The poor state of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet at launch shows Dexit was never about making the series better. For those fans that have managed to block the situation from their memories, when Sword and Shield released, it was the first main game in the franchise to have an abridged Pokedex. Up to this point, being able to bring all your pokemon from past titles into the newest game was a major selling point for the series for almost 20 years.
Dubbed “Dexit,” the controversy cast a shadow over Sword and Shield. Some players had brought their pokepals all the way from Blue and Red to the latest games, so the disappointment was understandable. Still, there was supposed to be a silver lining to the situation. Game Freak claimed that there was a smaller amount of pokemon because the studio was creating them “with much higher fidelity with higher quality animations” (which may have been a lie).
The Pokemon Scarlet and Violet Pokedex is missing over half of the total roster
Fans had hoped that Dexit would be a temporary issue while Game Freak found its footing. Sword and Shield were the first games in the series to release on console, after all. However, after the Sword and Shield DLC brought back some of the missing pokemon while also adding $30 to the game’s pricetag, it became obvious that there was no big issue preventing the studio from adding a complete Pokedex.
At launch, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet include around 400 pokemon. That’s less than half of the 1,008 that currently exist. Datamines have shown that even once the game gets Pokemon Home support early next year, the majority of the remaining pokemon are missing from the game’s files.
So, barring a huge update, we can likely expect things to play out as they did for Sword and Shield. Nintendo will repackage what was once the post-game that we got for free into a series of DLC that will leave at least a few fan favorites out.
We were promised there would be a higher purpose to Dexit, but the poor state of Scarlet and Violet show that it’s just one more way to speed up development so Game Freak can continue to put out at least one main game a year.
