The announcement of any new Pokemon game is met with excitement. So, it's not surprising that when the Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet games were announced to be coming to Nintendo Switch later this year, fans went wild. However, there is also some angst among long-time fans. Pokemon Legends: Arceus was so well received that now fans are worried that the new games may take a step back.
Currently, we know that the new games are touting that "players will be able to explore freely in a richly expressed open world." So, that bodes well as a sign that GameFreak is keeping the much-beloved open-world concept from Arceus. However, there's much more to consider. The traditional mainline Pokemon games need to improve several aspects for the new ones to live up to the standard set by Arceus. So let's take a look at some improvements fans want to see in the Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet games.
5 Type Chart Balancing
The type chart in Pokemon has some major balancing problems.
Some Types Are Just Too Weak:
- The Bug-type is the worst offensive type in the game, due to it being resisted by 7 types, some of which are the best in the game.
- Ice is the worst defensive type in the game thanks to it having 4 weaknesses and only 1 resistance to itself.
- Poison is one of the worst offensive types, as it only hits Fairy and Grass for super effective damage, and Steel is immune to it.
Ghost, Fighting and Fairy all need to lose the Bug resistance and Bug would also benefit greatly from a Psychic and Fairy resistance. Ice needs more resistance. Giving it resistances to Ground, Dragon, Flying, and Water or some combination of would help it out greatly.
Poison just needs one, very simple change. Hitting Water for super effective damage. This would increase the Poison-type's offensive presence immensely. Water is the most common type in Pokemon and also one of the best, so this change would absolutely bring Poison out of the rut it's in.
Others Are Far Too Strong:
- Water has only 2 weaknesses to Electric and Grass, while it hits Fire, Rock, and Ground for super effective damage. Those 3 are all strong types to hit.
- Fairy is an extremely strong offensive type, only Steel, Poison and Fire can resist it. It also hits Dragon, Fighting, and Dark for super effective damage.
- The Steel-type resists a whopping 10 types, and has an immunity to another, making it the best defensive type by a landslide. Additionally, it's one of only 2 types that can deal super-effective damage to Fairy, while also hitting Ice and Rock.
Make the changes to Water-type listed above. Give Bug the Fairy resistance mentioned earlier, and give Grass immunity to Fairy. These 2 changes would make Fairy a much easier type to switch into. Finally, if Steel were to lose the Psychic and Ice resistances, and gain another weakness in Electric. This would help make the type a little less overpowering.
4 Better Moves
Some Pokemon types are in desperate need of better moves.
- Ice lacks a reliable strong Physical move, the closest equivalent being Icicle Crash, which misses 10% of the time.
- Ghost doesn't have a Physical clone of Shadow Ball, putting Physically attacking Ghost-types in somewhat of an awkward spot.
- Rock in general needs better moves, as lots of them have lower accuracy when compared to move equivalents of other types.
Then, there are a lot of types that lack equivalents to heavy-hitting Moves like Close Combat, Overheat, Superpower and Double-Edge. However, by far the most glaring example of this is the Fairy-type. Fairy has only 1 Physical move, Play Rough. This makes the Fairy-type painfully limited on the Physical side, especially early in the single-player adventure, as Play Rough is generally a middle/end game move.
3 Even Type Quantities
Every generation has at least 1 or 2 types that are greatly shorted of new Pokemon. Some examples of this throughout the series include:
- Gen 1 has a single family for both Dragon and Ghost
- Gen 4 only introducing 3 new Fire-types
- Gen 6 only adding 1 each of Ground, Poison, and Bug
- Gen 7 only adding 2 new Dark-types
Scarlet and Violet need to avoid this. They should add an even number of Pokemon for all 18 types, or at least focus more on the rarer types (Ice, Fairy, and Dragon), and introduce fewer of the most common ones (Water, Flying, Normal, and Grass).
2 Unused Type Combinations
As of Pokemon Legends: Arceus, there are 16 unused Pokemon-type combinations. Let's highlight just 3 of the stronger ones.
Poison/Steel
Poison is a great defensive type, and Steel is the single best defensive type. It would have regular resistances to Normal, Flying, Steel, Rock, Ice, and Dragon, with 4x resistances to Bug, Grass, and Fairy, and to top it all off, an immunity to Poison. The combination would be somewhat balanced out due to its 2 weaknesses, a regular 2x weakness to Fire, and a 4x weakness to Ground.
Overall, it would be an amazing counter to just about any Fairy-type, thanks to the 4x resist and both Poison and Steel being able to hit Fairy-types for super effective damage.
Grass/Fire
This is a wonderful combination thematically. Combining 2 of Pokemon's most iconic types that don't really blend together realistically. Surprisingly, Grass and Fire complement each other beautifully. On the defensive side, it only gets 3 weaknesses, Poison, Rock, and Flying, while also having some valuable resistances to Electric, Fairy, Steel, and a 4x resistance to Grass.
However, the real magic of this pairing is on the offensive side. Fire is able to hit the Bug, Grass, and Ice-types which Grass struggles with, and Grass hits the Water, Rock, and Ground-types which Fire struggles with. It also hits 7 types for super effective damage.
Ground/Fairy
This is an unbelievably scary offensive combination. Ground is the perfect attacking partner for Fairy, as it can hit the Steel and Poison types that often give Fairy a hard time. This pairing also hits 8 types for 2x damage (Dragon, Dark, Electric, Rock, Fighting, Steel, Poison, and Fire). To top it all off, there is no singular type in the game that can resist Ground and Fairy simultaneously.
The defensive side is also good. While it has 4 weaknesses to Steel, Water, Ice, and Grass, it also gets 4 resistances to Dark, Bug, Rock, and Fighting. The best defensive aspect of this combination however is the immunities. It gets immunity to both Dragon and Electric, 2 very strong types.
1 Return Some Pokemon Legends: Arceus Mechanics
Pokemon Legends: Arceus introduced or reworked some mechanics from the usual Pokemon games in a couple of interesting ways.
Side Quests
Arceus had an in-depth side quest system. There were a lot of side quests to do in the game that all yielded various rewards, and while some of them did have similar solutions, they did an amazing job of making the Hisui region more interesting. One such side quest revolved around showing an NPC a specific Pokemon. It was a simple thing, but it gave what would otherwise be generic wild Pokemon some kind of use.
Pokedex Completion
Legends also had a much more fun Pokedex completion method. It wasn't just "see Pokemon, capture Pokemon." The game kept track of things like how many of this specific Pokemon have the player KO'ed, how many KO'ed with super-effective moves, etc. The game required the player to do all of those enough to actually finish the entry.
Pokemon Legends: Arceus is available now, on Nintendo Switch. Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet will be available in late 2022.