Pokemon Legends: Z-A - Fine, But Short

It’s no secret that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet were not exactly the best received entries in the nearly 30 year history of the Pokemon franchise. They’re not terrible and they delivered the promise of an open world Pokemon game, it just ran terribly on the Switch and the graphical issues were hard to overcome.

We are now nearly three years removed from the release of those games and Game Freak has now released Pokemon Legends: Z-A after taking a gap year to reassess and find themselves. The issue is that Legends: Z-A is more of a tech demo of what’s coming in the future than it is a cohesive and fulfilling experience in its own right. This wouldn’t be the first time a developer did something like this and it feels a lot like Kingdom Hearts 0.2: A Fragmentary Passage than it does a full game on its own. The problem is that 0.2 was bundled with the cutscenes from Union X and a full ground-up remake for consoles of 3DS. At full retail, Legends: Z-A feels like a short and incomplete experience, which is a shame because the game is pretty fun.

Pokemon Legends: Z-A picks up five years after the events of Pokemon X and Y (the 3DS games from over a decade ago) as the protagonist arrives in Lumiose City on vacation. He is immediately roped into the political turmoil of a city trying to find its identity as humans and Pokemon are starting to integrate into one society and live alongside each other. The player has to catch pokemon in Wild Zones, battle through the Z-A Royale to be crowned the top trainer, and unravel the mystery of rogue Mega Evolution that threatens the city.

Just to get this out there first, this game is clearly a mainline game in everything but name. Sure there are no abilities and no breeding, but hold items are back after Legends: Arceus omitted them and the entirety of the game is in-continuity with X and Y. Maybe there are no gyms, but there were no gyms in Sun and Moon either. Either way, the gyms are replaced with the Z-A Royale, which randomly jumps from like Rank V or U to Rank F, something I was bizarrely both relieved and disappointed by because, while the Z-A Royale can be tedious, it’s definitely less tedious than the missions for the Rust Syndicate and the missions to find the guy’s sister in the sewers later in the game.

The new active battle system is fun, innovative, and hopefully sticks around, but it does need some fine-tuning. For all the talk in the game about strategy and varying move types, it quickly devolves into type advantages and button-mashing and, in single player, there is still minimal use for status only moves. I don’t think at any point I was at a disadvantage to the point it was insurmountable and I was never at a point where I lost a battle. There is strategy in setting the moveset and some thought could theoretically go into what button the player maps the moves to, but that’s the extent of it.

As mentioned above, the story is short and the map is small. To an extent, this does kind of make sense if one thinks of the game as a tech demo to show what the Pokemon franchise will become in the future, but at $59.99 for the Switch edition or $69.99 for the Switch 2 edition, plus DLC, it feels hollow. I picked up the game Thursday evening and cleared the story by Sunday night with relative ease, not rushing through to mainline, and spending long stretches of time not playing the game.

The legacy of Legends: Z-A’s successors will be the ultimate decider of whether or not this game is remembered fondly. If next year’s games, reportedly leaked to be Winds and Waves, follows up on this standard or exceeds this level of quality, this game will probably be remembered fondly as a necessary step to bring the franchise to modern standards. If Winds and Waves fall flat on their faces and feel more like Scarlet and Violet, the franchise could be in serious trouble.

Legends: Z-A is worth playing, but whether or not someone wants to rush out and play it in this moment will be entirely down to how much they like the franchise. I played on the Switch and my game ran smoothly with only a few minor glitches (I fell through the ground at one point) so you probably don’t have to splurge for the Switch 2 unless you really, really want to see the game in 60 FPS. If this game was longer, or the map was larger or more engaging, or even if there was voice acting so the characters aren’t awkwardly acting like they’re talking while text is on the screen, this would be a 5, but in this form, it is a 4.

★★★★