What is endgame Pokemon actually like?
I've recently been in several conversations with different people who did not know what "endgame" play is actually like in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. Millions of people are very familiar with the experience of playing through the main plot of a Pokemon game, but there's also a lot of weirder stuff do AFTER completing the plot.
You can have your very controlled and polished story about being an anime child... and then you can go do a bunch of bizarre stuff with the live service elements of the games, or with PVP, or with breeding Pokemon and shiny hunting. You can even get into editing your save files, or RNG manipulation, exploits, and hacking.
The playerbase is big enough and the history of Pokemon as a series is long enough that millions of people are engaging with this other weirder stuff - often for Pokemon games that are well over a decade old. It's also a popular topic for videos, and tip guides on how to do endgame Pokemon activities routinely get millions of views. Videos which engage frankly with the topic of PVP, hacking, or cheating also routinely top a million views on YouTube.
Playing Pokemon weirdly is an entire hobby. Playing Pokemon weirdly is normal. The people who KEEP playing Pokemon after they finish the main quest are usually playing it weirdly.
The funny thing is that the intended endgame play for Pokemon is actually pretty weird all by itself. I'm going to describe these activities in this post. You can decide for yourself whether this is something you would ever actually bother to do. I'm sometimes surprised that I bother to do it, honestly!! It's so laborious and unpleasant that it helps to explain why so many people who keep playing Pokemon after finishing the game are doing exploits, hacking the game, or pushing its boundaries in other ways.
PVE content
The most recent two sets of "mainline" Pokemon games launched with pretty robust live service PVP and PVE content schedules. In fact, the calendar of events for Scarlet and Violet are pretty similar to a lot of the events scheduled for Pokemon Go. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to assert that Scarlet and Violet are receiving vaguely MMO-like live game support.
Each time I turn on Scarlet, I can navigate to a "news" page listing recent PVE and PVP events. When I began drafting this post several weeks ago, we were still in the middle of a set of "Pokemon Day" events celebrating Pokemon as if it were a national holiday. The Switch won't let me take a screenshot of the game update news... so here's a picture from my phone.
This first event is a "mass outbreak." Connecting to the internet during the event will change spawning patterns in the overworld, and increase the shiny rates for affected Pokemon. To participate in this, you just run out and look for Pokemon spawn sites on your map with a shiny animation behind them. Then you run to the spot and start auto-battling everything there until you see a shiny Pokemon. It's enjoyable if you're shiny-hunting, but not otherwise particularly engaging.
The other listed PVE event is a "seven star raid" for "Skeledirge the Unrivaled," a very difficult multiplayer PVE battle against a Skeledirge with a unique moveset and AI. Beating this raid will let you catch one Skeledirge, who will arrive at max level and with good stats.
The multiplayer raid mechanic kind of sucks, though. It's a very clunky and unpleasant implementation of what a 4v1 Pokemon battle could be like - you shoot attacks at the enemy on a timer, and the enemy can attack multiple times for each one of your attacks. Because the enemy's attacks can interrupt you while you are choosing your next move, it feels like the main challenge is menuing. I'm not a fan.
"Seven star" raids are hard enough that random children battling with their favorite Pokemon are probably not going to be able to win. You need to bring Pokemon with specific buff or debuff moves, or intentionally-crafted stats. You may also need to silently cooperate with your battle partners to achieve the right team comp in the lobby. In the past, it's taken me over a dozen fights to beat one of these raid bosses. That's time on top of the hours I spent building the Pokemon who could participate in the first place!
I do enjoy some of the buildcrafting for these fights... but I'm going to walk you through what crafting one of those builds is actually like, and you can draw your own conclusions about whether this is gameplay you'd ever participate in.
I've had to build a brand new Pokemon from scratch for most of the seven star raids I've completed. For Skeledirge, I built a shiny Tentacruel named Terry who can use "Throat Chop," which disables Skeledirge's powerful voice-based attacks. It took me two hours to build Terry and max out his various stats before I could even start trying to defeat Skeledirge.
How I built Terry
To beat seven star raids, you need to actually understand the battle mechanics which Pokemon generally does not tutorialize. It's possible for a child to complete Scarlet's entire main plot without learning or mastering the mechanics required to beat the seven star raids at all.
First, you need to go into two different menus and press specific buttons to reveal a pair of radial charts that show you what your Pokemon's stats are. Your Pokemon has, effectively, two sets of stats, so you need to visit both.
Then, you need to interpret these charts to tell what changes your Pokemon's stats need in order for it to "become perfect". You will probably need to change both sets of stats: inborn "IV" stats, and trained "EV" stats.
To do this, you need to go out and do a bunch of OTHER content - in my case, lesser raids - to collect the items you will use to change the Pokemon's IV stats.
The items are Bottle Caps. The game description for Bottle Caps straight up does not tell you what they are used for, and there is no part of the main tutorial that covers this stuff. The entire mechanic of IV manipulation is only discoverable if you either know about bottle caps already, from a previous Pokemon game, or speak to the right NPC in the right town. I'm sure that many players discover how to best use this mechanic through online communities.
A regular bottle cap raises one IV stat to its maximum. You'll probably need six of them, or a golden bottle cap that raises all six IVs at once. Here are two screenshots of me using my shiny Slither Wing, Jumbaco, to hunt for Bottle Caps.
If you have the most recent DLC, you can use RNG manipulation to get loads of Bottle Caps much more easily. By setting the date and time on your Switch, you can cause an "item printer" device in the final zone of the game to give you 14 Golden Bottle Caps at a time. If you haven't paid for the DLC, or you're too square to manipulate RNG, or you're just too normal to think independently of googling "Bottle Cap Exploit Pokemon Scarlet Violet", you're more likely to just end up doing what I did with Jumbaco in these screenshots.
Then you need to know to go to this random NPC in the town of Montenevera and use those Bottle Caps to optimize the Pokemon's IVs through a process called "hyper training." You can pay Bottle Caps to raise individual IVs, or Gold Bottle Caps to raise all at once. Not every raid Pokemon needs all stats maxed, so if you're pressed for time you can skip some... but still, it's a lot of work.
Separately from this, you also need to tackle the EVs - the stats which a Pokemon usually acquires slowly over time. A Pokemon grows one EV stat by a small amount when they defeat any individual Pokemon in the wild. Each Pokemon species will increase one specific stat whenver it's defeated. This data is depicted nowhere in the game.
We're on a timer, so we won't be doing that. Instead, we'll begin editing the EVs with items. You just need to know, somehow, that trained stats have a cap number that all EVs contribute to, and that the most efficient Pokemon will solely allocate their trained stats to only the exact places that are most useful for their build. By the time your Pokemon is level 100, you will probably have a bunch of misallocated EVs that you earned from random battles.
To fix that, you need to feed your Pokemon a series of mysterious berries to drain some of their trained stats down to zero. These items usually do explain this in their descriptions, but they do so vaguely, and don't use the same words - like "EV" - which players use to discuss these mechanics online. Furthermore, no part of the main tutorial experience covers this, so you need to read a bunch of those item descriptions and figure this mechanic out for yourself, or read about it online.
Then you need to earn a shit ton of money - often by redoing the same content like raids or tournaments against AI characters, over and over again - so that you can buy the workout supplements in the above screenshot. Feeding enough of them to your Pokemon will max out the correct trained stats.
How many is the correct number for each stat? Well, it's 26 for each of your Pokemon's main two stats, but it doesn't say that anywhere in the game. You need to figure the number out yourself. Again, this is something best learned through searching online.
Buying these "vitamins" will cost you precisely 520,000 poke dollars. That's a lot!! Earning that much through raids or by repeating the tournament feature is going to take you a bit of time. The latest DLC makes it easier to do this... but it's still a pain.
The end of the process will look like this: a Pokemon with precisely two maxed out vectors on their radial graph.
Then you've got one last thing to change - the Pokemon's personality. Each Pokemon can have different "natures". Each nature boosts one stat and reduces another. You want to pick a nature which will boost a stat your Pokemon relies on, and reduce a stat they basically don't use. The first couple times you do this, you will look at a big chart (probably online) of all the possible natures, then pick the only viable one for your build. You will need to grind for or buy a "Mint" which, when consumed, will change your Pokemon's personality to the one you want.
NOW, finally, you are ready to fight.
Oh, wait! Did you forget to level your Pokemon to 100? That happens in here somewhere, too. I usually do this with XP gems from the raids.
Actually completing the battle
Now you're ready for the battling - which, as we've established, fundamentally sucks mechanically. An incompetent player on your team can also sink your entire raid - if they bring the wrong Pokemon and die several times, they'll hit your raid timer with several penalties and make it impossible for the entire group to win.
This is the main reason you would bother making a pokemon "perfect" at all - the seven star raids are tuned so tightly that if you have dead weight on your team, having a Pokemon with the best possible HP, defense, or attack stats might actually make a difference. There are also some live events tuned around six star raids - which are slightly easier - but I tend to lose a lot of those, too. When someone brings the wrong Pokemon to the fight, it can really mess your entire team up!
Is PVE endgame content in Scarlet and Violet good? For me, it's a definite NO. But I'm a completionist, and a collector, so I do a lot of it anyway. I occasionally find some fun in it. Usually, I'm more sour on the experience when I'm struggling to build a raid Pokemon under a difficult timer - like the timers which control when seven star raids expire. If I have a Pokemon ready to go for a six star raid, I usually feel a lot better about it.
The crazy thing is that these systems are so much more accessible and simplified than they used to be. You used to have to actually go out and battle hundreds of Pokemon to train EVs. A lot of the stats I'm talking about used to not be visible in the UI at all. The fact that I can churn out a perfect Pokemon in two hours is a massive improvement over previous games... but it's still busywork.
And it's completely crazy to tutorialize this stuff the way they have - which is to say, not tutorialize them, and barely present them at all, and then to hit an audience of probably-mostly-kids with a ton of overtuned boss fights that you need to look builds up for online. Is this really the **only thing* they can do for the teens and adults who want to keep solving PVE build and battle puzzles after the game finishes?
It feels like they should be presenting that kind of challenge very differently, doesn't it? Maybe they should return battle tower content to the game. Or, better yet, maybe they should provide a big red button in the endgame that says "make all my Pokemon's stats perfect so that I can do buildcrafting for endgame battles without the laborious timesink"?
I'd like something like that!! I wouldn't mind an overtuned boss fight if I could just slap a button and get the Terry I want immediately.
What endgame Scarlet and Violet PVP content is like
I don't really know that much about this stuff! I don't participate in it.
I do get tons of comms about it from the game itself, though. Scarlet, Violet, and Pokemon Home all send out alerts when new "Seasons" of PVP combat begin and end.
One thing to remember is that if you are going to participate in a mainline game's PVP, you have to do all the stuff I described above, too. You need to level all of the Pokemon in your team to 100, feed them the right mints to change their natures, EV train them, Hyper Train them, and so on. It's so much easier now than it was 15 years ago - the process I described above exists, so you don't need to endlessly grind for a creature born with exactly the right stat distribution. Unfortunately, it's still not simple or easy to prep a team for competitive play.
The biggest reason for this is that Pokemon has only made it easy to maximize your stats. But there's a very popular team strategy, based around a move called "Trick Room," which revolves around having the lowest Speed stat possible. Casting Trick Room reverses turn order and allows your slow Pokemon to hit before your enemy's fast Pokemon. Playing a Trick Room team is very enjoyable to a lot of people and it's been a staple of the competitive scene for a long time.
If you want to run a Trick Room team, you will have to adopt old-school tactics for minimizing your Pokemon's speed: you will have to go out and just breed or catch a ton of Pokemon until you randomly get one with 0 speed. Only then you can max all its other stats.
This is still crazy! To the people who engage with it at a high level, Pokemon battling feels more like... well, MTG than pet simulation or animal training. If you want to engage on the level of your strategy and judgement and team comp, you don't want to be losing because your stats were slightly wrong. When people build a deck of MTG cards, they don't want one of their cards to fail in their game because it's like, slightly flawed compared to other identical cards. Similarly, people who play competitive Pokemon need all their Pokemon to have exactly correct stats. Once they've chosen the correct stats for their build, the stats are not interesting - their team comp and move sets and decision-making are the interesting part. They want to get to that part as fast as possible.
I, personally, believe that after you complete the main plot, Pokemon games should just allow players to set their Pokemon to perfect instantly, or set any stat to any value they want. You should be able to press a big button and get your Pokemon ready for a Trick Room team in, like, 1 second. Maybe this only applies to online play... maybe you still have to treat your Pokemon like a real creature when it's just you against the game... but at the very least, I shouldn't have to dump 2 hours on a single creature just to do a raid.
Hell, one of the big reasons I do not do PVP at all in Pokemon is that you do have to spend so much time crafting a Pokemon to fulfill a role in your team. It makes your experimentation cycles unbelievably slow.
What we'd lose if we had more control
Complete control over my Pokemon's stats would render a lot of my playtime unnecessary. I spend a good half of my time in this game just getting my team ready to do something.
I don't think it would be a loss to take that activity away from me. If you're going to design live service stuff worth doing at all... then you should make it pretty easy for me to participate!
Unfortunately, I think the big problem is that the live service stuff isn't worth doing, really, at all. It's possible that if I could make my Pokemon ready for PVP with a single big button press, I'd play more PVP. In its current state, I'm not sure that I'd actually do more raids if it was easier to prepare my Pokemon for them. I might just stop, because they suck.
I'd love to do another post to dig into the endgame activities that players create for themselves. However, you can probably explore this topic more efficiently yourself if you just search on youtube for videos about shiny hunting, hacking, RNG manipulation, and "nuzlocke".
The funny thing, however, is that a lot of these activities are still just as focused on busywork as the stuff I've described here. It's possible that the core pleasure of Pokemon endgame play is just busywork.
It's possible that I simply find busywork more valorous if the developers are not the ones making people do it.