For all our sakes, Game Freak must learn from Pokémon Legends Z-A

Pokémon Legends Z-A has been yet another success for Game Freak. The tile has sold nearly six million copies within its first week amid generally favorable reviews. However, this pales in comparison to Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, which sold nearly 10 million copies in their first three days of release. While fans are still willing to shell out for a new Pokémon game, it’s clear that Game Freak is beginning to pay for resting on its laurels. 

There are some major lessons that Game Freak needs to learn from this latest release. Should Game Freak wish to overcome the onsetting Pokémon stagnation, there are successes from Pokémon Legends Z-A that must be brought forward, and failures that must be consigned to the dustbin of history.

✓ VideoGamer Summary

• Pokémon Legends Z-A might not be a mainline Pokémon title, but there are plenty of lessons the series could learn from it.
• The change to real-time combat is inspired, as are the Pokémon Legends catching mechanics.
• Pokémon Legends Z-A leaves much to be desired visually. 
• The story does a lot with a little, but suffers from terrible pacing and too many tutorials.
• Pokémon Legends Z-A boasts some of the best Pokémon characters across any games, but these gems are too few and far between.

Right on time

Pokémon Legends Z-A took its biggest swing with the introduction of real-time mechanics. While it’s not a home run, Game Freak showed willingness with this innovation. 

Losing the heights of turn-based strategy might cause problems with the competitive crowd, but this new system fits the Pokémon fantasy far better. It gives a feeling of being in the Pokémon anime, in a way that the stiff turn-based attacks and animations from previous Pokémon titles don’t allow.

Pokémon Legends Z-A has also had some interesting iterations on Pokémon Legends Arceus’ boss fights, taking the over-the-top visuals of the Pokémon Sword and Shield Gigantimax fights and including the player in the proceedings.  

Running around to avoid hits in the Rogue Mega Evolution fights is as pulse-pounding as Pokémon has ever been, and would be an excellent way to showcase Legendary Pokémon going forward.

Pokémon Z-A happily included superior catching mechanics from Legends Arceus, combining them with the more traditional elements of the main series. Aiming a Poké Ball on the world map feels so much better than the slow catching of a turn-based entry. Outside of turn-based prison, the tension and suspense surrounding potential catches are heightened and given space to breathe. Game Freak would be remiss to ignore its successes here. 

Switching it up

Conversely, Pokémon Legends Z-A’s Lumiose City suffers from some very lackluster texture work, with elements of the city looking like they’re painted backdrops intended to be kept at a distance. There’s also a heavy reliance on reusing assets, and the scaffolding for Pokémon Z-A’s very own lackluster version of parkour underscores a low production value. 

Much of this is due to Pokémon Legends Z-A releasing on both the Nintendo Switch and the Nintendo Switch 2, meaning that it isn’t necessarily designed to take advantage of the new console’s HD graphics. 

The Switch 2 is capable of so much more. Mario Kart World is gorgeous, as is the technically impressive Donkey Kong Bananza. Pokémon Legends Z-A, despite access to better hardware, in many ways looks worse than Pokémon Legends Arceus. 

Of course, Arceus had even worse textures and terrible issues with pop-in, but the varied locations between the forest and mountains felt better than being stuck in a single, blocky city. Pokémon Legends Z-A fell into a pitfall here, and Game Freak would be doing itself a disservice not to take notes. 

Never-ending story

Pokémon has never had a strong focus on narrative, bar games like Pokémon Black and White, but Game Freak always tries to make some kind of effort. Pokémon Legends Z-A showcases one of the series’ best tries at a story yet, picking up on beats from Pokémon X and Y and effectively building intrigue in service of a cinematic climax. 

However, despite these successes, the pacing in Pokémon Legends Z-A is absolutely nightmarish from toe to tip.

The worst is in the game’s opening hours, as Pokémon Z-A takes you by the hand with a death grip to stop you from doing anything it hasn’t pre-approved first. It is hours between your arrival in Lumiose City and the player being able to actually interact with the world in the way they want. 

There’s a big difference between using a tutorial to ease players into concepts like battle and wild zones and destroying a player’s interest by forcing them to take things as slowly as possible. Pokémon Legends Z-A manages the latter.

The lesson here is that Pokémon should stick with making more elaborate stories, rather than falling back on the slim pickings offered by the traditional, gym-chasing formula.

Character flaws

Pokémon Legends Z-A probably has the most dynamic cast Pokémon has ever seen, and much like the best characters in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, this is because they get chances to reappear throughout the game. Having a core ensemble allows creating some kind of depth to the character, or at least makes their jokes feel less inherently one-note. 

The pleasingly dramatic Canari has a similar streamer persona to Scarlet and Violet’s Iono, but she’s more memorable because she gets multiple chances to define her edgy gamer persona. By contrast, Iono is relegated to the town where she’s a gym leader, and so once you leave, she’s never to be seen again.

The presence of these larger-than-life personalities makes the lack of voice acting even more conspicuous. Even if it wasn’t fully voice-acted, small injections can better define the ways a character is supposed to be read. It would add more energy to the slimy-but-kind yakuza boss Corbeau, or the exaggerated dragon maid Lebanne. 

In the world of the Switch 2, Pokémon needs to up the ante, and with a dedicated fanbase ready to become enamored with these characters, a little would go a long way to create more attachment. 

This is, in many ways, the story of Pokémon Legends Z-A as a whole. The groundwork for a meaningfully evolved Pokémon franchise may be found amid the uneven ground of Game Freak’s newest installment. It now falls to the developer to clear away the detritus. 

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