I went in with extremely low expectations for Pokémon Legends: Z-A, and maybe that’s why I’m coming out of it pretty happy with my experience. The first Legends was personally such a slog to get through and, by comparison, I thought this was a way better time. The main difference being the real-time combat that the entire game revolves around. It keeps things moving at a pace we haven’t seen in any other title, and I think that it’s one of the game’s greatest strengths. I can defeat/catch 20 wild Pokémon in ZA 5x faster than it would take in any of the turn based entries.
And the combat system itself is pretty fun, even though it comes with some glaring flaws. Ultimately it’s very cool to see a lot of these moves translate to a real time combat system and a lot of them act exactly as you would think they would. I was really surprised that they dropped PP for moves completely and instead went with cooldowns in battles. This made a huge difference in enjoyability for sure. And I’m not sure if this has been done in other modern day titles, but I thought it was really nice how you could change out your Pokémon’s moves on the fly whenever you wanted to adapt to any given situation. Items go on a short cooldown after you use them as well, but it’s pretty easy to cheese the system and keep your party alive indefinitely. If you were determined to power through these encounters without using them however, there would need to be a good amount of strategy implemented which some people might get a kick out of.
What made that option untenable for me though was just the lack of precise control you have over your Pokémon. Sure they follow you around as you’re running around the arena and you can use moves to kind of place them where you need them, but most of the time your party will just be running straight into attacks you’re trying to avoid. This problem is the worst when it comes to the Mega Evolution battles, which mainly feature AOE attacks that are scattered around the area and need to be traversed around. It just got to a point where I would call my Pokémon back, run around until the obstacles went away, and then got them back into the fight. Not super fun. It would’ve been great if your right stick could directly control your Pokémon while your left stick controlled the player character, but I could see how that level of complexity might trip a lot of people up.
The story is here is pretty meh. Not particularly interesting, but not bad enough that I was dreading pushing the plot forward. Despite taking place in a city, you’ll see the same key NPCs pop up over and over again which was pretty annoying. They would just show up for no real reason, demand a rematch, and then move on. This was especially bad with the tournament that pops up more than halfway through. You would think there were only 10 people living in the entire city.
The ending sequence here was pretty terrible. It consisted of working with the same NPCs you’ve talked to a million times escorting you to the final location. There were also multiple multi-mega evolutions battles that were just a complete mess. There were at most 6 guys on screen at a time duking it out in a super unfun and chaotic way. It all culminated in a really really bad final boss. Why fight against a Pokémon when you can go through 3 phases of bashing down generic tentacles to get the job done. The final cutscene was kind of cool, but just like all of the other ones, it falls completely flat without VO.
Speaking of which, this was probably the most jarring part of the game. Cutscenes feel lifeless without it and hype moments are totally diseviced with the lack of it. Characters are solid, but they really needed VO to have their personalities come across in a more memorable way. The whole game doesn’t need VO, but for the love of God please do it for the cutscenes.
It’s nice to see that the game returned to its best gimmick and built the entire game around it: Mega Evolutions. The system works surprisingly well with the real time combat and, if you don’t have a mega evolution in your party, you can use segments of the gauge to power up individual moves instead which I thought was a nice touch. It was kind of bummer that you couldn’t cancel a Mega Evolution once you triggered it, but I eventually got accustomed to it. I’d say most, if not all, of the new Mega Evolutions look like complete garbage which was a real shame. It was even more disappointing to see what they came up with for Feraligatr… basically looks exactly the same with a dumbass hood attached to him.
There’s a solid amount of platforming in this game and, while it’s all very simple and janky, it wasn’t all that terrible to get around most of the time. I’d say the biggest pains regarding this were when you had to hunt down Rogue Megas. It could be pretty frustrating figuring out how to access some of them on roofs just to figure out you had to run 3 blocks away, climb up a ladder, and then run all the way back once you had a path.
I thought I was going to manually trigger the change from day to night and vice versa more than I actually ended up doing. It was a surprisingly good flow of spending your time during the day progressing the story and catching wild Pokémon straight into the night sections where you would battle trainers and work towards getting yourself a Challenger’s Pass. I only really touched a handful of the available side quests, but the ones that I did were surprisingly diverse and a few of them were actually pretty fun to do.
The character customization here is the best we’ve ever had in the series for people that really care about their in-game fashion. I just ended up finding a nice set a clothes and then rocked those for the rest of the game. I did think it was really annoying that there were so many individual stores that only had a handful of items in stock. It would have been way nicer if they consolidated every mall area into a single store so shopping could be a bit less cumbersome.
While certainly not cutting edge by any means, I thought that the models and animations for all of the Pokémon and trainers were pretty top notch. The people were very expressive and always had a few more looks than I expected them to have. The music was kind of mixed bag, but the tracks that hit really hit hard which was nice to see.
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