As of a couple weeks ago, I have played through almost all of Pokémon Legends: Z-A. There’s some battling left to do, the constant siren-song of shiny hunting, and enough research tasks to keep me busy for a while yet, but I’ve caught all the Pokémon I can, cleared all but the last shreds of the story which are locked behind an “endless” battle royale that just isn’t super motivating to me. I’ve also got a few side quests centered around using specific Pokémon in battles and training up Pokémon I don’t use to accomplish specific feats, but the rewards are small and there’s really nothing left for me beyond the grind, at least in the base game. There’s a DLC out that looks interesting and adds a lot to the game, but I’m in my “financially recover from Christmas” phase right now and not buying things. I definitely will buy it either later this month or sometime next month, but right now I’m content to take a break. Pokémon ZA was a lot of fun and maybe the most… “situated-in-the-world” of the Pokémon games I’ve ever played, but there’s a repetitiveness to it that makes it difficult to play beyond reaching your chosen goals. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, since the loop you’re stuck in is a fun one, but you eventually wind up doing the grind for the sake of the grind and I can only do that for so long before I need to do literally anything else. You might argue that this is true of all Pokémon games and while I’d have to admit that you are right on a certain level, most of the games don’t really pretend to have some kind of ever-running Thing To Do within the world itself. Most of the time, Pokémon games require you to invest your time and approach them from outside the game to experience those kinds of features (online challenges, Player versus Player Pokémon battles, The Battle Tower that makes you play outside the normal format of the game), but ZA has one built in as a part of the plot and while it’s not a huge deal to keep doing it, it is asking me to do more of these nightly “royales” than I’ve actually done prior to this point in the game to get there.

At it’s core, Pokémon Legends: ZA is much more similar to most of the mainline franchise games than the previous iteration in this sub-series, Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Rather than finding yourself in a strange land where the idea of battling Pokémon is still in the “oh my god, that massive fire dog just burned Timmy to a crisp!” phase of the world’s history, you find yourself once again embroiled in some kind of contest despite having more or less spawned into existence just moments before. You have no history other than that you were somewhere else prior to this moment, you have no true personality, and all you have to do is become the Strongest That Ever Was because that’s how the plot of Pokémon games works (Arceus is a fun deviation from this because you basically start out as the Strongest That Ever Was since most of the people from the time you’re in are terrified of Pokémon and instead just go on PokeGod’s Mission Of Salvation, making you sort of PokeJesus in a way, in that you were brought there to accomplish a goal by an absent deity interested in saving the souls of all mortals but by your battle prowess rather than by dying as a symbolic sacrifice). You get a starter Pokémon, establish a rival, move through the ranks, get embroiled in the deeper plot, win a bunch of contests, and then catch all the Pokémon there are. Notable (and actually very fun) deviations from this standard procedure include rivalries with some of the bigger trainers you fight–meaning they keep showing up again and again rather than largely fading out of existence once you beat them, their skills improving almost as quickly as your own–and a single location in which all of this takes place.

That’s the central quirk to this game, after all (I mean, battling is also different, but you can still easily win by using powerful moves quickly to beat every opponent to death, so it isn’t really THAT different). For the first time since X and Y, we’re back in Lumiose City which is dealing with the ramifications of what happened in those games. Regardless of your experience with the prequels to this game, the established lore is that the bad guy from those games fired off a super weapon powered by the lives of Pokémon/the power of a Legendary Pokémon, and while the good guys were able to mitigate some of the damage (helped by Zygarde, the last member of the trio of Legendaries from this generation), the local ecology was clearly altered as a result. In the five years since that day, new Mega-Evolutions have appeared, wild Pokémon have begun to flock to Lumiose City, and a corporation that rose up to fill the gaps created by the fall of Lysandre Labs (the company belonging to the bad guy, Lysandre, that pioneered Holo Tech) has begun to silo them into specific parts of the city using the holo technology that took from Lysandre Labs. This company is also in charge of the nightly Royale to find “the strongest mega evolution user” in order to… Well, the plot eventually reveals what, but it’s pretty easy to guess what’s going to happen as you play through the game and even though it does do a bit of a twist on what you’d expect, it quickly delivers exactly what you’d expect just through a different means than you expected (but you still probably expected it at least a little bit). All of which means that all the Pokémon, all of the battles, and all of everything in the game is contained within Lumiose City. It is bigger than it was in X and Y, with additional sub-areas and special map zones (mostly sewers: this is PokeParis, after all), and traversable rooftops, but you are really feeling the constraints of the city by the time you’ve reached the end. Sure, that means you know pretty much exactly where to find everything and never need go far to find it, but it does start to feel a little like you’re just running around in circles.

Instead of changes in location progressing the game and introducing change or new mechanics, ZA relies on the passage of time. Days and nights pass as you play, but most of them don’t matter except to denote when you can go to a Battle Zone and beat up enemy trainers for XP, money, or the ability to unlock the next battle to rank up in the royale. Instead, as part of moving through the various quests in the main story, you will go to bed and wake up again. While some changes, namely the introduction of new side quests, will happen while you’re out and about doing main quests, the appearance of new “Wild Zones” and Pokémon to catch in them only happens after you’ve narratively gotten at least a partial night’s rest. It really helps make the city feel alive, to hear some people’s background chatter change to discuss new Wild Zones appearing and to have people in general comment on how much these wild zones full of often dangerous creatures (Alpha Pokémon, which have returned) inconvenience them, but it still slowly becomes a rather dull thing when you reach the end and the changes stop. The DLC should offer some relief in this regard, but I’m not sure how much and whether or not it’ll eventually become just one more largely featureless grind. I heard a lot of people talking about how much fun ZA was but almost no one seems to be talking about the DLC, so I suspect it’s just a way to get more Pokémon into the game for the hardcore players to catch. Why limit themselves to about 240 Pokémon, after all, when there’s several hundred more they could introduce via DLC and weird wormholes or whatever.

All-in-all, it’s a fun game. I had a great time. The battle system is different and allows for consideration in a new way that the old one didn’t (move have range now, in ways they didn’t use to), but battles are still largely about quickly beating your opponents into submission with a superior force rather than the actual strategy that the game encourages you to employ. Maybe that’ll come in the later battles I haven’t done yet, in the DLC, or in PvP battles, but right now I’ve gotten through almost every situation with type advantages and rapid bludgeoning. Still, it’s fun to run around and occasionally dodge moves as a result. Really feels more immersive and it’s definitely worth the experience if you can get it on a Switch 2. I shudder to think of how rough it would be on a Switch 1…