I hope it's easier to discuss the merits of the region and game design
I’ll mention this much, much later in my post, but I think Paldea has a lot going both in its favor and against it. There are merits… right?
That’s just it, though- what merits? Sure, the game plays noticeably better, and the update itself is free, so that’s good, but you’re still going to be paying for a $450 console plus another $10 to $70 depending on if you the consumer waited until 2025 to finally pick up a Paldean Pokémon game. The reason I’ve seen a lot of people, myself included, are disappointed with this update isn’t because of the performance but because this doesn’t seem to fix any of the games fundamental issues. You mentioned the “merits of the region”. What merits? If you’re like me and you tend to be critical towards open world games, Paldea is already going to be a big turn-off, but even by the standards of open world, nonlinear games that are on the original Switch, Scarlet & Violet are far from impressive in that particular context, to say nothing of true 9th Gen games that the Switch 2 may or may not even be able to run.
In fact, I’ll say this in Scarlet & Violet’s defense. I think the games being as empty as they felt in terms of landmarks and the design of the game world actually played to its favor. Because I can tell you right now, if there were actual landmarks and detailed environments and whatever else you can think of on the 2022 build of these games, they would have run and performed even worse than they already did on native hardware.
(Seriously though on my end the prospects for playing SV one day have moved from "absolutely not outside of a deep discount that'll probably never happen" to "maybe". Dare I say the first kernels of excitement for Gen 10 are materializing in my soul?)
Maybe it’s my fault for getting my hopes up that Patch 4.0.0 was going to also have some extra content (which could technically still happen tomorrow but, like, we all know that’s not happening), but if you weren’t a fan of the games before, I don’t think what we’ve been shown is going to change your mind. Paldea just doesn’t offer enough from a fundamental standpoint to justify the 2022 build running as poorly as it has.
Something else I will give Scarlet & Violet in response to some of the other criticisms I’ve heard and updated sales data for the games themselves. What Paldea was going for on paper, what these games represent compared to the Sword & Shield era, and the growing casual side of the audience being introduced to Pokémon through the merchandise and everything else… that growing player-base dwarfs the “I hate modern Pokémon” crowd by an absolutely massive margin, and Scarlet & Violet even in it’s rushed, unoptimized base form, still did enough recently to pass Sword & Shield in overall game sales. That should tell you something. In fact, this is the first time in Pokémon’s history that the second generation of a specific console (2, 5, 7, and 9) has outsold the first generation for that same platform (1, 4, 6, and 8- the GBA only had 3 and that’s it). This would not have happened if Paldea didn’t at least offer some form of appeal for both older and newer fans, even if I somewhat sarcastically joke that Paldea didn’t have any merits or good game design.
Gee, it’s a miracle what happens when Game Freak doesn’t try and work on literally nine different games in a three year span huh
