Revisiting Pokémon Legends: Arceus before this preview of its sort-of-sequel, Pokémon Legends: Z-A, I couldn’t help but be struck by its almost singular eeriness. Legends: Arceus is deathly quiet, thanks in part to the total lack of voice acting – a long-running Pokémon quirk continued again here in Z-A, even in the lengthy cutscene we were shown at the start of the preview – but also, more intentionally and more interestingly, because of its environment. Legends: Arceus was set in the ghostly wilds of Hisui. A cold, unwelcoming, frequently haunted corner of Pokémon’s take on the Japanese region. It made sense to dial into the sounds of swaying grass and gusting wind, the braying Ponyta, the heavy footsteps of human travellers in untamed lands. What an odd game, with such an odd vibe. I kind of loved it.
With Pokémon Legends: Z-A that whispering atmosphere is turned inside out. It’s chaos, frankly, or at least the hour or so that I had with it was, spread across four, separate micro-demos in the heavily Paris-inspired Lumiose City. Z-A has taken the bold, and potentially quite ill-advised leap of going full real-time action with its battles, which coupled with its modern approach of overworld-roaming Pokémon means you’ll frequently find yourself in the middle of absolute carnage, moves flying everywhere, wild pokes on all sides. And, if you’re much like me, maybe just a tiny voice carrying through amongst the noise, wondering whether this is, now you mention it actually, really any fun?
I say that, but should also right away throw in some hefty caveats. This is only a preview, and one that was both quite brief and also heavily devoid of context at that. A lot of the magic in Pokémon comes from outside of its mechanics, and instead in how they all knit together – the knitting is the part I haven’t seen. Instead, as I said, four miniature demos in one. The first: a Wild Zone.
Wild Zones are a concept first introduced in Pokémon Sword and Shield (though really something that has threads tying it right the way back to the Safari Zone of Pokémon Red and Blue). Here, they’re dotted around the city sporadically and bursting with alarmingly aggressive Pokémon. I set foot into Wild Zone 6, where the preview’s first section took place, and was immediately assaulted by a Lv.33 Alpha Houndoom (the red-eyed, souped-up stats Alpha mechanic of Legends: Arceus returning again here) and its gang of surrounding Houndours. The party we were given was a fair bit below that level – around Lv.25 – adding to the challenge, as did my starter of choice for this demo being Chikorita. Curiously, evolution has received a tweak here: it’s now something you opt into, rather than out of – when your Pokémon’s ready to evolve, you go into your party menu and select the option to evolve it. Moves, likewise, can be swapped out on the fly for free as with Legends: Arceus, as long as you’re not mid-battle.
Taking the time to tinker in the menus certainly helped, but the difficulty of this Wild Zone was still curiously uneven. Smaller, lower level Pokémon like those Houndour would go down in a single hit, while their ‘parent’ Alphas will frequently take multiple attempts of fully wiping your team to actually catch. And the Pokémon-catching mechanic itself has been tweaked a little here, too: you can throw Pokéballs mid-battle, as usual, but now bringing wild Pokémon down to 0 HP will give you a brief window where stars swirl over their head and they sit there, stunned, for you to lob a Pokéball with a raised chance of catching them – but there’s no guarantee; if that catch fails, they’re gone as if traditionally KOed.
Dashing about this Wild Zone also brought a few other small discoveries. The way items work has been tweaked again, for instance: running over a glinting ‘hidden’ item will now automatically pick it up, while specifically-placed items still appear in red Pokéballs for you to manually collect. There’s also a strange, pink rocky substance in the world, which I often found on the area’s rooftops. Use a Pokémon’s attack against this and it’ll break off, giving you a handful of Mega Shards. There was no use for them in the demo, but as the official Pokémon website explains: you can exchange these with someone in-game for Mega Stones of your choice, once you’ve collected enough.
The Cufant in the room here, of course, is that battle system. As well as letting you use moves on the fly as you run about Wild Zones, Pokémon battles themselves have now gone fully real-time. Instead of PP, which limited how many times a Pokémon’s move could be used before you needed to restore it with an item or visit to the Pokémon Center, moves now simply have a cooldown timer, typically in the range of two to 10 seconds, from what I saw first-hand. Moves can miss, typically when your Pokémon follows you around vaguely while you run about during battle – there’s no explicit dodge button for Pokémon, but is for you the trainer – and also be outright blocked by a well-timed Protect, which feels more essential than ever. But otherwise, things feel pretty simple: use your strongest moves as soon as they come off cooldown, use your other ones in between.
There’s a bit of strategy involved, with the right moveset. My Gyarados for instance had Whirlpool, which did area-of-effect damage over time to any Pokémon staying within it. And Waterfall saw it dash aggressively through an opposing Pokémon, potentially also helping it avoid their attacks too. Others, such as good old Growl, maintain their original effects of raising or lowering certain stats, while status effects have also been tweaked too. My Vivillion’s ability to put opponents to sleep became an essential staller while cooldowns ticked along, and Paralysis seemed to just lock a Pokémon in place – not that useful in my experience, but maybe certain ones will be more evasive of your attacks, as you progress through the game? And if I were more skilled at switching Pokémon on the fly it might’ve dovetailed nicely with that Whirlpool’s area-of-effect.
I’ve mixed feelings about how it all works in practice. On the one hand, it’s always nice to see Game Freak, stuck in its ways for so long, continue to experiment a little with its near-30-year-old battle formula. On the other: that turn-based formula was really good, in large part because it had been honed by incredibly smart designers such as Shigeki Morimoto for those 30-odd years. Compared to the almost excessive precision of the old system, this new one is a direct opposite. Battles are chaotic, a little button-mashy, and largely unstrategic – though again, maybe this might change with more time to learn the nuances and build a team with proper, complimentary movesets of my own.
Most of my time was spent rapidly switching between Pokémon, using third- and fourth-choice attacks while the actually useful ones cooled down, and using up lots and lots of Revives. As with Legends: Arceus, where this was a major issue, most evenly-pitched battles seem to devolve into most-but-not-all of your team getting wiped before you catch or defeat your enemy, leaving just one Pokémon to collect the XP. Levelling-up will, at this rate, likely come from repetitive spamming against lower-level Pokémon on the fly.
I also discovered one, deeply frustrating oversight. After several torturous minutes battling an Alpha Binacle I found down by not-Paris’ waterfront, eventually getting it down to the last slither of red HP, a brief cutscene triggered to indicate that day had officially switched to night, and therefore the Z-A Royale was now open for entrants. How did that impact my epic struggle with Binacle? You can probably guess from the frustration: it reset its health back to full, while my battered, end-of-battle team remained, well, battered. Not cool – and given this cutscene triggered twice in my limited time with Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s Wild Zones, also quite worrying. If I have to enter every fight with a more challenging Alpha Pokémon knowing there’s a risk my opponent could suddenly get reset to full HP at any moment, I most likely just won’t bother. Another journalist at the event noted their HP also resets if you get slightly too far away – as they learned the hard way by attempting to regroup and think up a plan.
On the topic of the Z-A Royale, this was the next demo I briefly played, whether things were a little less frustrating. Each night this opens up, your ultimate task being to climb from rank Z to rank A (I get the reference!) over time, first by gathering enough tickets, itself done by completing tasks during the royales, and then by winning a rank-up battle between each letter. Those ticket-earning tasks are interesting, if a tad repetitive at this early stage. Typically they were some variation of sneaking up on your opponent to get a first attack, or knock them out with a surprise attack of a certain Type, and so on. “Sneak up and start battles using Normal-Type moves!” was one, for instance, with counters for how many times you’ve done it (future tasks asked you to do this X amount of times), plus a reward of 20 medals and 200 points. Those sneak attacks mean sneaking up on a trainer’s Pokémon, without the trainer seeing you, curiously, the result being a very funny sequence of you basically skulking about the streets of Lumiose City sucker-punching these kids’ pet birds and getting a medal in return.
This was more or less the sum total of the Z-A Royale, at least this early-game one I tried, so onto the next: a rank-up battle against a bloke called Rintaro in his restaurant.
Rintaro used the three ‘simi’ Pokémon here – Simipour, Simisage, Simisear – and duly received a beating from the champion-elect. Again, this battle didn’t involve a lick of strategy beyond me simply realising some moves did more damage than others and prioritising using them as soon as their cooldowns stopped – plus using the odd Revive when needed. If nothing else, it’s nice to know trainer battles are as familiar as ever.
On to the fourth part of the demo: a raid-like boss battle against a rogue mega-evolved Victreebel. This plays out like a real-time spin on the raid battles of Sword and Shield or Scarlet and Violet: a giant, static Pokémon with a giant health bar in the middle of a circular arena, only this time with you free to run around the space alongside allies and direct your Pokémon to attack it.
In this instance, I mega-evolved my Gardevoir to spam some Psychic-type attacks against Victreebel’s Poison, with Houndoom switching in as support. The key mechanic is mega evolution, naturally. Here, you have a mega ring which fills up as you land attacks, and then gradually depletes over time when you’ve mega-evolved a given Pokémon. There’s a slight twist beyond that: occasionally, a collection of little orbs will burst out of the raid boss Pokémon, and collecting these will top up the mega ring. Likewise, there’s one more twist to moves, in Plus Attacks.
These are activated by – you guessed it! – pressing the plus button on the Switch before selecting the move. Only certain ones have a marking to indicate a Plus version is available, and unlike Z-Moves, to which they are very similar in concept, they can be used repeatedly, simply draining your mega ring as a resource. Mega-evolved Pokémon use them automatically, so it seems to make sense to wait to mega-evolve first unless a single use can be decisive. As for that boss battle, it was fairly simple again: avoid getting hit by area-of-effect attacks that Victreebel spewed repeatedly – and more challenging: somehow get your hard-to-control Pokémon to avoid walking straight into those attacks too – and continue to spam out as much damage as you can, reviving between KOs.
A final twist amongst all this, mind: items have cooldown timers too, although strangely I couldn’t seem to find an indicator of that timer anywhere in my brief time with the game. Across the Wild Zone and the tougher battles like this against Mega Victreebel, where in both scenarios was noticeably under-levelled, I spammed Revives and Potions until suddenly I couldn’t, and had to get clarification from a nearby PR as to why they were unavailable. Thankfully in Wild Zones there are cafés, where you can stop to fully heal your Pokémon by taking a little break with a coffee – very French – but if you plan on battling anything above your level or catching anything challenging, it seems like you’ll need a very full backpack as you go.
Altogether, it made for a curious mix. This is Pokémon going full real-time action, ultimately, with your character frequently dodge-rolling around the Wild Zone or crouching behind cars in the Z-A Royales, as Pokémon attacks fly. I’ve nothing against that in principle, much as I love Pokémon’s classic, highly tactical turn-based battle system. The only concern is the implementation: this feels, at first pass, like a system retro-fitted onto a series that already has all kinds of baggage, as opposed to proper ground-up reimagining of how Pokémon-on-Pokémon combat might work.
As a result it’s a little clunky. Do we need the risk of your character getting hit by attacks, for instance? Shouldn’t the jeopardy be your Pokémon team getting wiped, rather than you getting caught by a stray Iron Tail? Shouldn’t we be yelling for our Pokémon to dodge – Ash-and-Pikachu-style – instead of dodging ourselves? And is mashing your quick-cooldown moves repeatedly while waiting for the strong one to recharge really the best way to implement it all?
Hopefully, in the fullness of time and a full game in itself, those quite significant kinks will work themselves out. Game Freak’s battle designers haven’t gone anywhere, after all, and they’ve proved on more than one occasion that they can bury smart nuance into systems that initially seem overly simple. There’s also the wider city that’s still yet to reveal itself, the ways in which these disparate parts of the game knit together, and that all-important atmosphere of a more confined, but probably much more bustling world (which also, importantly after the mess of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, does seem to run very smoothly on Switch 2). I’m looking forward to seeing more of that, to following what’ll no doubt be another oddball but quietly affecting story, and to digging into the finer points of its battles for any hidden strategy within. In the meantime, I’m a little skeptical as to whether Pokémon’s real-time reinvention is really for the best.
This preview is based on a trip to Paris. Nintendo / The Pokémon Company provided travel and accomodation.
