In the freshly dropped trailer for December 14's second half of Pokémon Scarlet And Violet’s The Hidden Treasures of Area Zero DLC, it was revealed that there’s a way to directly control your buddy Pokémon, via a new technology called The Synchro Machine.
While this all reads like the setup for some dystopian horror tale, it seems more likely that questions over the morality of mind-controlling your Pokémon aren’t the focus here. It’s more that you get to run around The Indigo Disk’s Blueberry Academy underwater realms as Pikachu as well as an insufferably compliant school pupil.
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While only a vague few seconds in the trailer, an accompanying press release offers more details about what’s happening. The Synchro Machine, we’re told, allows players to sync up with one of their Pokémon, and “move around and battle wild Pokémon.” It’s described as “a fresh way to play the game.”
Access to this device comes some way into the DLC, when encountering an adult called Synclaire (hopefully a kind allusion to Sir Clive Sinclair, the father of home computing), who after you’ve helped her out, asks you if you’d like to participate in “an amazing experiment” she’s working on. Then, by what looks like closing their eyes and wishing really hard, a bunch of kids possess their Pokémon as if they have no Earthly rights nor dignity.
It’s not yet known if this ability will be possible to carry with you, back to the main game, but it’ll be just splendid if it can. Being able to actually play the game as Snorlax sounds like a dream come true to me, and I’m super-interested to find out how battles will work, assuming the lack of access to a trainer’s arsenal of trinkets and berries.
The trailer also brought news of a fantastic influx of Legendary Pokémon, along with confirmation of the expected ability to properly fly (rather than just glide) while riding Koraidon or Moraidon. The latter will come about after players “take on the Elite Trial set by Amarys of the BB League Elite Four,” which all suggests a far meatier portion of game to play that we saw in The Teal Mask.