Pokémon Legends: Z-A ruined my expectations so badly I can’t predict what the third game will be anymore

The first time I played Pokémon Legends: Arceus, I understood why it’s a game separate from the standard naming conventions of other Pokémon games. The colon after “Pokémon Legends” in the title hinted that more games could come in the future, and I was excited to see how Arceus was different from the mainline games.

Legends: Arceus introduced complex exploration, crafting, and a more natural way to interact with Pokémon in wide-open areas that I would almost call an open world. It painted a picture in my head that this is what Pokémon Legends would be all about.

Perhaps other games in the series would explore time travel or alternate timelines. Just as PLA takes us to the ancient times of cataloging and studying Pokémon, I imagined future games exploring different eras or dimensions. So this new series had an identity in my mind: a game focused on a good legend, with intricate mechanics and a more mature storyline than the other mainline games.

PLA is significantly harder to play than Pokémon Sword and Shield. You have to face strong Alpha Pokémon that are tougher than your team, complete long Pokédex tasks, and manage scarce resources. You can’t want to waste Pokéballs, and salvaging items to craft others is key. There isn’t much money to be had, and blacking out is a huge problem because you have to go back to where you were to recover your satchel and precious items.

It’s a much harder and more mature experience. The story is more serious, instead of the usual savior child and silly evil characters. It feels more like an actual legend, something closer to The Legend of Zelda than Pokémon. I decided that’s what Pokémon Legends is about: Pokémon for experienced players, for a new audience, for the modern way of playing video games.

But then came Pokémon Legends: Z-A, and right from the announcement, I was skeptical. It’s set in the same timeline as Pokémon X and Y, just five years later. So Pokémon exist, the Pokédex exists, and all the Pokéball technology exists as normal. When I finally got to play the game, I realized its story is essentially like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. Some bad guys aren’t really that bad, elementary plot issues are there to be solved, and once again, you’re the hero saving a city. The theme became much more normal than the previous Legends game, more like Scarlet and Violet than Legends: Arceus.

We lost the time dimension in Z-A, and I feel we could have gone to the far future instead. We lost the plot and all the exploration, as the whole game takes place in Lumiose City. The city, supposed to feel big, becomes small because you can fly to almost every building. Distances are irrelevant since you can fast-travel everywhere.

The Pokémon discovery is also boring. In Legends: Arceus, Pokémon were in their own habitats where you’d expect them. You’d find Hippopotas and Hippowdon in the mud, in the poisonous Scarlet Bog next to other ‘mon like Haunter and Stunky. In Z-A, Hippopotas is in artificial sandboxes in Wild Zones inside the city. These wild zones are extremely small and packed with Pokémon seemingly at random, in a way that’s not creative or attractive at all. We lost that natural habitat, exploration, and ambiance that Legends: Arceus had.

There’s almost no legend to be told. Legends: Arceus had several legendary Pokémon to meet and explore, and building the first Pokédex felt like ike writing down the legends of every Pokémon. In Z-A, it feels like playing through a long, repetitive story without knowing the Pokémon’s origin or role in Lumiose City. The story about Zygarde takes forever to be told, and there’s no big-picture legend in Z-A.

Resources are always available. In Z-A, I suddenly had 20 Hyper Potions with no idea where they came from. In Legends: Arceus, I’d spend time exploring to get money for Poké Balls to catch difficult Pokémon instead of getting them fed to me nonstop from floor loot or quests.

The fact that we went from Legends: Arceus, a game with complex mechanics, a mature plot, and an interesting living world, to the story of a prodigy being good at Pokémon battles in a single city is disappointing. It killed everything I thought the Pokémon Legends series would be. I just hope The Pokémon Company goes back to something more like Arceus that pushes the franchise’s lore, exploration, and depth forward, rather than returning to something so basic and childish as Pokémon Legends: Z-A.