Pokémon Violet is the second title I have played from this video game series, with the first being Pokémon Legends Arceus. I originally wasn’t planning to buy PokéViolet as PokéArceus had quenched my curiosity about the word of catching pocket monsters, but I was often told that it wasn’t a true Pokémon experience and that I should try one of the ‘mainstream’ titles. So about a month before its ninth generation was released, Amazon had it 40% off and my credit card did the rest. (No wonder it was a record-breaking launch!)In terms of my experience as a relative newcomer to Pokémon, I was impressed with this title’s visual design. It was colourful and vibrant, and the map was significantly bigger than the Hisui map. The premise of being a transfer student is a little uninspired, but after spending way too much time on customising my avatar and choosing my starter Pokémon (Quaxly), I was ready to explore Paldea!Of the three quest line choices presented, I opted to help out Arven first and locate the Herba Mystica so that his dog Pokémon would recover (Path of Legends) but I soon discovered that there is no level scaling and that I would have to concurrently complete the gym battles in a specific order to be at a suitable level to progress evenly through the game. I was trying to avoid having to look up an online guide, but I relented and I was somewhat relived when I saw the amount of zigzagging around the open world required. It would have wasted a lot of time to have worked that out myself, and it gave me a fairly smooth experience although being slightly over-levelled throughout my gameplay.In getting started, I think that PokéViolet does a better job at explaining the basic mechanics (through taking classes in the Academy) than PokéArceus as I was initially detracted by the differences between the two titles. For example, not being able to catch Pokémon without having to battle them (and so Quick Balls became my first choice when out exploring), and that Poké Balls weren’t craftable but money was a-plenty so there really wasn’t an issue of running out. Also, when a wild Pokémon sneaked up on me and I had them already registered in my Pokédex I usually fled the battle. I missed the real-time battle elements from PokéArceus.I liked how both titles reward exploration, and I found the gameplay loop rather addictive. I also appreciated the diversity of the NPCs which you don’t normally see in a first party Nintendo game - age, gender, ethnicity, body shape - and it made me wish that I had some more options in customising my own avatar to be a little more mature considering the older ‘students’ you meet/battle out in the open world.Of the many well-documented performance issues at launch, my main issues that negatively impacted my enjoyment were:- the draw distance and asset pop-in- the poor frame rate and pacing meant that I often felt nauseated, especially when I played in docked mode connected to my television- when the timer unfairly skipped forward if you pass-out during a tera raid battle.Fortunately, I did not experience any crashes or soft-locking bugs.The series’ slogan is *Gotta Catch ‘Em All*, but this is technically impossible if you are a solo player without a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, and the best you can do is 366 of the full 400. For me, this is unacceptable. There were a few other design and gameplay elements that I feel that could have been improved:- level scaling and difficulty options- the logic of the controls as I was consistently getting + and - mixed up so the option to re-map controls within the game would have been beneficial- the terrible user interface with poor accessibility and overlapping of written text elements,- an editable map so you can pin points of interest to return to at a later time- the entire Operation Starfall story/quest (and the catchphrase *Hasta la vistar* … WHY!?)- the pointless, vapid NPC dialogue.I only started PokéViolet recently after the patch with version 1.2.0 was released at the end of February, as I had decided to hold off after reading the countless online articles and endless comments on social media about the title’s performance issues. As a solo player, the co-op and online multiplayer features doesn’t factor in my review of Pokémon Violet, but if the performance and glitches were resolved I probably would have been more positive about it. I don’t see myself buying another Pokémon game in the future.