Pokémon Legends: Z-A Reviews

Hoist the tricolore, red and blue and green, for the creatures at the start and ever more to gain! In this fair City of the Lights, from gardened heights to deepest gloam, in zones of green and red do trainers tread, and fearsome beasts do roam.

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

Pokémon Legends: Z-A brings together many of the best features of the Pokémon Legends spin-off, and with luck, this could be the first step toward them being added to the main series.

Pokémon Legends Z-A dares to be different in various ways, and it comes together beautifully. Sure, not everything works, but it’s a marked improvement over the many issues that Scarlet/Violet had, and improves upon the “graphical issues” that many felt Arceus had.

Pokémon Legends Z-A gives us an amazing, fresh take on Pokémon battles, but that’s about all it does. Difficult fights are a highlight, but they can feel few and far between in a game that really overstays its welcome. When it works, it’s an absolute blast, but since there’s nothing else to do it’s a very one note game.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A marks the franchise’s next big leap, returning players to Lumiose City in the Kalos region. While it follows the format established by Pokémon Legends: Arceus, it doesn’t serve as a direct sequel. Instead, it takes place five years after the events of Pokémon X & Y, exploring the aftermath of Kalos’ technological boom and the lingering scars left by its past conflicts.

Longtime Pokémon fans more or less know what to expect with the series’ mainline RPGs, which is why the proposition of the Legends spin-off franchise is so enticing. With 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus, players were treated to a sprawling adventure in the wide-open Hisui region, tasked with filling in the area’s first Pokédex. Outside of doubling down on exploration, Pokémon Legends: Z-A has little to do with its predecessor, instead establishing the Legends spin-offs as places for ...

Pokémon Legends: Z-A is a great new entry in the iconic monster-collecting franchise, outside of a few issues that seem to stick with the series. The story is enjoyable, the gameplay is stellar, and the new Mega Evolutions are a lot of fun to see – I just wish the game could look as good as it feels to play.

Pokémon Legends Z-A is a welcome change of pace in a series that’s been running for almost 30 years. Here’s hoping the Legends games continue to serve as testing grounds for new ideas, and that the core mainline games can bring some learned lessons in exciting ways.

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.

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.

Pokémon Legends ZA is an incredible new entry set in a world that's as alive as the characters that inhabit it. The new battle system adds a unique level of chaos to keep battles constantly fresh, and exploring the world for new Pokémon never gets old.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A is another bold experiment from Game Freak. It may not fully succeed in building a cohesive, immersive world, but its innovative battle system and exciting new Pokémon make it a fascinating step forward.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A may not surpass Arceus in innovation, but it delivers an exciting adventure with plenty of nostalgic charm that make it a worthy follow-up in the series.

Pokémon Legends Z-A manages to be simultaneously promising, fun and disappointing. Pokémon series is the highest-grossing video game franchise on earth, and as a major release from this series, Pokémon Legends Z-A feels leagues below what it could be. However, if you are able to cut Game Freak some (perhaps unearned) slack, then you’ll find plenty to enjoy on the mean streets of Pokémon Legends Z-A. It’s not a monumental leap forward, but there is genuine innovation here. Amid Pokémon’s reputation for stagnancy, this is very much worth celebrating.

Pokemon Legends: Z-A finally feels like Game Freak hitting its stride in Pokemon’s 3D era, with a fun setting to explore, a well-written story, and a total battle system overhaul that works surprisingly well.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A is not the next-generation evolution of the franchise that you've been waiting for. And while that is disappointing, these spin-off titles have done a pretty good job of creating fun little diversions that will tide you over until the next mainline game. If you're expecting voice acting and a compelling story, you'll be disappointed, but the appeal of catching and battling with Pokémon is still a decent adventure worth undertaking.

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

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.

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.

It’s still as embarrassingly low-tech as ever but this is easily the best of the 3D games, with a surprising amount of ambition and invention, not to mention real-time combat that actually works.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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