Pokemon Scarlet and Purple are Nintendo’s best-selling games of all time
The first major new entries in the Pokémon series since 2019, have become the best-selling games in Nintendo’s history, the company announced. The two games sold 10 million copies worldwide in the first three days of sales, including physical and downloadable versions. “This is the highest global sales level for any software on a Nintendo platform within the first three days,” the company’s press release said.
Although it’s not a perfect apple-to-apples comparison, he said. Nintendo previously claimed that Animal Crossing: New Horizons got off to the “best start for a Nintendo Switch title” after selling 17.37 million units in the 11 days following its launch on March 20, 2020. The latest Pokemon titles appear to have sold more than half a third of the time, putting it on track to overtake Pokemon Sword and Pokémon Shield, which sold 6 million copies in their launch weekend, with lifetime sales of more than 25 million copies.
In contrast, Sony recently boasted that God of War Ragnarök had become the best-selling first-party release title, selling just 5.1 million copies in its debut week.
While we liked the latest Pokemon entries in general, its release was met with reports of poor technical performance on Nintendo’s five-year-old console. But these strong sales suggest that for most people, “more Pokemon” is enough to forgive technical problems.
Pokemon Scarlet and Purple Rotom Phone Review: It’s a Literal Lifesaver
As the Pokémon world becomes a bigger, richer place filled with an ever-increasing number of new monsters, the Pokédexes that Trainers receive at the beginning of their journey have similarly evolved with the release of each new Pokémon game. At first glance, the new Rotom phone from Pokémon Scarlet and Purple doesn’t seem like a huge step up from the first-generation model found in Pokémon. Swordand Shield has been introduced, or appears compared to Pokémon Legends: Arceus‘deific Arc Phone not at all. But the most popular smartphone from the Paldea region offers a number of useful updates for classic apps, UI changes, and new life-saving safety features that make it a whole new experience to use.
Pokédex
Although Pokédex have a long history of taking design cues from Nintendo’s handheld consoles, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet mark the return of the Generation VIII Rotom phone, an ordinary smartphone that charges after owning a Rostom. While the jump from the Generation VII Rotom Dex to the original Rotom Phone led the device to undergo a drastic redesign to improve pocket readiness, the Generation IX Rotam Phone is more of an incremental hardware upgrade designed to make the phone more useful for adventure. In addition to a new second camera module and a slim ring light built into the back, Scarlet and Violet’s Paldean Rotom phone looks pretty much exactly like the last-gen model and comes in a familiar fiery orange-red, but it can also be customized with a variety of bodies.
While it’s nice to see the implementation of a dual-camera system on this year’s Rotom phone, adding a second lens doesn’t seem to have done too much for the phone in terms of its photo-taking capabilities. Aside from 11 filters (none of which are anything out of the ordinary), the new Rotom Phone offers few features designed to enhance the photos or videos you take, and the lack of a zoom feature makes it particularly difficult to take photos of Paldea’s wild Pokémon without being attacked. That said, the front camera of the new Rotom Phone is jumping better than that of its predecessor, mainly due to the fact that it actually works and is accessible, rather than just being a black dot on the device that implies the existence of a camera.
Some previous Rotom-obsessed pieces of gear are known to be too talkative and point out the obvious if you just want to figure out where certain Pokémon like to hang out. But the Generation IX Rotom phone remains pleasantly quiet while you use its map, Pokédex and profile apps, the three most useful tools built into the device, all of which track your progress as a coach and as a student in Orange or Uva Academy.
Because Paldea is so massive, and its cities are often connected by well-traveled roads rather than paved roads or well-defined routes, the map functionality of the new Pokédex is key to navigating the land and understanding how things relate to each other. In addition to major cities like Mesagoza, the map of the new Rotom phone automatically shows the crystal coordinates of Tera where Tera Raid battles can take place, the locations of various gym managers, and the places where particularly powerful Titan Pokémon live. While the zoomed-out view of the Maps app sometimes feels a little unwieldy, it’s surprisingly useful when zooming in, both as a navigation aid and as a light detector for Pokémon in your immediate vicinity.
As there is plenty to do in Paldea, and you have the freedom to visit cities in any order, the Rotom Phone’s ability to set landmarks that will then appear on your minimap is invaluable once you reach your Koraidon or Miraidon. But there’s a certain fixity with the map when you zoom in between different views of Paldea, which occasionally makes getting in and out of the app more tedious than it should be. This is especially true when you consider how much of Pokémon scarlet and purple is about exploration.
Although the map of the new Rotom phone tells you when certain wild Pokémon are nearby, you should launch the new Pokédex app, developed by Jacq, the biology teacher at the Orange/Grape Academy. Like previous Pokédexes, the Generation IX Iteration automatically records and displays important Pokémon statistics and descriptions after you catch or battle them. But instead of presenting all its data as a simplified vertical list of different sprites, the Pokédex app on the new Rotom phone is designed more like a horizontal, skeumorphic bookshelf filled with dozens of books, each representing a different Pokemon entry.
Unlike the old Pokédexes, which had to be filled by hand, the new Rotom phone includes details about their common habitats and the specific types of places in those habitats they like to visit, both of which are available after you encounter a Pokémon in the wild. Overall, the amount of information the new ‘dex’ gives you is about the same compared to previous generations, as are their descriptions of many classic Pokémon. But the way each Pokédex entry includes a unique, detailed animal photo of that particular Pokemon is a welcome change that makes filling out the digital encyclopedia a joy (and a reminder of how limited the Rotom phone’s camera is).
Rotom
As nice as the new entries are, scrolling through the Pokédex of the new Rotom phone can also be an exercise in frustration, as Pokémon sprites take a few seconds to load as you scroll through the app at high speed. Hopefully, this bit of roughness can be smoothed out in future updates, but in its current state, it’s definitely something about the Pokédex that leaves a lot to be desired.
The same goes for the new Rotom phone’s profile app, which adorns a selfie of your choice with information about how many badges you’ve collected, how many Pokémon you’ve captured, how many sandwich recipes you’ve collected, and how many shiny Pokémon you’ve fought. While it’s nice to see when you first signed up for Orange/Uva Academy, how much money you have on hand, and what fitness badge effects apply to you, the profile app feels like the least elaborate part of the Rotom phone. If that were all the new Rotom phone has to offer, one might find it hard to really understand why it’s worth an upgrade to the Paldean model. But all you need to really appreciate the coolest feature of the new Rotom phone is that you have it on your person while falling from a dangerous height that could seriously injure or kill someone.
Trainers familiar with the Hisui region understand well how dangerous it can be to migrate into the wild in search of powerful Pokémon that prefer to live in remote locations that aren’t exactly safe for humans. Paldea Pokémon aren’t as aggressive as their Hispanic ancestors, but the region’s mountainous terrain is often as dangerous as Hisui’s, thanks to its countless steep cliffs that can’t be easily escaped. Similar to how Apple’s latest generation of iPhones and Apple Watches are equipped with emergency SOS features to help people no matter where they are in the world, the new Rotom phone can detect when you’ve fallen from a great height and will take steps to make sure you don’t fall into your untimely death.
While the Rotoma that lives on every Rotom phone doesn’t seem as interested in its well-being in normal situations, it takes control of the device in drop emergencies and uses its ability to float to prevent it from falling to the ground while the phone is in your hands. In addition to saving your life, the new Rotom Phone also offers to fly back from the point you fell from, because it understands that you probably don’t want to fall off headlights or rock walls, but you probably mean being in those places for one thing or another.
Pokédexes (or the devices that contain them) are rarely the most interesting things to do when exploring new regions of the Pokémon world, and the Paldean Rotom Phone is no exception. The new phone definitely feels like a piece of hardware that understands the pivotal role it needs to play in its next big adventure, and instead of trying to incorporate some little features here and there that you’ll never use, it focuses on doing a few things very well.
It might have been nice to see the new Rotom phone equipped with more robust photo capture features similar to New Pokémon Snap’sresearch camera, and the lack of a fundamental aesthetic overhaul might disappoint some. But the fact that the new Rotom phone will literally save your life in situations where your life is in danger makes it a must-have tool for all coaches looking for their way through Paldea.
