Why You'll Probably Want To Reset Pokémon Scarlet And Violet Every Once In A While

It's no secret at this point that "Pokémon Scarlet" and "Violet" are suffering from a litany of issues. It seems that the Nintendo Switch isn't powerful enough to run the games that were designed for it at an adequate framerate. Not only has the gaming performance in both of these titles been atrocious, they have also been plagued by an extraordinary number of intermittently creepy and hilarious glitches. While some of these have been entertaining, however, the overall framerate and texture issues in these new "Pokémon" titles has led some fans to find them unplayable, with the user score for "Scarlet" dropping to a disappointing 2.8 on Metacritic – an all-time low for the series. That said, the overall response to the changes made in the gameplay has been generally positive, and so many fans are still seeking ways to continue playing these games ... if only there was a way to improve the performance.

Well, these fans are in luck! There might be a way to make "Scarlet" and "Violet" run a little bit better. Streamer and speedrunner Linkus 7 recently made a post on Twitter suggesting that, while it won't actually fix any of the issues that "Scarlet" and "Violet" are currently suffering from, resetting the game every once in a while might actually make it perform better.

Linkus7's Twitter post states, "Tip for anyone playing Pokemon Scarlet and Violet: Restart [your] game every few hours. The [game's] performance is rough in general, but there seems to be a memory leak which causes the game to slow down more and more the longer you play for, which a full restart seems to fix." He then shared a screenshot of one of the games where the ground textures had failed to load entirely in a subsequent tweet. Here, he explained that Flokade, a fellow content creator, had taken the screenshot after five days of not resetting the game, showing how bad the problem could get in time.

According to Geeks for Geeks, a memory leak "occurs when programmers create a memory in heap and forget to delete it." For "Scarlet" and "Violet" that would mean that the leak slowly fills up the available memory on the Switch, leaving an insufficient amount of memory remaining for it to run the game. If is indeed what is happening, resetting the game would clear the leaked memory heap and allow the console to run the game with a clean slate.

This may not exactly be the fix that fans are hoping for, but it could help to make "Scarlet" and "Violet" a little more playable until Nintendo and Game Freak can hopefully implement a proper solution.