Pokémon Legends: Z-A might not be quite what people have in mind when they complain that the Nintendo Switch 2 launched without some kind of big, sprawling RPG alongside it, but it’ll do ’til that comes along.
Series developer Game Freak’s second entry in the more experimental Legends sub-series (after 2022’s Arceus) does exactly what I wanted it to do: It drags the Pokémon formula kicking and screaming into a more modern design philosophy. Game Freak has disposed of the rigid, stop-and-go pace of the mainline games here, replacing it with a gameplay loop that flows in a delightfully brisk manner.
Quite honestly, that’s an even bigger change than the excellent new combat system, which I detailed in a preview a few weeks ago. Between its quick pacing, fresh combat, and a decent amount of charm around the edges, Z-A gives me hope that the next big generational leap for Pokémon will succeed where Scarlet and Violet dropped the ball a bit.
Pokémon Legends Z-A is enjoyably light and airy
Credit: Nintendo
Like Arceus, Z-A takes players back to the setting of a previous mainline Pokémon game. Unlike Arceus, though, it’s more of a direct follow-up than a distant prequel.
As you probably already know if you’re reading this, that setting is Lumiose City, the biggest city in Pokémon X and Y for Nintendo 3DS. It’s more-than-vaguely inspired by Paris, with a big tower that’s visible from most of the city, a culture that values hanging out at the cafe more than almost anything, and lots of people wearing outfits that ride the line between fashionable and ridiculous.
A lot of people I know (myself included) will be happy to know that there are a large number of clothing shops with plenty of outlandish fits for the player to rock in this game, by the way. Playing dress-up is a huge and vital part of the experience.
Anyway, Lumiose has seen an influx of wild Pokémon in the five years since X and Y concluded, leading to the creation of gated Wild Zones in parts of the city where Pokémon can roam freely…until you beat the snot out of them and stuff them into a Poké Ball. The fact that this is framed as an altruistic, Pokémon-friendly solution to the problem is kind of goofy, but this series has never really had a good answer for why it’s cool and widely accepted to make animals fight each other, and I’ve embraced the fact that it never will.
Credit: Nintendo
All the while, there’s a trendy new Pokémon battling competition in town, in which entrants start at rank Z and move all the way up to rank A. This is your created avatar’s calling, of course, and moving up the ranks makes up the bulk of Z-A‘s gameplay loop. It’s all built around a day/night cycle. During the day, you can roam around town expanding your roster via Wild Zones and completing simple sidequests for NPCs. By night, a random part of town will be walled off and designated as a Battle Zone, in which trainers fight each other to earn Challenger Tickets. These are used to challenge the next person above them in the alphabetic hierarchy.
What makes this simple loop work is that Game Freak hit the fast-forward button on the game’s pacing, relative to other recent Pokémon games. It doesn’t take long before you’re free to roam around Lumiose at your own leisure. Once you’re at that point, a drastic reduction in the number of text boxes you have to button through makes this by far the most easygoing Pokémon experience in years. You don’t have to make a text box go away when you pick up items anymore, for example, and lots of items don’t even ask you to press a button, as they make their way into your inventory when you walk over them.
The inclusion of a sprint button (something Scarlet and Violet desperately could’ve used) is also of vital importance here. Lumiose isn’t huge as far as video game open worlds go, and between your quick movement speed and an extremely generous fast travel system (aided by the Switch 2 version’s nearly instant load times), there isn’t a single task that feels burdensome in Z-A. I have personally been begging for Game Freak to make changes like this for years, so as you can imagine, I’m very pleased by this aspect of Z-A.
The new combat system is a hoot
Credit: Nintendo
Game Freak’s second pillar of innovation in Z-A is a refreshingly reimagined combat system. This game brings back some ideas from Arceus, namely the idea of using the environment to sneak up on opposing Pokémon and the fact that wild Pokémon will attack you, not just whatever little freak you’re ordering around. Z-A builds on these ideas by removing the menu-driven, turn-based combat that Pokémon has used since 1996 and replacing it with one that adds a layer of juice to the proceedings.
You can still only carry six Pokémon at a time, and each one can still only equip four moves, but that’s about where the similarities end. Combat is now real-time and based on cooldowns, meaning you will lose fights if you just sit there, hemming and hawing while trying to figure out what to do. You now have free reign to repeatedly use all of your abilities (you can’t run out of PP anymore), and combat is very much based around the idea of matching wits with aggression. A clean UI with helpful icons letting you know which moves will be effective or not makes this work, especially for adults who don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of type advantages anymore.
What makes this system so cool is how it recontextualizes classic Pokémon abilities and the ways you use them. For example, moves that exist solely to buff or debuff stats now feel significantly more useful than they did in the turn-based games because they no longer take up an entire turn anymore. You can just fire them off in between your damaging moves now. Some moves, like Protect, now require precise timing to reduce incoming damage, while others, such as Whirlpool, create areas on the ground that gradually damage anything inside of them. Timing and positioning have never really been major considerations in turn-based Pokémon games, but they are tantamount to success in Z-A.
There are various ripple effects to this approach that further accelerate Z-A‘s pace compared to its predecessors. For instance, damaging status effects like poison or burn are now elegantly displayed in a running combat log on the right side of the screen, rather than constantly interrupting fights with unskippable text boxes. Cooldowns are also lightning quick compared to something like Xenoblade Chronicles (perhaps the closest Nintendo game in terms of combat basics), and you can still easily one or two-shot enemies with the right type advantages, so even the longest regular Pokémon battles in this game will last, like, a minute at most.
Credit: Nintendo
All of these changes really shine in Z-A‘s major boss battles against Rogue Mega Evolved Pokémon. These are wild Pokémon who have managed to reach their temporary and incredibly powerful Mega Evolution states without the help of a trainer, and it’s your job to pacify them when the story asks for it. Almost all of these fights are fun at a minimum and thrilling at their best. Each of them includes phases where whichever Pokémon you’re fighting goes haywire and starts firing off projectiles or filling the floor with poison or what have you. At that point, it’s usually in your best interest to withdraw your active Pokémon and save your own skin by sprinting and dodge rolling out of the way as needed.
These fights genuinely ask a lot more of the player in terms of skill and dexterity than the average Pokémon game. I dig it, personally. I think it’s fun to frantically try to dodge tornadoes and lightning strikes while desperately trying to beat a Pokémon whom I don’t have a type advantage against.
I want to be clear that I really like turn-based RPGs. My love for Z-A‘s combat is not rooted in the notion that turn-based combat is inherently outdated or boring because that would be a silly thing to think. In the specific context of Pokémon, though, it’s pretty heartening to know that Game Freak understood its own prior shortcomings and did a lot of work here to address them. For a series that has traditionally been resistant to change for various reasons, it gives me hope.
There are some cracks in the armor
Credit: Nintendo
Pokémon Legends: Z-A is characterized by Game Freak tryin’ some new stuff, and nobody has ever tried some new stuff without making a few mistakes along the way.
By far the biggest problem with Z-A is that its structure, by necessity, is less varied than your average mainline Pokémon title. You aren’t going on a grand adventure across the whole of a new region here. Every waking moment of the 20-30 hours it takes to finish this game is spent within the confines of Lumiose City. And while Wild Zones try to account for each Pokémon’s natural habitat (water types are more likely to be found in sewers or ponds, for example), there’s no getting around the fact that each of them sits within the confines of an urban metropolis. It just isn’t the same as venturing into an active volcano to catch fire types.
The Battle Zone conceit also wears out its welcome by the end of the story. Game Freak tried to inject some variety into these by setting them in architecturally distinct parts of the city, but the core gameplay is the same in each one. You’re going to fight somewhere between 10 and 20 opposing trainers who all fit into one of four or five archetypes until you have enough points to take on your next promotion match. Your opponents in promotion matches are usually themed around some Pokémon type or another, but it doesn’t hit the same as fighting your way through a whole ice-themed gym or whatever.
Speaking of the story, it’s of roughly the same caliber as any other Pokémon RPG. Some of the characters have neat designs, but few of them are actually compelling as people, and your character is just some stranger who they all worship as the greatest and coolest Pokémon trainer in the land five minutes after meeting you. To be clear, there is a plot outside of just moving up the alphabetical leaderboard, but I never found myself terribly engaged with it.
Visually, Game Freak nailed what really matters. After the disastrous performance of Scarlet and Violet on Switch, the Switch 2 version of Z-A runs at a perfectly crisp 60 frames per second, without a single noticeable hitch in my time playing it. It’s incredibly sharp-looking thanks to that and a higher resolution than you’d ever see in a Switch game. However, the core assets were still built for the Switch, and it shows. Environments look flat and lack energy. Characters don’t have a lot of personality outside of their outfits, either. The Pokémon themselves look OK, but I feel that Game Freak would benefit from going back to the drawing board with regards to art direction before the next major Pokémon release.
But I still hope the next one learns a lot from Z-A
I’ve brought up the amorphous “next Pokémon game” often enough in this review that I really ought to close the loop on that.
Put simply, I hope the next generational leap in the series (likely to come out next year) learns some big lessons from Z-A. I don’t need Game Freak to do away with turn-based fights entirely, but simple UI adjustments like the ones found here would do so much to make those fights feel more dynamic and energetic than they currently do. There’s a broad undercurrent of “this game just moves real fast, man” to Z-A that the next game sorely needs to embrace. Improved performance thanks to the Switch 2’s hardware will surely help in that regard, too.
But even outside of what it means for the future of the series, Pokémon Legends: Z-A is a good time on its merits. Sure, parts of it get repetitious by the end, but the moment-to-moment action is so innately satisfying and digestible in short bursts that the repetition is bearable. This is easily the best combat Game Freak has put in one of these games in years, too. If you have a Switch 2 and have wanted an RPG for it, you might as well hop on this one.
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