Pokémon Violet and Scarlet may be a radical reinvention of the Pokémon formula, but they still pay tribute to past games. In particular, the Paldea region includes a few callbacks to Pokémon Red and Blue that are sure to make fans nostalgic.
The most notable reference comes in Alfornada, a town nestled on top of a mountain in the southwest corner of Paldea. This is where players will fight the game’s psychic gym, which is intended to be one of its latest game challenges. It’s one of the game’s smaller towns, but its notable for a massive stone arena where that battle takes place. Walk up to it and you may notice something very familiar about it.
The sides of the arena feature mosaics made from stones. Those images are perfect recreations of the sprite art used throughout Red and Blue. Unlike recent Pokémon games, the Game Boy classics would use generic sprites in its party menu to give players a general sense of what type each of their monsters was. You’ll notice classics like a bird, a six-legged bug, a blob-like creature, and more plastered around Alfornado’s arena.
While that’s the biggest callback to the classics in the games, there are more fun details like that to be discovered in Paldea. For instance, the seaside town of Porto Marinada features its own street art, which represents water-type creatures like Magikarp and Psyduck. Touches like that bring a bit of life to Scarlet and Violet‘s otherwise scaled-back approach to towns.
Pokémon Violet and Scarlet is available now on Nintendo Switch.
