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Review
SCARLET FACED

I’m one of Pokémon’s biggest-ever fans but The Indigo Disc ended up disappointing me

Read on to find out why the huge DLC ended up being its greatest drawback.

LIKE all Pokémon fans, I was super excited when I saw all of the trailers for The Indigo Disk.

The latest DLC introduced all starters from every generation of Pokémon in the wild for the first time.

All of the added legendaries don't make up for the amount of grinding required.
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All of the added legendaries don't make up for the amount of grinding required.Credit: The Pokémon Company

This means that you can catch as many of these strong and rare Pokémon as you like.

It also brought back 26 legendaries from previous games with fun ways to obtain them.

The main draw of The Indigo Disk for me was the focus on battling, as fights are far more difficult than they usually are in Pokémon games.

All battles in this DLC are double battles, and the teams are designed specifically for double battles.

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This means most people will have to rethink their standard teams if they want to take them down.

This flows into the E4 of the game, which is a brand new gauntlet of difficult trainers to take down, all with difficult sets.

Overall, the whole package was pretty promising, and I’ll admit I was completely sucked in for the first few hours of gameplay.

I loved travelling through the biomes, taking on the new Elite 4 was challenging, and catching Pokémon to complete my dex was fun.

There are loads of new Pokémon that have been added to the DLC, including many fan-favourite regional forms we didn’t think we would see again.

It also has a lot of extra content which I was pleased about, but it ended up as a grindfest.

In order to unlock more of the game following the main story you need a currency called BP.

BP is earned by completing quests inside Blueberry Academy, and these are repetitive and tedious.

There are only about 10 different quests you can get, and they range from taking a certain picture, to picking items off the ground, to catching or defeating a certain Pokémon.

While ones like travelling 500m will be completed passively, there are some long and annoying ones like terastylizing your Pokémon to defeat a wild.

Then there are longer, harder, more boring missions which will net you more BP like hatching an egg, or finding Ditto blocks in a certain area of the map.

The problem with BP is you need a huge amount of it in order to unlock all of the post-game content.

You need 12k BP to unlock the starters, and you’ll need these if you want to complete your Pokédex, or unlock Perrin’s quest.

Then there are the special coaches you can invite to the school which you need a further 12k in order to complete.

Most BP quests will reward you with 20 BP, so you can see just how long it will take to complete them.

You can invite other trainers from Paldea to fight like the Gym Leaders and teachers, but they haven’t given these trainers doubles teams.

Two players can join a Union Circle in order to earn this more quickly, but you will still find yourself repeating the same tasks over and over again.

There is no variety in these tasks, and even when paired up, it can take a very long time if you want to unlock everything.

BP quests are also required to unlock the legendaries, and you’ll need to do literally hundreds of these quests.

The core idea of this DLC was so good, but the amount of grinding you need to complete it really was a letdown.

READ MORE SUN STORIES

If you want to know more about The Indigo Disk, check out how you can catch Meloetta in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.


Written by Georgina Young on behalf of .

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