Hi everyone! It's been a while since I wrote anything non-personal on here xD

I'm currently playing through Scarlet, not that far in yet. Just finished the 3rd gym. I'm liking the game so far, but I will only give my review at the end of the playthrough.

This chapter might have some very small spoilers for the game structure, so if you want to know absolutely nothing about the game, you can click away NOW.

All good? Alright.

As you may know, Paldea has a school, the Naranja (orange) or Uva (grape) academy depending on which game version you bought.

I currently just finished the mid-term exams, and I had some thoughts on the implementation of this school feature as a whole, at least so far (though I expect the structure will stay the same for the rest of the school period).

The school has a few courses, I'll list the ones I can remember off the top of my head:

- Biology
- Maths
- History
- Art
- Languages
- Home Ec
- Battle studies

I think that's it...? I might be forgetting one or two. The system works like this: you attend a class, the teacher says a few lines on a subject, asks you a question, then the class ends, and from what I understand after a few classes there is a mid-term exam and then a final exam.

I can't speak for the final exams yet, but the mid-term exams were very easy. I got 5/5 on every subject without even reading every sentence the teachers said.

The first thought I have is that it's sad you don't get a nice reward for that. I know the game is mostly advertised towards kids, but instead of some small Exp. Candies, I would have found it sweet to have some sort of diploma to show your grades, or that you have a special cutscene if you ace every single exam. Something of the sort.

That's a small criticism, though.

Now, onto the actual subjects. I was disappointed when I found out that most classes like Biology, Battle studies, Maths, Home Ec, and even Art were basically all tutorial, explaining the basics of the game.

I actually was interested in the first art class, which talked about the wonders of life, the meaning of art etc.. Unfortunately the next class and the one after that were about the Tera phenomenon. And not about the history or meaning behind it, but about how to use it. Yikes.

Maths talked about critical and super effective damage, Biology talked about eggs and catching Pokémon, Home Ec talked about picnicking, and Battle Studies talked about special and physical attacks and raid battles.

The only subject I genuinely found interesting was History. And languages, a bit. Because they weren't tutorial. They didn't explain game mechanics.

History talked about, well, the history of Paldea and the Great Crater. Languages genuinely gave you a bit of language exercise, no matter how easy it was xD

So, this is what I want to talk about. I think the classes in scarlet and violet have so much potential,  but I feel like they are being used wrongly. I was very hyped when in Languages I saw the board full of Alola, the Altar of the Sunne (at least I assume that was the Altar), Alolan Raichu... and then very, very disappointed when I realised we probably won't be taught anything about Alola.

Let's go back in time a bit:
When I was 7, I played Diamond and Pearl. I only spoke Dutch, and that wasn't an option for Pokémon games. I didn't know about crits, about accuracy, I didn't even understand anything the characters said. Yet I still loved the games. Hell, it even forced me to learn English. Eventually, I learnt how the game mechanics worked.

Did I get stuck? Yes, a lot, though it didn't help that gen 4 had the most complicated map ever. Did it stop me from loving the games? Absolutely not. If anything, it felt like a big accomplishment to figure these things out.

Nowadays, you have an hour of tutorial section to explain all the mechanics to you, and on top of that now you have classes to tell you even more about all the mechanics all throughout the game. I think the classes + mid-term exams I had until now took me about 1:30h in total. Imagining the rest of the school period will have the same amount of classes + the final exams, it will be around 3 hours of mostly tutorial classes on top of the 1 hour tutorial 🤡

In my opinion, kids aren't getting dumber, but they will if you continue spoon-feeding them like this. I'm going to be a dad soon, which makes me think often about how I'd raise them. If in 7 years my kid will want to play a Pokémon game, I wouldn't give them Scarlet. I'd give them Platinum or Soul Silver. Or Ultra Sun (even though it also has quite a long tutorial, at least the game is 100% worth it).

And you know what? I'm not a kid expert, but I bet most of the young kids playing Scarlet and Violet (or any game for that matter) don't care about tutorials. Most of them probably skip through these 4 hours of dialogue 😂

Keeping that in mind, I would drastically change the structure of the classes. Why not, instead of making the classes tutorial, make the classes educational and/or lore-based?

Off the top of my head, let me give ideas for each class:

Biology: Imagine how cool it would be to learn about how bird Pokémon came to be, about what happened to Fossil Pokémon, about Mega Evolution, about regional forms!

Maths: Educate the kids! Make them calculate with the help of Pokémon. Can be a silly little mini game of adding up Mareep, I don't care.

History: The only class imo that is doing the right thing, and actually teaching us a bit of lore.

Art: As I said, I like the first class. Why not continue that? Teach the kids about morals, about the meaning of art. Heck, you could even use Chatot to teach them about music.

Languages: As a polyglot myself, this class was very easy but fun! I personally would enjoy it more if they'd teach us Alolan, but at least they teach Kalosian (French) and Paldean (Spanish).

Home Ec: This is a difficult one, because this isn't a real course xD I guess I would like some survival tips like Bear Grylls!

Battle Studies: Again, this is harder to think of creative ideas. Maybe some double battle strategies? Or just keep this course as a tutorial section altogether xD

See? Just from improvising, I can already give some potential cool ideas to work with. Surely it's not thát hard to implement.

What do you think of my view on the classes? How did you personally experience them? Do you have any other ideas?

Thanks for reading this long, this was way longer than I expected xD guess I'm passionate about teaching kids.

See you next chapter, which will probably be a review chapter of Scarlet. Take care!
~Golf