Pokemon Violet DLC Retrospective

​ Anyone who knows me could tell you one infallible truth about me. That is that I love
Pokemon more than any other game franchise in the world. There are many I love, like Fallout
and The Elder Scrolls, but from that fateful day my dad gave me a gameboy color and a copy of
Pokemon Silver he pulled out of a dumpster I’ve been hooked. The franchise has been with
me my entire life from being stuck in New Bark Town because I hadn’t learned how to read yet,
to getting Pokemon Emerald and a GBA on my 8th birthday surrounded by my family. To the
original 2DS and Pokemon Y being the first game and console I preordered with my own money.
Even to this day I have an annual tradition of picking up both games at the midnight release and
playing through each new installment side by side with my wife. For many people my age
Pokemon has been a constant in our lives as we move from young kids, to teens and into
adulthood , but as the years went on the games started to lose their luster. Wild shifts in design
philosophy mixed with muddy looking graphics caused fans of the franchise to think that
Pokemon had turned their back on them, or worse turned their focus to the company coffers.
While it would be impossible to be the world's most valuable media franchise without thinking a
little bit about the money the Pokemon games on the Switch have been label things like “sloppy”
“rushed” or “cash grabs” and while these are all arguable it’s pretty easy to see that the
reputation of the series has definitely taken some blows over the past few years.

​ But where do I stand on this? Well as a lifelong fan of the Franchise I wanted to take a
look at where my thoughts on Pokemon were currently through a fresh perspective, and here on
this channel we do that through Blind Playthroughs. My name is Zach, but you can call me Tilted
and this is a trip through my first experiences on the Isle of Kitakami and the Blueberry
Academy as I tackle the Pokemon Violet DLC “The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero”

Now I know what you might be thinking. Something to the extent of “Wait a sec those
DLC came out months ago, you can't be that big of a fan if you waited all that time to play them”
your right, I didn’t hop in right at launch and there's a couple reasons for that. The easy answer
is I wanted to stream them and I had other projects I was working on. You can check out my
Resident Evil or Dragon Quest videos if you want to see the product of my procrastination. But
the other big reason is that I wasn’t necessarily blown away by the base game of Pokemon
Scarlet and Violet. I thought that they were fun games, and I think that the response from the
community was way over blown, But the world didn’t grip me quite like some of the previous
games did. Even Sword and Shield, the games most comparable in my opinion, I played for
hundreds of hours, completed the Pokedex, and several shiny hunts and multiple playthroughs
finished. But for whatever reason after completing the story of Pokemon Violet my general
feelings were “That was nice. On to something else” but no longer as we made our way into the
World of Pokemon and to the Island of Kitakami for Part 1 of our DLC adventure with The Teal
Mask!

​ When we set off for Kitakami I knew I had wanted to start with a fresh new team other
than the one I had completed the Pokemon Violet base game with and I had just the Pokemon
to act as my new pseudo starter pokemon. On a Shiny Sunday stream we managed to catch
ourselves a Shiny Iron Jugulis and we nicknamed her Queen Bee. I didn’t know at the moment
just how far the Shiny team would go but it got a little out of hand not long after starting.

​ Immediately after landing on the island you are flooded with new pokemon that aren't in
the base game and personally I like this alot. It made this new area feel really special and
Teeming with life. I know that not having the complete national dex in the base game is a sore
spot for many in the pokemon community but I think if everything had been in the game from the
start none of these admittedly average pokemon would feel as special as they did because the
second the games got Home support you could just dump the entire pokedex into the game and
you lose the sense of rediscovery. This is what I spent by far the most time doing in the DLC is
just running around in the big open spaces and getting familiar with some old favorites and a
few new pokemon.
​ I’d say for the most part I really liked the characters that were introduced in the DLC as
well. Carmine was a really fun case of a bitter rival who turns into a great friend and Kieran as a
shy kid who just can't get things to go his way but more on him later. And the pokemon who
drive the story are absolutely top notch. Ogrepon being an ostracized creature who is seen as
purely evil by the naive and misguided townsfolk and the Loyal Three of Okidogi, Monkidori, and
Fezendipiti, who are seen and the heroes of Kitakami who defended the town against the evil
Ogre, but are really just lowly thieves who attacked Ogrepons one true friend. This heart
wrenching tale of misunderstanding and persecution was so beautiful and unfortunately brings
me to one of my first issues.

​ This game, including both DLC neeeed voice acting so so bad. Game Freak has
seemingly taken the “every game has the same story” criticisms levied against the franchise to
heart because they've been firing on all cylinders in the story department for a while now. Sun
and Moon had a cutscene to describe a new bit of story and lore about the region like every 15
steps, Sword and Shields base games story was nothing to write home about but found the next
gear in the DLC and Legends Arceus has a bananas story that had you flying through time and
ending with a fight with a GOD!... but… like…. In a different way from all the other times you
fight a go in the other Pokemon games. But with the emphasis on the 3 major stories and 3
stories in the DLC the dialog can be a slog to get through as its just line after line of lore dumps
and character building and with all the cinematic and obvious mouth movements that are
supposed to look like they are speaking, having it just be ambient music or sometimes even
dead silence is a really awkward disconnect. Now while having it be fully voiced similarly to like
a Baldur's Gate, I totally understand that that isn’t a reasonable expectation for the game and
the hardware that it’s on. But something like Breath of the Wild could be attainable. Narrating
and voicing the big and important scenes could have taken the already good plot that The Teal
Mask had and turn it up to 11!

​ Another disappointing thing that hit me not long after the beginning of my DLC
playthrough was that little to no performance improvement had been made from the base game.
When the base game launched people went into the graphical fidelity and the performance
issues HARD. I was having a fantastic time as I started my romp through Paldea so I just
blocked out the noise thinking people were just being over critical and even stopped watching
some of my favorite Nintendo creators because I didn’t want to hear the slander of a game I
enjoyed. But they had an extra year to work on this DLC and people paid extra money to
experience the new and significantly condensed areas so I thought for sure that at the very least
the DLC areas would be running as reasonably well as one could expect of the dated hardware.
But at least in my experience the game seemed to run WORSE in the DLC areas. Miridons wall
climb ability was almost unusable and the cliffside often looked like melting wax. The
background NPC animations seemed to run worse in cutscenes and the random glitches and
bugs with the Pokemon were a near constant. This was super disappointing to me because with
how big the public outcry was I really thought that they were going to go in and take a serious
look at the performance before releasing extra content. Maybe that is me being a disillusioned
fanboy, maybe there was at least a little merit in my line of thinking. The world may never know.
One thing I will give them credit for in the performance department was they did fix the PC
boxes so it no longer takes 3-5 business days for each new page to load as you sift through the
hundreds of pokemon you collect throughout your playthrough.

​ Outside of these issues I had a blast with Part one of this DLC. The helping Ogrepon
and blooming new friendships with people generally wary of outsiders was a touching story with
a really cool Festival of Masks as the setting where all the drama unfolds. We even managed to
catch ourselves a second shiny for our team with a random encounter Koffing! Even with the
performance issues. I'd recommend checking this DLC out if you haven’t already.

​ After revealing the truth about Opgrepon to the town, our trip to Kitakami had
unfortunately come to an end. Luckily we can come back to explore the island to our heart's
content at any time we wish. But we won’t be back at the Uva Academy for long! We are quickly
guided to a meeting with Cyrano, the headmaster of Blueberry Academy, who invites us to join
his school on an Exchange Program! Blueberry Academy isn’t your average school either,
being held in a massive underwater terrarium filled with Pokemon! It’s like the pokemon version
of Rapture without all the horrors of unregulated capitalism! This terrarium is filled with even
more returning pokemon and some wild random encounters with things like Flygon and
Reuniclus just chilling out in the bushes. This is another thing I find super cool about the DLC
areas especially doing it after beating the base game story. Is getting to use these powerful late
game pokemon in some meaningful story battles. Although with how this school is run they
seem to be just regular power pokemon.

​ The main focus of this school is competitive battling, doing their battles in a double battle
format and man do they NOT mess around. I was regularly getting demolished by random NPC
trainers and had to grind hard for levels. I wasn’t expecting the trainers to go for the throat like
that and I can’t lie it hurt my pride a little bit. I’m not a huge fan of grinding but with the little
radiant quests known as BBQs it made it a little less monotonous. Now the word little in that
phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting because unless you're doing the BBQs in a multiplayer
Union Circle there's like 6 of them that rotate through at a rate that would make my boy Preston
Garvey blush.
 While these BBQ’s are only needed for story progression with each Elite Four member
only needing like 50 BP to challenge, but if you are wanting to unlock any of the extra wild
pokemon, or other bonus functions (like feeding your gambling addiction in with the item printer)
your gonna want to gather up a few friends and knock some specialty BBQs out together.

Speaking of the Elite Four they operate slightly differently than the base game group of
the same name. This group of students are the four strongest trainers who are led by the
Champion who is the strongest of them all. That champion being our old friend Kieran, though
not the same Kieran we left on Kitakami. Last time we saw him we had beaten him in a battle for
the chance to capture Ogrepon. We beat him as we had several times before and this pushed
him over the edge. With a new look and an attitude shift that would make any school bully
jealous, he has taken to the idea that power is more important than anything else. He pushed
everything to the side damaging his relationships with his friends, family and pokemon to reach
his only goal. To beat us.

​ This is a character arch that I was really hoping that Game Freak would take for years.
Ever since the shift the rivals had taken from Insufferable jerk that's always one step ahead to
loveable ouph who's always right on your heels I really wanted a character who would just get
tired of being dunked on every battle and snap. I personally thought the Hop would have been
the perfect rival to do this because before we came along his older brother and Region
champion had been taking him to school since birth. But I thought that Kieran played the role
well. I only wish that the bad guy side had been given a little more depth. Like some real evil
villain sort of scheme to steal Ogrepon, or something other than just being kind of a jerk all the
time.

Keiran does jump out and try to undercut our opportunity to catch Terapijos but in the end
couldn’t handle the Legendaries power. Teaching him important lessons about friendship and
the responsibility required when in a position of power and leadership. All and all I thought this
was a decent way to tackle a character arc like this but hope one day we get a full base game
with a similar, more fleshed out version of it.

​ That wraps up part two of our DLC adventure and the entirety of the Hidden Treasure of
Area Zero! But wait! There's more! During our time in the DLC Game Freak released a free
epilogue to the DLC just in time for us to play as we wrapped up the Inigo Disc portion. This
Epilogue give more insight into the Loyal Three and who was secretly pulling the strings behind
the scenes. Pecharunt is a new mythical pokemon and the leader of the Loyal Three. Pecharunt
also makes a special mochi that turns all who eat it into chicken dancing mochi fiends. This is
obviously a parody of classic Zombie movies like Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead.
Where in our instance the Zombies are trying to feed those non infected the special mochi until
the whole town is taken under the influence of Pecharunt. While all this boiled down to was a
series of brief cutscenes with a few battles in between the premise was so goofy and
entertaining that it would end up being my favorite part of the whole DLC. My only qualm being
that a mystery gift item is required to start the DLC so this content will be lost whenever Game
Freak decides to stop distributing the item, and also how to start the epilogue is a little obtuse so
starting it naturally without the help of a guide can be really tough. Hopefully if GF does end
distribution they will release a patch to put the item in the game without the need for a mystery
gift because I feel like this has been one of the most fun and creative stories in the main series
pokemon games for a long time.

​ With everything taken into consideration I think that this generation's DLC was a
success. Do I wish they would have taken a step back and fixed some of the core issues that
the base game had? Of course I do, but I'm glad that they gave us a bit more of a look at this
corner of the Pokemon world. Game Freak seems to have cooled the jets by not having a 2024
main series release so hopefully they learned a lesson and take it forward into games like
Pokemon Legends ZA next year.

But how do you guys feel about the Pokemon Scarlet and Violet DLC? Is there anything I
missed? Let me know down in the comments and don't forget to Subscribe to stay up to date
with everything here on the channel. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @tilted1013 and
I also stream every Tuesday and Thursday right here on Youtube. Thanks for watching and I
hope to see you soon!