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Pokémon Scarlet and Violet just got a new trailer, and oh boy — this one is fourteen minutes long. That’s a lot to dissect, so find a comfy chair and make yourself a cup of Sinistea as we go through everything new (and expanded!) in this latest trailer, which you can watch here:
Don’t forget to head to our Pokémon pre-order guide to nab yourself a copy, and check out our colossal “Everything We Know So Far” list and our “New and Returning Pokémon” list to catch up!
Right, as Game Freak would say… Let’s Go, Pikachu!
Everything we noticed in Scarlet & Violet’s new trailer
New Pokémon
We’re starting strong, but small, with the new Pokémon that we spotted in this trailer. Only one was officially announced — Farigiraf, the hard-to-spell evolution of Girafarig, where the tail has become the head. Farigiraf also comes with new abilities… But we’ll talk about those later.
Several other new Pokémon appeared in the trailer, although we didn’t get any information like names, types, or even what they actually look like. Here they all are:
Our guesses on what these are:
- Armarouge’s pre-evolutionary form
- Some kind of snow-mouse
- A parakeet
- A salt…mushroom…house?
- A spider that’s maybe a coin, somehow?
Honestly, who knows.
If you want to find out which pre-existing ‘mons are getting added to the Paldean Pokédex, we’ve added the ones from this trailer to our ongoing list:
Picnics
Pokémon’s ever-evolving attempts to make a Poké-hangout with our ‘mons continues with the new Paldean Picnics, which are pretty similar to Sword and Shield’s camping. Instead of a static first-person camera, it looks like you’ll be in third-person, playing ball with your team to bond with them.
There’s also a first-person washing minigame (with a little Mareep spoooonge!!!) for your filthy Pokémon, which seems to make them like you better. Also, makes them clean.
For some reason — it wasn’t explained — there’s a chance that a Pokémon Egg will appear in your picnic baskets, giving you free Pokémon, as long as you don’t fry the egg, you monster. Is this a particular Pokémon that loves laying eggs in baskets, or is it any old Pokémon? We’ll have to wait to find out.
You can also customise your picnics a little bit — by changing the tablecloth! Very important.
But the best part of picnics is the food, of course, and ScaVi replaces Sword & Shield’s curries with Paldea’s sandwiches. It looks like you can buy sandwich ingredients like lettuce, tomatoes, and ham (presumably from Lechonk) in town, and then use those ingredients to create a sandwich within a ten minute time limit (which is a really long time, if you ask us).
It also looks like the sandwich has real physics, meaning that the hard part is balancing ingredients and bread without it all falling apart. We can see some hilarious physics-related antics happening here… and some really nasty sandwiches.
The sandwich’s components dictate how good it is, and what buffs you get from it — higher EXP rates, better catch rates for specific types, and help with raid battles are all possible, plus more that we have yet to see. Love a good sandwich.
New Pokédex UI
The Pokédex has taken its design cues from Apple Books, it seems, with Pokémon appearing more like books on a shelf than entries in an encyclopaedia. Each Pokémon will have its own photo, plus the usual Pokédex stuff of height, weight, animations, and so on. It’s a lot prettier, but maybe a little less accessible?
New Abilities
Girafarig’s evo, Farigiraf, introduces two new abilities to the game:
- Chew Cud: Allows the Pokémon to eat a berry twice, over two turns
- Armor Tail: Stops opposing Pokémon from using priority moves
Armor Tail in particular is a potential game-changer for competitive play, but we’re interested to see if players can do anything cool with Chew Cud, too.
Character Customisation
Pokémon games continue to increase the amount of character customisation that players can do, with haircuts and hair colours returning, but also eye shape, eyelash and eyebrow style, beauty marks, freckles, coloured contacts, lip shape, and makeup options.
As a bonus, it looks like all of these options are no longer locked to a specific gender. This not only means that you can create a gender-neutral character if you want, but also a genderfluid character that readily switches between a more feminine appearance and a more masculine one!
Camera app
We knew about the camera app, but we got a better look at its capabilities in this trailer. It looks like you can take selfies and photos of people and Pokémon, as well as landscapes and other interesting phenomena. There are multiple filters you can use, poses and emotes for your character to do, and something to do with eyes — we’d guess that it’s a “Look Over Here!” command like Animal Crossing: New Horizons has.
If you take a picture you like, you can use it as your character’s profile card background. We’re also curious if you can use pics of Pokémon as their Pokédex profile, like in Breath of the Wild.
The TM Machine
We like the TM Machine. As well as finding TMs scattered across the world or buying them in shops, TMs can now be crafted at a Pokémon Center. Using League Points and Pokémon materials, you can craft anything you have a recipe for — how we get those recipes, however, is still unknown.
League Points?
But wait, did you say League Points? What are League Points? We are going to assume for now that they’re earned through gym battles, but there aren’t a lot of those, so maybe they’re also earned through regular trainer battles. In the latest revamps of the Pokémon anime, Ash and friends have their League ranking monitored and updated by a Rotom Drone every time they battle someone else in the Pokémon League, even random trainers, so we’d guess it’s something like that.
Pokémon now drop materials
You may have noticed that the crafting materials for TMs are Pokémon bits. Don’t worry! These are just bits that fall off a fainted Pokémon, right? Like Snom Thread. We don’t know what part of a Snom is thread, but it doesn’t sound like a body part! And Shinx Fang, well… okay, that sounds like a body part. Maybe you just punched a Shinx so hard its teeth fell out. Don’t worry about it.
Field HUD
While you’re in the field, the Heads Up Display — the term for the interface that’s on the screen, like maps and health bars — has been redesigned to limit your view as little as possible. Instead of your Pokémon team appearing in a separate, full-screen menu, it now appears as a semi-transparent sidebar, allowing you to continue whatever you’re doing while checking a Pokémon’s status.
Mini-map
The mini-map looks like it’ll provide a lot of useful info — nearby wild Pokémon, pins that you can set yourself, and the locations of useful places like Pokémon Centers.
There’s a menu that you can open while in the field that lets you access multiple options:
- Union Circle
- Tera Raid Battle
- Link Trade
- Surprise Trade
- Link Battle
- Battle Stadium
- Mystery Gift
Previously, many of these things were only accessible from either a specific location (like raid battles) or from the start menu (like mystery gifts). Now, it looks like all of these features can be accessed wherever you are!
Offline trading?
We’re willing to take this one with a pinch of salt, because the game is still in development, but it looked to us like the game lets you do a link trade in Offline Mode. But yes, this could just be because the servers aren’t open yet.
New info on terastallizing
- There are 18 Tera types in total
- Tera Pokémon have a type that might not be anything to do with their basic types
- Terastallizing might be available from the start — we see an unevolved Quaxly using it
- Tera Pokémon can be found in the wild — they sparkle
- Catching a wild Tera Pokémon is a matter of getting its HP low, at which point it will turn back into its basic form
- There are rare Tera types, which can be found in raid battles
- There’s a new move called Tera Blast, which changes its type to whatever the Tera-type is of the Pokémon using it
- Sudowoodo finally gets to be a grass type!
Raid battles
Tera raid battles feature up to four players in a timed fight with a Terastallized Pokémon. Much like Sword and Shield’s Dynamaxed battles, these Pokémon are extra strong and extra rare, with Tera types that perhaps can’t be found in the wild.
If your Pokémon gets knocked out in these raid battles, don’t worry — they’ll be revived after five seconds, but that might be precious time lost all the same.
If your chosen Pokémon is a bit pants, or if your team needs help, you can choose to cheer your allies on instead of making a move. This lets you increase their Atk and Sp. Atk., their Def. and Sp. Def., or provide a full-team heal.
When the battle is over, you and your pals will have to team up to catch the Pokémon, as your Poké Balls combine into one big one — but it’s not clear who gets it. Maybe all of you?
Titan Pokémon are cowards
We got to see Klawf, the new Titan Pokémon, in battle — but he notably scuttled off before being fully defeated. Does that mean we’ll have to take him on again in multiple rematches? Probably!
The Titan Pokémon are part of the Herba Mystica plotline, called The Path of Legends. We wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a little more involved than just “beat this big guy and call it a day”.
Day/night cycle
There’s a day-night cycle! We did already know this one, but this trailer confirmed it. No word on whether it’s real time or not, but it looks more dynamic than previous games, which stuck to a morning/day/evening/night cycle.
Height differences?
We’re theorised about this for past trailers, but the stark difference between the little trainers and the more normal-sized trainers makes us wonder if you can choose your height in the character customisation. Reasons why this would be nice — some players are children. Or short, like some of the NL team! Reasons why this might not be possible — mapping animations onto two different-sized frames might be pretty difficult.
Let’s Go! commands
We got some new info about the Let’s Go command, which lets you send off one of your Pokémon into the field to do stuff while you do other things. That includes auto-battling wild Pokémon, and picking up items — although it seems like you might still have to micromanage the Pokémon a little bit, because you have to actually throw them at the item. Which saves you, what, 15 seconds?
New info on Team Star
Team Star — who seem to be the main villains, at least that we know about — have a number of bases across Paldea, each one with a bunch of grunts and a leader. You’ll be allowed to enter the base with the first three Pokémon in your party, but the name of the base will be a clue — like the Fire Squad, for example, which means you should stock up on Water types.
It looks like the grunts will be open-field battles, rather than locked-down arena fights; the game seems to encourage you to use the Let’s Go feature to fight off waves of low-level grunt Pokémon.
When you’ve defeated them all, you’ll unlock the boss — in this case, the boss of Team Star’s Fire Squad, Mela — who rides in on a souped-up car that we strongly suspect is a Pokémon of some kind.
The trailer said we’d have to wait to find out more about these battles, which take place on the car, so we have to assume that there’s some neat twist hidden in amongst all of this.
Graphical compromises
Yyyyyeaaaaahhhh. Sorry.
It looks like ScaVi has some serious graphical compromises that it’s had to do in order to get the game running on Switch, which is definitely preferable to a game that punches above its weight and runs poorly.
Even in a trailer, which is usually polished up, we can see low levels of detail, reduced poly count on Pokémon even in close proximity to the player character, low frame rates on things like the windmill, and simplistic textures. Is it a problem? That’s up to you to decide. And also whoever ends up reviewing it for us. In our opinion, it looks better than Pokémon Legends Arceus did, though.
Some fans have noted that the Japanese trailer doesn’t suffer from many of the same graphical issues, although we can still see low frame rates and low-poly animations:
Rotom Phone can get calls
Ring ring! It’s Rotom Phone. Yep, you can get calls on your Rotom Phone, a bit like in HeartGold and SoulSilver, where people would call you to invite you for battles, progress the story, or give you items. Cool!
Those are all the big things we noticed — but here, have a nice gallery of some other cool screenshots from the trailer that we didn’t get to use already, and see if you can spot anything neat:
Did you notice anything new and/or unusual in this mega-trailer? Are you hyped to max for the game’s release on November 18th? Tell us all your Poképinions in the comments below!
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