This week, the first wave of reviews for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet went live and unfortunately, they have brought to light a number of issues. Game Freak began its transition to open-world Pokemon games earlier this year with Legends: Arceus, which suffered from choppy frame rates. Unfortunately, it sounds like this has gone unresolved for the new Gen 9 games. 

A wide number of reviews have already put the performance issues in the spotlight, including Polygon, which had three writers with early access to the games all experiencing problems. These issues range from poor frame rates to crashes and graphical errors, like clipping, invisible Pokemon and pop-in.

While graphical errors like clipping and disappearing Pokemon can be fixed through patches, and performance can be improved, we've likely reached a situation where the Switch hardware just can't keep up. Nintendo never went through with a Switch Pro, and for the last couple of years, the standard Switch has really begun to show its age.

In Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, you'll notice half-rate animations for NPCs and Pokemon in the distance, which is an effort to keep details on screen without bringing the frame rate down. Still, even with measures like this in place, there will be sections where you'll notice choppiness.

Recently, Bayonetta 3 also drew some criticism for its limited level design, as PlatinumGames had to scale back in some areas due to the hardware under the hood. It seems this is a trend we can expect as the Switch enters its sixth year.

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KitGuru Says: The Nintendo Switch has been a great console and it has been astonishing to see games like The Witcher 3 running on a handheld, but we seem to be hitting a bottleneck now where developers are more limited by the hardware, which is a particularly big issue for games targeting multiple platforms. Hopefully, by this time next year, we'll finally be looking ahead to a more powerful ‘Switch 2' or something similar. 

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