“So What Happened To That Pokemon Violet Series?”

A while back, I started playing Pokemon Violet. I intended to do a complete playthrough, the same way I did with Pokemon Shield. However, it turns out that Pokemon Violet has a little too much to do, and, well, I kinda lost interest.

To recap, I did do a bit of everything. I caught some Pokemon, I did some battles, you know the drill. The gyms I did were rather easy, but they weren’t particularly interesting. I also did one Team Star base, which I completed rather quickly, but I didn’t particularly enjoy. What did interest me was the Path of Titans, which I managed to do quite quickly despite not having particularly high-leveled Pokemon. However, I ran into a roadblock, my team all being too low a level to properly face Arven.

After that defeat, I kinda got stuck. I didn’t have a problem with having to level up my team, but I’d also have to do more gyms in order to catch more Pokemon and make sure my team actually listens to me. The leveling I needed to do was pretty great – my Pokemon were all mostly 20 levels below Arven’s level 60 Pokemon. Plus, the process is pretty slow, and leveling things up can be an arduous task that isn’t very interesting. No one wants to read about doing constant battles in order to level up, even if it’s much easier now compared to other Pokemon games.

At the same time, I was kinda getting bored of doing gyms too. Not because the gyms and the gym challenges were bad, but because I was sick of seeing Nemona constantly battling me. Even when I told her no. She just felt like a teacher breathing down my neck after every gym I beat, rather than any sort of rival. In Pokemon Shield, Hop was hardly a challenge, but he was supposed to be on the same level as the player. Nemona constantly goes on about how she’s intentionally making things easier for me, because I’m new. She’s not that challenging, but I feel that I’m only winning because she’s not trying. If anything, I think I prefer Hop because he IS trying his best, while also just being a little bit inexperienced. He’s far less patronizing.

I’m also not particularly happy with my team. It pains me to say this, but having tried Houndoom outside of Pokemon GO and Pixelmon, it just doesn’t feel like a strong Pokemon. I want to set Houndoom off to auto-battle other wild Pokemon but it gets beaten down too easily. The rest of my team have similar problems, but I can’t really decide what to replace them with. So I’m wandering around with Pokemon that just aren’t very good. They all pale in comparison to Meowscarada, who is borderline overpowered with her unmissable perma-critical hit attack.

Thing is, it’s not like I hate Pokemon Violet. Not at all. I think it’s an alright game. The difficulty level is all over the place and there IS a lot to do, but after trying out all these things, it’s just not that fun to spend hours playing. The gym path is pretty typical, similar to other Pokemon games. The bad guy team are just kids bunking off school and playing loud music. And the path of titans has promise and is actually quite fun, but it abruptly comes to a halt because of the spike in difficulty.

So I’ve ended up being a bit stuck and not sure what I want to do. I’ll probably come back to the series in the future, because I do want to get a bit further in Violet, but currently, I’m just not in the mood for grinding levels.