Trivia / Pokémon Scarlet and Violet

• Author's Saving Throw: Nintendo released a statement in early December acknowledging the cavalcade of visual and performance issues plaguing the game about a day before the 1.1.0 update came out, assuring players that they were taking their feedback wholeheartedly and would continue working on improvements.
• Content Leak:
  • About four months before the games' release, a slew of previously-unknown information was leaked and spread online, including the fact that Wooper would get a regional form, some fuzzy pictures of Penny, all but one of the Gym Leaders, and the existence of Farigiraf.
  • On November 4th, 2022, Pokémon GO data miners leaked the full form of Gimmighoul.
  • In the days following the leak and official reveal of Gimmighoul, the entire game was leaked as well due to copies of the game surfacing just over a week prior to November 18th and a resulting ROM dump online.
  • On February 27th, 2023, the game was updated with the Tera raid release of Walking Wake and Iron Leaves. Within 24 hours dataminers found the entire roster of previous-generation Pokémon who would be returning in the upcoming DLC, which had only just been announced, were at least six months away and didn't even have definite release dates, had been added in to the game files.
  • Shortly after the Indigo Disk was released, dataminers discovered the existence of Pecharunt, The Leader of the Loyal Three, and its event, Mochi Mayhem Epilogue, before the latter's official announcement on December 20th, 2023.^BecauseThe Mochi Mayhem event was bundled in with the Indigo Disk and locked behind a timegated Mystery Gift item released on January 11th, 2024, rather than being part of its own separate update. Hackers were simply able to give themselves the necessary item and access the content ahead of time. Nintendo issued a massive wave of DMCA takedowns to try and cover up its existence before the event came out legitimately.
• Defictionalization:
  • Some of the characters' accessories, such as Penny's Eevee bag and Rika's gloves, were made available as merch.
  • In March 2024, a collaboration of Toyota with Pokemon Company had produced a prototype of a motorcycle that looks exactly like Miraidon's Drive Mode.
• Development Gag:
  • Bellibolt resembles the Spaceworld '97 prototype version of Politoed, albeit with a different typing.
  • Iron Jugulis is a robotic Hydreigon, bringing the original tank-like design to mind.
• Distanced from Current Events:
  • Not for the games themselves, but rather their announcement: The February 2022 Pokémon Presents that revealed Scarlet and Violet wasn't advertised outside the initial Japanese announcement in order to be "sensitive to major world events", specifically alluding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which had happened less than a half day prior. The only reason it couldn't be postponed completely was because all the updates attached to other games in the presentation, such as the "Daybreak" update for Pokémon Legends: Arceus, couldn't be rescheduled.
  • Along with Legends: Arceus, which was developed concurrently, for the first time since its introduction^note It wasn't in FireRed or LeafGreen due to a lack of clock, but would still be retained and function in trades., Pokérus is not present in a Pokémon game, with no indicator on the summary screen and no effect on EV training. This is most likely due to Scarlet and Violet, as well as Legends: Arceus being developed during the COVID-19 Pandemic, and thus the purposeful spreading of a virus amongst one’s Pokémon being less palatable.
• Milestone Celebration: A special video was released to commemorate the fact that there are now over 1,000 Pokémon.
• Promoted Fanboy: Ed Sheeran was a long time Pokémon fan before getting to have a song as the end credits of this game.
• Reality Subtext: A Famitsu article revealed that the storyline of Arven losing his parent is based on Shigeru Ohmori losing his own parents when he was young.
• Trolling Creator: People have long wanted an evolution for Dunsparce. Finally, one was created in this game...in the form of Dudunsparce, who looks almost exactly the same, but much larger, with an additional body segment (or, in some individuals, two), and a spiral pattern on the belly; pretty far off from the dragon or serpent fans imagined it would be.
• Troubled Production: Shortly after the game's release, allegations of long-term internal struggles within Game Freak from a Japanese job review website began circulating around Twitter, citing communication issues between full time employers, contractors and higherups; workloads compounded by insufficient staff and significant overtime, poor training practices and claims of minimal access to newer tech.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Magikarp and Gyarados were originally planned to have Convergent Species instead of Tentacool and Tentacruel. In fact, the codename of Toedscruel still is OKAGYARADOSU.
  • Many of the Pokémon species and Hisuian Forms introduced in Legends Arceus had their abilities revamped from the ones they had according to datamines, depriving them of the chance to make use of their original ones in an official environment.
  • The official website claimed that Nemona would be using a Lechonk and a Smoliv on her team as well as Pawmi. This ended up not being the case.
• Write What You Know: Shigeru Ohmori mentioned in a Famitsu interview that he drew on his own experiences of losing his parents at a young age to write Arven.

---