly schedule isn't going to come with short comings. Unless Game Freak have the money to create an entirely independent studio under them, which they haven't so far so I can only assume they don't have that sort of money, these development cycles are going to start feeding into one another. That's just the cost of ever increasing expectation in a market that is only becoming more complex and expectant.

Of course, this is just me explaining the raw facts of the situation. I'm not here making excuses for why it is that Game Freak are incapable of making a brilliant genre-defining Pokémon game once again.  That's for their main marketing team to brush off with a smile whilst assuring everyone that Game Freak are doing just as fine as they always were. Nor is this me trying to make excuses for the increadibly pitiful way in which Scarlett and Violet launched; to the point where many feel like they're playing the early access to a title at least six months away from a 1.0 launch. There really is no excuse for charging so much for a product like that and you lose the sympathy of me when you do regardless of the very real complications that are going to come in the way of delivering.

Oh and the game crashes. It breaks down more than a Vauxhall. Or a Tesla when you aren't in the country of the companies origin. Pokemon Scarlett and Violett sees more crashes to the home screen then any other first party game allowed on the Switch ecosystem, and if Gamefreak were literally any other company (other than Nintendo themselves, obviously) this game would never have been greenlit to be sold on their storefront. (Oh wait... unless it was an overly ambitious port of a game far too big to fit on the console. Nintendo seem to have total QA blindness in that department.) But the current state of gaming means that most just write that off as 'launch pains' destined to be ironed out within a matter of weeks. That's just the price of paying full price for an early adoption! As long as that is the extent of the issues of course...

But it isn't. How could it be? There's also just general visual bugs and oddities within the context of the world itself. Not least of all the ugly character models that seem strangely mismatched for their roles. Yes, I understand that the Academy central to the narrative of Scarlett and Violet is open to all ages, so it makes sense for there to be adult students, but horrible string monsters? Are they allowed to join the Pokemon academy too? The past few days have been filled with example after example of just ill-fitting characters in odd places. And more than that, some of the actually designed character's look overdesigned and messy; as though the character artists were still on their drafts when the concepts were finalised and modelled. 

Things are so bad that Digital Foundry issued a veritable diss-article on the game. I typically see Digital Foundry as a very mild mannered outlet, more occupied with nit-picking the finer details of graphical settings only relevant to people entire tax brackets above myself; but for Scarlett and Violett they amassed their darkest energies. They slammed the bugs, the lack of shadows, the low quality environment assets and even the 'crude' artwork. And when you see some of the side-by-sides between this game and what the spin-off 'Legends Arceus' did, the comparisons are stark. And supremely ugly, incidentally. To quote their wrap-up: "Embarrassing artwork, terrible draw distance, poor performance, mediocre image quality, and a litany of bugs plague this pair of very troubled games. Pokémon fans deserve better.”

Which leaves us at the question; is the Pokemon franchise too much for Gamefreak to handle, practically by themselves at this point? In this age of ultimatums, the calls are already going out for Gamefreak to be sacked from Pokemon entirely, but I think that's a little bit overly-vitriolic at this stage. I think there's still a charm to modern Pokemon, but it's lacking the scale to really evolve in any significant way thanks to the very tight grip of the franchise holders. Arceus made an interesting step, and SV at least attempted to do something different, but without the time and personnel to realise these dreams, the Pokemon franchise is only going to end up seeming more and more dated with every release. Which will incidentally make every game seem more and more overrpiced. There is value lost with every underwhelming entry; and the second you fool yourself into thinking your brand is too ubiquitous to sag, is the moment the wolves come to tear your pride apart.