by Doc – Owner, Founder, Doesn’t Understand How Robot Pokemon Can Eat Herba Mystica
About once a year I go back and play through Pokémon Scarlet or Violet again, as these games have quite a bit of emotional weight for me. Without getting too much into the details, Pokémon Scarlet came out during what was a low point of law school for me and it got me through a pretty hard time. It made me feel free again. So while the “Internet acceptable” opinion of the game is that it’s terrible and looks terrible and should only be derided, I actually think these games are quite good and are well worth playing and the graphics aren’t the point of the experience anyway. (And let’s be real, when these games start getting good graphics mods they’re going to go so hard.)
When you compare Scarlet and Violet to the previous Pokémon games, the in-game balancing actually gets kind of funny by comparison. I’m simultaneously playing through a ROM hack of Pokémon Blue called Let’s Go Meltan, which basically takes the core ideas of the Pokémon Let’s Go games on the Switch and puts most of them into Pokémon Generation 1. You can trade at each Pokémon Center for the Alolan equivalent of a Pokémon that lives in that region, Steel, Dark, and Fairy types are included in the game as are some of the modern moves, and you can get Meltan on the SS Anne in a new room. It’s a great ROM hack if you’re looking to spice up a playthrough of RBY without changing it much, but it’s also reminding me just how constrained the balancing options for the early games are.
See, early Pokémon games were really structured and had a pretty narrow Pokedex even up through Generation 6 or 7, I feel. The developers could allocate Pokémon spawns and set them to the levels appropriate to the nearby gyms so that the player would always have to come to a new area, grind up a few levels or catch a new, more powerful Pokémon, beat the objective in that area whether it was the story mode or the gym, and then move on to the next area. Rinse and repeat. There was a lot of consistency involved, which is why you see some creations like the Smogon in-game tier list that exists for several generations. It’s the same game each time, played the same way in order, so you can optimize it because there’s not that many options.
(We don’t talk about the Johto level curve.)
Then you go to Scarlet and Violet. This is by far the most free Pokémon game, and that’s what a lot of the marketing focused on. While there is a prescribed order to take the game in, it’s set up so that to some extent you have ultimate freedom. Your only real restriction before beating the Elite Four and Champion is the ability of your riding Pokémon to physically get you to a location so you can beat the objective of that location. You’re not 100% free, but you’re pretty free, and at any given point you have three different story objectives to complete that take you to new regions of Paldea. Thing is, whereas in older games all experience points came from battling wild Pokémon or Pokémon trainers, and outside of trading all Pokémon available to you were placed and balanced, Scarlet and Violet completely throw that out the window and it creates hilarious balancing issues.
For starters, you do begin each playthrough with an on-rails experience until you get through Los Platos to Mesagoza and go through all those cutscenes. Outside of some kind of movement glitch that lets you break out of those boundaries, you’re not going to find anything to let you get overpowered between Areas Four and One of the South Province, so the game is balanced until Mesagoza.
Tera Raids
Your first time loading the game and getting out of Mesagoza there is a preplanned set of Tera raids available to you. That set is pretty well balanced for the early game and you’re not going to get anything particularly game-breaking… if you’re playing by yourself. If you go online to do a raid that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to beat or find in that set, you’ll find a ton of extremely high level players who like to just trounce low level raids, so you can already get Pokemon that are a little bit overleveled for you and that you’re not supposed to get so early, like Bagon. On top of that, you get experience candy from raids that can easily bump up a Pokémon by 5 to 7 levels, completely throwing out the balancing.
The developers did their best to prevent something like this from happening by implementing the disobedience mechanic that has been in Pokémon games since the beginning. You know how when you get a gym badge they’ll tell you that Pokémon up to level XYZ will obey you now? That’s to prevent somebody from trading you a level 100 Pokémon at the beginning of your adventure so that you just destroy the rest of the game. That does keep Wonder Trade and Pokémon HOME from destroying game balance. Thing is, that doesn’t work for Tera Raids because the Pokémon you catch from that has your OT. And even if you don’t catch it, the experience candies are hugely overpowered. Three raids and you’ve gone up 10 to 12 levels on a Pokémon in ten minutes flat.
Kitakami
Oh yeah, as soon as you get out of Mesagoza you can also go back in to begin the Teal Mask DLC. That wasn’t there when the game originally launched. So let’s say you start on Teal Mask, the difficulty of which scales with the number of gym badges you have earned. You can go to Kitakami fresh off the bat, get through maybe half of that part of the game, and then come back to Paldea and absolutely destroy half of the main story of the game from the levels you picked up. If you decide to go all the way through the DLC, you walk out of there with four legendary Pokémon available to you and are so overleveled that everything until the post-game is a walk in the park.
I will say, it’s pretty funny when you leave Kitakami partway through, go back and beat a few gyms and suddenly the local flora and fauna is 40 levels higher than it was. Gives me chortles.
Timed Drops
When I first started this Violet save file before forgetting and coming back to it, I was right in the middle of the shiny legendaries distribution. I’ve played the whole game with four level 75 shiny legendaries sitting in my Boxes! Sure, they have a different OT so they wouldn’t be very obedient, but they’d still do the trick for nearly the entire game if I needed them to.
They’re Still OP Even Without These
The great thing about this is that even without the DLC, and even without raids, it’s still extremely easy to get overpowered in Pokémon. In most of my playthroughs of Scarlet and Violet I do it by accident, actually. Some of the Pokémon introduced in Paldea are so overpowered like Annihilape, Ceruledge, and Espathra that they alone can tackle most of the game without needing much of a support team. The only thing balancing those Pokémon is the fact that you can’t get them until the mid-game unless I’m mistaken, and their evolution methods are somewhat tedious. Still, get an Annihilape with Bulk Up and Rage Fist and you’re steamrolling everything for the rest of the game.
I think one of the funniest ways to characterize the absurd balancing of Paldea is by comparing what Fuecoco learns versus what Charmander learned in Generation 1. Fuecoco gets the move Round at level 7, with a 60 base power and 100% accuracy. In Generation 1, Charmander doesn’t get a move over 40 base power until picking up Slash at level 30. If we’re looking at damage output, you’re starting in the middle of the game! Of course I think this was intentional by the developers so that Pokémon battles took three to four turns to get a KO instead of 8 to 10 like what you would find in the early games, but still, that’s pretty broken.
I think the general lack of balance and the sheer whimsy of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is one of my favorite things about playing this game. There’s so many great Pokémon and designs and they’re all viable in some way that it’s hard for me to ever stick to a team of six for the whole way through like I typically do in other games. In some sense, that’s balance enough!
Amiibo Doctor 