[pokemon] My brother got Scarlet and oh yikes the choppy animations may be worse than I thought. These NPCs can’t so much as walk without dropping frames...

The ones that are far enough away yeah, they do that on purpose actually

There's more focus in stuff closer to you

far away objects will render with low frames, yeah, and the like

generated non persistent npcs will also be low priority (think castelia city npcs from be)

that does explain why it was happening with people that were just about right next to him