Pokémon Legends: Z-A - Switch

A decent Pokemon game, but has no business being called Pokemon Legends

If you were expecting for something similar to Arceus don’t bother, it you’re in the market for a decent mainline Pokemon game with a previously used locale go for it

The game starts strong but the cracks in the facade quickly starts to show, the new battle system looks fun at first but then you realize it forces you to hold the left trigger at all times for absolutely no reason and because everything is on cooldowns rather than discrete turns you’re encouraged to just button mash instead of thinking your next move

Basically if you ever played Pokemon Go you already know how this works except you have access to four moves instead of just a basic attack + a special move

Wild Pokemon encounters are particularly chaotic, with other Pokemon quickly joining the fight and often resulting into 4v1 or even 6v1’s as you start focusing on specific Pokemon instead of catching whatever you find

Luckily the devs decided to switch things around a bit to accommodate this mess, instead of fainting wild Pokemon defeated in battle will be dizzy and become easier to capture for one last chance to throw your poke ball at them before they run off and become unavailable

The ranking system (in single player) is just a gimmick, there’s no real danger to derank and very early on you’re given a massive rank promotion that skips pretty much every rank so the trailer implying you had to climb all 26 ranks to make it to the top was just a straight up lie

The new system is just the old gym-badge system with a different facade, as you are forced to do a bunch of boring trainer battles before being eligible to rank up

Unlike gyms however these trainer battles are bot tied to a specific type and don’t train you for the rank up battle ahead, everyone has varied teams

Whether this is an upgrade or not it’s up to you, it certainly fits the idea of an ongoing Pokemon trainer tournament better but it also skips the learning experience (then again, who needs to learn a system that’s been in place since the 90’s)

While everything I pointed out so far is negative I still came out of this game with a positive feeling because everything that usually works in a Pokemon game is still there: catching, battling, exploring, collecting stuff, and generally enjoying your time in the bizarre world of human obsessed with Pokemon that we’ve come to expect

All in all that’s exactly what this game is: another safe, by the numbers, not ambitious, non committing pokemon game that for some bizarre reason piggybacks off the name of the one pokemon game that tried to be different

Even though the Grafic is total garbage, I must say that I've never had this much fun exploring and battling in any other pokemon game. And I've played all from Blue&Red on the Gameboy Color to Z-A

Good Pokemon game!

Pokémon ZA is a decent game overall. The story is arguably the best in the Switch era or at least the most enjoyable one. The new Mega Evolutions are quite unbalanced; some have excellent designs while others look extremely lazy. The gameplay is addictive and fun, and Lumiose City feels large enough to get lost in, especially if you are not using the teleportation option.

The mount system could have been a great feature, but after playing on the Switch, I understand why it was not included. The map already struggles to load properly at normal running speed, so at mount speed it would have been much worse. To be honest, the towns look pretty bad, with bland layouts and empty spaces, but some individual buildings actually look really cool. Structures like the Richissime Hotel or the Quazar Building stand out with nice design work, and the few interiors we can explore are amazing and well-crafted.

One of the strongest aspects of Pokémon ZA is its user interface. The menus are clean, fast, and easy to navigate, with smooth transitions that make team management and item use much more enjoyable.

The music in the game is amazing. Some of the iconic songs from the original X/Y games make a return, bringing extreme nostalgia. My personal favorites include the return of the Looker soundtrack and Jacinte battle theme, among others.

There are a lot of good ideas and promising concepts in this game, but they are executed in a lazy and inconsistent way. The story itself is actually pretty cool, and I really enjoyed how it develops. The beginning feels slow, especially until Rank F, but once you progress further, the pacing improves a lot and the game becomes much faster and more engaging. The ending is also pretty cool. The game is far from worth the full Nintendo price of 70, but if you can find it for 40 to 50, it is decent. I hope this is their last slip-up before they finally manage to satisfy players properly.