Review – Pokémon Legends: Z-A brings a new level of action to the streets of Lumiose City

With Pokemon Legends: Z-A, the Nintendo Switch 2 officially has its first new release in the Pokemon series, and the original Nintendo Switch has one of its last. This dual release marking both the dawn of a new era and the twilight of another takes us back to the Kalos Region for the first time since the Nintendo 3DS days. It’s an adventure set entirely within the streets of Lumiose City, complete with all of the Mega Evolutions a fan could want.

But not everything is so familiar in Pokemon Legends: Z-A. Just as 2022’s Pokemon Legends: Arceus did before, Z-A brings plenty of unique twists to the Pokemon experience, some of which are among the most significant changes that the series has seen in years.

Returning to the heart of Kalos

Your avatar character’s vacation to Lumiose City quickly turns into far more than just taking in the metropolis’ sights and sounds. Not long after stepping off the train, you’re recruited into Team MZ — a lovable, ragtag group of youngsters working to protect Lumiose City and solve the mystery of wild Pokemon Mega Evolving all on their own. Team MZ works alongside the enigmatic AZ, who fans will remember for his role in Pokemon X and Pokemon Y (as well as for his towering height).

Like Legends: Arceus, Pokemon Legends: Z-A takes you on a very different journey from the tried and true quest to earn gym badges and become the region’s Pokemon Champion. Once you get past the first hour or two of frustrating handholding, Legends: Z-A opens up and lets you dive into a variety of different systems related to the catching, raising, and battling of Pokemon. Central to this is the Z-A Royale, which is a city-wide competition used to determine a ranking of the very best Pokemon trainers in Lumiose. Quasartico Inc. — a corporation overseeing the development and renewal of Lumiose City — hosts the Z-A Royale in the hopes of recruiting the most capable people to assist their efforts.

Climbing the ladder that is the Z-A Royale involves a whole lot of Pokemon battles, starting with earning Ticket Points by defeating fellow trainers in designated Battle Zones when night falls over Lumiose City. Defeat enough of them, earn enough points, and you’ll eventually earn the opportunity to duke it out in a Promotional Match against a [usually] elite trainer to move up to the next rank. Of course, things go awry every now and then in Legends: Z-A’s story, so you can often count on a new event to break up any repetition. Wild Pokemon will unnaturally undergo Mega Evolutions (known as Rogue Mega Pokemon) and will need to be subdued. A missing person may need to be tracked down alongside Detective Emma. Team M-Z may even have to pay off a predatory loan after one of them accepts very ill-advised help from a shady organization. Legends: Z-A never lets its narrative grow stale.

From the most dramatic of battles that determine the fate of Lumiose City, to the smallest of interactions between everyday ordinary NPCs and Pokemon, there is a lot to do in Pokemon Legends: Z-A. While plenty of wild Pokemon can be found hanging out on the rooftops of the city’s buildings, the majority make their home in Wild Zones, which become enclosed sections of Lumiose for the Pokemon to roam free and to steer clear of people. More Wild Zones appear throughout the city the further you progress through the game, introducing new, stronger Pokemon to catch (including the fearsome, oversized Alphas). There are also well over 100 side missions for you to complete, which range from battles against other trainers with special conditions, to very amusing scenarios involving Lumiose City’s human residents and the wild Pokemon who have migrated to the sprawling urban center.

Just about everything you do in the game in regards to filling your Pokedex and raising your Pokemon contributes to an extensive list of requests supplied by Mabel at the Pokemon Research Lab. Similar to how we completed the research levels in Pokemon Legends: Arceus, Mabel’s research requests are fulfilled simply by indulging in the various systems and gameplay elements that make up Z-A’s experience, rewarding you with TMs, Exp Candies, and other goodies for your efforts.

With so much content of varying scope and scale, Pokemon Legends: Z-A is accommodating to all levels of commitment. If you want to lock in for hours on end and immerse yourself in the many gameplay mechanics, you will never be lacking for challenges to tackle. If you just want to play for a few minutes and get a quick bit of action in, there’s countless ways to do so. This accessibility is made possible by how open Lumiose City is from a very early point in the game. With the exception of some interior locations, you’re free to make your way to any corner of the map after only a couple of hours. That makes a significant amount of the optional content readily available just about from the get go, no matter how far along you are in the story.

That’s the upside to Pokemon Legends: Z-A taking place solely in Lumiose City. The downside is that there’s no thrill of discovery in finding new, exotic locations. Exploring the wilderness and visiting all sorts of unique biomes and man-man settlements have long been quintessential elements of the Pokemon experience. For as charming as Lumiose City is, the sense of adventure is sort of lost when you’re permanently stuck in the city limits. The story consistently takes you to enough new locations (particularly indoors) to stay interesting, but it’s not the same as making your way through a whole region with diverse habitats and ecology.

Pokemon battles reach new heights

Pokemon Legends: Arceus made the bold leap to having Pokemon capturing done in real time, occasionally without even needing to call upon another Pokemon to wear them down. That all returns in Pokemon Legends: Z-A, but the adventure in Lumiose City makes another bold leap by introducing real time combat. You’ll be able to freely move your trainer around the battlefield, using a lock-on trigger to focus on a specific Pokemon, and then directing your own Pokemon to use an attack. As one might expect, this is a gigantic shift from turn based combat. Z-A’s real time battles don’t afford you the luxury of being able to stop and take as long as you want to decide what move to use next, if you should swap Pokemon, if you should use an item, etc. You need to think fast and make decisions on the fly, while being mindful of the cooldown on actions like your attacks and item use.

A Pokemon’s four assigned moves will each have their own cooldown period (generally between 8-12 seconds) before it can be used again, which means you can’t simply spam the same move repeatedly. Among the most compelling elements to Z-A’s real time combat is finding the right combination of moves that you can reliably use one after another in battle to achieve maximum efficiency. Thankfully, the permanent move lists from Legends Arceus return in Legends: Z-A. Your Pokemon will never permanently forget a move, and you can use a TM as many times as you want, so you can — and will — customize a Pokemon’s four active moves time and time again during your playthrough to ensure having the most effective offense depending on what the scenario calls for.

Being able to navigate the battlefield also gives you a bit of room to take advantage of positioning. It’s entirely possible for you and your Pokemon to outright avoid an attack if you time things right and manage to keep your distance. Staying fleet on your feet is especially important during the Rogue Mega battles against gigantic Pokemon who have unnaturally experienced Mega Evolution. These boss-like encounters are wild and chaotic, with the Rogue Mega Pokemon firing off all kinds of attacks that will cover sizable chunks of the area. They feel like a natural progression from the Noble Pokemon battles in Legends: Arceus, tasking you with dodging everything that the Rogue Megas throw at you, all while commanding your Pokemon to strike back.

Rogue Megas are nasty customers, and they’re just one of several contributors to what makes Pokemon Legends: Z-A far more difficult than the mainline Pokemon games generally run. Rogue Megas, Alphas, and opposing trainers with Mega Evolutions under their direction deliver a stiff, and very welcome challenge. The vast majority of Mega Evolutions from previous games appear in Legends: Z-A, and with several new ones making their debut, players are given ample opportunity to stay evenly matched in battle. That said, the game’s most fearsome Pokemon will still be dangerous even if you send Mega Evolved Pokemon at them, and even if you’re overleveled. You won’t always be able to skate by purely through brawny stats; sound strategy and good decision making under pressure are what will ensure success for you in Pokemon Legends: Z-A.

There is one particular postgame opponent who is a complete and utter monster, the kind who will be immortalized alongside the likes of Champion Cynthia and the Volo/Giratina encounter as one of the most brutal sequences in any Pokemon game ever.

The ups and downs of city living

While Pokemon Legends: Z-A readily experiments with the series’ longtime mechanics and scenario structure, it follows in the footsteps of recent console entries by having decidedly mixed results with its production values. We played the game on the Nintendo Switch 2 for the purposes of this review, where the performance was as smooth as you could ask for. Animations are fluid, and loading times are over in the blink of an eye. Of course, this is clearly an original Switch game at its core, so it’s not exactly pushing the limits of the Switch 2 hardware.

It’s not pushing the limits of even the original Switch hardware. Environmental textures leave something to be desired, often grainy and with washed out colors. The wait for a fully voice acted Pokemon adventure continues, which is as jarring as ever with how expressive and well-animated character models are during cutscenes.

For as large as Lumiose City is, it’s nowhere near large enough to justify being the sole environment in the game. Conceptually, the Kalos region’s Paris-inspired metropolis is one of the more compelling cities of the Pokemon world, with its art deco architecture and French trappings. But its layout also has a great deal of symmetry, which makes the sights and sounds of your exploration rather repetitive no matter whether you’re at the street level, or running across the rooftops. There’s not a lot of variety to the building shapes, and aside from a handful of exceptions like the Prism Tower or Quasartico Inc.’s headquarters, they’re all around the same height.

Ideally, Lumiose City would have been the hub of a larger overworld, surrounded by vast wilds for us to wander through as we did in Legends: Arceus. At the very least, some greater semblance of varied biomes were needed for an adventure playing out exclusively in an urban environment. Locations like a sprawling, wooded park in the style of New York City’s Central Park, an extensive maritime port out on a large body of water, or an interconnected set of pathways stretching between the pinnacles of tall skyscrapers would have all gone a long way to making Legends: Z-A’s setting more exciting to explore. But alas, those features have never been a part of Lumiose City dating back to its debut in Pokemon X and Pokemon Y.

Where Lumiose City comes alive is in its residents, both human and Pokemon. This is one of the best-written Pokemon games to date, with strong themes of the benefits and struggles that come when humans and Pokemon attempt to cohabitate a dense, urban environment. The story does a fantastic job following up on the events from Pokemon X and Pokemon Y, revisiting the lore of the Kalos Region and its conflict-ridden history. Fans with fond memories of those Generation 6 titles will appreciate the many callbacks, seeing how Lumiose City has changed, and the way that certain returning characters have developed. Newcomers, meanwhile, are treated to plenty of context so as not to feel out of the loop.

Those aforementioned themes are prevalent from the main storyline all the way down to each individual side mission, with the main cast and NPCs all contributing to the narrative’s message. Team MZ and their allies are an incredibly likable bunch, their personality quirks and their sense of camaraderie making it very easy to grow attached to them as they work tirelessly to protect Lumiose City. Even the most unassuming NPCs found on the city streets can leave an impression with how heartwarming some of the side missions’ premises are.

That makes our time in Lumiose City well worth the stay, even if it would have been nice for the game’s vision to be a little broader. Pokemon Legends Z-A delivers a concentrated Pokemon experience, purposefully focusing on a few select elements, and absolutely excelling at them. For this return to the heart of the Kalos Region, a great story and explosive battles are more than enough to guarantee a memorable Pokemon outing.

SCORE: 8.0/10