Fans of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have been discovering a seemingly endless number of glitches in the Generation 9 games since they launched, with one such hilarious bug involving the destruction of a whole city at the hands of an innocent Pokemon Trainer while they were trying to catch a shiny Eevee. Along with other issues such as performance problems and underwhelming graphics, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have certainly suffered in terms of reputation since the games were released last November.
From vanishing NPCs to mutating player avatars, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet have a bunch of weird glitches that are often just as funny as they are outright ridiculous. Although the majority of the game's technical bugs don't tend to carry any serious negative consequences for players, that hasn't been the case with all of them, and many upset fans claim that the state of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet is the worst out of all the games in the series. Shiny-hunting enthusiasts in particular have also expressed how irritating their favorite activity has become due to several common, terrain-related glitches causing many Pokemon to spawn and become stuck outside the playable boundaries of the map.
It seems that glitches regarding map geometry and terrain in the Paldea region are a somewhat common occurrence, with one player named Pasukaru_Apple on Reddit highlighting this in a post that they recently shared on the site. The attached clip shows them in battle with a rare shiny Eevee, although the Poke Ball that they used to catch the critter must have malfunctioned as the device appears to capture the entire surrounding city instead. Although it's little more than a visual glitch, this bugged catching animation somehow causes nearly everything in the background to unload temporarily, wrecking many of the on-screen textures while also bringing the frame rate to a grinding halt. Thanks to a lucky critical catch though, the player did manage to successfully capture their shiny Pokemon.
Aside from the previously mentioned bug that causes wild Pokemon to spawn out of bounds, many shiny hunters have also complained that the lack of sparkling effects can make it hard to spot a shiny Pokemon when one spawns in the wilderness. The new open-world style of gameplay that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet boasts does technically make shiny spawns more frequent, but even with the new sandwiches that can further improve shiny encounter rates, the latest titles seem to provide new challenges for eager shiny hunters.
Despite the poor technical polish which has contributed to Pokemon Scarlet and Violet receiving the lowest score on Metacritic out of all the core-series Pokemon games, Game Freak's latest entries to the franchise have been record-breaking in terms of sales. While the majority of players are thoroughly enjoying the games despite their shortcomings, many continue to hope that glitches such as these are dealt with in the upcoming patch.
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are available on Nintendo Switch.
