What is it? - 2025 Switch/Switch 2 RPG in the Pokemon Universe. Generally considered just sort of okay, but I really love it.
In Pokémon you become all that you are and all that you could be. This is the main appeal of the series, it’s a RPG power fantasy where you’re hyper competent at controlling cute animal critters of your choosing, where you’re a 10 year old sent off from your house to go conquer the world, where you’re loved instantly, in the moment, unconditionally. This tightrope balance between freedom and safety is exactly it’s the quintessential RPG series for children. But recently (as in, for over the past decade), the series has come under fire. Maybe the modern Pokémon games are as bad as some fans claim. Maybe they don’t contain all the pocket monsters, pester you with incessant tutorials, look bad, and run even worse. Or maybe time sands down the rough edges of memory, maybe what you really long for are those carefree days when all that mattered was chipping away at the Pokédex, when all your worries drifted away while staring at a tiny little screen. Pokémon Legends Z-A is easily the best Pokémon game that has come out since Black and White 2 thirteen years ago because it managed, at least for me, to capture a fraction of that experience. For those sick of the glacial progress of Pokémon, put your money where your mouth is and play this radical re-imagination of what Pokémon is. The core remains, but the childlike wonder the series evokes is sparked back to life.
The first thing you’ll notice upon first starting the game is that you play as an older teenager, presumably 18-19. Anyone can project themselves onto the protagonist, considering that their age is never mentioned, but you look like a teenager and your peers worry about adult matters like paying rent. After modifying your appearance, you arrive at Lumiose City (the Pokémon equivalent of Paris), where you’ll remain for the rest of the game. This might sound limiting, considering that it only takes a few minutes to walk across the whole map, but it’s very similar to the Yakuza series in how it densely packs everything into a small open world and how you manage to create memories to associate with each locale. You go through a relatively short tutorial and meet your new best friends/roommates before being set off. Progressing through the story unlocks more wild zones to catch different Pokémon in the city, but you’re otherwise free to do whatever you want. To progress the story, you need to collect challenger tickets by defeating enough trainers in the nightly Z-A Royale, where a small chunk of the city is filled with hostile trainers all looking to climb the ranks and become the strongest mega evolution user in the area. Whoever manages to do this gets any one request of their choosing, so long as it’s within the means of the corporation running this event. This of course invokes the idea of Nietzsche’s Übermensch – the greatest will create their own values that the rest of humanity will follow. Unfortunately, this is a game for children and the story does not actually deal with Nietzschean
philosophy. In fact, it doesn’t deal with any philosophy – like the games that precede it, the story is purely just a vehicle to get you from point A to B, though the characters are endearing enough.
Infinitely more interesting is the story that you craft while playing the game. No two Pokémon playthroughs are alike and you’re given free reign here to do whatever you want. Want to test your skill against the high level alpha monsters within each wild zone? Go ahead. Want to spend your day doing the various parkour courses in the city? Sure! Want to just relax with your Pokémon at a cafe? Why not? This freedom also extends to your party selection. While Pokémon is ostensibly about using a team of your choosing to barrel through the game, some previous generations make are infamous for not really allowing that unless you put an absurd amount of time in. Legends Z-A has no such issues, giving you lots of EXP candy and a wide variety of options regarding team composition, letting me switch my squad multiple times throughout the run.
All this talk of customization leads to the single best part of the game — the fashion. Clothing options existed in past games, but never to this extent. There are 41 clothing stores within the city, each having a few different pieces of clothing that you can choose the color of. This, of course, leads to unprecedented levels of self expression (though, amusingly, there are no real skirts in the game. Only skorts for you). Pokémon is a series that lets you be who you want to be and never has that idea been better represented than in Legends Z-A. Even better, all clothing is gender neutral so you can wear whatever the hell you want (just like in real life). Ever get bored of beating children up in gamified rock paper scissors? Go pretty yourself up and get a new outfit and get your hair done. Free from the monetary and social constraints of the real world, you can be yourself or whoever you want to be.
If the idea of being a beautiful, confident, powerful city girl in a Yakuza-like Pokémon game doesn’t sell you, here are some issues from other modern Pokégames that Legends Z-A fixes. If you don’t give a shit about Pokémon, you can skip this paragraph. Firstly, the difficulty: sure, the main campaign is incredibly easy, but there are still avenues for you to express your min/maxing desires outside of competitive play. While the trainers inside each Z-A Royale are incredibly easy, the real challenge is defeating as many as possible in one night under the time limit, with each victory contributing to the money multiplier for the cash prize at sunrise. You can also, as mentioned earlier, try to defeat and catch alpha Pokémon that will likely be a decent bit stronger than your Pokémon when the wild zone first opens. Finally, and most importantly, there are cafe battle challenges, the hardest of which pits you against 10 trainers with 3 Pokémon each in a row (no items in battle allowed + the first team is a toxic spam team). Pokémon raising is made more interesting since the 4 moves known can be swapped out at any time in the menu for other known + TM moves and evolution is manually triggered whenever the conditions are met instead of having to wait for a level up (apparently this is also a feature in other recent pokégames, I haven’t played them). You can have multiple save files (like every other Switch Pokémon game). The game runs at a mostly stable 30 FPS on Switch 1 and looks pretty okay. There’s a whole new MOBA battle system which recontextualizes how every battle works, but it remains similar enough that your memorized type advantage chart will still carry you through the whole game.
Now, for the bad stuff. The boss battles against rogue mega evolved Pokémon suck, but they’re over pretty fast. There’s no voice acting for the shitty story. The DLC is abysmal (probably, I didn’t buy it). That’s about it. It’s a miraculously good game, especially under the horrendous time constraints that each Pokémon game is subject to. Modern Pokémon discourse is unsustainable, with every single release being proclaimed the devil incarnate because it’s not a perfect release from the highest profiting media franchise in the world. Sure, the games could be better, they should be better, but in our rage we often forget to appreciate the beauty in the world. Game Freak doesn’t need me defending them, this game sold well and made one pokillion dollars, but what I will say is this: Pokémon Legends Z-A brought me back to the long car rides where the time would melt away as I lost myself in the kindness of the Pokémon world, to those hours where I would lower the screen brightness to try and stay in my digital dream land just a little longer.
LENGTH - 40 hours ish?
SCORE - 8/10