Pokemon Legends: Z-A

Publishers: Nintendo, The Pokemon Company

Developer: GameFreak

Platforms: Nintendo Switch (Reviewed), Nintendo Switch 2

I've recently heard it said that Pokemon fans are the Nintendo fans of Nintendo, and I understand exactly what that means. Throughout recent history, Pokemon fans have been shockingly vitriolic towards GameFreak about the smallest things while simultaneously being defensive about the noticeable drop in quality that these games have been experiencing.

News flash: you can be a fan of something and still recognize its flaws. Such is the case with me. I, like the vast majority of people on this little blue rock in the cosmos, love Pokemon. But with it being the most profitable franchise of all time, it's easy to tell just how complacent GameFreak has gotten with the basically inevitable success of each title. This all came to a head with Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, which boasted not only a wealth of glitches and a horrendous framerate, but also some of the most offensively bad game design this side of a Team Ninja soulslike. 

Fastforward to now, and we have Pokemon Legends: Z-A. Given that Scarlet/Violet is such a sore spot for so many people, expectations were understandably low going into this new spin-off title. The fact that the game was set to take place exclusively within the Kalos region's Lumiose City did nothing to quell these fears.

How does this new foray into this storied world hold up for a (I like to think) reasonable fan? Well...it could've been worse, that much is certain.

What the marketing for Pokemon Legends Z-A won't tell you is that it's more or less a sequel to Pokemon X/Y, not a prequel like the first Legends title. You are the usual nondescript 10 year-old that you always are in these games, and at the start of the story, you've just arrived in Lumiose City 5 years after Team Flare more or less nuked one of the Kalos region's smaller towns. Aside from the ever-dominant whims of destiny, it isn't exactly clear why you've come to Lumiose in the first place, but that's neither here nor there.

Upon arrival, you're stopped by a manic pixie dream girl named Taunie, who asks you to appear in a promotional video for Hotel Z: a struggling hotel run by none other than AZ. You know, the stupidly-named, 9-foot tall, 3000 year-old man from X/Y who created a giant weapon in ancient times specifically to kill a whole bunch of Pokemon as revenge for his Pokemon dying...that one. Well, he's cleaned up quite a bit since X/Y and is now in the hotel business for some reason. 

Anyway, you don't actually get to do that video shoot, as a Pancham belonging to a group of local hooligans steals your luggage to lead you and Taunie into a dark alley.

Now, let's see if you can guess what the proceeding exchange was like:

A) "Give me all your money!"

B) "I'm gonna kill you now!"

C) "Let's have a Pokemon battle!"

I trust you're intelligent enough to answer that question.

So, in this way, you come to choose your starter Pokemon: Chikorita, Tepig, or Totodile, to fight these hooligans off with. Fun fact: Totodile was my first ever starter Pokemon way back in the day, so naturally I went with him!

Things happen, yadda-yadda, and it turns out there's something of a growing epidemic in Lumiose: rogue mega evolutions. In the years since X/Y, wild Pokemon have flocked the city in great numbers, and recently some of them have started mega-evolving and going on rampages...all of this in spite of not having the prerequisite friendship with a trainer to do so. 

According to AZ, this is a phenomenon that can only be quelled by the city's most powerful mega evolution user, and so a massive battle royale (the ZA Royale) has been approved by the city to determine who that is. With that in mind, the story is basically climbing the ranks of the Royale and meeting colorful characters along the way.

I've made fun of Legends Z-A's story a bit at this point, but I do have to say it's a lot of fun...when it isn't drowning you with tutorials and line after line of banal dialogue about people and Pokemon living and working together. It takes you everywhere from a famous streamer's die-hard fanbase event (with a hilarious plot twist) to a worryingly realistic crime syndicate's headquarters to the ruins of one particular location from X/Y. Some laughs, some peril, some odd moments where GameFreak seems to not think children are stupid, etc. Hell, there are even characters who actually say nothing at all about how amazing Pokemon are!

So, not the most expansive or shakespearean story, but I enjoyed it for what it was.

There's one big problem with the execution of that story, though: presentation. As I always tend to say,  I'm a Dragon Age fan, and therefore I can't throw stones too much in that department...but I think I can make an exception to that rule with the most profitable media franchise in all of human history, don't you?

Pokemon Legends Z-A features by far the best animations since Sun/Moon, at least. At times, I daresay it looked like character mouths were forming words...but the whole thing falls flat due to a complete lack of voice acting. There isn't even a Legend of Zelda-style series of grunts for characters. Just complete silence with unusually well-rendered talking animations. It's weird on ice, and while I haven't always agreed that a lack of voice acting is distracting in these games, it's undeniable in this case. 

Then there's the framerate issues. Given the amount of money Pokemon brings in, the framerate issues in Scarlet/Violet were never acceptable, but there was at least a large open world with many systems at play that could be used to explain things away. Not so in Legends Z-A. 

It's just one city, and a city that takes less than 10 minutes to run the span of at that. And while the framerate issues aren't as bad as in Scarlet/Violet, they are still unacceptable. 

This all goes away if you shell out the extortionate cost of entry for a Switch 2, but I'm not a moron, so that wasn't about to happen. 

All the new animations and fun characters in the world can't exactly save a game from such technical issues if it has this kind of financial context. I realize this paragraph has jumped ahead in my usual order of operations, but that's just how it goes sometimes.

Before I move on, there is one positive to bring up on the technical side: the soundtrack. While some of the tracks are re-imaginings of tracks from the X/Y OSTs (or maybe all of them...I don't remember those soundtracks very well), they're darn good re-imaginings. The nighttime theme especially hit me where I live. Of course, this also has a negative attached in that the amount of tracks is extremely limited, so you'll be hearing them nonstop. I normally don't think there's such a thing as too much of a good thing, but that doesn't apply here.

There's some limited positives to be found in this technical package for sure, but none that don't come with caveats...not a great look, GameFreak.

With all this talk of complacency and skating by on brand loyalty, it's worth noting that there's exactly one thing GameFreak has tried here to push the boat out a bit: the combat. Gone are the days of the usual turn-based rock/paper/scissors gameplay that has defined Pokemon since its inception. Now, there's a sort of realtime combat system.

My succinct impressions are that it would be a lot of fun if it weren't so rough.

As always, when a battle starts, you send out a Pokemon, and in this gameplay model you have to press the ZL button to "lock on" to the opposing Pokemon, then press one of the four face buttons to have your Pokemon use one of their four allotted moves. Each move has a base power or strategic effect as well as a cooldown time after use, with the most useful moves naturally coming with longer cooldowns. Simple, straightforward, effective. 

But like I said, there's some rough edges here that dull the experience a bit.

The first problem is the animations. I know I just praised animations in the previous section, but the same level of effort clearly didn't go into the Pokemon themselves. They'll do an attack and instantly turn all the way around within a single frame to run back to you. Or if using a ranged attack, they'll usually run away from the opposing Pokemon, then suddenly turn all the way around to do the attack. It's all rigid and slap-dashed feeling, to say nothing of the lack of positioning. 

Early on, an NPC is going to tell you she admires how you used positioning to your advantage in a battle she witnessed.

You'll see her cute :3 face, her form-fitting suit, her Naruto run, and her canonical over 20 age and feel inclined to believe her.

Don't.

When you select an attack for your Pokemon to use, they'll move entirely of their own volition into the path of oncoming danger without a care in the world. On the surface, this might not sound like too big a problem. After all, both your moves and your opponent's moves are damn near 100% accurate in the first place save for the most powerful, slowest-to-use moves. 

But then there are the trap moves like "spikes" and "stealth rock" which are clearly meant to create areas of denial. The strategy GameFreak is trying to enforce with moves like this is to force you to move your Pokemon out of whatever comfortable position they're currently in to continue the battle elsewhere in the arena...but there's no way to do that. So unless you're lucky and your Pokemon deigns to see the floating rocks as a hazard and move away from them, you're going to watch their health drain continuously as you facepalm your headphones off.

Of course, you have the ability to use healing items in battle when this happens...but this is another situation where steps forward are taken followed by immediate steps back. 

There's a laudable attempt at balance in that you can only use one item at a time, after which you have to wait for a cooldown to use another one. I was a big fan of this idea. However, in execution, it's more than a little frustrating for one specific reason: it feels nigh impossible to actually get the proper menu to show up. You'll press the x button and press and press and press once you need to use an item, but it always feels like it takes at least 5 presses to actually bring up the menu. At first glance this would appear to be a way to force you to wait until after your Pokemon has finished using an attack before using an item, but there are times where it'll be several seconds after an attack animation ends and the button still won't work. It's also entirely possible that this is merely a limitation of the Switch 1 hardware, but if so, it's a bit worse, don't you think?

Everything I said in that last section comes to a head in the game's many "boss" battles. Essentially, these are wild mega evolved Pokemon with MMO raid boss-sized health bars and enhanced size to really show off the models. In these battles, the flow of things is pretty simple.

Your attacks basically do nothing, but every attack you land builds up energy in your mega ring. Once that energy bar fills up to max, you can get an eligible Pokemon in your party to mega evolve, at which point the fight becomes more-or-less a more challenging regular battle until you run out of mega energy and have to do it all again. 

These are also the best battles in the game, hands down. Each of these bosses has their own unique movement styles and attack patterns...and you know something is wrong when that's a praise and not just a given! But I digress.

As fun as these bosses are, as I said, they're also where the problems with this new combat model really come out swinging. 

Take positioning, for example. Almost every rogue mega has a series of wide area-of-denial/area-of-effect attacks, and I found that the only way to get through these was to temporarily retract my Pokemon until the effect went away, thus wasting valuable mega-evolved time. Otherwise I'd have to gamble on the item menu actually opening as health ticked down at an alarming rate.

 Then there will be some charged attacks a boss does that can either be avoided or interrupted, or they might have the ability to one-shot your Pokemon...but you won't usually catch any of this because the information comes in the form of little text boxes at the side of the screen...

You know...

Because there's no voice acting.

Like I said, these may be the best battles in the game, but they're also where the flaws shine the brightest.

With combat now out of the way, we can talk about other things. Things that surely will have a bit more effort put in...right?

Ha.

Lumiose City itself is, as I may have already mentioned or implied, small and bland. In fact, I daresay it's only a minor step up in size and detail from its 3DS origins. Every building is the same, with the only rendered interiors being a sewer system, one story dungeon, and one cafe used over and over again. Despite the city having multiple "districts," none of them are visually distinct from one another in any way at all. There's the occasional (blatantly copy-pasted) round park with a pointy monument in the center, the occasional winding set of alleys, etc, but you won't find anything unique anywhere.

Well, that's not 100% true. There are several unique platforming challenges throughout, but I write that with my teeth firmly clenched. 

See, movement in this game blows. You move clunkily, you sneak too slowly, and your dodge roll is ridiculously long. So when you come up against one of the haphazardly-placed bits of scaffolding where you need to climb and jump your way through obstacles for a reward, you're in for a bad, bad time. 

You'll have to desperately angle dodge rolls so that you fall exactly on a platform instead of overshooting it by five feet. 

You'll be able to climb up ledges as tall as you are if they have an arrow on them, but you won't be able to step over obstacles that only come up to your ankles.

You'd better believe you're gonna come across balance beam segments with inconsistent colliders, so you'll fall off them time and time again when you try to turn a little bit to correct your walking angle.

And all of this is if you don't get stuck in the stairs leading up to this scaffolding and have to fast travel away to get out. That was more than once in my time. 

With most of these being optional, I can hear you ask "why not just ignore them?" Well, keep that in your back pocket...we'll get to it.

But for now, let's continue our discussion of Lumiose by moving onto the "zones." 

Firstly, there's the "wild zones." These are designated sections of the city that have been cordoned off to make room for wild Pokemon, so as you can likely tell, these are the areas where you'll be catching these lovable creatures. 

And this whole wild zone system suuuuuuuucks. There are 20 zones in total that unlock over the course of the plot, with a given zone featuring, at max, 6-8 catchable Pokemon. 

"6-8 per zone for 20 zones", I hear you say, "that's like 120 Pokemon at least"! What's the big deal?

If you did say/think that, I'm afraid you misunderstood me, dear reader. 

Let me give you an example: The first wild zone has Pidgey, Pichu, Mareep, Fletchling, Bunnelby, and Weedle. Not a bad starting line up, right? 

Well, you'll find each of these or evolutions of these in other wild zones throughout.
A subsequent wild zone might have Kakuna, Magikarp, Binacle, Patrat, Staryu, and Budew. 

Then another one might have Fletchinder, Magikarp, Kakuna, Clauncher, Houndour, and Stunfisk. And so on and so forth. 

If you don't know Pokemon, that all likely sounded like a bunch of nonsense, so in layman's terms: you don't get 6-8 new Pokemon in each zone. Aside from the occasional exception to the rule (such as the two square feet of the city that are somehow a winter wonderland), I'd say each zone actually has like 2-4 new Pokemon each, because it's beyond lazy to count evolutions in a line as new options to catch.

What's more, each wild zone is tiny enough that you'll end up swarmed with wild Pokemon within seconds, which tends to throw a wrench into things. 

Not only that, but every wild Pokemon spawns in exactly the same area each time the zone reloads. This makes it relatively easy to hunt down the creature you're looking for, but it also makes this lifeless world feel even more lifeless.

There's technically stealth involved where you can hide in tall grass to ambush a Pokemon you're hoping to catch, but it simply doesn't work as expected. If there's an aggressive Pokemon that intends to be a problem for you, it will spot you and throw your time in the wild zone into sheer chaos. I'd go so far as to say stealth is literally impossible in many wild zones. It becomes exhausting after a while.

In fact, it was one of these wild zone that started to permanently knock the wind out of my sails. In every Pokemon game, I try to do what the marketing commands of me: catch 'em all. For a while, I wouldn't move past any given wild zone until I'd caught everything to be found in there...but then there came a wild zone that I've seen gaining some infamy in the community. 

I was hoping to catch a Skarmory on a rooftop, and this was a delicate process since there was only one in this area and if I failed to catch it, I'd have to wait for the time of day to change in order to get it to respawn. However, in order to reach this rooftop in the first place, I had to sneak through a giant group of aggressive Pyroar to get on a ladder and climb. 

But as I've already said, stealth doesn't actually work here. 

Pyroar are fire lions, so they can't climb, and GameFreak doesn't care enough to have them be able to angle fire up at me...so surely if I could make it to the ladder, that would be the end of the problem, right?

Wrong.

See, wild Pyroar know a move called "Earth Power" that causes a small tremor in the ground...and they could use this move to hit me when I was on the rooftop. 

Yep.

They could cause earth tremors to happen on top of a roof. The rooftop was also filled with hostile Pokemon in addition to the Skarmory I wanted, so between having to dodge attacks from the rooftop Pokemon, taking damage from impossible-to-predict seismic activity on top of this roof, and struggling against this game's abysmally low catch rates, the experience was overwhelming and I found myself getting sent to the Pokemon center constantly. 

That was when I gave up on catching 'em all entirely.

I briefly alluded to catch rates in that last segment, and that's an annoyance that began long before this specific wild zone. 

When you aim a ball to catch a Pokemon, you can see a certain number of "^" symbols ranging from 1 to 4. The more of those symbols you see, the greater chance you have of catching the creature with the ball you're about to use. 

Only it isn't accurate at all. Even at the maximum amount of symbols, it still seems like your chances are about 25% at most no matter what kind of ball you use.

And you know what? That isn't entirely conjecture and guessing on my part.

See, there are key items you can purchase that actually increase your overall catch rates. In addition to this, there are similar items to increase EXP gained from battles, the amount of hits you can take from wild Pokemon before you faint (would've been great in that Pyroar area), the amount of money you get from battle victories, etc. So your catch rates are quite literally influenced by something you have to purchase in-game.

And what, dear reader, is the currency you use to purchase these items?

"Colorful screws"...thankfully not a microtransaction, though it feels distinctly like this is a trial run to try out microtransactions in the future.

And where, dear reader, do you get these "colorful screws?"

Follow-up question to that: are you ready for some payoff for something I set up earlier?

You get these colorful screws....as rewards for completing platforming challenges.

That, dear reader, is why I ever felt compelled to do those challenges...whether or not I could actually catch Pokemon with anything resembling consistency was dependent on these key items, and I can only imagine how difficult things would've been in the later hours if I hadn't figured this out.

Next there are the "battle zones." These are sections of the city that get transformed into free-for-all battling areas come nightfall. The city's designated battle zone location changes every night, and once dawn breaks, you'll need to wait until night again to continue using these zones. 

As you've likely already inferred, these are the segments of the city where you'll battle other trainers as part of the ZA Royale. Every trainer you beat awards you with prize medals and points towards a "challenger ticket." The prize medals translate into a monetary reward once dawn breaks, while the "challenger ticket" you earn by winning enough battles is used to take part in promotion matches to raise your letter rank (i.e. rank Z to rank Y). This is all fairly self-explanatory, but sadly, GameFreak just couldn't help but be weird about this.

Do you remember how I brought up stealth as a factor in the wild zones? A factor that doesn't really work?

Well, stealth is promoted as a necessity in the battle zones.

The idea is that every trainer in a battle zone is waiting to ambush other trainers to get an advantage in the ensuing battle, so there's an attempt at a tense atmosphere in which you have to remain unseen and get the jump on adversaries...but again, stealth doesn't really work. And even if it did, it wouldn't be that useful since other trainers are about as dumb as they come. 

The idea is that you'll have one of your Pokemon walking around with you, see another trainer, then have your Pokemon attack the one your opponent has out before you're spotted. Fair enough, right? 

Well, there never appears to be any sense of urgency with any of these NPCs. They'll be standing with their backs turned to a giant courtyard and they won't see anything wrong with that. 

Furthermore, they literally can't tell that you're there unless they see you specifically. I can't even count the amount of times I was able to gain an advantageous first move by simply hiding behind a corner while my Pokemon went to attack. It's beyond weird. A trainer will be standing there, watching an Excadrill walk up to their Pokemon, seemingly thinking "well, it's not a trainer! Nothing to be alarmed by here!" 

Wanna know what makes that even more head-scratch-worthy?

If you're trying to sneak in a wild zone and have one of your Pokemon out, wild Pokemon will 100% realize you're there even if they can't see you. Wild Pokemon are literally smarter than human beings in this game. 

Most battle zones don't even come with anywhere you can hide, so not only is stealth not very effective (or perhaps way too effective) in some cases, but in most cases it isn't even a relevant discussion to be had. I can understand the high-level idea behind this design decision, but it's half-baked.

I've already done a segment on technical fidelity, so this next section is just going to be a smorgasbord of other topics I haven't covered yet.

Firstly, the tutorials. Recent Pokemon games have been infamous for their ridiculously long, incomparably restrictive tutorial sections, and Legends Z-A is no exception. It stings a little more in this one, however. The tutorials in Legends: Arceus were extensive, no doubt, but they were gating off a fairly large world that you got to go into on your own after it was all said and done. 

In Z-A, though, these tutorials not only relegate you to about an alley's worth of space, they're also gating off what amounts to a postage stamp's worth of map. You need only watch Dunkey's coverage of this game to see what I mean about these tutorials.

Secondly, the business stuff. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't hold GameFreak's feet to the fire on this one, because the money-grubbing has officially gone too far. 

When I was considering whether or not I even wanted to buy this, one of the criteria I looked for was "is it the new marked up $70 that the suits are demanding?" The results of my query were "no," despite what I'd heard some people saying. But even recently, I've still been hearing people talk about a $70 price tag...so I had a look, and I realized that it's evidently $70 if you want the 60fps version on Switch 2. 

You have got to be kidding me.

Then there's the fact that they've locked mega evolutions for the Kalos starters behind ranked online competitions, which ultimately means a monetary investment since you'd need to pay for Nintendo Switch Online.

Then there's the day-1 DLC behind which the two new Mega Raichu variants are locked behind.

That makes a grand total of 5 mega evolutions that you have to shell out extra money for if you want them. In addition to a $60/$70 price tag. That, dear reader, is highway robbery.

As I said in the introduction, I love Pokemon, but I'm too cognizant of its flaws to let it skate by on my love alone. Legends Z-A is a bite-sized piece of the Pokemon pie that people like me go crazy for. So if you like this long-running series, surprise surprise, you're going to like Legends Z-A...or, you might. I'm not sure anymore. 

In spite of all the complaints I have and the score I'm about to give this game, I actually liked it an awful lot. There's plenty to like in this package: a fun story, fun characters, some exciting new mega evolutions (and Mega Victreebel is there too), etc. But the plain truth is that there's also a lot of asterisks and this distinct feeling that as much as I love this saga, it doesn't really love me anymore.

Another way to put it would be to say I really enjoyed my brief fling with Pokemon Legends: Z-A...but I do find it weird that my Uber got here so fast. 

Let us review:

Scummy business practices - 1.0

Technical issues - 1.0

Wild/Battle zone woes - 1.0

Combat woes - 1.0

Platforming - 0.5

The final score for Pokemon Legends: Z-A is...

5.5/10 - Slightly Above Average

Do better, GameFreak, do better!