Pokemon Legends Z-A - my thoughts!

Welp, I’ve put in nearly 40 hours in Pokemon Legends Z-A, so I thought I’d write a little about my thoughts on it. This is coming from a gamer who has been pretty enthusiastic about Pokemon ever since it first released, and I’ve played every mainline Pokemon game, and a few of the many spinoffs as well. I really enjoyed the last Legends game, Pokemon Legends Arceus, and was excited about a followup and also hesitant about the idea of keeping it central in one city instead of a vast outdoor region. And the real-time battle idea seemed really intriguing. I was a bit on the fence about buying it when it came out, but after a week of reading some reviews, I decided to give it a try.

First off, let’s get one of the biggest issues out of the way, that being the entire game taking place in Lumiose city. This sometimes works, and at other times feels like it could have worked but they didn’t take the concept far enough. I’m not opposed to the idea of staying in one huge city like Lumiose. Not every person in the entire region can be expected to be traipsing around the entire country all the time, so the idea felt grounded, in a good way. Plus spending the whole time in the city gives you a chance to really know the city. There’s a lot of groups and personalities residing here, from internet celebrity streamers to mob bosses with a heart of gold, and it makes the city feel more lived in and like an actual place that they all live here and call this city their home.

But there’s a lot that I feel let down by with the one-city setting. The biggest thing might be the monotony of a lot of the buildings. Look at a place like Paris, that Lumiose is inspired by, and you’ll see architecture of all kinds. There’s so much variety. Artwork and sculpture everywhere. There’s just not enough to be visually interesting, and when you’re never leaving the city boundaries, that’s not great. Another double edged sword are the interiors. When you go inside an area, there’s some beautiful details. I LOVED exploring the museum, which has a special display about the era from Legends Arceus which was a great touch. The inside of the Hotel Z is nicely detailed, with paintings and cool wallpaper, it feels lived in. Places like that are few and far between though, and you don’t actually see many interiors when playing, which is a shame.

Having the game take place entirely in the city also helps them tell a more focused story, as well. It takes a while to truly get going, but I enjoyed all the characters you meet and the story beats of this game. Your other teammates in “Team MZ”, Az, the weird mafia like characters, there’s a lot of fun people you’ll interact with. The main game loop is during the day you’ll be doing optional side missions along with main story missions and catching wild Pokemon in the city’s designated areas, then during the evening you compete in the city’s battle zones. Earn enough points in the battle zones and you can take on a challenger that will help you rise in the ranks. It was this part that took a while for me to come around on, because at first these rank battles just seem like they are with random people. But after a short while, they will begin to be with specific story-centric characters, and from that point on they became much more interesting and the game loop finally felt like it was working for me.

The thing that got me to go buy it was one of the features I was most curious if they could pull off, the real time battles! And I was surprised at how well they worked. You still have your four moves you can select from when you have a pokemon targeted, but now instead of using up moves via PP, they have various cooldown timers. And I was pleasantly surprised to see that it still manages to tell you how effective a move will be, with an icon under the move’s name. Either a circle with a dot in it for super effective, a circle for regular, a triangle for not as effective, and an x for a move that won’t work at all. There’s also still a small area of the screen that will tell you things like a move was super effective, or a pokemon was poisoned, but honestly in the heat of battle it was hard to remember to view that. Your position now matters too, as some moves are long range while others you need to be close to the Pokemon to use, and things like trees can act as cover. It made traditional Pokemon battles into something action intense and super fast. Leveling up happened much quicker in this game, as battles can be over in no time when you have a super effective move against an opponent. Overall I really liked the new system, thought it took some getting used to at first. And it’s really weird that in order to target a pokemon, you have to hold down a button, so you’re essentially holding down a shoulder button the entire time you’re battling someone. It’s very strange that they didn’t make that a toggle instead of something you hold down.

I eventually started earning more money than I knew what to do with, but luckily there’s a ton of shops around Lumiose. And they’re all pretty pricey, so you can burn through your money pretty quickly. There’s a great variety of styles to try out and mix and match, and the shopping is very snappy, you can instantly go in and browse, see what it looks like on your character, and purchase and get out and move on to the next shop. It felt pretty good.

Overall I really enjoyed the game and am pretty sure I’ll end up getting the DLC that just came out. Though since I just put about 38 hours in to the game, I might take a break before jumping back in. Oh, and I guess lastly I should mention the online play, which has a different ranked system where you battle against three other players. It seemed like a good idea, but man did I get clobbered every time I tried it. Maybe now that I’ve finished the game and have a much stronger team I’ll try again, but after a while I just gave up on that one!

I feel like Pokemon needed the Legends games to shake up the formula a bit, as it was really starting to feel stale. I’m curious what the next main game will look like, as I really doubt they will keep the real time battling, but the menu based stuff is going to feel really slow after this, so I hope they have some kind of trick in mind to make the menus feel interesting after this!