How To Avoid The Pokémon Scarlet & Violet Bug Crashing Games

Pokemon SV Arven

It’s no secret that Pokémon Scarlet and Violet for the Nintendo Switch are messy games. They have some major performance issues that will likely never be fixed, it’s still possible to clip through the environment in certain situations, and they look bad a lot of the time. It’ll be no surprise then that the latest DLC expansion for the game, The Teal Mask, introduced a nasty new bug that’s crashing games.

The new bug will probably only affect new players, or returning players who didn’t finish the main game prior to the DLC coming out. It happens in the final fight of the main game’s story, against the Paradise Protection Protocol — the robo-professor after they’ve become crystallized.

After sending out each of the Paradox Pokémon, the PPP will summon forth the wild Koraidon or Miraidon, depending on your game version, to battle against you, locking your Poké Balls in the process. At this point you would usually just scroll down your Pokémon list and select your own Koraidon or Miraidon, but some players have reported this crashing the game.

Some crafty Pokémon researchers on Twitter have discovered the exact cause for the crash, and it’s honestly a little strange. The gist of it is that if you’ve completed your Pokédex prior to the battle, which can be achieved through trading, hovering over any Pokémon in the fourth to sixth slot in your party will crash the game every time.

Thankfully, there are ways to avoid the crash. Firstly, it doesn’t happen if you haven’t completed the Pokédex prior to the battle, so you don’t have to stress if you haven’t gone out of your way to do that. It can also be avoided if you bring three or less Pokémon with you, as you’ll never hover over the problematic spots. That’s a little bit unrealistic though, especially since the fight against the PPP can be a bit challenging.

The best way to avoid it is to simply press the up button to instantly go to the Koraidon or Miraidon slot in your party after opening the Pokémon menu. This will bypass the problematic spots, and let you select the ride Pokémon for combat.

The Pokémon Company has not yet acknowledged this bug, but a patch for the game is due out sometime this month, so with any luck a fix for the bug will be included in that patch. If not, it may be even later, as developer Game Freak tends to be quite slow with its updates.