Pokemon Scarlet & Violet’s performance is truly awful – but if it’s really fun, how much does it matter?

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are here, which meant that yesterday the internet was abuzz with critics, media, and influencers delivering their verdict on what is arguably one of the most ambitious and different mainline Pokemon games of all time. The verdict was positive, but also surprisingly mixed.

As it stands now, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet will be some of the lowest-scoring core Pokemon titles in franchise history. This Metascore of 77 isn’t exactly bad, but the fact that it came in lower than other equivalent Pokemon games caught me off guard, as I clarified in my This caught me off guard, as I gave a 4-star review on VG247 it. he basically calls it the best joint Pokemon game of the last 20 years, sitting next to Legends Arceus from earlier this year as a breath of fresh air that challenges the franchise’s status quo.

But there is an elephant (Donphan?) in the room. That, as I said in my review, is performance. Guys, it’s bad. It’s probably the worst performing triple A big budget game I’ve ever seen. And it’s even worse when you consider that it comes from literally one of the biggest franchises on the planet, a brand so powerful there’s no question more resources could be thrown at the problem.

Also probably made worse by the fact that earlier this year, Nintendo also released Xenoblade Chronicles 3, a truly beautiful Switch-based adventure that seems to stretch the hardware to mind-blowing levels. In some ways, Pokemon not only performs worse than Xenoblade 3, it also looks worse. It is the worst of both worlds. It’s honestly quite shocking.

But… man, how much does it matter? For me, it depends. I found a lot of visual off-putting in Pokemon Violet, which was one of two I tried. NPCs in the background were routinely animating at 5 frames per second, the popup was liberal (although, it should be noted, not as liberal as it was in Sonic Frontiers, even on a PC with a $1500 graphics card and 64gb of memory), and frame drops would occur semi-regularly. The battle cam was jumbled and cut off within the world, a world that, to be honest, has a lot of visual flair but also struggles in terms of detail.

But… none of it was technical. The game didn’t crash, my experience wasn’t massively tarnished. I got kicked out of it from time to time, but more importantly, this new take on Pokémon is powerful enough that I’m willing to forgive a lot of it and move on. There are types of performance issues that affect the way a game plays or make it less playable. But in my experience with Violet, which was certainly on a newer OLED model Switch, I found none of those.

The upshot for me was that Violet was never going to be a ‘perfect score’ game, but I wasn’t about to pull the plug on a game I enjoyed so much because of glitches that amounted to an ignorable level of ugliness… but this is just me. . There’s no right or wrong answer here – it’s deeply, deeply subjective. And I certainly don’t have the high spirits to be willing to ignore these issues and enjoy the game for what it is. Nor is anyone who does the opposite, choosing to omit it out of ugliness.

But it brings to mind a question and a debate: where do you draw the line? For you personally, how bad does a good game have to be in terms of its technical execution for those issues to outweigh whatever good things the game has and make it a no-go for you? I wonder what is the average between people.

Game development is always a matter of give and take, of balance: a game that really does everything perfectly is very rare. What level of balance, or lack thereof, is unacceptable? It’s probably a topic in gaming that deserves more discussion.