Aside from its phenomenal shift to a true open world, I’ve had one other major takeaway from my time with Pokémon Scarlet and Violet so far that is impossible to ignore: they are a technical mess. In fact, there really isn’t a moment in these games where I’d say they run well. I'm sad it just feels like the game could have used another year in development to shine. There are plenty of Switch games that are beautiful and run fine on the hardware. It's not a bad game, but it could have been a GREAT game if they'd just spent some more time on optimization and landscape and depth. I'm not far enough in to comment on story. I like all the Pokemon and Character designs, and Pokemon as a franchise proves the basic gameplay is solid. If this is the result of the Open World feature, then I rather wish they hadn't gone this route. I mean... Legend Arceus was also pretty bland and boring with its environments. To me it looks like Game Freak has been literally struggling and spend the vast majority of their time creating and making the Open World work, with too little time left to make it look nice. Jeronan I agree that SV have lot of dissapointing issues (the fact that there isn't even a Battle Tower says a lot) but launch SWSH was also quite bad.

We all know they can do way better than what they give us and launching these latest games with such poor graphics quality and then still having serious framerate issues is inexcusable! No idea how in earth Nintendo approved these games to launch in such a state?!

Nintendo Switch (OLED Model)

It's the same on the Switch, there are plenty of high demanding games on the Switch today that have been properly coded and optimized for the system, who both look and perform much better than any of Game freak's games. TMs aren’t the only thing you can make, and Pokémon’s culinary step forward from Galar’s curries is sandwiches. You can set up a picnic out in the overworld, interact with your Pokémon (including giving them baths), play ball, and make tasty bocadillos in a cute, if awkward, little minigame. You can follow set recipes or try and make some unique flavours. Depending on the ingredients you use to construct your succulent sub, you’ll get different benefits, such as boosting experience for one type of Pokémon, or increasing the drop rate of items from a particular type, and even Tera raid boosts. There are tons of these to experiment with, so even our wonkiest sandwich felt like it helped us fill our bags and our Pokémon up a little bit.

Truth be told, yyyyyup, this is poor game optimisation. The Switch has managed to run stuff like Doom, Wolfenstein, Warframe (even with its "open-world-esque" maps), Breath of the Wild, Bayonetta 3, Xenoblade Chronicles Remastered, 2 and 3, and a long etcetera. Is level scaling the best modern developers can come up with to compensate for what the player might do? I mean, level scaling is a critical flaw of open world games so maybe the genre is to blame. Otherwise, battling and catching Pokémon is no different compared to previous mainline games. Fight your Pokémon in turn-based battles, catch them if you want, etc. In addition, trainer battles are now optional, which works because we usually didn’t want to be distracted from just riding around in the wild — you're able to initiate fights by just talking to the trainers. We’re lamenting the loss of Legends: Arceus’ ability to catch Pokémon by simply throwing Pokéballs at them, but we love the addition of something we touched on earlier: 'Let’s Go'.Can't understand why TPC couldn't fix the biggest issues, Switch hardware maybe part of it, but when Breath of The Wild runs fine, I can't see why they couldn't find a way to fix it. Maybe there is hope a patch of some kind can improve on it, even if it's not the day one patch, but who knows. I enjoyed the changes of Arceus, and I know some folks wish they'd brought more of those mechanics over, but I think part of the point of Arceus is it's a different time when we were first discovering partnership with Pokemon rather than fearing them, and thus things work differently than modern times of Pokemon. I like that it's rather unique. Another great thing about linear RPG's is that you can usually go into an area you aren't ready for, take the risk and if you win the reward will be greater.