The Pokémon franchise has always been special to me. I’ve always been interested in biology and animals, so much so that I originally majored in Environmental Science before discovering I was terrible at lab work. Nonetheless, the entire concept of traveling through a fantastical world studying and catching monsters has always appealed to me.

Additionally, like most other fans, I’ve always wanted a truly open-world RPG from the series. The newest Pokémon titles, Scarlet and Violet promise to be just that. This week a new fourteen-minute trailer was released discussing all the new features coming to the game. There is certainly some exciting stuff, but unfortunately, this trailer did more to hurt my excitement for the game.

For a game releasing next month, Scarlet and Violet are looking extremely unfinished. Just from watching the trailer, you can see numerous frame rate drops, low poly textures, and robotic models with stiff animations. Environments look exceptionally bland and are missing that natural charm, which defined areas in earlier titles. The Switch is certainly the lowest power console available right now, but I don’t believe the hardware limitations are a real issue.

A quick glance at any other Switch exclusive published by Nintendo shows that the hardware can certainly handle a polished graphical art style.  Pokémon is the biggest multimedia franchise in the world. They are not a small indie studio, and The Pokémon Company’s profits exceed Nintendo themselves. Game Freak has been developing games for over 20 years, and if they wanted to I’m sure they could stretch the Switch’s graphics to the utmost limit.

Scarlet and Violet not only promise to be the biggest Pokémon titles to date but are introducing many new mechanics, quality of life improvements, and branching storylines that will hopefully shake up the age-old formula. In contrast, earlier games for the most part remained relatively unchanged in terms of mechanics and gameplay but often had longer development times.

Gold and Silver were released two years apart from the debut titles. Generations three and four continued this trend with a solid two years between titles. Since the release of Sun and Moon in 2016, the team at Game Freak has been pumping out game after game, each with varying levels of success amongst the gaming community.

In my opinion, Scarlet and Violet have ambitious ideas and present a solid foundation for a truly great Pokémon title. The true issue here is the lack of time. The team at Game Freak released Pokémon Sword and Shield in 2019 and concluded development in 2020 after the release of two DLC expansions.

In 2021, they most likely focused on not only Scarlet and Violet but also Legends: Arceus which was released in January of this year. Assuming building the Legends: Arceus engine took a decent chunk of time in 2021, that means the dev team has had barely more than a year to create an entirely new open-world RPG.

Compare this to another Nintendo-published RPG, The Legend of Zelda. The series transitioned to open-world in 2017 with Breath of the Wild. The direct sequel to this game (which no doubt uses similar assets and engine) was announced two years after the initial release. After a delay, the game will finally launch in the Spring of 2023. That’s a total development time of six years! Even without a delay, the development time would have been at least five years.

Breath of the Wild is regarded by many to be the greatest game released on the Switch, and this is no doubt due to the incredibly polished world, art style, and gameplay that comes together to deliver a complete artistic vision. Meanwhile, the last few Pokémon titles often include many one-off mechanics and ideas that feel half-finished such as Z-Moves, which I often forgot even existed while playing Sun and Moon.

Clearly, it takes more than a year to develop new RPGs that coincide with current industry standards.  However, despite the minuscule development time and vocal discontent amongst much of the fanbase, Pokémon games continue to sell extremely well. This only serves to enforce Game Freak’s damaging development strategy. Why spend more time delivering a polished product when the profits continue to trend upward?

I can’t say I fault the company for going with this mindset, but it’s sad to see the studio have to settle for mediocrity in order to meet continued demand. This is where I believe the Internet has also played a role in this recent detrimental business model. In the ever-connected world of our modern society, profitable brands have adopted a need to stay relevant in the online space. Without constant news, updates, and discourse, be it positive or negative, a franchise could risk falling into obscurity.

Thinking logically, this would be extremely hard to achieve for a series as popular as Pokémon. However, in the modern world business logic supersedes the factual. As a result, the Internet has no doubt influenced on a small scale the pressure for Game Freak to continue producing games at an alarming rate.

Time will tell how this newest business model will turn out for the series. One way or another, I feel this unsustainable practice will soon bring some misfortune to Game Freak’s doors. I hope to be proven wrong, for at the end of the day I’m still a fan of the series.  However, I would rather wait two or even three more years for the latest release if the end result is the Pokémon game that truly can be called a masterpiece.