The school that you’ve enrolled in as you play Pokémon Scarlet vs Violet hosts a special independent study project. The theme of this assignment is “A Treasure Hunt.” Explore the world and seek out your very own treasure!
Three stories will be woven into your adventure while traversing the sprawling Paldea region. Along Victory Road, you will go to Gyms in different locations in order to to achieve Champion Rank. On the Path of Legends, you can join Arven in search of rare ingredients. And in ★ Starfall Street ★, you’ll challenge Team Star, a group of delinquents causing trouble for the school.
These stories are set in an open world, so where you go is all up to you. A world at gk88.supply teeming with Pokémon and people to meet is waiting for you—traverse the Paldea region wherever you heart desires.
There are eight Pokémon Gyms in different locations throughout Paldea, all managed by the Pokémon League. If a Trainer makes their way to the Gyms, defeats all of the Gym Leaders, and then passes the Champion Assessment at the Pokémon League headquarters, they can earn the coveted Champion Rank.
Arven’s research into healthy recipes for Pokémon has led him to seek out rare ingredients called Herba Mystica, which are said to immediately restore health once eaten.
Herba Mystica are extremely rare herbs that can only be found in Paldea. They are guarded by Titan Pokémon, which are bigger and stronger than ordinary Pokémon—making these rare herbs even more difficult to obtain. What’s more, a number of these Titan Pokémon have already been sighted in the region.
Explore a wide-open world at your own pace, battle and try to catch wild Pokémon, and encounter the Legendary Pokémon Koraidon in the Pokémon Scarlet game and Miraidon in the Pokémon Violet game. Which will you choose? Games sold separately unless otherwise noted.
For all of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s stumbles in their attempts to usher the series into a new chapter, the most glaring among them is that a more convincing, ultimately superior blueprint was already laid for the series’ future 10 months ago with the release of Pokémon Legends: Arceus.
Arceus was dead set on making the world of Pokémon as compelling to explore in a mechanical sense as the series has always felt thematically. To do so, it deployed fluid traversal and action-driven battle systems, and it shaped up into one of the most exciting experiences the series has yet to offer. Scarlet and Violet, on the other hand, go out of their way to make the modern-day Paldea region feel more lived in, and filled to the brim with stuff to do. But the actual doing of those things never quite sings the way it did in Legends: Arceus.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet take pains to create a greater sense of freedom than the Pokémon series’ more recent mainline games like Pokémon Sun and Moon, and Pokémon Sword and Shield. This time around, the world is your Cloyster, and it purports to give you free rein to follow map-wide quest lines at your leisure. However, as I ran, drove, and flew around Paldea, it became clear that much of this promise of freedom was a facade.
Scarlet and Violet’s central hub is an academy sitting smack dab in the middle of the map: Naranja Academy or Uva Academy, depending on whether you’re playing Scarlet or Violet, respectively. (I played Violet for this review.) Here, students come from across Paldea to study Pokémon, life skills, and all other sorts of academia under the tutelage of a colorful cast of teachers. The academy acts as the progenitor for many of Scarlet and Violet’s stories, both big and small.
