more thoughts on Pokémon Violet

  1. Arven, I’m sorry I ever slandered you. I love you and I love your big dog and I don’t care one single whit about gym badges, I’ll take your handmade ones over those any day, get rekt Nemona. … seriously, as soon as the big dog came out of his ball I dedicated myself to completing the Arven storyline before even setting foot in a gym or a Team Star base, and I’m pleased to say that despite consequently not being able to give commands to any Pokémon I’ve caught at above level 20, I’ve seen off four out of the five titans so far. It’ll be quite the grind preparing for the fifth one, but, look, I see a guy who openly cries and I’m immediately 😍. Good thing he’s not called Pepper like he is in Japanese, because that would be too adorable to handle. (Also I’ve been looking for come across some really cute Arven art and this one by dwsiknw is my favourite so far!)
  2. The character creation screen looks like it’s going to let you be non-binary, in that you can pick a “boy base” or a “girl base” and then customise it with features of either, but then the game itself is Very Gendered in the way the player character is constantly referred to as (in my case) “Master Trem” – I do wonder if that’s just how the English localisation team decided to deal with “-san”, and if the Japanese version manages to get away with being a lot more vague in that respect. I just think it’s odd that the text of the game is so gendered when there isn’t the explicit “Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?” question of yore; having said that, I have no memory of how this was handled in Sword and Shield, so maybe they’re just doing the same thing again, but it does feel like the school setting turns the binarism up to 11.
  3. Not having a PC with all the Pokémon in, and being able to access one’s entire inventory of Pokémon at any point, has radically changed my playstyle. Back in the day I would settle on a party of six and just level those up along the way, coming back to the PC later on to make a lacklustre attempt at levelling some of the others and inevitably abandon this shortly afterwards because there wasn’t any story left to keep me interested in the game. In Violet, I’m taking an agressively egalitarian approach, where I have a consistent lead Pokémon that actually does the fighting, and then the five behind it are my weakest. Every time one of those five levels up, I go into the boxes and switch it out for a weaker one. This is another reason why this playthrough is taking such a long time, and also why I’m going to find it very difficult to add any lower-level Pokémon to the dex later, so it’s really just a terrible idea on all fronts, but you know what, I want all the wee lads to have their time to shine.
  4. I love how the music transitions properly as you go into battle, changing to the new theme at a point that makes sense based on the rhythm and harmony of the old one – it fits really well with the open-world aesthetic. Also the tunes are banging! The trainer battle theme really sounds like old school Pokémon battle music, but also really new and fresh at the same time, and the various wild battle themes are The Funk. Just very excellent.
  5. Clavell is still great! That’s all I wanted to say.
Want to respond to this? Want to see other people’s responses?