Thank you to Nintendo for sending us this game to review!

The Pokémon Legends series has proven to be a way for GameFreak to experiment with new types of gameplay in the long-running Pokémon series. Prior spin-offs have taken the series to different genres like dungeon crawlers or on-rail shooters with titles like Pokémon Mystery Dungeon or Pokémon Snap, but these have mostly been developed by third-parties and haven't been pushed as mainline titles. With Legends, however, GameFreak has tried to turn the classic turn-based battler with random encounters into a real-time action game with dynamic encounters.

But let's back up. Have you heard of Pokémon? If you haven't, it's a series built around collecting fantasy creatures known as Pokémon and training them to fight. Other people are doing the same thing, and you're all aiming to be the very best Pokémon trainer that ever was by catching all Pokémon in the region and defeating the greatest trainers it holds. In the classic games, Pokémon would randomly spawn in designated areas like tall grass or forests, and you’d never know what Pokémon it was until you were in a battle. Different regions of the map have different Pokémon, so exploring the world and its spawnable areas was necessary to complete your Pokédex (a collection of all catchable Pokémon in the region). Battles took place in a turn-based setting where you’d take turns choosing actions.

There are over a dozen different types of Pokémon like Fire, Grass, Ghost, and so on, and they all affect each other in a rock-paper-scissors type system. Pokémon can be caught with Poké Balls, little palm-sized balls capable of capturing Pokémon, and the best way to ensure they didn’t escape was by lowering their health beforehand or using Poké Balls with higher catch rates. Some Poké Balls are more effective on certain types of Pokémon, some are more effective at certain times of day, some more effective if used repeatedly, and so on. There are also numerous different consumables, berries, and special items your Pokémon can hold to increase certain stats or give buffs. As you fight, you collect XP, and your Pokémon level up. Most Pokémon can evolve after getting enough XP, and they’ll transform into a (usually) bigger, more mature form, as if they’re animals simply growing up. Some, however, require certain conditions or items for evolving.

For over twenty years, this was the formula GameFreak stuck with, and they seemed content with it. But the Legends series has served as an experimental proving ground for ideas they've been building up to for a while. For the past two generations, Pokémon have moved from random encounters you might not expect and with Pokémon you might not want, to taking place in an open environment where Pokémon roam and explore. You can now see the Pokémon around you, letting you pick what encounters you’re interested in. The Legends games have tweaked this slightly. The traditional battle system has been transformed from classic, turn-based combat into something reminiscent of the modern Final Fantasy battle system, with actions and moves now executing in real-time as you select them. Without turn-based combat, battles are no longer a game of chess, where you're solely concerned with type effectiveness; instead moves now execute when picked, and some moves might take longer to hit. If you make the wrong choice and pick a slow option, even if it would have defeated your opponent thanks to type effectiveness, there's a chance they can defeat you before it lands. This makes battles far more dynamic and interesting, and makes combat more active than it's ever been. Additionally, you can now catch Pokémon without entering a battle, and the game encourages you to play like this. New stealth mechanics increase odds of catching a Pokémon if they haven’t noticed you, and doubly so if you’re behind them, letting you fill out your Pokédex far faster than with turn-based encounters.

Legends: Z-A takes place in Lumiose City, a city from the France-inspired region of Kalos from Pokémon X/Y and inspired by Paris, complete with its own Lumiose Tower. Once a closed-off, short stop in a much larger game, the city is now a full-scale urban center that Z-A solely takes place in. In X/Y, Pokémon were found in the wilderness or caves as random encounters, but in Z-A, they’re roaming the city and kept inside things called Wild Zones. Wild Zones are the product of the corporation Quascerito Inc., a massive company working inside Lumiose to transform the city into a utopia where Pokémon and humans live together in harmony. However, they aren’t ignorant to the reality that some Pokémon cannot co-exist peacefully. To this extent, they’ve used holo-tech barrier technology to create designated zones where Pokémon can reside inside the city. Most Pokémon cannot escape these designated zones, and these areas are where you will catch most of your Pokémon, but there are still the occasional stragglers found elsewhere in the city. There are only a few Wild Zones at the start of the game, but others are added as you progress, letting you have some breaks from the main story and battles to do something a bit more adventurous. The city skyline has an explorable verticality thanks to rooftops reachable through ladders and Holovators, devices that teleport you to the tops of buildings, meaning that the streets aren’t the only place secrets and Pokémon are hidden. There are also parkour challenges around the city with bridges, slopes, and ladders that give you items to boost certain stats like money earned, XP gained, and so on.

But Quascerito has brought a second big change to the city of Lumiose. At night, as soon as the sun sets, a specific part of the city transforms into a Battle Zone, and any Pokémon Trainers inside are now (willingly or not) part of the Z-A Royale. The Z-A Royale is a tournament taking place in Battle Zones, similarly holo-tech designated areas where trainers battle each other for points and money. You start at Rank Z, and your goal is to reach Rank A (Z-A, eh?) to prove you're the greatest Trainer in the city. Anyone who reaches Rank A will have any wish of theirs granted, to the best of the company’s ability. NPCs of all kinds roam these areas, and you'll have to duke it out to earn points for a Challenger's Ticket, an item that lets you take on another Trainer who's similarly reached the top of their Rank. Whoever loses stays at their ranking, but the winner moves on to the next. But this is Kalos; a region known for the Mega Evolutions unique to it. Most Pokémon evolve as they level-up, but Mega Evolutions are a step beyond a Pokémon's final form that transform it into an even more powerful fighter. As such, you're not just fighting to be the best Pokémon Trainer—you're fighting to be the best Mega Evolution User, too.

The writing and supporting cast is also some of the best I've seen in several Pokémon gens. There are some parts that reference Pokémon X/Y, but they aren’t required knowledge, and the game does a well-enough job of explaining some of the details for players who might have missed them. You arrive as a foreigner to Kalos who is quickly scooped up by a member of Team MZ, a group of teenagers working with a mysterious man called AZ. AZ runs Hotel Z, a rather nice but unpopular hotel tucked in the corner of a back alley. AZ is friendly to the team and provides them with room and board, while also hoping they can reach Rank A to provide a better future for the city. Later on, you’ll be introduced to the idea of Rogue Mega Evolutions—Pokémon that are forced to Mega Evolve by some kind of strange power growing inside the city. Working secretly with Quascerito to keep the public from panicking, you and the rest of Team MZ must defeat these Rogue Mega Pokémon to free them from their suffering.

There are a variety of other characters and groups you’ll encounter while playing, but I don’t wish to spoil them. Characters feel like they have real emotions and purpose in the story, rather than just being flavor text with some forced battles here and there (something I’ve felt from the last two mainline generations), and they’re just plain funny and interesting. The main quest has a lot of side stories that seem disjointed or irrelevant, but by the end of the game, they’re all woven back together in convincing fashion. All of these new elements coalesce into something reminiscent of a Persona game; an urban environment with different creatures to collect, where strange things happen, causing parts of the world to change, and working with your friends to overcome difficult odds and take down targets that the rest of the world doesn’t know about are all themes central to that series. There are also tons of side quests you can choose to do at any time to receive rewards, new Pokémon, important items, and more, giving you chances to take breaks from the main content.

Pokémon games historically tended to hold your hand a bit too much, which was a concern of mine for the first hour or two of gameplay, but after the tutorial had ended, the game was pretty much set to my own chosen pace. If I wanted to focus more on catching Pokémon, I could. If I wanted to focus on exploring the world for hidden items, I could. If I wanted to just grind through the Royale, I could. The game largely respects your time and (mostly) avoids filler quests or pointless battles, but it is still a game intended for children, and has some padding here-and-there. I’d say it took me about 30-35 hours to complete the main storyline, but I did do a lot of side quests along the way and completed the Pokédex in that time too.

Sound in general is good, with an incredible OST featuring a lot of returning motifs from X/Y that I really enjoyed. The daytime music is a whimsical, jazz cover of the classic Lumiose song with beautiful orchestral work, light drums, accordions and more that perfectly match the aesthetic of the French surroundings. At night, it transforms into a more subdued track that sounds like the backing music of an infiltration scene in a spy movie, perfectly fitting the nature of the Battle Zones and how your best method of fighting is to sneak up on opponents. Battle tracks can follow this format of excellently-arranged orchestral pieces or forgo the traditional instrumentation for amped up synths and electronic sounds. Tracks can be energetic techno, swinging electro house, and one song even had a speedcore section, which surprised me.

The only thing I wish were better were the sound effects. They’ve certainly improved since X/Y, but they are still trapped in the same kind of digital, computer sounds they’ve held since the 3DS-era. These fit items, buttons, and dialogue boxes fine, but as the Pokémon grow even more natural in their animations and representation, the weird digital-sounding howls and cries fit less. The same goes for the attack SFX, which lack impact thanks to this same design philosophy. I hope that with Gen 10 GameFreak evolves the identity of the series not only visually, but in terms of its sound, too. To that extent, I also think the time has come to get voice actors. Some cutscenes are now fully animated and are begging for a crumb of VO, but even the ones that aren’t given special treatment feel as if they’re expecting you to be listening rather than reading. It makes for a very jarring experience, with some scenes having nearly empty soundscapes that could easily be improved by some voice acting.

With that said, let’s talk about the worst stain on this game: its graphics. Before going into what the game gets wrong, I’d like to compliment what it gets right. Animation quality, both for humans and Pokémon, is substantially improved here from prior titles. Most moves and actions are now fully animated and have impact behind them, while cutscenes and gameplay do a good job of conveying emotions to the player, both from NPCs and Pokémon. Menus are very clear and have a sense of style to them without being sterile, though I do think they could do with a bit more character. Most models are also not bad, but they can range from good to blocky and low-poly, especially on some NPC characters.

But if we’re looking at environmental design, I genuinely believe GameFreak are two or even three generations behind. Buildings are not modeled aside from their shape, with walls being simply flat textures with no normal maps. These are especially egregious because they depict big, French-styled buildings with intricate windows and railings, only for you to walk up to them and realize they’re all a ruse. Textures in general are poor quality and feel very dated, lacking detail and looking blobby at times, and shadow resolution has a similar showing with low-resolution, simple shadows cast by characters and Pokémon. The game does run at a solid 60FPS with sharp resolution, but that’s just for the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition. The Switch 1 version has even worse textures, truly terrible shadows, and is locked to 30FPS. There’s simply no excuse for a franchise with this much success to have such a vast technical gulf between its peers, especially other games from Nintendo themselves and their partner studios.

Morally, the game has no language or sexual content, but does feature some light fantasy violence as Pokémon battle it out. The Pokémon universe could best be described as slightly magical. The universe is said to have been created by a Pokémon, who then went on to create a trinity of Pokémon possessing control over destruction, space, and time. None of this is explicitly present in this game, but the mythology of the Pokémon world echoes in some corners of the games, and players should be aware of it. Some ghost-type Pokémon also have darker implications, such as one Pokémon said to survive off the life force of people. In addition, the plot of Pokémon X/Y was that the group you were opposing wanted to counteract overpopulation and struggles for resources through the use of an ancient weapon meant to take or give life. In essence, the Thanos approach. This is heavily touched upon in-game, with many references to the event and what results it had, both on the city at large and any surviving members of the group.

A few months after the game was released, on December 10th, the rogue-like Mega Dimension DLC was released. It takes place in the post-game, where the mythical Pokémon Hoopa returns from X/Y, accompanied by a young girl named Ansha. She gives Team MZ an odd request: make her Hoopa a donut. The gang has to go on a small fetch quest to get the necessary ingredients, but once they’re obtained, Ansha opens up a donut-making station in Hotel Z and whips one up. She leads the group outside and has Hoopa eat the donut, which gives it the energy it needs to open up a mysterious portal! When they step inside, they find themselves in an odd, greyscale replica of Lumiose City, but the oddest thing is that the Pokémon inside aren’t native to Lumiose or the Kalos region, and are far stronger than they should be. Eventually, Hoopa runs out of energy and they’re taken back to the real world, but a new portal forming above Prism Tower becomes an immediate concern for Quascerito and the Rust Syndicate, a mafia-like organization I didn’t mention before to not spoil the story. Both groups recognize that research needs to be done on this strange Hyperspace Lumiose before people panic and before it possibly bleeds into the real world, and Team MZ is tasked with doing it.

The Mega Dimension DLC adds an entirely new Hyperspace Pokedex with 132 Pokémon not in the base game to catch, and they’ll solely appear inside Hyperspace. This is where the rogue-like element of the Mega Dimension DLC comes into play: by using the different berries you collected while playing the game, Ansha can create different types of donuts that will get you into Hyperspace and make you stronger. You can only stay in Hyperspace as long as Hoopa’s calories last, so a higher calorie donut means a longer trip. Donuts also increase the levels of all your Pokémon, and some can give you special buffs like increasing attack power, increasing item effectiveness, making it easier to encounter shinies, and more.

The portals usually consist of four missions: Hyperspace Wild Zones, which are small sections of the city with only three Pokémon, usually made up of one Hyperspace Pokémon and two Pokémon from the base game; Hyperspace Battle Zones, where you can take on much stronger opponents than you’d find in the normal Battle Zones; Unknown Areas, small spaces inside Hyperspace usually for side missions or battles to get more mega stones; and later on, Hyperspace Rogue Mega Arenas, where you have to fight Rogue Mega Pokémon that are much stronger than in the base game. Along the way, you need to complete tasks specific to each area you enter to earn survey points, much like the points needed to earn Challenger’s Tickets, in order to advance the main story of the DLC.

With the content of the DLC explained, I can now give my thoughts on it. The survey points system was fun at first, but after a few loops it quickly became tedious due to the amount of points required to progress and how few points are given with each trip to Hyperspace. The donut mechanic also seems interesting, but general UI slowness turns making them into a chore, and you’ll need to make a fair bit to get the required survey points, at which point you might start running out of good berries. But aside from that, if your hope is completing the Hyperspace Pokedex, then unlike the base game, it will be an extremely slow grind as they are introduced one Pokémon at a time and require trips into Hyperspace, which require donuts, which require berries, and so on. In base Z-A, you could explore a Wild Zone and catch a bunch of new Pokémon in less than three minutes. In Mega Dimension, catching the same amount might take you thirty minutes. It feels like a watered-down, drawn-out version of the base game’s formula, repackaged and sold for $30 with an unnecessary grind to lengthen the content. For that reason, I strongly do not recommend the DLC unless you are a superfan of the base game and the new Pokémon introduced, as even though I loved the game, I did not like the DLC and found it frustrating to continue.

In summary, Pokémon Legends: Z-A is a phenomenal evolution of a classic formula that delivers a great gameplay experience, a fun narrative, and stellar music. However, it suffers from an abysmal technical foundation, an aging identity in sound effects, and a very disappointing Mega Dimension DLC that I felt did not come close to justifying its $30 price point. Despite this, and if you’ve felt a bit disappointed by recent Pokémon titles, I highly, highly recommend Legends: Z-A, while not recommending its DLC. Z-A hit all the right notes to keep me coming back for hours, and I refused to write my review until I’d seen the credits roll.