I started playing Pokémon Legends: Z-A over the weekend. I made a file sometime last Friday and wound up turning to the game for entertainment as I clicked through a bunch of crafting macros in Final Fantasy 14. So far, it’s been a lot of fun! There was quite a bit of preamble and introduction as seems to be the case in the more recent Pokémon games, but the only restrictions on me where invisible barriers to prevent me from entirely wandering off while I was still going through the tutorial and early missions. Once those opened up, though, I was able to roam as far and as wide as I liked, taking on side quests, catching Pokémon, blowing all of my money on clothing, earning more money by battling at night, and then blowing even more money on yet more clothing items. It has been quite a rewarding experience, so far, and it’s been fun and engaging enough that I’m only sticking with my nightly forays into Final Fantasy 14 because I’m good at making myself do my chores (and I have a LOT of those to do in the next couple weeks yet). This is the kind of game I could lose myself in for a few weeks to a month, if I could tear myself away from FF14 long enough, and I might yet do that while I’m on my trip to visit people over the holidays (I am writing this before the trip and it was published after the trip, so I’m in a bit of a weird place vis-a-vis timing). I think it will help balance out my Final Fantasy 14 time a bit, though, even if I don’t entirely lose myself to it, so maybe I can start building a more healthy variety of activities. I have so much I still want to play, even beyond Pokémon Legends: Z-A.

Still, nothing else is as compelling as this second entry in the Legends series. So far, about fifteen hours in, it feels like it took the best parts of Pokémon Legends: Arceus and Pokémon Scarlet and Violet and combined them into one game that, so far, runs really well on the Switch 2. There’s been a couple instances of NPCs and Pokémon popping into existence when I’m right next to them rather than as I’m running up to them, but I’ve never actually run into them (in terms of in-game colision) so it’s entirely possible that this is just how some NPCs apear in the world and I’ve just had a few that popped into existence not far from me as others have popped out of existence in the distance. There’s no lag, no stuttering, and there doesn’t even seem to be much of a noticeable performance difference between playing in Handheld Mode or on the Dock using my fancy huge TV. Given how much Scarlet and Violet chugged the minute more than a dozen moving models were on screen and how often Legends: Arceus would struggle to spawn Pokémon as you traveled across the various maps even in the better-performing docked mode, it is almost startling how well this game performs on the Switch 2. I have not once run into a moment that made me think about the performance of the game while playing it, which is saying a lot because I could barely get an hour into playing Pokémon Violet at any point without some lag or choppiness calling the poor performance to my attention.

Beyond that, they really figured out what people want out of a Pokémon game these days (or, at the very least, what I and the people I talk to want out of a Pokémon game) and they’ve given it to us: lots of little and big guys to catch, battles to fight, a tepid story to pursue, and plenty of clothing options to change up our character’s look. So far, I’ve gone through five different outfits, at a rate of about one for every three hours of gameplay [this has not stayed true, but I’ve still changed it up way more often than in any other game I’ve played]. It’s just so easy to change! You can do it from the menu now! The only thing you can’t do from there is change your haircut and color. Everything else is fair game, though! Every stitch of clothing, your bag, your shoes, and even your facial details! Change your eyes, your eyebrows, makeup, freckles… Whatever you want, you can change! And there’s such a wide variety of clothing options! Plus, they’ve added an element of layering to a lot of the outfits, which is killer because you can swap pieces from the same set around. Say you get a purple croptop with a black undershirt and then a black graphic croptop with a grey undershirt: you can swap the tops and the underlayers! You can mix and match any pieces of the same style with each other and the game’s done a good job of breaking everything down to layers that feel natural to work with. Pants and belts, coats and underlayers, shoes, socks, and leggings, and even entire outfit pieces like rompers or dresses or big coats or suits or shirts & suspender or jumpsuits or coveralls and so on. It’s all there and you can swap between stuff as much as you want. It’s great.

I didn’t realize how much I’d be into changing clothes and outfits in my video games until I got into Final Fantasy 14 and got a taste for just how far you can push it. I largely ignored these kinds of features in previous games, only really digging into it in Pokémon Legends: Arceus in the limited way you can there and in replays of Pokémon X, but now it feels like such an important part of the series that the limited options you had in Scarlet and Violet felt like such a step back… All that said, even with the careful wording of “what do you look like?” in creating your character, the two-gender hegemony still rules Pokémon’s protagonists with an iron fist, which feels especially silly because one of the first Pokémon researchers you can talk to comments on how some Pokémon are male, some are female, and some are even neither! Aren’t Pokémon Interesting?? And yet I can’t get a nice, gender-neutral they/them or even for the various NPCs of the game to go back to referring to my character in a way that doesn’t reference gender at all like they used to in the older games. This is my only real gripe about the game and it’s one I’ve had about the series for a while now and so many other games in general. It just feels so limited now that I’ve seen it done thoughtfully elsewhere. And, you know, now that I’m willing to be honest with myself about how much it matters to me.

That’s not going to stop me from playing the game, though. There’s still so much left to explore and play! I’ve only made it to rank V (which, funnily enough, is also the fifth rank you get in the battle thingy going on in the game) and JUST unlocked Mega Evolution last night, so there’s still so much more to do. I did, of course, already complete every available side quest, catch every single new Pokémon I could lay my eyes on, and even battle my way through a few tough Alpha Pokémon battles that I had absolutely no business trying to fight. I haven’t found a proper shiny Pokémon of my own yet and the mission-based shiny is no indication that my usual poor shiny lucky is still in effect. The mission one was actually one of my favorite electric types, though (Mareep), so that’s pretty nice. I don’t have to stretch myself to include the plot-based shiny in my battle team like I did in Arceus, so that’s pretty cool. I hope I find some more soon. My friends who have been playing the game for a while now have already found so many! I need to catch up! Incredibly slowly since I’m still playing a lot of Final Fantasy 14, unlike them. Still, there’s plenty of time to do that and I’m in no hurry to be done with this game. I want to continue enjoying myself as long as I can.