As important as Pokémon has been to basically my entire life, I still haven’t even finished Sword & Shield or Scarlet & Violet. I’ve bounced hard off most of the modern entries, and that’s mostly because of prominent technical issues and what I’ve felt was almost a loss of soul. Sure, I still like a lot of the new Pokémon designs, but the games themselves and their stories just don’t feel as adventurous or soulful. Legends: Arceus was the exception to that, and after following every tidbit of news and playing Pokémon Legends: Z-A, I’m genuinely hopeful it might be the Pokémon game I’ve been waiting decades for. Through a fantastic choice of setting and some brilliant changes to combat, I can’t remember the last time I’ve been this excited for a Pokémon game.
While Z-A is the second game to sport the “Legends” moniker, it’s unrelated to the plot and setting of Arceus — but still in the same vein of splitting off from the mainline series. This is the very first Pokémon game to take place entirely in a single city, the dazzling Paris-inspired Lumiose City from the Kalos Region, which was first featured in X and Y.
My roughly half an hour of hands-on with Z-A gave me a generous taste of battle, called Mega Evolution, and a little bit of city exploration in the nighttime Battle Zone — and boy I could have played hours more right on the spot.
Far and away, the thing that excites me the most about Z-A is the fact that it’s entirely set in Lumiose, for more than one reason. I mentioned earlier that modern Pokémon games have lost a bit of their “soul,” and I specifically mentioned that in regard to town. In the 2D games, every single town didn’t just have a unique art style, but you got a sense for their culture, and how those unique regional cultures intertwined with the region at large.
In Gold and Silver, Mahogany Town is a sleepy little mountain village with an unassuming gym, hiding a dark secret as the base for Team Rocket’s Slowpoke Tail Black Market. It’s a huge source of funding for Team Rocket, and ties into their activities at other locations like Goldenrod. In Red and Blue, you learn about Lavender Town being a burial place for Pokémon, and future games embellish on that even more as a way for people to go on a kind of pilgrimage and reconnect with their beloved lost Pokémon.
By comparison, I feel like modern Pokémon games have leaned too hard on the design of the world itself, of emulating an open-world kind of feel. Because of that, towns have become more of stops on a map, rather than an interconnected web of cultures. Sure, they each have distinct visual styles, like Artazon’s iconic windmills, but you don’t spend a lot of time getting to know how these places function, how they meaningfully spend life with Pokémon.
An entire game set in Lumiose City is a chance to really explore that idea, and really dig into what daily life alongside Pokémon would look like. How do cafes function? What does a supermarket look like? Although it’s a very different series, that’s a huge part of what I love about the Yakuza games so much — how being set in a single city lets the narrative explore culture, place, and society in unique ways.
I’m bursting with excitement at a Pokémon game exploring those ideas, and even the Battle Zone seems to leansinto that a bit. The Battle Zone is an area for trainers to blow off steam, a nightly competition called the Z-A Royale, where trainers accumulate points and go up the rankings by winning battles. There’s a sort of rebellious edge to this event taking place at night, like a forbidden Fight Club. And going through this area gave me a great taste of Z-A’s combat, which shockingly might actually be the best part of the game.
The best way to describe it is if you mixed Pokémon with Xenoblade Chronicles. Your trainer can move around the battlefield at will, and the Pokémon you have out will scamper after you, sticking pretty close on your trail. Enemy attacks with often have markers for where they will land, giving you an opportunity to dodge in real-time. Along with that, your four attacks are each assigned to the face button, and after you use one, it’ll be on a cooldown timer — with stronger attacks having longer cooldowns.
But what this means is that you’re actively using all four of your attacks in battle, so you’ll need to think differently about movesets. And that addresses my exact problem with Pokémon’s combat, where moves like Growl, which lowers the enemy’s attack, pretty quickly become useless in turn-based battles. Those stat-affecting abilities drop by the wayside as you get later into games, as long as you’re not playing competitively or anything — but in Z-A, they can become a valuable piece of your repertoire. Being able to use Growl consistently can be a great strategy, especially when coupled with other effects, while your damaging moves charge. Even further strategic options are layered in when you factor in your entire party, as Pokémon can be swapped out during battle at any time, just with a short delay that leaves you open.
Z-A’s combat feels like a fantastic middle ground between action and turn-based; it doesn’t fall distinctly into either camp but rather blends elements of both. Mega Evolution feels similarly intuitive. While exploring, you can break crystals to build up your Mega Evolution gauge, which is crucial for some battles. The one I played had me fighting an Absol with the help of Lucario. Mega Evolving powered up all of Lucario’s moves, and damaging the boss sufficiently would drop orbs. Picking up these orbs would keep Lucario in his Mega Evolution longer, or build the gauge if he dropped out. So the battle became a game of both managing Lucario and being aware of your trainer’s movement and placement on the field.
All of this gives Z-A a distinctly different, more vibrant feel than most Pokémon games. It’s seemingly taken what Arceus did well and doubled down on those ideas. And that’s exactly why this game has me so invested already, it feels like it’s daring to do something drastically different than Pokémon’s usual fare, while still retaining the charm and feel of the series. That being said, there are still some lingering worries. In my experience, Z-A ran extremely well on Switch 2 with no hiccups or frame drops, but it’s certainly not the most visually impressive game — especially when I went right on to playing the likes of Kirby Air Riders, which genuinely looks stunning. There’s a continued sense that Pokémon games just need a bit more time and care, and Z-A doesn’t completely erase that worry.
But, more than anything, I’m excited by how bold Z-A feels, how willing it seems to be to break from norms and try something different. Arceus had one of the best stories the series has ever seen, with some genuinely surprising twists and turns, and if that can happen here, we might be in for something special. Pokémon Legends: Z-A has been an interesting idea since the day it was announced, but after playing it, I’m more than ready to be there day one. Hopefully, it’s the push the franchise needs to truly innovate again.
