Last week, I got to play over an hour of the upcoming DLC for Scarlet and Violet. The Indigo Disk is slated to release next month, and a head of time I was able to dive in and explore Blueberry Academy, the Terrarium, and just how fun the focus on challenging Pokémon double battles can be.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet first launched last year ahead of getting some love with post-game content in the form of a 2-part DLC expansion. The first batch of new things to do in Paldea launched back in September with a new story focused on the lore of the 9th Generation Pokémon world. Now we’re getting the second half of the new content with the upcoming Indigo Disk release. It’ll be dropping on December 14.
The Pokémon Company brought me in to explore what’s new ahead of time, giving me over an hour to just dive in and see what’s going on in the latest expansion. Some things to get out of the way now though – this is post-game content and as such, you’ll need to have completed the base Pokémon Scarlet and Violet story as well as the first wave of the DLC. But after you do that, you can embark on a quest to an underwater Trainer academy.
Blueberry Academy is the setting for the new Scarlet and Violet expansion, and more specifically the Terrarium. It’s a habitat under the ocean that is filled with four different biomes – each of which packed with tons of Paldean Pokemon and some returning catchable characters from previous generations. There are some fun new evolutions in the game, like Archuladon (who evolves from Duraludon), as well as new Paradox Pokemon like Raging Bolt and Iron Crown.
While the Teal Mask was a bit more focused on actually unfolding the story of Paldea, the new Indigo Disk DLC for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is all about testing your strength as a Trainer. Given that this post-game content for after you’ve managed to take on all of the action from the original campaign, this isn’t going to be easy. I was expecting a bit more of a challenge from tall grass encounters and the various other Trainers I would be going up against, but I really wasn’t expecting it to be so challenging.
Pokémon in recent years has gotten a lot of flak from the fanbase and greater gaming community for being “too easy.” It’s a claim that doesn’t really have a lot of weight in whether or not you’re going to enjoy one of the more recent games – like Scarlet and Violet – but it’s clearly something that the Pokémon Company has taken to heart.
The focus this time is largely on double battles. Whether it’s just one on one Trainer matches where each side throws out a pair of Pokémon of their choice, or you taking on a duo, you’re handling a two on two battle. That scene should be incredibly familiar for a lot of fans of Pokémon, especially if you’re at all familiar with the competitive side of the action. Double battles are the preferred way for gamers to challenge each other, and is the official format of the Pokémon World Championship.
That’s very much the case for the world of Blueberry Academy, too.
After a bit of exploration early on in the DLC, I was thrown forward into the action to take on one of the Elite Four members of the Blueberry Academy – Amarys. It was a boss fight that I was extremely keen to dive into, but in hindsight I was probably a little too eager. I had played around just enough to know a bit more about my pre-selected team of six Pokémon, but even so, I was not prepared.
Without spoiling too much from the experience of the actual battle, Amarys was very difficult. So much so that I lost the match. Sure, I could make up excuses about how I was on the clock and was thinking too much about being efficient with my time than making sure I was making the perfect decision, but the end result is the same – I was defeated.
The double battle format is really just the tip of the iceberg for why everything in so difficult, too. Before I mentioned that this is the preferred format of the competitive scene. Well it turns out that the Pokémon Company is borrowing more than just the two on two gameplay. Opposing Pokémon were all equipped with items that made actually taking them down more difficult than in other games. There’s a level of strategy that my opponent Amarys employed that made this feel a lot more like my days grinding through Pokémon Showdown than an encounter with a CPU.
That is such a complement though. As challenging as it all was, I was engaged with a way that I hadn’t been with Scarlet and Violet so far. Making games more difficult is surely not the solution every single time to making the games better in the future, but in this case it was a breath of fresh air after a tour around Paldea.
It has been ages since the Pokémon Company has implemented post-game content so well. Even though I was playing with a team of six Pokémon that were provided to me by a save file I just jumped into for the afternoon, I could feel the sense of accomplishment that would be there from winning. I am so excited to dive into the the Pokémon Indigo Disk on my own save file come next month and fully relish in the joy of raising up a team to finally beat Amarys, as well as the rest of the Blueberry Academy Elite Four.
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