For starters, I don’t know how it’s possible, but somehow The Teal Mask runs worse than the base game of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet does. I complained about the poor performance of Scarlet and Violet in my initial review, and had hoped that a whole year later Game Freak would have made improvements to things like framerate, pop-in, weird lighting issues, model clipping, and everything else – problems Nintendo even stated it was working to address back in December. But it hasn’t. Instead, it feels like the DLC has the jankiness turned up about one or two more notches.

It’s still playable: I didn’t run into any game breaking bugs. I did suffer from one hard crash, which while not a huge deal due to the game’s frequent autosave, is still pretty shocking given the franchise’s relatively polished history. But more importantly, during my playthrough of The Teal Mask it was impossible to go for more than a minute or two without a visual distraction.

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That said, The Teal Mask isn’t all bad. The battling and competitive aspects are still what they’ve always been (good), and it’s still fun to fill up a PC box full of neat little dudes you find running around outside. The island checks all the boxes for that activity specifically: it’s big, full of Pokemon, and has lots of different biomes to poke around in. One of my favorite parts of Kitakami was the mountain at its center with crystalline pools at the summit, numerous caves along its path to the top, and a surprising cavern structure within full of Pokemon hiding around corners and in little holes. But the overall ugliness and performance issues did detract from locations that looked like they were probably quite beautiful in their concept art, just not their final execution – such as when I first laid eyes on those sparkling pools on the mountaintop, or when I crossed a thin, stone bridge to a mysterious cave as the sunset hit the surrounding rock formations.