Despite complaints from players about bugs and poor graphics performance, the latest Pokémon game has posted the most worldwide releases in Nintendo’s history.
Released last week on Pokemon Scarlet and Violet changeHas the lowest user rating in series history on the Metacritic review aggregator site.
The previous lowest-scoring game was Pokemon Unite with an average score of 3.7, but at the time of writing it was “beaten” by Scarlet and Violet with scores of 2.9 and 3.4 respectively.
Scarlet and Violet were mostly praised by critics, who praised the addictive gameplay and vibrant colors, and together sold 10 million copies in their first three days.
But players on social media have documented numerous glitches and evidence of poor graphics performance.
It’s fair to say that the visuals are pretty bland by modern standards–for our money, they’re reminiscent of PlayStation 3 games of yesteryear.
During Sky News’ involvement with the game, framerate drops were frequent even in simple scenes where Pokemon and other characters popped up.
Gameplay that continues Pokemon’s transition to a more open-world experience remains enjoyable.
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Players can explore a larger world than previous works.Figure: Nintendo
Poor graphics raise questions about Switch’s future
Some have blamed the Switch’s hardware for poor graphics performance — even with recent iterations, the premium switch OLED model, not as powerful as Sony’s previous-generation PlayStation 4.
But more than five years after its release, the Switch remains hugely popular and is expected to be the most popular console on Black Friday.
Switch has 132% more searches than Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Sony’s PlayStation 5, which is consistent with consistent results showing that Switch has been the best-selling console every year since its release.
The console is still capable of producing some beautiful games, and fans are looking forward to the upcoming open-world epic The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
The issues with Scarlet and Violet have raised questions about the future of regular Pokemon developer GameFreak, but regardless of the backlash, Nintendo certainly isn’t worried about its financial performance.