Pokémon Legends: Z-A Review – A Modernized Evolution

Pokemon Legends Z-A Review
Pokémon Legends Z-A is looking to draw players in with a new real-time combat system and Mega Evolutions. Can it deliver? We’ve played in on Switch 2, let’s dive in!

Z-A takes place in Lumiose, a circle-shaped city. The overarching goal is to climb up the ranks in the Z-A Tournament. You start at rank Z and must work your way up to rank A. Each rank has you challenging trainers in battle zones to gain a challenger ticket, then you must face a stronger opponent for the rank-up match. So unlike the typical gym and badge-based progression system, this time it’s all about improving your rank in the tournament.

Welcome to the Tournament
In between the tournament there is a lot of story content. Among other things, you will get to experience Mega Evolutions, one of the game’s biggest announced features. Pokémon that have reached their last evolution stage can “Mega Evolve” if you have their Mega Stone, which makes them stronger and gives them a cool new look.

The game runs very smoothly on Switch 2 and I didn’t experience any performance issues or framerate drops. Finishing the story took me a good 30 hours. The story is much more linear this time. A large amount of that playtime is spent in dialogues, which at some points felt a bit too much in relation to time spent in battles. The gameplay loop can get repetitive pretty quickly, because it’s always the same process for increasing your rank and the entire game takes place in the same small city from start to end. So there’s not much new to explore after the first few hours.

Mega Evolution of the Battle System
The biggest upgrade to Z-A is the modernized battle system. It’s a more interactive real-time system and no longer round-based. Trainers and Pokémon walk around together and engage in battles simultaneously. Attack moves have no limit on how many times they can be used, instead they have a short cooldown of a few seconds. This allows you to build chain combos, using attacks in such an order that by the time you cycle through all moves the first one has cooled down. The trainer can now take damage too, particularly when fighting wild Pokémon, and if you take too many hits on your character you will faint and lose the fight. Then you can either rematch the opponent immediately or you will wake up at the nearest Poké Center.

Your Pokémon will stay close to you in battle, and you can even use the environment to your advantage. For example, some attacks won’t reach very far and if you have a flying Pokémon and hide behind an obstacle, you can use it for cover while using ranged attacks from a safe distance. This doesn’t always work against trainers, but is useful when fighting wild Pokémon.

During battles against Mega Evolved Pokémon, they will sometimes target you and it requires dodging the attacks at the right time. You can even unsommon your Pokémon, which is useful when the opponent Pokémon is about to launch a powerful attack. This allows for some creative freedom with combat tactics. The synergy between trainer and Pokémon shines much more with this new combat system and feels more interactive than ever before. Battling strong wild Pokémon feels more like boss fights, and requires managing not only your Pokémon but also dodging attacks with your trainer. If you take a hit the screen will get red to indicate your trainer is low on health. If you don’t take hits for a while, your trainer’s health automatically recharges so you can take another hit.

That said, I found the game too easy for the most part. Regular trainers you fight for challenger tickets don’t pose any threat. They only have 1-3 Pokémon versus your full team of 6, plus you can use Mega Evolutions which defeats them in one hit. You can even sneak up to trainers from behind to land a surprise hit, which almost guarantees their first Pokémon is instantly defeated. The rank-up matches are a bit harder but I did all of them on the first attempt. You can use your Mega Evolution right at the start of the battle, while opponents tend to keep it for their last Pokémon. Plus, you can have multiple Pokémon mega-evolve during a match but opponents don’t do this. Your mega evolutions have a timer, once it runs out or your Pokémon is defeated, you will need to land attacks to charge up another mega evolution. Then you could trigger a mega evolution again in the same match. This makes mega evolutions a bit too overpowered for yourself.

Lumiose City needs You
Now let’s talk about the game world. Lumiose City is the smallest map I remember from a Pokémon game. The entire game takes place inside the city, there are no “wilderness” areas to explore outside the city. What makes up for the small map size, is that you can climb onto most of the buildings. The game has a more vertical level design, so there’s still a decent amount to explore.

Pokémon are caught in so-called “Wild Zones”, which get marked within Lumiose City as you progress the story. Each Wild Zone hosts a variety of Pokémon for you to catch, with some spawning only at day or night. The new catch system feels more interactive, you can sneak up to Pokémon in stealth and immediately throw a Pokéball before fighting them. It will show the catch chance before you throw the Pokéball so you know if it’s worth trying.

The game introduces other quality-of-life improvements too: Defeated Pokémon stay incapacitated for a short period and have a higher chance to be caught using a Pokéball. Attack moves no longer have a usage limit, this was replaced by a cooldown timer per attack (usually 6-12 seconds). Learning a new attack move no longer loses the old moves – any move your Pokémon has discovered stays in the Move Set and can be re-learned for free at any time. Now you can manually choose from your Pokébox if you want to trigger a Pokémon evolution or not. Pokémon no longer evolve automatically, it’s your choice to evolve them or not after reaching the level requirement.

It’s also worth noting that players can enjoy online link play over the internet as well as with nearby local consoles. Private matches can be created with friends. With all the gameplay changes it does feel like a substantially new Pokémon experience, but one that is being held back by a repetitive story with too little open world exploration.

A New Day for Pokémon

Pokémon Legends: Z-A isn’t afraid to make some much-needed modernizations. However, the small world and repetitive gameplay loop make it not the shiniest of the Pokémon games.

***A review copy of the game was provided by the publisher***

The Good

New Battle System
Cool Mega Evolutions
Player-Friendly Improvements

78

The Bad

Repetitive Gameplay Loop
Small World