Now that I have your attention, I’d like to speak with you about Pokémon.

It is so goddamn hard being a Pokémon fan sometimes. Some of the noise can be really easy to drown out, especially as it often comes from other fans who have gotten bitter over time. Guess what, Mitchell, no one cares that you think the games peaked with Gold and Silver, that’s your prerogative and it doesn’t matter how wrong you are as long as you keep your mouth shut at my house. But then there are aspects of the series and the franchise as a whole that you can’t ignore. Gamefreak trying to patent monster catching in order to stop Palworld from succeeding. Fan projects being shut down left and right despite earning zero dollars but generating infinite joy. Some Pokémon being unforgivably unoriginal/ugly (what the hell is Bruxish, seriously?). And seeing a billion dollar company develop a game that is at least one generation behind its competition.

Pokémon Legends Z-A should have been an over-the-plate success story for Gamefreak, even with naysayers coming in from the wings at the very beginning. Take the incredibly popular and much lauded Kalos area, which people haven’t seen since Pokémon X/Y. Finally give fans the third game in the series that everyone expected. Use the ideas from the shockingly inventive Pokémon Legends: Arceus and combine them with what the series was able to glean from both the Scarlet/Violet games as well as outside influences like PalWorld and the newer Digimon franchise entries. This could have been a perfect example of a swansong for the Switch, with the DS getting the incredible Black 2/White 2 and the 3DS signing off with Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon. There’s no way that Gamefreak could make this endeavor into anything less than profitable. Right?

Gamefreak disappointing fans, fans loving disappointment, perfect duo.

You play as generic boy/girl who decides to move to Lumiose City because it feels like education and parental influence are almost nonexistent in the world of Pokémon. By sheer luck/gaming logic, you immediately run into a townie who befriends you and then scores you a free, permanent residence at a massive and wildly underutilized hotel. Plus, you get a Pokémon of your very own, because you moved to Lumiose without one! I get that this is a calling card for every game in the series, but it almost feels like leaving home without a wallet or a gun, depending on your national background. Anyways, in short order, you find out that people in the city fight every night so they can climb the ranks, achieve the highest level and then be granted any wish they want, which thank God this is a game primarily aimed at kids.

Naturally, Pokémon Legends: Z-A doesn’t cap it at just simple tomfoolery and Pokémon The Purge/Fight Club. There’s also a subplot about the baddies from the original Pokémon X/Y games, which was a relief and also a disappointment. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want everything to revolve around the same old teams doing the same old things, but what if the game was just focused on how Lumiose City is some kind of hellscape where you can’t venture out at night because people are just constantly targeting anyone who wanders into the wrong zone? Plus, there’s this whole thing with rogue Mega Evolutions, which is compelling and horrifying unto itself. Oh yeah, this Pokémon is both the apex of engineered change and also feral, targeting humans more than Pokémon. That’s an absolutely real thing that made traversal in the game both exciting and difficult.

This majestic hellfire is honestly a high mark of the game.

Actually, in defense of Pokémon Z-A, this is one of the few times where the plot feels strangely cohesive. Dismissing the arbitrary setup, a lot of what occurs is fluid in terms of storytelling. You don’t just magically get noticed by the main plot point, it takes a while for it to come to you while you’re in the midst of the night fights. Plus, because of the way the Kalos region is constructed, the massive calamity you eventually need to try and stop is only really threatening the city. So often, it feels like you need to save the world, or the galaxy, or the concept of time itself, but this time it’s “stop this Paris proxy from doom” and that feels rather reasonable. Asking a child to unravel the mystery of time travel? Insanity. Telling a kid they need to assist in preventing a terrorism attack? Strangely doable.

There are so many sidequests that pop up, and they’re under the guise of you helping out one of the major NPCs in the game, but that’s all they are: sidequests. There are several that you wouldn’t even know about unless you purposely sought them out, and, from what I can tell, you can move from the beginning to the end of the game while doing the bare minimum of extra legwork. Granted, those sidequests are phenomenal since they grant you lots of goodies and sometimes better passage throughout the city, and they tend to be rather low effort in terms of what you’re asked to do. “Find me an item you’ve already picked up several of.” “Carry this bag of trash around the corner.” “Fight me because I’m on my lunch break.” This isn’t exactly the heaviest payload, so enjoy yourself and do what you want.

Oh, and some Pokémon are only available in sidequests. So, you know, get going.

For the good points, Legends Z-A has several, but the changed combat system will be what most will point to as positive innovation for the team. While Legends: Arceus already had a bit of the active battle approach, having it be positioned within the city of Lumiose in a competitive and exciting way made the game all the more interesting. Fans who are used to relying on singular combinations of attacks now have to totally rethink structuring thanks to cooldown meters and physically being able to move out of striking distance for some attacks. Things that cause status ailments and stat boosts/drops have totally different interpretations, and, frankly, makes for a far more compelling battle than the traditional turn based approach. While I adore  the tried and true method, it’s really fun to dust off something new once in a while.

In that same vein, it also makes what could have been an arduous grind incredibly complex and strategic. Since you’re battling from the letters Z to A with a maximum of one letter advancement per day, players have plenty of opportunities to see how to better combine attacks and defense maneuvers with real time consequences. You won’t have to struggle much for the first five letters or so, but the NPCs start to really challenge you as early as the U Rank. Instead of simply thinking about your base stats and which attacks matter most, you want to build for versatility of both ranged and melee attacks, plus knowing the terrain a bit. There’s nothing quite like being able to physically dodge out of the way of an incoming smite instead of simply hoping you can withstand the blast.

This improvement to combat only further extrapolates in the non-league areas of the game. Wild Pokémon exist in pre-designated areas, but there’s also plenty of birds, fish and alley-themed Pokémon waiting for you to deal with them, and I sort of love that. We always think about how the world would be with actual Pokémon, and the interpretation that some of them are just pesky strays fits delightfully into my world view. It also pairs well with randomly firing a stratosphere-reaching Psy Beam in order to knock a Pidgey off a lamp post in what seems like the most unhinged thing a tourist could do. As an added bonus, things like learning new moves and even evolving just sort of wait for you to decide when you want to, so you don’t need to interrupt your rampage to refuse to learn Fake Tears or to stifle Kirlia’s evolution.

Your honor, it was self defense, that Pidgey was a menace.

The hardest part about Legends: Z-A is realizing the game is essentially taking place in an Old West town. Well, out in Japan, we have Edo Villages, but the idea is the same. When you’re walking down the main streets and you’re surrounded by people in period clothing, speaking in specific dialects/accents and you’re entreated to so many little details about what it was like back in the day. It transports you, if only for a moment, into a space of interest and wonder, and you forget about the real world and just live in this wonderful moment. A lot of Lumiose has that kind of gravity to it, when you’re stopping into a cafe or looking out over the rooftops, or even just getting chased down by a murderous Rogue Mega Evolution. These moments are fantastic and really capture what the magic of Pokémon games can be like.

However, once you allow your attention to drift elsewhere, you see the bones of everything and feel how sparse it is outside of controlled interactions. There’s still no voicework, which…fair enough. At this point I feel like it’s equivalent to the loss of system menu music on video game consoles. I want it to happen, they have the power to make it happen, but no one is willing to boycott hard enough to make it happen. Pokémon games have never had voicework, but I think the jump to 3D titles, especially on the Switch, seemed to feel like maybe a change was in the air. Instead, you’ve got a mute protagonist and NPCs who are forced to emote the hell out of themselves since reading text doesn’t quite convey the same emotion.

I want to hear this shade, not just read it!

Speaking of NPCs, Pokémon Legends: Z-A seems to have the most boring set of background workers to ever exist. Sure, you’ve probably seen some screenshots of unhinged quotes that come out of seemingly nowhere from innocuous passerbys, but that’s a small percentage, in my experience. Most of what I read was the same trite, generic flavor text you’ve come to dread from Gamefreak. It used to be funny because it felt so out of place while still being appropriate, but now it’s just tiresome. I’ve gotten all these options to improve my looks and my clothing, but the joggers, stray children and non-compliant workers just spout off fluff that doesn’t mean anything and distracts more than enhances.

And there’s just not enough of the city that’s accessible. There’s a grand trick happening to make you feel like the world is sprawling even though you KNOW there’s limited accessibility thanks to the game taking place entirely in Lumiose. But once you get down to the brass tacks, you’re cut out of probably 70% of the buildings you see around you. If the game had actually scaled to access what you could do versus what you see, the whole of Legends: Z-A would fit into Castelia City from Pokémon Black/White, with little extra except for some more parks to accommodate for the Wild Zones. You love to see everything, don’t get me wrong, but I can just look at nice pictures anywhere, and I don’t have to be pissed that I walked over there for nothing.

Lastly, I hate, and I mean hate, that Pokémon Legends: Z-A launched with DLC already available for pre-order. We all know that games nowadays get DLC. The last few iterations of DLC for the mainline Pokémon games have been spectacular, in my opinion. At least lie to us and pretend you’ve been working on it since the game launched and then put it up six months down the road. Don’t tell fans that you could have added more to the game, but you decided to lock it behind a paywall and make us wait a couple months for it. It’s insulting, it’s greedy and frankly it’s hubristic, which would mean something if every Pokémon game didn’t sell like hotcakes. How the hell are fans supposed to convince Nintendo and Gamefreak to change if we just keep buying what we all complain about? I’m guilty of this as well!

One foot stuck in the roof as I’m murdered by lightning from a psychic cat. My guidance counsellor called it.

In the end, Pokémon Legends: Z-A could and should have been an incredible win for Gamefreak and the Pokémon Company, something to hush all the naysayers and deliver a fabulous product. And it has moments of brilliance, and there’s certainly fun to be had. It’s got charm, it has some excellent NPCs for players to stan and the new Mega Evolutions are genuinely fun to behold. Anyone who thinks the Mega Victreebel is bad doesn’t know what whimsy is and I feel sad for them. This game has enough meat to it that I wouldn’t actively discourage anyone from buying it unless they’ve been disappointed in the last two main Pokémon titles. You certainly aren’t getting anything here that’s going to convince the pessimists to finally open up their hearts and minds to silly mechanics and overpowered fights.

Yet I also wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend it. It feels so empty at times, grinding for wild Pokémon is still a sometimes boring chore, and there are exceedingly long periods of time where you’re just fighting and you don’t really have a choice but to keep going back, night after night, to brawl with strangers. When you limit the game to a single city, you want the whole thing to feel vibrant and charged, like if Blade Runner let you hunt Replicants with an Arcanine. Instead, it’s just another Pokémon game. It moved some things forward in terms of fashion and some animation, but it’s a snail’s pace of progress for one of the wealthiest IPs out there today. There will be a legendary mainline Pokémon game one day. But, for now, it’s simply a tall tale.

Pokemon Legends: Z-A is available now on Nintendo Switch/2.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch Lite.