Pokemon Scarlet and Violet: The Teal Mask DLC Review
It’s been almost a year since I reviewed Pokemon Scarlet and Violet at launch, and I still feel more conflicted about them than any other Pokemon game in all my years loving the series. They dazzled me with their open world design, which felt like the answer to years of fan requests – but the performance and aesthetic hits that came with that innovation were painful catches that didn’t quite feel worth the trade. Still, with two DLCs on the horizon, I had hope that Game Freak would be able to pull it together. Could the first DLC, The Teal Mask, fix Scarlet and Violet’s glaring issues and deliver a robust, new experience that fully embraced the clear potential of what these games could have been?
Nope!!!
For starters, I don’t know how it’s possible, but somehow The Teal Mask runs worse than the base game of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet does. I complained about the poor performance of Scarlet and Violet in my initial review, and had hoped that a whole year later Game Freak would have made improvements to things like framerate, pop-in, weird lighting issues, model clipping, and everything else – problems Nintendo even stated it was working to address back in December. But it hasn’t. Instead, it feels like the DLC has the jankiness turned up about one or two more notches.
It’s still playable: I didn’t run into any game breaking bugs. I did suffer from one hard crash, which while not a huge deal due to the game’s frequent autosave, is still pretty shocking given the franchise’s relatively polished history. But more importantly, during my playthrough of The Teal Mask it was impossible to go for more than a minute or two without a visual distraction. Maybe my Tinkaton was clipping through the ground during battle, or falling into the abyss when an encounter started on a cliffside. Maybe I was watching nearby Pokemon models vibrate violently, or seeing NPCs vanish in and out of existence. Or maybe the whole thing was just chugging, simply because I was riding on my Miraidon and it didn’t know how to handle more than a few trees appearing on screen at once. Look, I don’t expect high-fidelity graphics at the level of the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X in my Pokemon games. But the sheer amount of issues is so distracting all the time that it became an active detriment to my enjoyment. And if Game Freak keeps up its current pace of making performance several degrees worse with each game, by the next gen or so Pokemon might be literally unplayable, because you won’t be able to see anything. Fingers crossed that The Indigo Disk DLC this Winter improves matters literally at all.
I don’t want to keep harping on the performance issues, but one more critical note on this point is that my problems with endgame raid battles from the original review still haven’t been fixed, which tangibly impacts gameplay. Queuing into online raids is still inconsistent due to the very weird way in which Scarlet and Violet refreshes its available raids and doesn’t notify you when they’re full. And once you do get in, completing high-level raids can be challenging due to lag and a weird timer system sometimes skipping your turn, freezing your screen, or otherwise making it impossible to tell what’s going on at any given moment. While some major raiding bugs have been fixed in the last year, it was impossible for me to spend time on the primary endgame content of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet or its DLC without running into this stuff and being frustrated by it.
My feelings about the new Kitakami island region itself aren’t much fonder. Like Paldea, the world of Scarlet and Violet’s DLC is butt-ugly, with low-res textures, little detail in its environments, and a single town mostly made up of buildings you can’t enter and NPCs uttering boring, nothing phrases. That big local “festival” that the trailers hyped up? It’s just a few carts with vendors and some uninteresting NPCs. It’s even more of a disappointment when you consider that Kitakami is based on Japan – a nation that Game Freak has based multiple memorable regions off of before (Kanto and Johto). When I’ve already seen a Japanese-inspired world done in such loving detail in multiple Pokemon Games, Kitakami feels like a massive letdown.
That said, The Teal Mask isn’t all bad. The battling and competitive aspects are still what they’ve always been (good), and it’s still fun to fill up a PC box full of neat little dudes you find running around outside. The island checks all the boxes for that activity specifically: it’s big, full of Pokemon, and has lots of different biomes to poke around in. One of my favorite parts of Kitakami was the mountain at its center with crystalline pools at the summit, numerous caves along its path to the top, and a surprising cavern structure within full of Pokemon hiding around corners and in little holes. But the overall ugliness and performance issues did detract from locations that looked like they were probably quite beautiful in their concept art, just not their final execution – such as when I first laid eyes on those sparkling pools on the mountaintop, or when I crossed a thin, stone bridge to a mysterious cave as the sunset hit the surrounding rock formations.
Content-wise, The Teal Mask largely consists of a familiar Pokemon formula where you track down a legendary Pokemon while learning about local lore. You’re accompanied on this quest by a sibling pair, Carmine and Kieran, both of whom spent most of the story alternating between yelling at me over nothing and challenging me to battles. The Teal Mask’s plot is so overdone that even a Slowpoke could see its twists coming, which is a pretty big bummer after the heights reached during the ending of Scarlet and Violet. This DLC campaign is also short, about seven or eight hours long, though catching every newly-added monster will stretch it a bit more.
The best part of Teal Mask’s story is the subplot surrounding a photographer, Perrin, who sends you on a Pokemon Snap-esque photography journey after a totally different legendary Pokemon. After hours of Carmine and Kieran shouting at me, Perrin’s curiosity and backstory with photography were a refreshing change, and her photo-taking minigame provided a natural avenue for The Teal Mask to expand on something I loved in Scarlet and Violet: discovering Pokemon doing fun Pokemon things in their habitats. Frankly, Perrin’s story is so much more interesting than the rest of the DLC that it’s a shame I couldn’t spend more time hanging out with her and her Hisuian Growlithe instead of being dragged around by the world’s most unnecessarily angsty preteens.
Other new features in The Teal Mask include an expanded Pokedex with a tiny handful of new monsters, a middling selection of new cosmetic choices, and a terrible minigame called “Ogre Oustin’” that involves tanking your framerate further by speeding around on your bike to collect berries really fast. While I’m always happy to praise Game Freak’s Pokemon designs (especially the candy apple-themed Dipplin – cute!), and it’s nice to finally change out of my hideous school uniform, I don’t know what they were thinking with Ogre Oustin’. It’s boring, repetitive, runs terribly (especially online), and yet made me feel bad about not wanting to play it by offering great rewards for anyone looking to build raiding or competitive teams. Terrible.
The ways in which The Teal Mask feels like a step backward from what made Scarlet and Violet astonishing are also disappointing. Scarlet and Violet themselves promoted player freedom: you could go anywhere you wanted at almost any time, and do the major plot points in any order. The Teal Mask mysteriously tosses that in the bin in favor of a far more standard, linear journey. While you can explore any part of the island at any time, there’s no benefit to doing so beyond catching Pokemon. You can’t even do the initial quest – which involves visiting three sign boards around the island – in any order. The sudden loss of that player freedom is painful given how critical it was to my enjoyment of the base game.
It’s also a surprisingly weak effort when compared to Game Freak’s previous DLC attempts in Pokemon Sword and Shield’s Isle of Armor and Crown Tundra. While both of these DLC were similarly criticized for being shallow in the story department, Isle of Armor added challenge by forcing you to train a brand new Pokemon, while Crown Tundra included multiple new game modes. The Teal Mask does… none of that, and feels distinctly incomplete. Maybe that’s because it was always meant to be just one half of a package with The Indigo Mask, but if that’s the case, then I question the wisdom of splitting the DLC at all.
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