Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are BROKEN. What happened? - Tama Hero

If this Byte left you hungry for more, please, enjoy the entrée and feast yourself on this playlist of all my in-depth Pokemon reviews! youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz5XeL444xPATlw8IQd082X… Thanks to Lewtwo for the credits footage!

Something that this game made me realize is that I have a way higher tolerance for graphical and technical issues than I thought. Unless it hurts my eyes, or straight up makes me lose hours of progress, then I usually just can ignore all the issues, or just find them funny. Maybe because I'm used to play games on an underpowered PC.

The random pokeballs embedded in the ground are actually the pokeball of your lead Pokemon. If your lead Pokemon is in a different ball, the balls on the ground will change to that ball. You tend to see them in doorways in the academy, and during the herba mystica scenes.

"Let's look at the credits to get an idea what happened." I'm blaming everything on Ed Sheeran, then.

One little thing that should be pointed out, apparently the glitch on the left side of the thumbnail with the player's arms and legs stretching does not happen in the actual games, it's an emulator exclusive glitch we can fault game freak for lots of things but not for that one 😅

I'm a developer but not a game developer (backend engineer), and I don't know much about how development works within Game Freak, but one thing that stuck out to me is that there are some areas of the game that are incredibly well polished and some that are outright falling apart. The Pokémon look better than ever, all the new texturing on them is gorgeous and the way that lighting interacts with them is also such a step up from previous titles. It's obvious that this is something that must've been part of the plan since development started. But to me the one part of the game that is most broken has to be the real-time Tera Raid Battles. The disparity in quality leads me to suspect that in response to focus group testing, some manager or executive made a late-in-development demand that raids be made real-time, and shuffled the team around to allocate resources to that effort. Now most software devs know that adding resources to a late project doesn't work (read "The Mythical Man Month" if you want to learn more about that), but hypothetically if you consider the idea of a team of programmers trying to jam that feature into the game as fast as possible, a lot of the other problems we see start to make sense. The UI is unfinished, and raids would've probably required a UI programmer to make it work. The game launched with a bug that prevented sleep animations from properly showing up in battle - again, if you consider the hypothetical battle programmer shuffling code around to retrofit real-time into this ancient battle system, that's the kind of regression you can expect to emerge. Pokémon's battle system just isn't designed for real-time and it's so easy for me to imagine the burnt out and sleep deprived programmers who toiled to make it happen within a ridiculous deadline, making expected mistakes along the way. Add on top of that the obvious memory leaks leading to random crashes, it's clear that the haste was a longstanding problem with these games and these games specifically. The classes of bugs are totally unlike the ones we've seen before in Pokémon. I can feel the mismanagement all over these games.

Excellent video! Two things, Tama: 1: This is exactly what I've been saying. The problem is not that with a failure to outsource or complete ineptitude with programming (though Pokémon games have never been spectacular technical feats, they usually are stable and fine). The problem is the fact that Pokémon is not just a game series, but a multimedia franchise. They, as you said, have built this system for themselves of coinciding new games with new anime seasons, new movies, and new TCG releases. They don't have the luxury of delaying their games because of the treadmill they have shackled themselves to. 2: I do want to make a note regarding QA. You pointed out that you could not find QA for gameplay anywhere in the credits. Maybe there was QA and maybe there wasn't. I don't know if it matters. I am reminded of the Game Grumps' story of speaking with a QA developer for another glirchy mess of a game: Sonic Boom. After finishing their pkaythrough of Sonic Boom, they made a joke asserting the game could not have had QA, even though QA Testers were listed in the credits. This led to them being contacted by a QA Tester who saw that video. The Tester explained to them that yes, the glitches and problems of the game WERE well reported by QA, but it made no difference. The higher ups pushed the game out the door and refused to delay the game any further. Due to the aforementioned release cycle treadmill that Pokémon is shackled to, even if there was QA, I think the same thing would have happened. QA can only help insomuch as the devs are willing and able to take time and resources to fix the problems QA finds. I find myself wondering if they knew there wasn't a point to QA and just didn't bother.

I really enjoy when people list actual possible reasons for the games having problems instead of “Gamefreak is so lazy”, “Give it to another company”, “Fans do it better”, etc. Nice video 👀

I work on IT, I'm a senior QA analist (Quality assurance). Literally my job is to work with software in development, look up for bugs, then report those to the developers in order for them to fix em. When things like this happen on this big money things it always amazes me how this could have passed the QA stage. It makes me suspèct that they didnt even test it.

I was really hoping that with the current season of the anime not being focused on any specific region or game, that it would allow the game developers more time to create the next generation of Pokemon and make it as perfect as they possibly can. They could extend the Journeys series for as long as they needed to since there's infinite possibilities to pull from with revisiting previous regions, characters, etc. But I guess that wasn't the case. I don't have much else to add that hasn't been said by everyone else, already. I feel bad for the game devs who aren't given enough time to work on these games. And I have little hope in that ever changing since Pokemon sales have never once slowed down, and I'm sure that Scarlet and Violet having the best selling launch Nintendo has ever had will just put even more pressure on getting future titles out even quicker, no matter the consequences.

Really loved this video, probably my favourite you've posted this year. Was simple with minimal footage, yet deep in terms of the background research.

My entire family and I feel the same way you do about this game: It's really fun, but imagine how much better it would be if the development team had more time before release.

People are acting like this game being broken doesn't hinder the experience in any meaningful capacity, but I think that's absurd. The atmospheric experience of Pokémon Scarlett and Violet is greatly hindered by its technical, graphical and performance hindrances; I have a Switch, yet I'm playing a 2022 AAA game on this console that genuinely looks like a Wii game or a higher-end 3DS game (but even then, many, many 3DS games are beautiful and visually stunning, looking far better than this eyesore) and even then, it can't perform properly. I don't know if GameFreak are funded or rushed poorly, or they just have bad developers. But it's really crazy how Nintendo haven't stepped in to sort this situation out - The Pokémon Company is a corporate mess. Things really need to get polished before they get better. Thank you so much for this great video, Tama.

Finding out people who worked on Persona also worked on Pokemon Scarlet/Violet makes a lot of sense now, seeing as there's a random "Relationship" system with the teachers in the game

I love SV, they're probably one of my favorites on the series, but I also won't pretend the problems don't exist or are easy to overlook. I've been blessed that most of the major issues haven't reared their head for me, though I have noticed the slowdown is exponentially worse in co-op. With the latest patch announcement from Nintendo's official Twitter, the last sentence in the Tweet was "we are listening", a surprisingly humble statement from Nintendo (at least their English-language branch), and I'm hoping the near-universal outcry will allow something to change behind the scenes. I feel and always have felt that Game Freak is one of the best creative teams in the industry, I truly hope that soon they'll get a dev environment that lets them take their ideas to full fruition

Honestly, I wish more people would be as vocal about gameplay features and exploration incentives as they are about graphics.

I honestly really feel for the staff, it is clear that plenty of love/creativity went into the game especially models/design and story but it falls short because the technical problems that hold it back, REALLY hold it back.

I like that literally everyone I've see talk about this game (who's played it) has, like, the exact same opinion of it: "This game is super buggy, but it's fun." (Also, I really like your top. It's very cute.)

Awesome vid as usual. I think your comparison of BDSP to SV in so far as bugs is on point. So many people will talk about BDSP or gen 1 or 2 or even emerald bugs, but those bugs never impact the player on accident. You go out of your way to trigger them for benefits like cloning and stuff. This games framerate constantly tanks and there's a bunch of other problems, that is frankly unusual for a Pokemon game.

I find it really interesting that somebody who's worked on shin megami tensei helped program the battle system in the game, those games and Pokemon are largely some of the best turn based RPGs that are still around, and have perfected that style of combat. Thank you for doing this video