GAME CLEAR No. 112 -- Pokémon Púrpura

Pokémon Púrpura (2022, Switch)

Developer: GAME FREAK
Publisher: Nintendo, The Pokémon Company
Clear Date: 12/17/22
Clear Language: Spanish

The kind folks at GAME FREAK have really outdone themselves this time. They’ve made the worst-performing Pokémon yet with probably the best underlying gameplay, mechanics, and story in over a decade.

For me, Pokémon is comfort food. Its release schedule has turned it into a nice, semi-frequent language retention ritual for me. Because of its continued use of text-based dialog, it has allowed me to at least retain my reading skills in Spanish (I’m sure my abilities to speak and write the language are much rustier). So, even when I saw the new games’ middling review scores, I knew I would still find value in that and purchased Violet.

What I did not expect was to love the game. I won’t get into it a great deal to avoid spoilers, but the story is as good and intriguing as any Pokémon story has ever been (I understand that’s a low bar). Your main allies in the game are charming and grow throughout the game in ways previous rivals/friends of the games have not. The open world of the Paldea region looks like shit and has atrocious draw distances, but it is just enough. The Pokémon world should have been here years ago, but maybe GAME FREAK is finally rounding the corner.

What Paldea does offer, though, is a setting for the numerous challenges that await the player. Still here are the traditional gyms and Elite Four of the previous Pokémon games, but two other quest lines involve helping a friend’s sick dog and breaking up a gang of truant students. The former requires players to take down fearsome boss-style Pokémon while the latter involve defeating swathes of Pokémon in raids on the gangs’ bases. I will admit that these new challenges and encounters do feel somewhat prototypical in nature, but they’re something I hope can be expanded upon and improved in future entries.

More than anything, though, they gave the game legs! Tackling the 18 Things these quest lines require you to finish takes time, and once they’re done, you must complete the endgame, which takes a couple hours itself. In all, I spent about 45 hours in Paldea before rolling credits, which makes Pokémon Sword look downright paltry. Critically, I was having fun the whole time too.

My typical approach to party-building in Pokémon games is to have my favorite child Gengar alongside five Pokémon that I have never used before, whether they be from old games or the new cast. I also endeavor to have at least half of them be Ghost type. This time, my endgame party ended up being Gengar, Annihilape, Tinkaton, Talonflame, Glaceon, and Ceruledge. However, those were not the only Pokémon I spent any time with. Thanks to the game’s length and breadth of things to do, I was able to make use of other Pokémon like Scovillain and (shiny) Arcanine for awhile even though they were not part of my long-term party. In previous games, swapping out Pokémon was something I often found to be prohibitively time-consuming or annoying. In Violet it seemed perfectly natural.

It’s a bit frustrating to have enjoyed this game so much. It sold tremendously, so GAME FREAK’s incentive to make future games perform any better is nonexistent. And I contributed to that! But maybe they’ll take just a little more time on the next game. If they do, they could really make something special.

I suppose I’ll be there for them regardless.