Incorporating the action and intrigue from 2017's Breath of the Wild, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom ups the ante in a lot of different ways, with better frame rates, improved textures and illuminations, and quicker load times when traveling between points on the map, all the while incorporating bold new creation mechanics. It's been just as much a mechanical success as a critical one.
Which makes me wonder exactly what happened went wrong with Pokemon Scarlet & Violet? Why was that game such a technical shambles that people were sounding the death knells for the Nintendo Switch, and yet the visually vastly more spectacular Tears of the Kingdom totally shows that Nintendo's ageing yet impressive console has still 'got it'?
Now I understand that may seem like an apples-and-oran-berries comparison— the Pokemon and Zelda games are vastly different, with one being a turn-based monster battler RPG and the other primarily focussing on exploration and action-filled swordplay, with some puzzle solving thrown in for good measure. What irks me is that when the last pair of Pokemon games came out, they were filled with bugs and glitches that ranged from hilarious to headache-inducing, and the excuses that rolled in from the die-hard fan base mainly fell into two camps.
First, there's the more obvious theory for a game (or pair of games, in this case) to be full of flaws—that the publisher rushed it out the door to maximize profits because, hey, people are going to buy it no matter what state it's in. This seems like a shoo-in argument for a gaming empire like Pokemon, which according to a TitleMax report published in late May 2023, is the highest-grossing video game franchise of all time, with $90 billion (USD) in sales. Compare that to the second-placed Mario franchise, which has just over a third of that total ($30.25 billion) despite having an extra 15 years of sales history, and it's no surprise that Scarlet and Violet sold 10 million copies within three days of being released (just like Tears of the Kingdom did).
That huge opening sales figure came even after leakers had already shown the world some facepalm-inducing glitches before the game came out—from human characters turning into spaghetti-legged monstrosities when they mount a rideable Pokemon, to sweet little Fuecoco falling asleep mid-battle, sliding gently down a slope, and plummeting off the bottom of the screen like it'd been fired from a downward-facing cannon. Add to that some abysmal frame rate drops, and it seems like proof positive that people will buy anything if you slap a Pikachu on it.
But there was also a second argument for why Scarlet and Violet were so broken, and to my shame, I admit to having given that argument some serious consideration. It was that, yes, the game wasn't running right, but that wasn't GameFreak's fault—the Switch is just technologically inferior to the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X|S, and the latest Pokemon game is just too damn big to run properly on that already-antiquated hardware.
Except, no, that's not the case, and the latest adventure of Link proves it.
Coming in with a file size of 18.2GB, Tears of the Kingdom is the physically largest first-party game Nintendo has ever released, unseating the former heavyweight champ, and its Legend of Zelda predecessor, Breath of the Wild, which weighed in at an impressive 14.4GB. For comparison's sake, Scarlet and Violet barely managed to crack double digits at 10 GB. That's still well above average—one comparative study found the average file size of a Switch game to be 2.8 GB—but that's taking into account the nearly 40% of small indie game and retro releases that don't even crack the 1.8GB threshold.
That's a whole mess of numbers just to say that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are pretty big games data-wise, but still nowhere near as big as the Zelda games that came out immediately before or after them. With that in mind, blaming the Switch hardware seems unfair and downright silly.
So let's come back to that first argument—the one that says Nintendo and The Pokemon Company rushed Scarlet and Violet out the door in the name of the almighty dollar/euro/yen. I mean, that's a fair criticism, but everybody does that, right? It's just part of living in the modern gaming world, where every console is connected to the internet, and you can just patch and fix a game after you've let people spend money on it, because that's how every game release works, right?
Well, maybe we, the gamers, have just become a little too accustomed to be treated that way by publishers, and we need to start expecting more. We need to be patient and not demand that incomplete and flawed games get into our eager little hands as soon as possible. We need to start expecting the respect that Nintendo showed us with Tears of the Kingdom, which was pretty much complete all the way back in March 2022. Those last 14 months before its release were put in to add some polish and make the game the best it could be as soon as it hit shelves and digital downloads. And it worked!
Now that doesn't mean I'm going to hand in my Pokedex and turn my back on the past two and a half decades of fun that Pokemon has brought me. But I am going to stop making excuses for Nintendo and The Pokemon Company, and I'll be a little more critical of my fellow fans who want everything handed to them now, now, now. I'm willing to wait for quality, especially after Nintendo has proven that it can deliver that quality on the Switch.
But only if we're patient.