If you have been adventuring around and catching ’em all, odds are high you’ve been aching for a bit of new content in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. But that is all about to change with The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero expansion pass, which grants players access to The Teal Mask and The Indigo Disk (coming later this year). The pass also brings a few new spiffing uniform sets too.
The first of these expansion adventures, The Teal Mask, has just landed and gives you a taste of what The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero expansion is really like.
Just a Teal Mask
It’s worth noting that, in most respects, The Teal Mask is a nice self-contained affair. You start by going on a school trip to a new region, the land of Kitakami. Here you’ll find new characters, friends and of course a new rivals as well.
The Teal Mask sends you on a condensed epic quest to defeat some legendary Pokémon. It also encourages you to let loose and find a few fun side activities within the new region. There’s also the matter of catching a bunch of Pokémon, some returning and a few that were not in the core game.
Read More: Pokémon Scarlet and Violet review – More Weaknesses than Strengths
For this review, we will be looking at the Scarlet offering of the DLC. It’s worth nothing that there are only a few differences between the versions, but ultimately they walk the same path.
The Teal Mask doesn’t introduce any ground-breaking new features or tweaks to the game. The standalone DLC is more content that bolts nicely into what we already have.
Very Random Battles
You can expect to be running around, talking to people, doing quests and fighting in random battles. Oddly, the DLC isn’t quite sure how to handle if you have finished the core game. As it stands, The Teal Mask puts random encounter fights and trainers at level 60 from the get go.
These random encounters and trainers get a little samey after a bit. You can usually blast through them without braking sweat. Odds are, you’ll be battling the smallest of foes, except they are level 60 as well. This weird setup hints that the developers didn’t quite know how to best tackle the overall difficulty.
Kitakami Dreaming
The land of Kitakami is nothing truly mind-blowing or vastly different between where we have been on the main game. It does the job of housing classic Poké action, though it’s a little sparse at times. But explore a bit beyond the starting area and you’ll find more than a few interesting bio-domes waiting to be found.
Pokémon Scarlet and Violet was very rough at launch with a myriad of performance issues. The Teal Mask does not iron the numerous issues of the main game and is, at times, even an even rougher experience.
And this roughness is not just the legacy issues, but some new ones too. This is a real shame, as the general lack of polish was a really off-putting element when Pokémon Scarlet and Violet launched and we hoped that Game Freak would have sorted this before moving on to the DLC.
A Teal Miss
The Teal Mask is a strange first outing on the DLC front as its adds more content which is great, but then takes away the feeling of just going off the track and doing your own thing, instead having a more focused linear journey.
Fans will likely enjoy its brief break from the core game, but it’s far from a stellar opening on the DLC front for the game; for a number of mistakes, mis-steps and missed opportunities.