If you click on one of the joysticks while on the map, the map orientates to always point north. That’s really helps

So shocked they didn't do level scaling. Remember in the Pokemon Origins animated show, Brock chose pokemon specifically for the number of badges the challenger had? It just seemed so natural, I assumed that was how it worked. Imagine my surprise when I faced the Grass gym for my fourth badge, and everything was lv 16...

“There’s one gym leader in particular I really liked” Big man Larry stays winning lol

Regarding the cities, it sucks not being able to go into anybodys houses anymore. That was a big part of exploring cities in the past.

Me and my brother have been playing through the games with us doing a battle against each other after every 3 “points” which are gained by beating a gym, Titan, or Star base. And because we’ve both been going separate ways, developing different teams, and doing things our own way before converging in a battle to show what we’ve found to the other, the experience has increased tenfold

The co-op feature is nothing to sleep on. My friends and I were able to join each other's worlds seamlessly and continue our own errands and story missions while being in the game with each other.

One note about the map: I noticed that there’s a toggle for being able to rotate it vs. keeping it locked in a fixed orientation. I found that keeping it locked really helped prevent me from getting lost and kinda fixes that issue you mentioned.

WolfeyShills

I love that when you battle wild pokemon, there are other pokemon just chillin' in the background watching it makes the world feel so much more immersive. And I love Nemona she's fun.

I really liked how Arceus did with being able to throw pokeballs outside of battle and the shinies making an audible noise and visual cue when they spawned in. I really wish they kept those two features

At first, I felt so overwhelmed. I wasn't sure where to go or what to do, so I just said "fuck it" and went wherever I please without the map. I discovered most of the story stuff from randomly finding it while I get distracted by every new thing. It's been a blast and I still have a few gyms and 1 team star group left to beat. I haven't been in the snowy area in the north yet, so I'll be moseying my way up there eventually. Despite the graphical issues, this really is one of the best Pokemon games to date.

I might be the only one but the soundtracks are actual fire, especially team star boss, tera raid battles and gyms. Can't wait to finish the game and see all it has to offer

Nemonia is by far the best rival imo. If you lose to her in battle, you don't have to rematch her till you beat her. She just takes the fckn W. That's so funny and new.

Still think it is odd they removed set mode as an option, removing qol options is always a point dock for me.

Tera type really expands the pool of options. My brain is broken trying to think of the best ones. And they use it really well for making gym battles interesting.

My favorite QoL I’ve seen them take from Legends Arceus is the remember/forget a move mechanic so you can change previously known moves without needing a move tutor and a heartscale. I wouldn’t mind new moves being learned via that method but seeing previously known moves easily accessible helps me a lot.

Tip for the map: Click the right stick. It locks the map to pointing North, and it doesn't come undone between opening and closing the map or even the game. Made the map much easier to use for me.

For the map navigation, there's a way to set it so the map is only pointing north... SUPER helpful. I believe you click one of the sticks while in the map to do this

Heads up, Established Titles was very recently exposed as a scam. Scott Shafer has an explanation video on it for more info. Might be helpful for future reference if you ever get a sponsorship request from them again.

Fun fact: if you press the right stick while in a battle, the camera becomes fixed behind your pokemon, similar to past games. Though the angle doesn't always work well (big pokemon or flying types being kinda off camera), it's a nice option to have

Tbh, the stories in SV (I’ve done 4/5 Star Bases, all titans, and half the badges) are honestly pretty good. The Titan’s one I started getting really attached to after the second one, and the Team Star one is really hooking me. I really hope this does become the future for Pokémon cause they nailed basically everything we could want from an open world Pokémon game (only thing I would want is TRUE level scaling for the gym leaders because I wanted so badly to wait and fight Iono last so she could be at her strongest).

At first I didn’t like a lot of the Pokémon but the more I played I grew to love them. Many of them are weird and changed my expectation of what a Pokémon is.

I was just always 10 levels below the fight I was about to take on, but I actually think that this was a positive since it really made a Pokemon game difficult for the first time in generations.

What I love about this generation's legendary, is you immediately have a bond with Koraidon or Miraidon. Like it's your friend. You help it, and it helps you. I wonder how that's gonna translate to the anime considering the anime usually does one of two things: take aspects of the game story and puts them into segments of the anime, or strays from the game completely. Gen 9's mons are very well done, and I can't wait to dive back into competitive. It's a pretty ambitious game, and I'm excited to see where it goes.

The Titan storyline, especially when you get to understand Arven's reason for hunting them, is the most "emotional" storyline in any Pokémon main game I've played. That's not saying a lot, since the stories don't tend to be too deep or emotional, but that caught me off guard a bit. The game really needs a competitive mode such as a Battle Tower or something else. Anything that incentivizes min/maxing your setup/team. The only way to do that currently is online mode, but it would be nice to have something offline as well.

When you're starving even a crumb is a feast

Scarlet and Violet was that best Pokémon game since OR/AS. It needed another year of development time but it was actually fun to play unlike the gen 7 and 8 games.

Thank you for this it’s very hard to find non-spoiler content about scarlet and violet and I haven’t got them yet so I really appreciate this

Despite the huge performance / fps issues and a couple of bugs, I am enjoying this game WAYYY more than Sword and Shield!

Wolfey if you press the right joystick in on the map it locks it in place so you don't have to spin it. Just orient it so the north is facing up and then lock it. Perfect map!

You Name yourself Best pokemon Player of All times? Thats a little odd to say i feel and im normally a huge Fan of yours

I was here while wolfe was on lunch

The only thing I thought was a little weird was the fact that "y" opens the map. I am surprised how few times I accidentally opened the map before getting used to it though.

have you ever played anything else beside pokemon?

How much did Pokémon pay you?

SV is the first Pokémon game where I’ve had many Pokémon on my team I cycle between since there are so many great ones. So many times I thought my team was great, and then I’d find new ones and just think “oh shit, who is going to be on my team now?” And going in blind to non-officially revealed Pokémon has been amazing. I also want to know how many of these will fare in competitive like the new double-battle focused guys (absolutely love both of them and have loved using them against friends with their double battle gimmick)

This game has been a blast, and I'll never forget when a staraptor sweeped my team two times with facade terastylize, it was hilarious to see a normal type gym be so terrifying to me to the point where I had to catch a fighting type

My biggest problem is overleveling. This game is about exploring, and That’s what I have been doing the most. Because of that I’m overleveled for pretty much whole story. Everytime I’m going back to the story I’m sweeping with 1 pokemon. They should scale and the fact they don’t is stupid and joykilling.

One of the things I really love this Gen is how there is basically no RNG involved with getting a specific team. If you want a competitive Dudunsparce, you can just go catch one and then EV train and IV train it, get it any of the "egg moves" via mirror herb, patch in its Hidden Ability, set its Tera-type to whatever you want and you are good to go. Sure, that may be a bit grindy to achieve, especially the Tera-type changing, but none of them overwhelmingly so. Your first two competitive teams require very little effort because of how much the game rewards you the necessary items early on and after that I think it's pretty fair to expect players to put in some extra effort.

one thing i find so interesting about the game is how they still split up the areas into “routes” kind of. it’s hard to explain but it gives me hope that they can adapt this style into a more traditional region potentially

I like that the levels were all over the place. It made the game way harder than I thought it would be and having a challenge in a fun Pokémon game like this was fun!

The nice thing is, tutorials are more optional in this one. There are entire features and facts that I don't think even regular fans are aware of if they do the optional tutorials/ classes the school offers. It is also builds in some very beefy Exp Candy rewards if you do all the classes. 30 S, 30 M, 5 L Exp candies just from an optional tutorials.

Performance is really the only major gripe. The only other thing i wanted was an actual idea of which gym order was "preferred" instead of just the first gym. If you aren't going to scale, the game should at least tell you to some extent the order the gyms "should" be handled. The starfall street and titan pokemon being a mystery is fine.

The online is literraly the best part of the game. Everything is just so much funnier with the homies

obviously the graphics have issues, but the gameplay itself this generation is really fantastic. the story is the strongest since gen 5, and there're so many quality of life upgrades that just make it more enjoyable.

My main problem is that our ability to mark our map is stripped. This is honestly such a small feature that can do tonnes of good. What baffled me is that this mechanic is present in PLA, so why remove it in S/V?

Just coming back to Pokemon after stopping halfway through Sun and Moon and loving your content! Hopefully I can learn to step out of my mindset from all the previous gens of "Stat boost moves= weak". Any chance you could do a back to basics video about status boosts and basic strategies for both campaign and PVP?

I love that you can take on gyms, team star bases and titans in any order. I just chose the next task without looking at the proper order. So i often found harder battles i actually felt difficulty

meanwhile it has 2.8 user score on Metacritic.... the truth is somewhere in the middle. 10/10 is pushing it. Maybe mechanically it's a step up from pokemon games (which are stagnant for decades) but as a game, i've been more impressed by indie projects of 1-10 devs with the budget of a grocery cart.

I don’t mind the fact that the game runs at 10 fps because Pokémon is a little baby billion dollar franchise that can’t afford to make their game run. Poor little indie developer Game Freak making a game that’s actually broken. But it’s okay because y’all will just brush off that it actually doesn’t work right.

Hey Wolf! You need to watch out with Established Titles! They don’t do anything that you claim. It’s a scam

I really loved that the Pokémon can choose what moves they want to replace when learning new moves.

You started streaming your first time experience playing the game like 2 days ago. You currently have your hair way shorter, as seen in the streams But in this video you clearly have longer hair So you pre-recorded your "no spoiler" review based on your playing experience that didn't even happen yet? Can someone explain?

Something I really liked is that I can switch my Pokémons and try new ones really quick because it’s much more easy to keep up them on the level and is way less grinding

I agree with the first 4 seconds

Stoked to see the competitive videos coming out. You and Cybertron were pumping out VGC content nonstop

Biggest recommendation for the map, you can change the mode to have the map always face north, which is so much better

Hey Wolfe, not sure if you've heard about this or not by this point but you might take a closer look at Established Titles. The organization was recently found to be a massive scam : /

I really enjoyed this entry personally, but this is far from a fair take. The 10 seconds spent on visuals and performance issues here is unacceptable. Despite the fun I’ve had it’s objectively the worst visual and performance experience I have ever had in a full price game. It’s not just that the visuals are bad, it’s that there bad and don’t even run well for being that cheap. Makes it hard to trust much of the rest of this review as fair.

When Wolf called the rival Pneumonia I burst out laughing.

10/10? No way

My favorite part of the game is walking to class and saying hi to my buddy Tim and his Pokémon walking at 3fps

Your really into yourself hey?

"The tutorial is the quickest in the series" It took me like 45 minutes to an hour. Of course, with lots of exploring and catching in between but still. The quickest in the series? I'm pretty sure gen 2's tutorial is just "Here's how to use your phone. Walk across some grass and have an old man give you a phone app"

how can you give it 10/10 when the performance is so horrendous? yes the gameplay is good, but it's overshadowed by horrible frame drops and laggy UI, especially in boxes

Seeing a 10/10 sank my heart. I have been grasping for confirmation that these games are worth it and deserve the support. But from what I have seen from by sitting next to my friends playing through the game. This must be the most poorly optimized pokemon game of all time. Flicking shadows, frame freezes, lag, 3 fps npc's walking not far away, polygon buildings and 240p resolution pokemon when in battle with pokemon in certain areas. These are some inexcusable things we have found just playing through the game, the last couple of days. Im ranting here, because im a super hardcore pokemon fan, playing every game, every fanmade game, remembering pokemons base stat totals, ect. I really love pokemon and I REALLY want to buy the next generation of the mainline games and see the new pokemon, story and region. So im glad that the story seems to be good, but these issues I mentioned is scaring me off from buying a copy of either game. I don't want us to support unfinished games from our favorite franchise, and seeing these games. I think they would need another 1-2 years of development and/or cleanup of their code and optimization. What made my heart sink, was seeing that with reviews like this, that seems to disregard these issues, and still give the game a 10/10. Almost solidifies the fact that we will keep buying the next pokemon game, regardless of how rushed its release is. Im not trying to be rude to anyone with this, and I don't blame you if you bought the games and enjoyed them. I just worried that we will always hear, that the next pokemon game is a step in the right direction. Instead of hearing that we have finally arrived at the best game (not just pokemon game) of all time. Regardless of the pokemon games, "reputation", I do still believe that the number 1 franchise in the world, should be able to produce the number 1 gaming experience in the world.

So hardly any criticism towards the technical side of it?

The framerate and optimization issues bother me a bit, but I can definitely overlook them for how enjoyable these games are to actually play through the story. I'm totally with you on this review.

I'm honestly do happy to finally find someone who liked sv, because I adored it but everyone was so negative that it made me feel like I couldn't enjoy a game I enjoy

On the map gripe: that was one of my biggest issues, too. Apparently, you can actually lock it to always face north by pressing the right stick. It's just that the button for this isn't clearly labeled in the map app, and the game only tells you this through the dialogue of some random NPC. My biggest issue is that, if you zoom out and move the cursor to somewhere else on the map, then zoom back in, it recenters the map on your character. Not on the level where you can set destinations. (As for the level scaling - I believe it was said in promotional material that the levels would not scale. And, honestly, I personally find it more interesting unscaled. You can skip a gym you're disadvantaged against and come back to it later without having to just grind past it, or you can tackle a gym early if you have the right pokemon for it and reap the rewards. And, there's just something satisfying about delivering a well-earned curbstomp battle, y'know? Much better than dealing with GF's idea of scaled battles - you saw what that looked like the wild area and in Isle of Armor, and it wasn't at all pretty...)

Just throwing it out there, you can lock the map orientation by pressing down on the right joystick. It will always point North once you do it, hope this helps your experience ^^

With the map thing, press the right stick to make everything point in a locked direction (north up, south down, west left, etc)- helped me TREMENDOUSLY, so hopefully that helps you in the future

They are PEAK Pokemon, AFTER some performance patches

Probably pay sponsorship

This game is great, don’t get me wrong but saying its a 10/10 is a massive overstatement the frame drops and the choppy gameplay is really bad and it’s game freaks fault for delivering and unpolished gam

I love the game too but theres 1 big problem i have with it: shadows dissapearing when you dont look at the thing that the shadow comes from. Its really distracting and i hate it

The Pokémon models have never looked better. At least in the 3D era. I still love the simple yet nostalgic 2D sprites from the early games, but I can’t believe how good of a job they did in SV. For example, primeape has never been a favorite of mine but it just looks so badass in this game

I got most of my team to level 22 before I even went to the school for the first time. Running around enjoying myself and playing at my own pace.

I think since you are a competitive player you are legally obligated to like the new games since that is how you will be making money 😂

I would agree a 100% if the game was not almost unplayable and running between 10-15 fps. Great game held back by the performances

Playing violet after arceus, it really feels like while developing new tools for S/V, they ended up with a ton of stuff, some of which didn't fit what they wanted in a mainline game. But the tools and mechanics were so good (like catching in arceus), they ended up making a whole spinoff using them. Which is all to say, I'm actually excited to see what the next generation game brings

I would give the game a solid 7.5/10 WITHOUT considering the performance issues. Though I’ve been able to enjoy the game despite these issues, I think they are nothing short of unacceptable for a franchise like Pokémon. Not to mention the game looks like it could’ve come out in 2012 graphically, when we’ve had plenty of beautiful games running smoothly on Switch.

This is the first I've heard about being able to change your Tera Type! That's extremely helpful

My BIGGEST gripe with the map is that it doesn't always just orientate North. I think it sets the maps orientation to whichever direction you're facing.

I’ve only played enough to beat the first gym but so far I’ve loved the game. Although some things such as animations and certain movements could be sped up.

Fought Grusha for my 3rd badge thinking I was going in order of the badges. Had mid to high level 30s and was thinking "I'm about to 1 shot their entire team with my Skeledirge"...come to find out they were all high 40s. I ended up managing to pull off the upset, but soon realized everything was scattered and not linear like we're used to in a Pokemon game.

Is this sponsored? Game's unplayable running at a smooth 5FPS if it's not crashing

At one point in a battle in a city, people were just walking through the battlefield in the middle of an attack. Gotta say it made me laugh

I'm a little confused over the 10/10 score. You start by saying these are the best Pokémon games yet, so maybe you mean that the 10/10 is relative to other Pokémon games? ...because the rest of your review is mostly "this is the best it's ever been in Pokémon, but it could still be better". Like "the story is way better than gens 6, 7 and 8, but it's not a high bar to cross", or "the game gives you a lot more freedom, but the lack of level scaling makes it annoying to play". You seemed very enthusiastic over the new Pokémon and also positive about terastillization, but in general, it feels like you're describing an enjoyable game with significant flaws, while 10/10 is a score more fitting for an almost flawless masterpiece. It only makes sense to me if the score is meant to be relative to past Pokémon games or if you're just being a contrarian, because this game's had a lot of negative critical reception by players. You don't even mention the most criticized aspects of this game which are the pathetic graphics, lack of fluidity (caused by performance issues), and the very rough state of the game. I grew up with games that looked worse than SV, and games that were more glitchy too, and I think many of those old games are great, and maybe you're like that too, but if that's the case you should've said so in your review, since that's kind of the elephant in the room here. A lot of modern gamers expect more than me and you in those areas, so it is important to mention it. As for the performance issues, you do mention them, but only briefly and you downplay them a lot. SV are some of the worse-performing video games of all time, including no-budget indies and the like. They are the only post-2000 commercial games I have ever seen that can't keep a smooth FPS in *cutscenes*. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the way you talk (and don't talk) about the game makes it really hard for me to follow, and this review is more confusing than helpful in my opinion. Also some people are saying that your sponsor is a scam. I wouldn't know because I skip sponsors but I think you should look into that. Ok I spent forever typing this now I go do something else bye.

I want the physicals. Is it possible to patch the glitches an what not on those, through updates, or should I get digital??

I got really into surviving on the road and have been living off the items I’ve found on the way. I ended up in a high level zone and been struggling, but that’s what I always wanted from these games, a challenge.

One thing I noticed, while its a very very minor point, but the few times I was forced into double battles with an AI partner the partner was actually more than competent. Helpful, even!

Big con for me was the fact that you can't change clothes

I didn't find the lack of scaling too annoying. I'm definitely not playing in the "set order", I'm kinda finding an in-between for that and the free-roam aspects. Initially I went East to the cliff titan and grass gym, realized I was underleveled on my way to the fire crew. That gave me an excuse to go back to the school campus and discover the little mini-quests and such given by faculty - and where to get rewards for progress on the dex. I then went for the bug gym, open sky titan, electric badge, and dark crew (in that order) and discovered I was a little underleveled for the water gym. Back to the fire crew and lurking steel titan. While it limits how you play to an extent and there are several websites giving the exact same "correct order" it's still open enough you can stray from it a little bit. Also, I don't think the titans and Team Star SHOULD scale to you. The gyms 100% should though (it's even been outright mentioned in Generations that the gym leaders "scale" to their challengers to test their skills as a trainer, not just how buff their mons are. The stronger rematch teams and a little bit of critical thinking also imply that gym leaders certainly have stronger pokemon than a couple level 14s). But the titans and Team Star aren't "tests", they're in it to win it. Also, maybe not the BEST Pokemon games but definitely up there (I only have about 12 hours, so I don't wanna go prematurely saying that). My favourite is Pokemon Black. But they're VERY different games. Black mastered the traditional formula of a Pokemon game and I think that's why every generation since has had some kind of gimmick to spice it up. I think that the last few generations had the building blocks of the new direction for the series and this game is the foundation of the skyscraper that gen 10 will hopefully be. I'm very hopeful after this. ALSO x2! I find it interesting that this is critically the lowest mainline release ever but from what I'm seeing it's getting the best initial fan reaction since...gen 4 at least

Fun fact: You can press the right stick to lock the map. Meaning the north is always towards the north.

You can lock the map to always have north being up by pressing R3. I know the map still sucks but that helps a little at least

The only thing I want in a Pokémon game is a difficulty setting. I know that’s a lot of work because that means changing almost everything when it comes to battles but I think it would make for an amazing diversity and make the games more interesting for the older Pokémon fans that find the game rather easy

What about all the glitches and breakdowns

I love the variable themes, every zone has a wild, and trainer theme, and four variants of each, day night, and a rain and shine variant for all of them.

How much did they pay you Bruh?