Well here we are – the end of the journey that started over a year ago with the release of the base versions of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. Another generation of Pokémon has concluded with the release of The Indigo Disk, the second part of The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero that acts as the paid DLC capstone for the games.
The first part of the DLC, The Teal Mask, was a unique experience as a decidedly traditional Japanese visit to a small town as players got involved in a local legend. This was a fun time but has only tangential connections to Area Zero, but with Teal Mask ending on a bit of a stinger, that would supposedly be saved for Indigo Disk.
Indigo Disk, on the other hand, seems like it has a much larger scope from the outset. Sent to Blueberry Academy as an exchange student, the player is now in a massive undersea Terrarium that is split into four biomes. Each biome has its own specific environment and Pokémon to fill it. It’s quite interesting, for example, to stand in the Polar biome amongst the snow and Ice type Pokémon, while atop on a freezing mountain and being able to see the almost tropical resort Biome of the Coastal area.
It’s this artificial environment that the game uses to reintroduce many Pokémon from previous games that were not available in the base Scarlet and Violet, or in the The Teal Mask.
While this is all a bit of fun set dressing, a big shakeup to The Indigo Disk is how you battle. While the base game and Teal Mask were all normal single battles, all of the trainer battles in this last DLC are instead double battles.
Double battles are rarely used in the single-player portion of recent mainline Pokémon titles which is especially puzzling given that the competitive scene uses exclusively this format. You can read a bit on Pokémon’s rather complex and rich competitive circuit in this article which we wrote after attending the 2023 Pokémon World Championships in Japan this year.
Even for those who don’t care about competitive Pokémon, this means that a lot of interesting mechanics designed for double battles are simply never used in single-player, so this change for The Indigo Disk was very much welcome. Like The Teal Mask, the trainers and wild Pokémon here are leveled up rather high. That is doubly true for The Indigo Disk, as you can only access the DLC once you have completed the main base game story, and The Teal Mask Story, so this is all reserved for the players who have put in the hours and will have high-level teams.
Even if your Pokémon are the maximum level 100 you will need to employ a decent amount of strategy to get through the trainers here. While they are not rocking level 100 Pokémon like you can, they do employ strategies and teams that have been mainstays of competitive battling. Stuff like weather teams, speed control and doubling up of like Pokémon for extra effect (like double Intimidate users) make them more challenging than the pure levels would suggest.
We’re also fairly certain that NPC Pokémon have high EVs and IVs. Some of these NPC Pokémon were dishing out damage, and shrugging off hits, that shouldn’t usually be possible. We’ll leave it to the data miners to prove us wrong or right on that front, but just know that you’re in for a decent challenge.
We spent half our playthrough relying on Dondozo and Tatsugiri. For those who may not know, the two are made to be used in double battles. Tatsugiri will leave the battlefield giving Dondozo a huge boost to its stats. This boost is a trade off for you now having only one Pokémon on the field. It’s a fun mechanic and a great example of double battle mechanics that you may be missing out on.
For the other half of the playthrough, we used Slaking, a Pokémon with some of the best base stats in the game offset by its ability, which makes it attack only every other turn. If you pair this with Weezing, whose ability shuts off all other abilities in play (including your own), you can now use Slaking to its fullest.
With variety like this we had a blast going through the battles of The Indigo Disk and we’re also happy to now have an outlet to come back and have some casual double battles whenever we like.
The aforementioned location is also fun but is nothing new. Also not new are some supporting cast from The Teal Mask, most notably Kieran and Carmine who were a central focus in The Teal Mask.
We won’t spoil their story or the story of The Indigo Disk as a whole, but to be honest it’s not too captivating. On top of expected writing, lots of clichés, and way too much text to get through, the story has little to do with Area Zero.
Both pieces of DLC fall under the “Hidden Treasure of Area Zero” collective name, but for both this is only a small part of the story. We loved the mystery and potential danger of Area Zero as portrayed in the main game’s events, so to see it get such little play in the DLC is a shame.
Outside of the location, its story and the switch to double battles, there are a few more mechanics that we, again, don’t want to spoil. We will say that there are some new mechanics around a club in the Blueberry Academy which sees you collecting points by completing side missions. Side missions are something that fit perfectly in the Pokémon gameplay loop but they are sorely underbaked. Many of the missions are just “catch one Pokémon of this type” or “take a picture of a swimming Pokémon”.
While you are given some harder and more fun missions as time goes on, the majority are boring filler.
Side missions were done infinitely better in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. It’s a shame that Legends: Arceus pioneered a handful of innovations for the series that are simply being ignored by the mainline games.
As the credits rolled on The Indigo Disk we couldn’t help but feel a bit deflated by the whole thing. Scarlet and Violet dropped the ball on so many levels (see our review here) and only managed to plaster over some of the glaring issues from Sword and Shield before it (again, our review here).
These two paid DLC for Scarlet and Violet were just a bit of extra on top and didn’t do much to be transformative or address the fans’ requests for this series. While that may be asking too much from some paid DLC – or an expansion, depending on how you look at it – this is the biggest media franchise in the world and we should always ask for more.
We’re just not enthusiastic about the future of this franchise. There are many rumours that a new Nintendo console is in the works and we wouldn’t be surprised to see another Pokémon spinoff game coming out alongside this rumoured hardware, and then a mainline pair of titles sometime later.
While we would be, in the past, quite excited about that prospect, the Nintendo Switch era of Pokémon has been incredibly unfulfilling. Game Freak has been resting on its laurels so much that it is sleepwalking through game development and when each game sells millions of copies regardless, there is very little incentive to improve.
The Indigo Disk is great for what it is, and some love for the series’ double battle competitive scene is appreciated, but this lack of ambition is becoming more dire and more noticeable with every new entry.
As an end to Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, this DLC is reliably flat.
