Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are less than a month away, and today several media sites have been blessed with the opportunity to have a hands-on experience with the game! Near 10 minutes of gameplay can be watched, although there’s not too much reason to watch multiple videos, as all footage is identical – the only difference are the players’ opinions.

One crucial bit of news uniquely learnt from the Serebii preview of the game is that Shiny Pokémon appear in the overworld, like in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. A welcome piece of news! We do not know if there is any sound or visual effect, however, nor footage of it in action. Bonuses for throwing your own Pokémon at wild Pokémon for battles is back as well, although you cannot for instance dodge wild Pokémon or move your Trainer character during battles.

Meanwhile, it was noted by NintendoLife that performance was disappointing.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: in the build we played, performance is not very good. We were really quite disappointed at how the game ran in docked mode, and were unable to test its handheld capabilities. There was plenty we absolutely did like about the game, but we want to cover this hotly queried topic straight away.

The game appears to be running at around 720p whenever you’re in the overworld, with little to no anti-aliasing as far as we can tell, and the maximum frame rate of 30fps is not consistently achieved when moving around the world in a reasonable manner. Objects and characters that are only a few in-game metres from the player run, in busy scenarios, at an even further reduced rate, a technique used by a lot of games to prevent frame drops and poor performance elsewhere, but in this case it’s not enough to keep the master frame rate consistent.

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Textures in a lot of the more open areas can be extremely smeary as well. In the main city of Mesagoza (which is not part of the open world and requires a separate loading screen), walls and floors and chairs all practically blur together into what we can sadly only call a mess. The game isn’t pretty in busy, open areas, and yet it still doesn’t manage to maintain a decent frame rate. Frankly, we were gutted with what we saw.

What were your favourite parts of the preview? Are you hopeful the final game will perform better than seen by other people?

Edited by Sheep.