Pokémon Legends: Z-A review – The freshest feeling Pokémon game in years

I’ve loved the Pokémon games pretty much my entire life, but I think it’s hard to deny the fact that they spent a long time in a stagnant state. For over a decade, it seemed like a series terrified of trying anything new, and that seemed unlikely to change until 2022, which saw the release of Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

For the first time in ages, the well-worn gameplay formula had been completely mixed up. Random encounters and turn-based battles were massively de-emphasized in favour of a completely overhauled catching system that put the focus on exploration and studying Pokémon in the field. You’d be stalking through the grass, waiting for the perfect moment to unleash a PokéBall, considering what to do if it spotted you and attacked, or worse, tried to flee, losing your opportunity forever.

It was a brilliant change that made for the freshest-feeling Pokémon game in over a decade, but it had one major flaw that disappointed a lot of fans, and that was the lack of investment in the battle system. The story featured barely any major battles, and it only implemented a small twist on the standard turn-based format – it wasn’t enough to turn any heads.

That’s why, when Pokémon Legends: Z-A came along and revealed a completely overhauled, real-time battle system, hype was through the roof, and I’m pleased to say that the game delivers on it.

The game uses a system similar to Xenoblade, where the battles take place in real-time, and your Pokémon’s standard four moves can be selected and unleashed at will while both the monsters and their trainers move around the battlefield. Things that have never mattered before in this franchise, like movement speed and positioning on the battlefield, are now important factors, as rather than relying on percentage chances, your Pokémon can physically dodge moves if you command them properly. Heck, if you’re clever, you can even time a switch to pull your Pokémon out of the way of a devastating move and replace it with one that will resist the incoming attack.

What’s more, every move has different charge and cooldown times, and it forces veteran players to completely change their established understanding of how certain moves work. Take the eternal Thunder vs Thunderbolt debate, for example. Thunder has always been the more powerful move, but in the old system, its 90% accuracy vs Thunderbolt’s 100% made it ridiculously unreliable, so no one used it. However, now, the old accuracy system is gone, and Thunder is very much worth it if you can work around the increased charge time and cooldown. On the other hand, Quick Attack is now a genuinely quick attack.

It makes for much more difficult battles too – if you go in with the usual “this is a kid’s game” mindset, you’ll get knocked back quite a few times. You need to consider several layers of strategy in major battles, especially when fighting multiple opponents at once. You’ll need to know when to switch your active Pokémon, and when’s the right moment to throw out a few stat buffs or status conditions to give you the edge. It may not sound like much to some, but it’s far more than most of Pokémon’s single-player campaigns have asked for before now.

This goes extra for wild encounters or the raid battle-style Rogue Mega fight, where the opposing Pokémon will frequently target you instead of your Pokémon, and you can only take so many hits before it results in an instant loss. It means not only have you got to consider all the layers of strategy in what your Pokémon can do, but you’ve got to keep an eye out for when you need to dodge-roll to safety as well. Plus, this can be used to your advantage. If you need to heal up, for example, you can pull back all of your Pokémon for a while as long as you can confidently dodge all the incoming attacks from your opponent.

The major downside of this system is the control scheme, which can be a bit fiddly at times. You have to hold down ZL constantly to focus on the opposing Pokémon, and only doing that will let you command your Pokémon to use moves by pressing the face buttons. If you want to dodge or sprint around the battlefield, you have to release ZL and stop focusing on the opponent to use Y for a dodge roll or B to sprint, which in the heat of battle can cause you to frequently make frustrating mistakes. Plus, as the camera switches angles between these stances, it can often make a chaotic battlefield hard to read, as the visual noise of several Pokémon moves going off at once makes it unclear what you actually need to dodge.

It gets even more annoying when you add PokéBalls into the mix, as to throw one of those, you need to hold down ZL and ZR to aim, then use the arrow buttons to select the ball type you want before releasing ZR to throw, which is far too many steps for one of the most basic and important actions in the system. It’s manageable once you get the hang of it, though it would be nice if we were allowed to customize the controls, as even after 30 hours, I will never get used to L3 being crouch instead of sprint like it is in almost every other modern game.

That stalking and catching gameplay from Arceus is still here, though it’s much less the focus compared to the new battle system. While various Pokémon can spawn all over the city, the majority of monsters are found in the many small Wild Zones scattered around the map. Each zone contains around 6-8 unique Pokémon that use the same timidness and aggression mechanics that will determine how best to track them down and catch them, though the new battle system does make this process a bit easier.

With the rare exception of highly timid Pokémon that flee no matter what, most Pokémon will engage you in a battle if they spot you, and here we see another huge change to the series’ mechanics. Up until now, in battle, the goal was to get an opposing Pokémon’s HP as low as possible without KOing it, as then you’d lose your opportunity to catch it. With the more chaotic battle system that has been changed, and now when you KO a Pokémon, you get one more chance to catch it with a highly boosted catch rate, meaning it’s much harder to fail an encounter.

I can see why it’s been done this way, as the new battle mechanics would make carefully chipping away at an opponent quite annoying, but it’s disappointing that the in-depth and engaging catching mechanics from Arceus have been watered down a bit as a result. I think there’s a better balance to strike somewhere in there.

The Wild Zone system does make the smaller open world fun to explore though, With the entire game being set in Lumiose City, the visual spectacle wears off pretty quickly as the whole thing feels quite samey, but as you progress the story more and more zones are added that make the place feel more alive and crowded, as well as changing some of the layout. For example, when Wild Zone 12 appears, what was previously an unremarkable bit of grass becomes completely snowed over, so the Ice-types can live there.

The overabundance of side quests helps it feel quite lively. There are over 100, and while all of them are relatively simple tasks that will barely take you a minute, they are nice ways to get the vibe of all the different people in the city. It introduces some interesting plot threads, as many people express discontent with all the Wild Zones taking over the city, and yeah, to be fair, I’d probably be annoyed too if an alpha Pyroar and its entire pride were suddenly allowed to live right outside of my front door.

There is still a decent sense of exploration in the city too, as while the streets are generally unremarkable, you can get your Assassin’s Creed on and run around most rooftops in the city, many of which have items, collectibles, or Pokémon for you to find. It does make for some funny dissonance though, when the in-lore way you double jump and save yourself from long falls is by holding onto your sentient smartphone, but I suppose it’s far from the weirdest bit of lore in this series.

Speaking of, the story does a decent job of keeping things moving, giving you little bits of intrigue to lend context as you switch between facing standard trainers to advance in the game-wide Z-A Royale tournament and facing off against the Rogue Megas that frequently appear. Once you start to reach the higher ranks, each of your rivals in the Z-A Royale gets their own little story arcs too, as you meet them and do a few quests with them before facing them in battle, and it builds quite the colorful cast of characters that make up for the lack of traditional gym leaders.

The finale in particular is great. Without spoiling it, it does a fantastic job of walking that fine line of being over-the-top and a bit silly, while still feeling appropriately epic – exactly the tone I want from a series like Pokémon. That said, it does frustratingly leave a couple of major threads dangling, presumably to be picked up in the announced DLC. It ticked me off when Assassin’s Creed Shadows did that, and I’m not any happier with it here – I sure hope this doesn’t become an infuriating trend for the industry.

Despite a few annoyances, the key areas where Pokémon Legends: Z-A experiments are a big success. The new battle system is great fun and makes for a unique challenge compared to what the series normally offers. While I think there are still steps to take to strike a better balance between that system and the catching mechanics from Arceus, I’m just thrilled to see Pokémon be a franchise willing to take risks again. I can’t wait to see what fresh idea the team at Game Freak tries next, as so far, it’s two-for-two in terms of Legends successes.

More reviews on DBLTAP: