Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Generates Controversy Amid Disability Debate

Game Freak once again finds itself in the heat of controversy as fans call out the developers for removing Audio/Visual indicators for the Shinies in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.

Major Takeaways:

• Players with visual impairments call out Game Freak over their neglect for making a huge chunk of the endgame in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet a lot more inaccessible. 

Past games in the Pokemon franchise used to have certain audio and visual indicators to indicate shiny pokemon to the player. These indicators have now been removed in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet making hunting Shinies a lot more difficult, especially for players with even slight audio/visual impairment. 

It’s actually insane how Game Freak just removed any visual/audio indicator for shinies, so anyone with even a slight visual impairment can’t enjoy really any shiny hunting in Scarlet/Violet

— Johnstone (@JohnstoneYT) November 29, 2022

This is particularly confusing for a lot of players as subtle indicators have always been present in past Pokemon games, making their exclusion in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet particularly confusing. On top of that many of the Shinies in Scarlet and Violet are extremely hard to differentiate in the first place. 

Here is an image that shows the difference between normal and shiny pokemon.

Players with visual impairment have also noted how difficult is it to catch the shiny Pokemon in Scarlet and Violet.

I am indeed colorblind and I can tell that identifying shinies in this game is almost impossible, is either, seeing a pokemon with a slightly variant of colors and thinking, that could probably be shiny, but it ending up being slighlty darker or shinier because of light D:

— Chi-Co (@Guido_Victor) November 29, 2022

Shiny Pokemon have been part of the Pokemon series since the Gen 2 games such as Pokemon Gold and Silver. They are extremely rare variants of normal Pokemon with different color schemes than their normal variants and are usually part of the end game for every Pokemon game. 

In an era where many are pushing for accessibility in the gaming space, it’s a little disappointing to see that certain developers are still far behind when it comes to making their games accessible to audiences with disabilities. 

Despite this, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have had a more than successful launch with the game outselling God of War Ragnarok in Japan while selling 2 million copies in its first 3 days alone. The game has received a lot of controversy for its buggy, unpolished launch while many have also praised it for being one of the most fun games in the franchise that’s marred by technical problems.

eXputer’s Najam-Ul-Hassan describes the game to be the best (like no one ever was) and worst of the franchise, further describing the game as,

“In short, from excellent OSTs to great new-gen Pokemon, Scarlet and Violet have all the ingredients to be the best core Pokemon game in the franchise. However, these ingredients are pretty useless when paired with poor performance, lag, bad graphics, and glitches that make the games a test of your patience.”

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are currently out exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.