The Pokémon games are famous for the daunting battles and encounters that dominate the late game, with an Elite Four to beat, Legendaries to catch, and gyms to conquer. But thanks to Scarlet and Violet’s performance issues, the most difficult thing to accomplish in the new games might be trying to push an olive into a basket.
When players make their way to Cortondo and attempt to defeat the Cortondo Gym, they must first tackle the gym challenge. While all Pokémon games have featured some sort of challenge or puzzle to get through in order to face the gym leader, these challenges became much more formalized in later generations. Cortondo’s gym challenge? The olive roll.
Never has a name so undersold the difficulty of a task.
As streamer Werster demonstrates, this olive roll is anything but straightforward. The giant olive in question bounces off of Werster and his Koraidon like a balloon but will take completely nonsensical bounces, sometimes even changing direction in mid-air. To make matters worse, jumping over things with Koraidon is already a tricky proposition in SV, meaning the fences creating obstacles for the player represent a real issue.
And to top it all off, it’s incredibly difficult to be precise in the way you move the olive around when the game keeps stuttering as Werster’s does. The performance issues with SV are well-documented, but most reviewers have labeled them an unfortunate distraction. This, however, is an instance where they actually interfere with gameplay.
Werster does eventually get to the end of the olive roll, mercifully pushing the olive into the basket. And while the gym challenge was probably never supposed to be easy, it probably wasn’t supposed to be this hard, either.
Published: Nov 17, 2022 01:58 pm