Pokémon Legends: Z-A

The year was 2013, Lumoise was the city, and roller skates were all the rage. When you weren’t taking time out to ride a Skiddo across town, battle in a café or try out this newfangled Mega Evolution, you were doing tricks on your roller skates. Those halcyon days are long behind us. Pokémon X&Y are ancient, nobody roller skates anymore and Lumoise is not the city it once was. In Pokémon Legends: Z-A, it is much, much larger.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A mega evolves the series in an exciting new direction, and is one of the best games I've played on the Switch 2.

Twelve years after the release of Pokemon X and Pokemon Y, we’re finally returning to the Kalos region with Pokemon Legends: Z-A. The newest entry in the mainline series and the second “Legends” title, PLZA (Pokemon Legends: Z-A) reinvents the core battling system of Pokemon and introduces a vibrant cast of new characters. It’s a refreshingly fun adventure that’s strongly enhanced by the power of the Nintendo Switch 2.

How much someone loves Pokémon Legends: Z-A will really come down to how much they love Pokémon battles, versus getting to explore and catch new Pokémon. It's not that one gameplay element is better than the other — both have always existed within Pokémon — but it does make Legends: Z-A feel pretty refreshing now that catching Pokémon feels more ancillary, rather than being the game's primary objective. It's a fun, fresh take on the series' formula that really helps Pokémon Legends: Z-A set itself apart as one of the best entries yet.

People often say you can't reinvent the wheel. Pokémon Legends: Z-A proves that sometimes you can improve on perfection, and while some changes need some fine-tuning, the experience it delivers is one I hope I'll see again from this franchise.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A flips everything I thought I knew about Pokémon battles on its head, putting a fresh spin on the nearly 30-year-old series. Spicing up its challenging new real-time battle system is the return of fan-favorite mega evolutions, which give every battle a subtle tinge of excitement. However, its stealth mechanics leave a lot to be desired, and the lack of voice acting still makes for rather off-putting story beats and cutscenes.

With real-time battles, urban exploration, and a bold new direction for the franchise, Game Freak takes Pokémon to the heart of Lumiose City.

In recent years, the trend for core Pokémon RPGs has been to push for ever-larger sandboxes, with the recent Pokémon Scarlet and Violet offering a full-on Breath-of-the-Wild-style open world. The newly-released Pokémon Legends: Z-A bucks that particular trend, instead restricting the critter catching to a single relatively compact city map, while introducing a number of other tweaks to the Pokémon blueprint.

Basic graphics and slightly undercooked mechanics dampen the best Pokémon game I've played in a long while.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A should be celebrated for its fabulous real-time combat and its largely smooth jump to the Switch 2, but in condensing things down to one single location, it loses part of the Pokémon magic that Arceus and many other entries managed to amplify. I’ll forever find filling up my Pokédex fun, and for the Switch 2 generation, this is a good starting point for the franchise. But if the Legends series is to continue, it needs to recapture its personality and fuse that real-time system with a bit more freedom.

Lumiose City could do with work, but Pokémon Legends: Z-A is a much more tightly focused - and delightfully goofy - return to better form. At least by modern Pokémon's standards.

Pokemon Legends Z-A is a confident, city-bound shake-up for the series that looks great and plays fast, but trades away variety in the process. The result is a fun, polished adventure that leans hard on its battle systems and leaves little room for anything else.