Even by Nintendo standards, Pokemon has been glacially slow to change. The series has long been iterative, and the community has certainly taken notice. This year’s Pokemon Legends: Arceus showed a faint idea of what a bold reinvention of the series would look like. Now Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, touted by Nintendo as the “first open-world RPGs in the Pokemon series,” raise the question: Are these going to be the main series games to follow Arceus’ blueprint? The answer is mostly no, but Scarlet and Violet still represent the largest break in the main series we’ve ever seen.
The open-world approach really is impressive in a Pokemon game, especially one as dense with monsters as this one. During a recent opportunity to go hands-on with the games, the Pokemon were everywhere, around every corner and roaming freely around the new Paldea region. While setting my sights on an objective I would practically trip over the smaller creatures, initiating a battle accidentally because I happened to kick a stray Smolive. And the world feels open in the truest sense. I had a few objectives in mind for the slice of the map I was allowed to explore, and a limited amount of time to do it, but by all appearances you really can go any direction you’d like. Gone are the narrow routes of past Pokemon games, replaced with Sword and Shield’s Wild Areas but applied worldwide.
The expansive world means that some major changes have been made to battling itself, and in total, these amount to a deemphasized approach to combat on the whole. Rival trainers will no longer stop you in your tracks to initiate a battle, presumably because that mechanic doesn’t work in an open world where you could just go around them anyway. Instead, you can see if an NPC is interested in battling, and then you choose whether to initiate a fight. Similarly, while running into Pokemon starts a traditional battle, you can also just release your own Pokemon to wander the world beside you, and as they follow you around they’ll independently pick fights with wild Pokemon. These auto-battles resolve in seconds, passively, earning them XP in the process. Nintendo was sure to emphasize that this is less XP than they’d earn from a traditional battle, so as to not break the game balance, but it’s a welcome addition if you want the freedom to explore the world without constantly breaking your concentration for a random battle.