Some Pokemon Scarlet and Violet players aren't happy with the size of select pocket monsters depicted in Game Freak's latest RPG. This week, a number of fans have taken online to voice their displeasure about the fact that a number of species in the new titles are so tiny that they detract from the overall gameplay experience. The complaints emerged just as Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are being review bombed for a variety of reasons.
Released on November 18, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet seem poised to continue Game Freak's tradition of putting out extremely accessible and wildly commercially successful games with notable technical problems. Many players and reviewers have already voiced their displeasure about the fact that the games suffer from major performance issues, and while most have still praised their move to full-fledged open-world gameplay focused on exploration, Scarlet and Violet remain among the lowest-rated Pokemon games ever.
Adding to that negative momentum, some players are now complaining that they are having trouble differentiating between certain small species of Pokemon in the overworld, with a portion of them stating that they struggle with seeing the likes of Flittle and tiny olive Pokemon Smoliv at all. "Everything is so blurry," one user wrote on Reddit, while another person likened the depictions of some Pokemon in the new games to "stray pixels." This ultimately hurts the gameplay experience in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet regardless of whether the players are looking to hunt or avoid the small species, since the issue is identifying them in the first place, as per the complaints.
While the decision to make creatures like Pawmi and Rookidee as small as their Pokedex entries indicate might have been a stylistic choice, the well-publicized performance issues plaguing Pokemon Scarlet and Violet make it unlikely that this particular complaint is going to be addressed in a future patch. Namely, increasing the size of any creature models without making things even blurrier would require shoving more polygons into a given scene, which could put an even larger strain on the already encumbered hardware.
Naturally, it can be argued that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's performance issues are on Game Freak and not the Switch itself. While Nintendo's 2017 handheld featured decisively unassuming hardware from day one, many games such as Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Monster Hunter Rise, and Doom still managed to make impressive use of its modest Nvidia Tegra X1 system-on-chip over the years.
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are available now on Switch.