One exploration-minded Pokemon Scarlet and Violet fan managed to assemble a high-level creature team that includes the elusive Gholdengo without even completing the tutorial mission, illustrating just how much freedom Game Freak's latest RPGs provide to the players. This isn't the first impressive adventuring feat that the fandom accomplished to date, as evidenced by the fact that at least one player already filled their Pokedex before completing a single story objective shortly after the games were released back in November.
The open-world nature and exploration-focused gameplay of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have been widely touted as some of the games' biggest strengths. Whereas the series historically led players along a fairly linear path with some minor branching, its latest mainline installments immediately set them loose in an enormous region of Paldea, inspired by the Iberian Peninsula. Game Freak first experimented with this design shift in early 2022, when it released the critically acclaimed Pokemon Legends: Arceus, which featured a similarly open map.
In yet another example of this incredible freedom of movement provided by the new games, one player has recently taken to social media to share their high-powered team of pocket monsters that they managed to build without so much as starting First Day of School, the prologue tutorial mission. Their creature roster which took some 30 hours to assemble even includes Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's Gholdengo, which is pretty much universally considered to be a late-game catch and is exceedingly difficult to obtain.
Gholdengo can only be acquired by evolving a high-level Gimmighoul after finding 999 Gimmighoul Coins scattered around Paldea. While these collectibles respawn over time, hitting the 999 cap still tends to take dozens of hours on average. Apart from Gholdengo, the newly shared free-roam team also includes Ceruledge, which is another late-game pocket monster that requires catching Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's Charcadet and then jumping through a bunch of hoops to evolve it. As it turns out, that's also possible without completing the games' tutorial mission.
While many fans continue to behold the unprecedented freedom provided by Game Freak's latest RPGs, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet launched as some of the lowest-rated mainline titles in the long-running franchise. That's primarily due to their numerous technical issues and overall poor performance on the Switch, for which Nintendo even apologized back in early December, vowing that Game Freak is hard at work developing improvements. No new updates have been released since then, with Pokemon Scarlet and Violet still being stuck on version 1.1.0 which rolled out on December 1, 2022.
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet is available now on Nintendo Switch.