Review: Pokémon Violet

Text: Xanti Lizanzu

Some of you probably played some Pokémon games when you were younger. The soundtracks from Diamond and Pearl still spark nostalgia within me. But kids nowadays will grow up with quite different games. I was pretty curious to see what new Pokémon games look like, so I tried my luck with one of the two newest main series games: Pokémon Violet.

If your previous experience with Pokémon was a 2D-cartoonish game, playing this game might confuse you. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are open-world games meaning you will not simply linearly make your way through the gyms and storyline: it is totally up to you in what way you will play this game. Right after the opening tutorial, you can play through 3 different storylines in parallel: Victory Road, Starfall Street, and Path of Legends. Victory Road consists of the typical gym challenges, although it is now up to the player to decide in which order they traverse the gyms. In Starfall Street, you have the bad guys you have to defeat, but in this game, their story is a bit more indepth than in previous games. In Path of Legends, you battle socalled Pokémon called Titans. Playing through these different storylines in any way you want and switching between them created a fun and varied experience.

The open world feel was also something truly entertaining. Seeing Pokémon walking around, flying away, or chasing you added another dimension to getting through routes. Compared to many previous games I was actually getting lost, which was frustrating and fun at the same time. I also found myself wandering off route gathering TM's in faraway places, and simply discovering all the fun Pokémon there are. Trainer battles were also not mandatory, but I was still finding myself curious to see what kind of Pokémon trainers would have.

Apart from the starters, the new Pokémon did not disappoint me: I constantly played with new Pokémon which all had very cool concepts. The game also introduced a new mechanic for Pokémon who have evolved to look like existing Pokémon, but who are not the same species. To me, these were not as fun as regional variants or completely new Pokémon, but still a nice addition.

To help you traverse the big open world, you receive a legendary Pokémon at the beginning of the game which can be used as a bike. Throughout playing the game the Pokémon receives movement upgrades which are all helpful for crossing the mountains and the waters. In between the great outdoors, there are also some pretty nice cities to explore. Every city is distinct and contains some unique features, like a city with a huge windmill or a city with fishing docks. This also has to do with the fact that the whole game including the cities, landscapes, and ingame culture have been modeled after Spain, which has been done very well in my opinion. So on the surface, all looks well, but when actually trying to explore some of the areas and cities you discover they are not as nice on the inside as they look on the outside. Most buildings are not enterable, doors in cities lead to a menu where you can order food, and structures within areas feel like they have been copy-pasted. These are merely examples of the blankness that rules over this game. You can not even interact with every NPC, and the ones you do interact with do not really enhance the gameplay. This was pretty disappointing to me since Pokémon games normally do have this extra dimension of exploring the world by talking to NPCs and walking through buildings.

There were also some new additions to the game which did not add much to my playing experience. A very present addition was gastronomy. Every city had a lot of restaurants and food stands, and throughout the outdoors, there were places where you could have a picnic. Personally, this addition felt like it was added simply for entertaining children, but at least it did not affect the gameplay much. The same goes for the additions of TM crafting and auto-battling Pokémon. The latter was mandatory for one of the storylines, but I did not get much joy from it. Other than that I used them very little.

The one addition that did excite me was the new battle mechanic called terastallizing. This mechanic can be used once per battle and when activated, creates a sort of jewel and luster around each Pokémon. Each Pokémon can terastallize and each Pokémon has a special tera type. When it is terastallized, it will change its type to its special tera type. I mostly used this in impor- tant battles, and the animation and experience around it did not fail to amaze me. Pokémon with tera types other than one of their original types were however a bit hard to find, which on the other hand does add to the uniqueness of the mechanic.

Another big addition was the possibility to play most of the game with other people through wifi. I did not make use of this feature yet, but reviews online were not super positive. Some of them state that it feels more like you are playing next to each other rather than with each other. It supposedly also causes a lot of bugs and crashes. In the offline play, there were also some visual bugs and maybe, more importantly, a very poor framerate. They did not truly affect my personal experience, but if you care a lot about performance this could have quite a significant influence.

After having played Pokémon games a lot as a kid, I thought that this game might change my opinion about Pokémon games in a negative way. Very soon in the game,

Puzzle Solution: Secret Recipe

Text: Tim Hut

To not have to check 232 different possible solution, the first step was to realize one of the missing ingredients is ‘eggs’ leaving us with only 4 possible solutions.

Adding ‘eggs’ (or 01100101 01100111 01100111 01110011) via XOR operations tot the third cyphertext results in the key: 10101001 01001101 01011001 00000101.

At least that would have been the key had your great-great-grandmother correctly encrypted the second g, the key you get is 10101001 01001101 01000001 00000101.

Adding the key to the other cyphertexts and converting back to symbols using the ASCII table results in the final secret ingredients. The secret ingredients in order are: salt, milk, eggs, love

Or with your key: satt, mitk, eggs, lone

Just for further demonstration filling in ‘eggs’ on the other positions results in:

• eggs, {ogl, satt, zi}b

• {ogl, eggs, mitk, da}}

• zi}b, da}}, lone, eggs

Hence you see had ‘eggs’ correctly been encrypted; the non-perfect secrecy would

Puzzle: Addition Sum Search

Suggested by: Xanti Lizanzu

In the figure to the right you see an “addition sum search” puzzle. Find connecting numbers that make a total of the given sum. The numbers can be connected horizon- tally, vertically or diagonally. it became clear the opposite was true. It was awesome to explore the game in my own way, sometimes literally just wandering off-route and seeing what new Pokémon this game had to offer. I could feel the childish spirit in me rising whenever playing the game. It also made me somewhat ignorant of all the quirks that the game does have. So if you are seeking to feel the nostalgia of playing Pokémon games when you were a kid (and by any chance have a Nintendo Switch lying around), I would definitely advise you to try out this game. have revealed the other ingredients even if you guessed the wrong location of ‘eggs’ three times.