8 Ways Nintendo Can Save Pokémon
6. Full Freedom Of Exploration
Pokémon Sword and Shield, the series’ first foray onto the Nintendo Switch in 2019, were a strange dichotomy. They dared to dip their toe into larger, open areas with roaming Pokémon but outside of that the games had almost certainly never been so linear and boring.
The best thing Scarlet and Violet did, after the story set-up, was just let players go off and craft their own journeys. There was no set path and we were given a map of the game’s 18 most important objectives - gym badges, Titan Pokémon and showdowns with the game’s villains - and simply sent off to fulfil them as we came across them. It was an intoxicating preposition.
And largely it worked but… it also felt like they could’ve done even more with it.
Technically you can face these challenges as you found them but they all had a set difficulty level. That is to say, there was still a “correct” order. Sure, if you’re a confident and long-serving Pokémon Master you can tackle harder objectives first but you’ll wind up creating a game where the difficulty descends as you are forced to knock off the easy challenges later.
Quite simply, Pokémon’s next open world needs a level-scaler. If you use the franchise’s long-standing gym badges as an example, perhaps every Gym Leader has a different number of Pokémon that changes and levels depending on how many badges you already have. That way, whatever order you challenge them, there’s never a “wrong” order.
Scarlet and Violet’s world was great but its freedoms need to be built on next time around.