The 10 Worst Things About Pokémon Scarlet and Violet

Just so you all know, I'm aware that you can click the right stick to change the battle camera. But that doesn't solve my problem, it just gives me a super constrained angle. I want to easily see both Pokemon and trainers and move the camera around for different angles sometimes. grumbles about how this wasn't a problem in Legends Arceus

One of the big problems with the map and world design is that there is an unprecedented cut off between towns and wild area. There are no houses or really any buildings to come across in the wild that aren't Pokemon centers. Similarly there are incredibly few people that aren't trainers that you can meet outside of towns.

It’s insane that the gyms don’t scale. I thought it’d do that thing from the anime where gym leaders pick their Pokémon based on your current level

My biggest gripe with the game is when you get out of a battle to immediately get sucked into another one since wild pokemon swarm you while battling.

I played a little bit of the early game (borrowing my brother's game, I'd never buy it myself), and my absolute favorite moment so far is Nemona taking you up the lighthouse to say "golly gee look how beautiful the landscape is!!" while the camera cuts to shots of EXTREMELY low-poly, barely-textured mountains and trees. WHO on the dev team saw that and thought "yep, that looks good"???

As a fellow colour-blind person I really wish the shiny sparkle was still a thing

Getting into a battle you didn’t want to get into by stepping on a small Pokémon. But then you get out of battle and a Pokémon is either right on top of you or charging at you, initiating another battle. Tauros I’m lookin at you.

I wish the towns actually had shops and houses you could go into instead of popup menus. Imagine Kofu's restaurant as a battle restaurant or maybe Tulip runs a beauty parlour you could go to for unique makeup and face paint. I miss even just being able to go into people's houses, clicking on random objects and getting blurbs about how their fridge has a lot of fresh water or something like that.

"The closer you get to the light, the greater your shadow becomes." -that kingdom hearts quote Arlo needed.

Fun fact the game never tells you about: If you click in the right stick during field battles, the camera goes back to the classic "Dynamic" mode! Or, at least, it TRIES to. If you're battling on any sort of hill or near an obstruction it's most likely to not look especially good, and IIRC there are times where clicking in the stick gives you an "error" sound probably meaning it couldn't move the camera there at all... But hey! I guess it's there!

I was really sad that there weren't good tips from talking to people. There are so many pokemon evolutions and abilities that are confusing to figure out. I want someone with a Pawmot that explains "this pokemon evolved after they ran around with me a lot". Or that interacting with a pokemon in a city would add them to your pokedex like you had defeated one.

The level scaling is my biggest issue. How hard would it have been to say “little Timmy has five badges across the three stories, so this gym battle will be level 25ish,” and that would create an incentive to not go to all the titans right away because they increase the difficulty. Without the level scaling, the game does not lend itself well to open world at all.

I miss going into houses, getting stuff from people. It felt kinda world building, and nice to interact with others.

At #7, there technically are side quests, but it’s only inside the academy. Whenever you finish a class with a teacher, they can be found in random areas of the school for you to find, each having a small situation that you get involved in. Someone spying on the math teacher, The language teacher finds an injured Pokémon, and another teacher who doesn’t want people to know their deep secret or it would ruin their image to the students, just to name a few. When you defeat all the gyms, the whole plot line for all of the teachers opens, but you need to finish all of the classes and finish the finals in order to go through each quest line and gain the trust of the teachers. There’s even some that can’t be completed until you beat the game because it’s a late game item you have to find. I was really hoping there would be side quests outside of the school and in the cities, heck, even some within the Team Star camps where the students need some “persuasion” to go back to school, be it a fetch quest, find a item or even a Pokémon they lost, or just a simple Pokémon battle to set them straight. It really makes me miss Legends Arceus in that way.

I’m color blind and it’s really funny thinking over my time playing the last two Pokémon games just how many shinies I probably missed

One thing I hated was since so many Pokémon are so tiny, I constantly ran into unwanted wild battles, especially when riding Koraidon.

I feel like you could do a full "worst things" video on the online raids alone. Bosses healing themselves because you did more damage than the system is set to register, taking over a minute to try and join a raid only to have it say you can't join, but it doesn't give you the option t refresh your raids, the weird battle system randomly forcing you to stand there as you miss multiple turns, numerous visual glitches, the timer still ticking down while the game displays messages and shows various scenes (like, even when it says "You are almost out of time", it's still ticking down), ect.

To add to the map woes, you can't set a waypoint on the most zoomed out map. You have to go one level deeper to set a waypoint, but when you zoom back in after moving the cursor it just brings you back to where you were before you zoomed out.

I wish the physical attack moves had the pokemon actually lunge at and hit the opponent like in Arceus…

I really wish that gyms scaled to the number of badges you have since you can do them in any order. It would also be nice if after you beat all the gyms you could go back and choose which badge level you want to challenge them at to fight them again. Rom hacks have been doing that for years and would be pretty easy to implement some sort of scaling system.