Not long ago, Nintendo announced its financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2022-2023 (ended December 31, 2022). The financial report disclosed some of the data of the best-selling games, and "Pokémon: Vermilion" (hereinafter referred to as "Vermilion") is among them. Shockingly, but not surprisingly, "Vermilion" sold more than 20 million copies, directly coming to the seventh place in the NS game sales list.
As a game released on November 18 last year, "Vermilion" sold more than 10 million in 3 days of release, breaking the first-week sales record of many Pokémon games before, and even directly becoming the highest-selling game in NS and even Japanese history. More than a month after its release, Pokémon set another sales record of 20 million copies, which is naturally reasonable.
However, contrary to the rising sales of "Zhuzi", the word-of-mouth score of "Zhuzi" is extremely bad. A week after its release, the well-known rating website Metacritic gave a player rating of 2.6 points, of which more than 70% gave a bad review, and 50% of players gave a zero rating.
According to the law that the public has always believed that "word of mouth affects sales", it seems that "Vermilion" should be hit by a low rating, which will eventually affect the long-term trend of sales. But obviously, "Zhu Zi" not only has not been affected by low word-of-mouth, but also has a tendency to surpass the previous work and break the sales record again.
Why is "Vermilion"? Perhaps, the answer is still hidden in the game.
Low reputation, not wronged
After setting a sales record, "Vermilion" subsequently set a scoring record. 2.6 points, which is the lowest rating given by players in Pokémon games over the years.
There are many reasons for low ratings, but most focus on the game's poor graphics and frequent bugs. Many players reported that after opening the game, the first thing that shocked the eye was the jagged feeling visible to the naked eye and the large and large chunks of poor stickers.
The poor picture quality of "Vermilion" is visible to the naked eye
As a game released at the end of 2022, it is obviously unrealistic to compare the picture quality of "Vermilion" with the PS5 masterpieces of the same period, but even if the Nintendo Switch console (hereinafter referred to as "NS") function is weak, 2017's "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" also gives a good demonstration. Even, the non-canon "Pokémon Legend: Arceus", which was also released on NS, is much better than "Vermilion" in terms of texture.
In addition, users also frequently encounter bugs in the actual experience. Such as accidentally wearing a mold after entering the cave, and the sky map suddenly disappearing, etc. are already considered strange; What's even more deadly is that players may even lose their hard-earned Pokémon after the update, which is really unacceptable to players and turns into anger.
There is no doubt that Game Freak (hereinafter referred to as GF), as a development company, has not been perfect in its optimization problems, and even has a tendency to become more and more rotten. As early as the previous generations of works released by NS, players already had a lot of opinions about GF. Whether it's "Let's Go Pikachuib" or "Sword and Shield" and the replica "Pearl Diamond", they have been met with almost unanimous bad reviews from players.
Other works by GF are not highly rated either
Nowadays, GF has become a joke in the player circle, and the poor optimization of "Vermilion" has made this impression deeper among players. This accumulated resentment was eventually all released to "Vermilion", forming a lot of emotional scores. Many users gave "Zhu Zi" a low score, not really thinking that "Zhu Zi" was only worth 0 points, but somewhat with a kind of "hate iron is not steel" resentment.
In addition to these parts visible to the naked eye, players will also find that the game is actually quite empty in addition to the stuffed Pokémon and the marked Dojo, Star Team and Treasure Lord. Most towns have few interactive parts other than the main quests that must be completed, and the rest is a food stall-style arrangement.
On the whole, although this generation of "Zhuzi" officially began to use the "open world" gameplay and experience in the main story, due to the poor graphics, players lack a sufficient sense of substitution, and the innovation of gameplay is very limited, which makes players with high expectations for "Pokémon" not satisfied.
High sales, also reasonable
However, Pokémon players don't seem to care about these negative reviews, and under the surging bad reviews, they continue to contribute 10 million copies of sales to "Vermilion", why?
First of all, of course, because Pokémon itself still has a very high IP influence, its coverage is wide, and many non-core players who do not care about word of mouth will buy it as long as it is a Pokémon. According to Statista data, since the release of the Pokémon series of games in 1996, people have spent more than $100 billion on Pokémon, which makes Pokémon far surpass "Mickey Mouse", "Disney", "Harry Potter" and other IPs and become the world's most profitable IP.
In the development history of more than 20 years, Pokémon has sold nearly 500 million copies of the game alone, and many of the works are successful works with double harvest of word-of-mouth sales, which has also laid the foundation for Pokémon to accumulate many fans. In this case, almost every generation of Pokémon works can sell at least 10 million copies.
Compared with the previous works, although "Vermilion" still has many points criticized by players, it does meet the expectations of players to a certain extent in the open world. Although the picture quality is not good, the lakes, seas, and mountains in the game can all be interacted with by unlocking the ability of "Vermilion" exclusive Pokémon. This greatly improves the gameplay of "Vermilion" and the degree of freedom is quite high.
In addition, the game also forms a certain Pokémon social ecology. For example, water Pokémon will live in the ocean or lake, ice Pokémon will mostly live on snowy mountains, etc., and most of the Pokémon's attributes are obviously related to their environment.
Pokémon are almost all "Ming Thunder" designs, which can also allow players to clearly see at a glance whether there are Pokémon they want on this map in the process of collecting Pokémon, avoiding the boredom and hollowness that need to be repeatedly brushed in previous works.
The rich evolution mechanism inherited from previous works has also been further enhanced in this work, and some Pokémon need to evolve in a special geographical environment, which is integrated with the open-world gameplay. In other words, most of the bad things about Vermilion Zi have nothing to do with its gameplay, and in many ways, it's actually still a generation of Pokémon with progress.
It is precisely because of this that although "Zhuzi" does not satisfy players in all aspects, in terms of overall quality, it is still much better than the "Sword and Shield" experience a few years ago, and the latter has sold about 27 million copies on NS, and "Zhuzi" surpasses "Sword and Shield" in sales with a better game experience, which is actually not difficult.
After the first batch of players who gave bad reviews gradually stopped participating in the public opinion evaluation of Pokémon, the reputation of "Vermilion" also quietly improved. On Metacritic, the purple version has risen from 2.6 to 4.0. Many of the positive reviews said that this was "masterpieces", or expressed confusion about the low rating, "Even if there is a picture problem, there should not be such a low rating." ”
On domestic websites, Pokémon's reputation has also picked up. In fact, as early as the time of release, the reputation of "Vermilion" was in a polarizing stage. While some people think that the picture quality and frame rate are quite bad, others say that "gameplay" is the core of a game, and "Vermilion" is "fun". Now, after experiencing a round of public opinion reshuffle, the players who remain in "Vermilion" have regained their right to speak.
Not long ago, at the Pokémon face-to-face meeting, the official "Vermilion" DLC was also announced. In addition, "Pokemon Sleep" was also officially announced, which is an application where Pokémon accompany users to sleep and sing lullabies to users. It's hard to imagine The Last of Us or The Legend of Zelda coming out with a similar peripheral app, but Pokémon would have tried just that.
The answer may be obvious, compared to other games. The difference between Pokémon is that the game always wants to provide players with a sense of companionship, and for players, the Pokémon series is not just a game, but more often a warm companion to protect their childhood.