is a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
After shaking up the Pokémon formula with Pokémon Legends: Arceus, its successor, Legends: Z-A, pushes things even further — and it’s a very welcome change of pace.
With Arceus, Nintendo and Game Freak demonstrated how much more vibrant, weird, and exciting the monster catching series could become with a few key changes to the classic formula. Arceus’ historical story and open-ish world made the Pokémon universe feel like a bigger, wilder place, just as the revamped battling and catching mechanics turned the familiar process of filling out your pokédex into a completely different kind of experience.
After years of the mainline Pokémon titles feeling like slight variations of one another, Arceus was a breath of air so invigorating that it was easy to imagine it becoming a new blueprint for the series. That initially seemed to be the plan with Pokémon Scarlet / Violet. But those truly open-world adventures were plagued by innumerable technical issues, and their uneven plotlines are best described as undercooked.
There was such a vast gap in quality between Arceus and Scarlet / Violet that it was hard to tell where the franchise was going. But with its dramatically revamped battles and more immersive world, Pokémon Legends: Z-A (which I played on the Switch 2) is a fantastic return to form. And it’s one that feels like another example of how the Legends games’ experimental features could become the new standard as the series marches into the future.
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1 / 3 Image: Nintendo
Whereas Arceus transported you to the distant past when humans were first learning how to coexist with pokémon in the vast Hisui region, Z-A picks up in the present shortly after the events of Pokémon X / Y and takes place entirely in the Kalos region’s capital. Longtime residents of Lumiose City remember how their home was nearly destroyed by a nihilistic maniac hell-bent on wiping out humanity and pokémon alike in order to make the world a more “beautiful” place. But as a tourist visiting Lumiose — a walkable metropolis inspired by Paris — for the very first time, all your character really knows about the city is that it is in the process of being built back stronger than ever.
Overseen and financed by the Quasartico company, Lumiose’s ambitious redevelopment plan aims to turn the city into a place where humans and pokémon can live peacefully alongside one another. Lumiose is flush with newly built housing for people, and the city’s Wild Zones — sectioned-off areas filled with naturally occurring features — are spaces where wild pokémon can thrive. But as smoothly as the redevelopment plan has been going for the most part, there is also a growing concern about the rising number of dangerous Mega-Evolved pokémon that have begun appearing in Lumiose without explanation, and your character eventually joins a squad intent on solving that mystery.
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