I’m going to keep this one relatively short since I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about the new title in the Pokémon series; Legends ZA.
It’s a bit of a shame, since I was looking forward to it. The setting of having everything happen inside a big city sounded like a good idea to me, and that would make it a lot cheaper and easier to make the game look good, since there aren’t vast open spaces you need to load. It would prevent the pop-in issues that Scarlet and Sword had. And you all don’t need the awful blurring used in the gen 4 remakes, so it was set up for success.
Unfortunately, that’s not what we got. Copy and paste graphics that don’t even look all that good on their own, pop-in for characters that are about three steps in front of you and a game that genuinely looks worse than some of its predecessors. I don’t know what is happening at Gamefreak, but even as someone who is a die hard pokémon enjoyer that will eat up most of the slop they churn out, I feel offended by how lazy this game is.
For starters, you have an entire game that is set inside a city, but all of the clothing stores and things like the stone emporium are just a menu, not an actual store. There’s characters with animated faces, but none of them are voice-acted. And the writing is… not great. There’s an entire sub-arc about a streamer and her fans, and some of the characters’ writing feels very “hello fellow kids” to me.
Moving on to the gameplay, I do think that the way you catch pokémon is done quite well. Just throw balls at whatever comes your way and if it doesn’t catch immediately, you can battle the pokémon and try again when it’s weakened. This makes for a rather fluid catching mechanic that I quite enjoy. As someone who loves collecting all the pokémon, that helps a lot. But that’s about the only good thing I have to say about it. When it comes to battling, there’s Alpha pokémon as well as the core mechanic of ZA; rogue mega pokémon. What these pokémon tend to do is prioritize attacking the player over their pokémon. Adding on top of that somewhat irritating hitboxes – I especially struggled with victreebel, whose hitbox seemed to be higher up than other pokémon – and you get a very frustrating experience.
While we’re on the topic of those mega pokémon, there’s something else that really irks me about those fights. The main driving force of the story is that these pokémon are dangerous and could run rampant in the city, causing damage to the scaffolding, the buildings and the people. Yet the moment these pokémon go rogue, you’re transported to a pocket dimension that’s one color and just a circular arena with no obstacles. It’s such a missed opportunity to have proper fights in different parts of the city where cars, people, restaurants and other parts of the city are in your way. It’s just a very lazy game on all accounts, and that makes me sad. They’re one of the best performing gaming franchises yet they refuse to actually act like it. They could create some truly fantastic games if they stopped being as greedy as they are and stay a beloved franchise, but there is a good reason that more and more people are hoping that other games like Palworld and Temtem gain steam. But instead of creating a better game, Nintendo and Gamefreak just try to suppress their competition. As much as I love this franchise due to nostalgia, I think this will be the last time I’m buying a pokémon game and that saddens me. If you are on the fence about this game, I highly recommend skipping it. It’s not worth the money or the time. Thanks for reading.
Opal Kaharis 