In recent years, the trend for core Pokémon RPGs has been to push for ever-larger sandboxes, with the recent Pokémon Scarlet and Violet offering a full-on Breath-of-the-Wild-style open world. The newly-released Pokémon Legends: Z-A bucks that particular trend, instead restricting the critter catching to a single relatively compact city map, while introducing a number of other tweaks to the Pokémon blueprint.
Will Pokémon Legends: Z-A transform fans into enthusiastic city slickers? Or will you be left yearning for a return to nature? Here are the ABCs of Z-A...
Pokémon Legends: Z-A casts players as a tourist visitor to Lumiose City, the Paris-inspired metropolis last seen in 2013's Pokémon X and Y. Lumiose is in the midst of an ambitious redevelopment plan, which aims to create a city where Pokémon and humans can live side-by-side in an urban environment. As you might expect, this isn't going entirely smoothly, with some residents concerned about the growing percentage of the city being transformed into "wild zone" Pokémon habitats and rogue Mega-Evolved Pokémon causing havoc.
You’re quickly drawn into the intrigue of Lumiose City when you’re recruited by the eager Taunie/Urbain (their gender depends on the gender of your main character) to join their band of Pokemon-training friends, Team MZ. Before long, you’re set up in a room at the quaint Hotel Z and fully immersed in the Z-A Royale, a competition held by the Quasartico Corporation to determine the best trainers in Lumiose, with ranks going from, you guessed it, Z to A. It's up to you to earn your way to the top while figuring out the mystery of the rogue Mega Evolutions and what's going on in the mysteriously shuttered Prism Tower at the heart of Lumiose City.
While you shouldn’t come into Pokémon Legends: Z-A expecting Tolstoy, the story here is better than a good percentage of previous Pokémon RPGs. You also get an unusually strong cast of characters for a Pokémon game, with most of the members of your Team MZ squad, from the ever-earnest Taunie, to the spunky wannabe dancer Lida, to the fanboy fashion designer Naveen, being likable, or at least memorable.
The rest of the town is populated with an array of other unique personalities, with some even being recognizable for those who played Pokémon X and Y (Professor Mable has come a long way from her role as a minor villain in X/Y). Even the game's sidequests are fairly interesting, with your typical "fetch this item or Pokémon" quests being mixed with more original stuff, like a Pokémon scavenger hunt in Lumiose City’s surprisingly-expansive Pokémon museum. This is one of the first Pokémon games in a while where I wasn't just interested in the landscape and the Pokémon I can find there, but also the game's characters and the society they inhabit. This really is one of the richest-feeling Pokémon worlds to date.
This is the case despite the fact that the game’s map is, undeniably, quite small. You could probably run from one side to the other in a couple of minutes, but Game Freak does a lot with their limited real estate. The map is somewhat maze-like, which makes it feel bigger than it is, and the city's rooftops and even parts of its sewer system are fully explorable. There are also plenty of Lumiose City tourist traps to distract you along the way, like the aforementioned museum and scads of clothes shops and cafes. Did I miss the greater sense of geographic variety and scale we got in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet? I did at times, but not as often or as badly as I was expecting.
This bustling little world looks quite nice as well. While some folks looking to drum up negative engagement had a field day trashing Z-A before its release, the reality is, this is far and away the best-looking Pokémon game to date when playing on Nintendo Switch 2. Obviously, if you're expecting this game to measure up to mega-budgeted PS5 RPGs, you're going to be disappointed, and the game's buildings do look rather flat and blocky. That said, the things people actually care about, the Pokémon and their human trainers, look super sharp (the designs for human characters are particularly good this time around). On Switch 2, everything ran at a consistent 60fps without much in the way of visual glitches. The visual difference between Pokémon Legends: Z-A and Scarlet/Violet is night and day.
Of course, a well-designed world doesn’t mean all that much without solid core gameplay to match, and thankfully, Pokémon Legends: Z-A delivers on that front too. The game opts for a new action/menu-based hybrid system, in which battles take place in real time with trainers fully immersed in the action, but attacks are still selected manually. The system is very approachable, with a simple lock-on function and attacks being mapped to the four face buttons. Eventually, the concept of Mega-Evolved Pokémon is added to the mix, with players being able to temporarily power up some members of their party, but this doesn't complicate matters too much. This system feels like a “best of both worlds” scenario -- the rock-paper-scissors depth of the turn-based Pokémon RPGs hasn't gone anywhere, but battles now play out much quicker and with more of a sense of danger as trainers can get smoked if they don’t stay out of the fray.
This new battle system's greater immediacy also creates increased challenge and tension. This is particularly true of the battles against rogue Mega-Evolved Pokémon, which take the form of full-on action-packed boss battles with sometimes complex attack patterns you have to keep aware of. These battles were some of the most satisfying challenges I've ever encountered in a core Pokémon game.
Once you get through the game’s early tutorials, Pokémon Legends: Z-A settles into a fairly well-defined gameplay loop. The game rolls out a steady stream of rogue Mega-Evolved Pokémon to tackle and at any time you can engage in some sidequests or catch yourself some critters in the city’s wild zones. Catching Pokémon borrows from Pokémon Legends: Arceus, with players able to sneak up on creatures and catch them by simply throwing a Poké Ball at them. Of course, you can also battle wild Pokémon to weaken them first, and, in fact, in a change this series has needed for decades, you can now catch Pokémon for a brief window after they've "fainted." No more being punished for landing a super-effective move!
At night, randomly selected battle zones pop up. Here, you'll take on a succession of other trainers, racking up points to earn a Challenger's Ticket, which, in turn, lets you take on a promotion battle (essentially this game's version of a Gym Leader battle). Here too, players can gain the advantage by sneaking up on opponents, and picking up bonus cards will grant you extra points if you complete specific tasks (knock out an opponent from behind, hit a specific number of water/fire/ground-based attacks, etc.)
This gameplay loop works quite well, and while it could have become repetitive, Z-A largely avoids that. The game lets you skip a large number of ranks at one point (you don't have to rank up 26 times, don't worry) and Game Freak makes an effort to mix up the game's main story missions. Yes, you're still always earning a Challenger’s Ticket to enter a promotion match, but tracking down your opponent and getting them to face you usually isn’t a simple task. You'll find yourself doing things like engaging in a competition with other mega fans of an influencer-trainer in order to win the right to face them, and doing some detective work and delving into the dungeon-like sewers beneath Lumiose to find a missing person before another trainer will face you. Pokémon Legends: Z-A feels closer to the rhythms of the various Pokémon anime than most of its predecessors.
The Pokémon Legends: Z-A campaign is a bit lighter than some other entries in the series, as you'll be able to complete the story in around 20 hours if you're really galloping toward the finish line. Of course, you could easily spend two to three times that (or more) if you really want to Catch 'em All and tie up everything the game has to offer. As is usually the case with this franchise, you get out of this Poké Ball what you put into it.
This review was based on a Switch 2 copy of Pokémon Legends: Z-A provided by Nintendo.
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