Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero – Part 1: The Teal Mask is the 1st part of the DLC pack where you go to a new area with a new mystery to uncover. Here is our Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: The Teal Mask Review.
The DLC was developed by Game Freak and published by Nintendo, it was released on September 13, 2023, for the Nintendo Switch.
In this DLC you are taking a break from your normal classes in Paldea and get picked to go on a school trip to Kitakami and learn the local legend of the evil orge with a mask and the loyal 3 Pokemon protecting the villagers, but not everything is what it seems and the orge is not as evil as the villagers make out to be.
The story is fine and pretty enjoyable, but I wish they could have done a bit more with the story in between and with battles because you end up battling the same 2 people from the Blueberry Academy over and over again instead of introducing other things. They do get stronger of course, but not by much, it’s mainly just them having new Pokemon or the previous one being evolved.
This also brings me to my next issue, the level system here is just all over the place, mainly due to its level scaling based on the main game. I get that you can’t make it easy, but at the same time, having had a lock on the game and having you start from 0 again here would have been a lot more enjoyable. You can just bring a Pokemon of level 100 and just walk through the DLC pretty quickly. I personally would have liked to just start from 0 with the Sinnoh starter you got there and when you finish the story the levels would rise.
After the game has been out for almost a year now you would think the developers have worked out the lag issue, but that’s where you are wrong, the lag is worse than ever and throughout the whole game you will be playing with lag. There are worse things of course, but at times it is pretty annoying to run and look around in 5 frames per second.
The returning Pokemon they picked for the DLC was amazing, it had some fan favorites and some underrepresented ones while also adding a number of Pokemon also available in the base game. They balanced that out pretty well, but at the same time, I did miss having more common new Pokemon in the game, because we did get 4 legendary Pokemon and a variant of one of the special Pokemon from Legends, but we only really got 1 new evolution and a new tea cup pokemon, dont get me wrong, it’s a nice pokemon, but in my opinion just not enough.
Visually, the game is fine, I like the new location and the visual style that came with it, but the mountain design was just a bit annoying mainly due to having some random caves where you can only catch some of the common Pokemon. The size of the map is great, but the size of the overall DLC could have been longer. it took me about 7/8 hours to complete the story and Pokedex.
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