Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are clearly not the cleanest games that Game Freak has ever released. The launch period of the two games was riddled with news of games crashing, stuttery background animations, and a litany of bugs.
To some players, those performance issues have ruined their ability to enjoy the games. To others, they’re a hurdle to leap over for titles whose open-world design and terastal form battle mechanic are worthy of praise and exploration. And then, there’s a small subclass of players who enjoy the game not in spite of those bugs, but because of them.
Streamer PointCrow is used to diving into buggy games. In fact, many of his streams could be charitably described as “stress tests” for games that probably could have used a few more months in development.
And while everyone including PointCrow himself knew going into the game that there would be many bugs, it doesn’t seem like anyone realized just how many there would be.
After beginning the game with some readily known classic bugs, such as weird camera angles during battles, teleporting across gaps and onto higher platforms by initiating a battle with a Pokémon from a distance, and managing to get to a place where he could catch a level 65 Garchomp before even really beginning any of the game’s storylines, PointCrow decided to go a bit further—a bit further in, that is.
After initiating battles with wild Pokémon at awkward angles and on weird slopes, PointCrow finally managed to clip into an out-of-bounds area—one from which it seemed he could access just about all of Paldea simply by swimming and gliding around.
This worked because beneath the map, the entire world has a level of water. In the early game, falling into this water will simply cause players to respawn back at the last point they were on “dry” land (in PointCrow’s case, still out of bounds). But once you’ve unlocked the ability to swim for Koraidon or Miraidon, the out-of-bounds area becomes your plaything.
PointCrow realized this and blazed through the Titan Pokémon storyline to unlock all of his Miraidon movement options before clipping back out of bounds. Clipping out of the map and back into it was a relatively simple matter and he realized he could reasonably access the entire map simply by swimming around beneath it. There was one area that remained off limits, however: Area Zero and the Great Crater of Paldea. It appears that this area isn’t actually connected to the “open world” of Paldea itself since PointCrow couldn’t find a way into it from out of bounds. The water in the out-of-bounds area stopped at the Great Crater and jumping forward into the void beyond the water simply resulted in his player character being reset.
“The Crater doesn’t exist! The Crater doesn’t exist,” PointCrow exclaims in his video recapping his efforts. “It’s non-collision. It doesn’t work. But we made it!”
Despite not making it into the actual Great Crater, PointCrow did do Game Freak and The Pokémon Company a service in showing just how simple it is to clip out of bounds in the game and skip past some of the game’s artificial difficulty boundaries that it’s set up. But it seems likely that the game will get a patch or two of fixes, and then someone else will find a way to get out of bounds. That’s just some players’ treasure.
