With twenty-eight years of Pokémon gameplay under my belt and a love of the series that has spanned most of my life, I am always excited to see what Game Freak and Nintendo will do next with the series. Unfortunately, over the past few years, it has felt like the franchise has lost direction, and Pokémon Legends: Z-A puts the brunt of this on full display. A mixture of low-quality visuals, a convoluted story, and mechanics that feel like a half-baked attempt to shove online culture into gameplay, Legends: Z-A is the worst game currently available in the series.
Pokémon Legends: Z-A suffers from a variety of issues, but the most damning is the fixation with being pertinent in esports culture and streaming while also attempting to sink its teeth into the “new generation” of possible Pokémon fans. Because of this, the game has failed to deliver anything meaningful, leaving players with a Seventy-dollar piece of styrofoam with no joyful or memorable moments.
Key Details
- Developer: Game Freak
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Platform: Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2
- Price: $59.99+
- Review Code Provided: Yes, For Nintendo Switch
Legends: Z-A Is Damaged by Dismal Character Writing
When it was announced that Legends: Z-A was going to take place in the Kalos region, I was particularly excited. I have always loved the X & Y era, and enjoyed the debut of Mega Evolutions and what they brought to the series. I wasn’t put off by the knowledge that the game would take place in just Lumiose City. In fact, I was excited to see the series pulling away from open-world exploration, as Scarlet & Violet didn’t manage to create a world worth truly exploring thanks to its over-focus on Shiny hunting mechanics.
Unfortunately, my excitement dimmed to worry, and then to heartache within just a few hours of gameplay. Despite having a vast cast of exciting characters players knew and loved from X & Y, a new collection of empty NPCs led the storyline. Players take on the role of an empty avatar whose only backstory is that they stepped off the train at Lumiose City before being accosted and strong-armed into a group of teenagers.
Despite missing most notable faces from Kalos, Legends: Z-A sees the return of a handful of characters from the previous game, but none have a potent role in the story. AZ lurks in the hotel until the very end of the game, doing nothing for the story beyond chucking Mega Bracelets at children. Mable is the acting Research Director at the Lumiose Lab, but really only exists to provide TMs and the now-required Kanto Starter distribution. Meanwhile, “L”, who we quickly learn is Lysandre, was apparently resurrected from his demise by Zygarde and exists as a human chess piece to the Legendary Pokémon. His status as a truly horrifying villain has been gently redacted to something of a misunderstood anti-hero, who is now remembered as someone who helped the poor and wasn’t as bad as he actually seemed.
None of these characters has any sort of depth, and they only appear as needed to plow the episodic plot forward. In total, they all have only an hour of screentime combined, most of it being at the end of the game.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of the story is pushed forward by the antics of Team MZ. Unfortunately, Legends: Z-A has some of the weakest side-character writing of the series. The group consists of the main character, who again has no motive, backstory, or even a vague focus. They are joined by either Taunie or Urbain, Lida, and Naveen.
The Taunie/Urbain character is portrayed as stupid and disorganized, but determined. It is never clear what they are really trying to do for the Hotel, or why they are there to begin with. They regularly get into trouble the main character must get them out of.
Lida is some sort of Tierno knock-off with the personality of a stiff sock. She is vaguely arrogant, but her story of wanting to become a dancer is only achieved by a little animation of her spinning around TikTok-dance style before flinging a Poké Ball in battle.
Naveen, who had the opportunity to be interesting, is a fashion designer who ran away from home because he didn’t want to have to do his homework. It turns out that his primary goal, however, is to be some sort of internet-obsessed Streamer fanboy, and much of his designer motivations are dampened by being wielded as a shovel to cram as much streamer culture references as possible down the player’s throat.
None of the characters grow, change, or develop in this game. Despite being forced to battle with them repeatedly in the gameplay loop, the leveling of their Pokémon doesn’t feel like progression, but a difficulty check on the player to ensure they can actually deal with the next long list of chores that are needed to keep going forward.
The cast of this game is so lifeless that spending time with the cookie-cutter NPCs scattered around the city is more enjoyable.
Beyond the main team are the Rust Syndicate, the Quasartico Inc. group, Ivor, and Canari. None of these groups offer anything to the story, acting as plot walls that players will have to manage and battle regularly. Canari is particularly horrific, as a rehash of Iono with an even less enjoyable personality, with far too much screen time. As I kept running into her, I couldn’t figure out if the developers were trying to satiate streamer culture or make fun of it. The last thing this story needed was another arrogant, self-obsessed teen who would “rather be playing games” than battling.
In short, Legends: Z-A never had a chance at being memorable, as the cast of the story is so poorly written. Add in the fact that the player is constantly given conversation options that never actually offer any sort of choice or control, and it feels more like the Hotel California than a stay in Lumiose City. You will never escape. You can never leave. You have no say in anything happening. We’ll revisit this later.
Sit Through Cutscenes, Battle Megas, Battle for Tickets, Repeat
Diving into the gameplay of Legends: Z-A, things don’t get much better. The game begins with one of the longest tutorial sections of the franchise, giving even Sun & Moon a run for their money. After being kidnapped into Team MZ, the flow of gameplay will settle. Players will sit through arbitrary cutscenes designed to slow gameplay down, sometimes complete an even more arbitrary fetch quest or battle sequence, then be handed a slew of Mega battles to slowly pick through. Once this is done, another cutscene or battle or fetch quest will be required, before players will need to grind in the Z-A royale for a Challenge Ticket to fight a person to do the entire sequence all over again.
To break this up, as players are trapped in Lumiose City, accomplishing Main Missions will slowly unlock new Wild Zones and Side Missions. However, the Wild Zones really only serve as Pokémon distributors, with the best of the very limited Pokedex purposefully locked behind progression as another way to slow players down.
Side Missions also only act as time wasters, designed to give the illusion of progression. They fall into three categories: Find a thing, bring a Pokémon, or battle. Unfortunately, activation of Holovators and other needed mechanics is often stuck behind these mindless tasks, so players will have to do a lot of them if they want to access rooftops or revive fossils.
While older Pokémon games followed something of a pattern, with players moving from town to town, exploring routes, accessing new Pokémon, and battling in Gyms, this progression felt organic and was aided by tackling puzzles, exploring vast route maps, and gaining access to new abilities via TMs. The loop felt less chaotic, offered a feel of satisfaction as objectives were completed, and was immersive thanks to an understanding of the main character’s motivations – to beat their rival and become the best trainer in the region.
Legends: Z-A just doesn’t offer that same sense of progression, instead turning the plot into a Groundhog Day series of repeated requirements that are no more difficult or interesting than the previous run. There is little to no strategy, and the lack of changing environments creates a suffocating feeling that makes continued work through the story unenjoyable. I never got excited to face the next miserable Mega battle gauntlet like I used to get excited about facing a Gym Leader. I trudged through each task, waiting for when I might start actually caring about what I was doing.
The New Battle System Is…Something
Pokémon has been doing everything it can to get away from turn-based battles in recent years. From removing random trainer battles almost entirely in Scarlet & Violet to this thing they have created in Legends: Z-A. The reality is, the system could have worked if it weren’t so awful to try and understand.
My Pokémon get stuck on everything. Gates. Trees. Chairs. Stairs. Buildings. I can’t even count how many times I’d be trying to fight something in a Wild Zone or during the Z-A Royale, and I’d just get stuck. Don’t even get me started on trying to shove a Meganium through the Battle Court fence doorway.
Add to it that Alpha Pokémon are so big that they stand on my character and block them from view, and it made every element of trying to move around during these battles horrible.
I have also run into issues where trying to recall a Pokémon doesn’t work, trying to attack requires multiple times of hitting a button to get it to acknowledge, and Mega Evolution does not trigger when the button is pressed. I was basically Hulk-Smashing my controllers in every battle just trying to get everything to respond correctly. It made every encounter a test of my patience in a way that could never be enjoyable.
This type of system isn’t designed for the people playing it. It’s designed to look nice when being streamed, and it puts the obsession to make newer games more of an esport on full display. This really isn’t a game for Pokémon fans; it’s a game for streamers and esports competitors, and boy howdy does it suck.
Pokémon Legends: Z-A is the least Pokémon, Pokémon game I’ve played, and there were times where it felt more like Fortnite in every one of the worst ways.
The Ugliest Pokémon Game To Date
Unfortunately, the cheapness of Legends: Z-A doesn’t stop at the writing or the gameplay. The game also looks awful. I try very hard not to be the person screaming about the trees, but even I couldn’t ignore the flat buildings.
The problem that Legends: Z-A runs into is that not every area is ugly, which then makes the areas that are so much more obvious. The player’s room at the Hotel and the front entrance and sitting area are so beautiful and carefully designed, and then players step outside and are met with flat cubes covered in poorly rendered JPEG images. When walking around, the city feels lifeless and hollow, and this is only made more egregious by the inability to enter most buildings.
The game just feels very cheap. Animal Crossing: New Horizons offers better graphics, and it is nearly six years old for an outdated console.
Add to it that the lighting on Mega Evolved Pokemon looks like it was recycled from the Tera battles of Scarlet & Violet, and nothing about the game feels like a new-gen console debut title sitting at $70 before paid DLC costs, and it becomes heart-wrenching.
Legends: Z-A Has Me Worried About the Future
The biggest hurdle I think Pokémon Legends: Z-A struggles with is that there is a vibe that the development team feels the players are too stupid to play a game with any sort of depth.
Everything about Legends: Z-A is a backstep from previous games. Despite the chaos of all the requirements, nothing is hard; everything is spoon-fed to the player, and there are very few times in which strategy is needed. Players don’t even need to think too hard about their character. There is nothing in this game to think about. Our job is just to absorb what is said and go hit a few buttons before coming back for more.
This follows a trend that Pokémon has been struggling with in recent years, where gameplay feels less and less immersive. Complicated mechanics have been taken out. Puzzles are gone. Hidden secrets and special areas are removed. This makes playing Legends: Z-A a passive experience that is boring at best and maddening at worst. So often, I wanted to be allowed to do my own work, only to be led right to the end of a puzzle by a quest marker.
So often, I wanted to be surprised by something, only to realize that everything in the game is so linear that there is no room for surprises of any type.
The critical thinking requirements of Legends: Z-A are lower than an early-reader children’s book, and it’s insulting to think that this is what the developers think players are only capable of understanding.
Final Score – 3/10
Pokémon Legends: Z-A is a thin, laughable, almost mockingly bad game that robs players of both their money and their time. I’ve never been so angry at a game in this series, and I have never been happier to walk away from anything. I have spent hours trying to come up with one good thing to say to try and soften the blow of this review, and frankly, I don’t have anything positive to throw here in the footnotes.
Legends: Z-A does a fantastic job of illustrating how it feels about the playerbase of the series, and will leave a hollow ache in the hearts of longtime fans. The thin world is punctuated by the knowledge that nothing you do has any point – something that is hammered home during the final scenes of the story, where not even the final choices are left in the player’s hands.
This return to Lumiose City is a nightmare in which players will be forced to battle for the glory eternally, never filling a forever-empty cup.
**Bonus Action was provided with a Switch Code of Pokémon Legends: Z-A and paid for the Switch 2 upgrade for the purpose of this review**
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