The Indigo Disk is home to a lot of returning pokémon, including alolan forms from Sun & Moon (Picture: The Pokémon Company)
The second DLC expansion for Pokémon Scarlet & Violet looks set to feature the game’s most challenging content to date.
The first half of Pokémon Scarlet & Violet’s DLC expansion, The Teal Mask, had a lot going for it, but it was held back by a lack of difficulty and the ongoing technical issues fans have complained about since the base game’s launch.
The second slice of DLC, called The Indigo Disk, is due next month and having played a small section of it, it seems at least one of those issues will be addressed. The bad news is that it’s not the performance problems.
It’s too early to tell how the final package will perform but even in our short time with it, we witnessed choppy frame rates and awkward graphical pop-in. We didn’t expect these sorts of issues to be resolved until the next mainline games but it’s still a shame they’re set to remain a part of Scarlet & Violet’s legacy.
On the plus side, The Indigo Disk promises to offer the sort of challenge that was missing from The Teal Mask, and which will hopefully make it a more substantial post-game adventure than even what was available in the base game.
First things first, whereas The Teal Mask was akin to a school trip, The Indigo Disk functions more like a student exchange programme, as you visit Blueberry Academy, which has a particular focus on pokémon battles. It also has its own underwater Terarium consisting of four biomes, home to more pokémon that were excluded from the base game, including, for the first time ever, all the starters from previous games, from Bulbasaur to Sobble.
Much like the base game’s overworld, it’s easy to get distracted and lost while exploring the Terarium, as you continuously spot new pokémon, areas, and items.
The biomes are rather lacking in personality, though. The entire area is just one big circle and, from what we saw, none of the are are visually interesting, barring random structures made of cubes which stick out like a sore thumb.
The savannah, for example, looks like any typical desert area, with the only noteworthy thing about it being the pokémon that inhabit it. This is perfect for collectors, though, who only care about filling their pokédex.
With any luck, the story will pick up the slack. So far, the premise simply involves battling against the school’s own elite four, comprised of unusually experienced students, which is quite the downgrade after The Teal Mask’s attempts at tackling deeper themes.
However, unlike Sword & Shield’s DLC expansion, the two halves are inextricably linked (you can’t even start The Indigo Disk without beating The Teal Mask), with certain characters set to return so, with any luck, The Indigo Disk will carry over unresolved plot threads.
However, the main draw, as we …read more
Source:: Metro
