Reviewed by Sgathaich. 

I have been with the Pokémon faction all the way back even before the first generation of games Red and Blue came out over here. I’ve seen highs, I’ve seen lows. During that time I’ve disagreed with people on what was good and what was bad. So with a new Pokémon game released on the Switch and Switch 2, let’s see what I thought shall we?

Pokémon Z-A is the second game to carry the Legends subtitle. This time the game is focused on the central city from the Gen 6 Games X and Y Lumiose city. The game is entirely set within the city. This is a bit of a bad thing but I’ll get to that later. Shortly after arriving your luggage is stolen but with the aid of a trailer your age but opposite gender, you’re given your first Pokémon and soon roped into the local tournament as well as a threat facing the whole city, Rogue Mega Evolution.

Wild Pokémon can be found all over the city but mostly in designated Wild Zones. There are only a few at the start, but as the game continues more open up. Like Arceus you can capture Pokémon without battling them as you move about the open world. Unlike Arceus, battles are now no longer turn based and you can move about the battle arena which you can use to get your Pokémon out of attacks by trying to evade them. This is where I got a first big feeling of something wrong with this game.

Yes… this is a rare Pokémon game I found a lot wrong with.

The battle system as mentioned is meant to feel more dynamic. But the more I experimented with it the more it felt like it needed a lot more fine tuning. Melee attacks have your Pokémon go up to the enemy to attack, while ranged ones have the Pokémon go towards you first. Problem is if a Pokémon is attacking you, and you’re trying to attack it at the same time, your Pokémon will then go the long arduous motion of going to where you were when pressing the button, often into the Pokémon’s attack  and only then attacking, they could be in range, but won’t attack till they get there. Some, even if standing right next to them, will wait  a few seconds before attacking as it will wait to register when the computer decides the Pokémon is in the right position, maybe just float up a few inches first! during which your opponent has already hit it and everything is messed up. Your opponents don’t suffer from this problem, but the zero IQ of your Pokémon will, especially if they float. Other times Pokémon just simply don’t work, Aegislash has gone from a top tier Pokémon to now worthless as it has to change forms before doing anything, that’s 5 seconds before being able to respond, 5 seconds it is not invulnerable. There is a side quest that has you fight 10 trainers right after another, each with 3 Pokémon, and you cannot heal or use items through it. Beat that at the “intended” level, only then can you tell me this system is an improvement over the superb refinement of the battles we got in Arceus.

The game is also very grindy post game too. While the other Switch era Pokémon games I have all had a considerably more enjoyable post story experience, possibly to get a Shiny charm. Z-A requires you to battle 1000 Trainers before you can get it. I got a team all the way into level 90, beat every major post game story and caught all the Legendarys… and not till at 500 Trainer battles. This is a game meant to be far more about battles than exploring, yet made them feel so boring and unresponsive, removing the more strategic elements that Arceus mastered… then makes you do things far longer after they are welcome.

And then there’s being stuck in the city. Those Wild areas are tiny, and the city itself doesn’t feel as big as a single zone we got in Arceus. Yes you can explore on the rooftops, but there’s not much up there but a few Pokémon you won’t find elsewhere and the parkouring doesn’t feel as fun to explore with than when you got the riding Pokémon from Arceus. I know I continuously compare it to Arceus. That game came out in 2022 and is still the high point of the franchise. Battling was at its best, and exploring was magnificent. The things you could find, discovering it felt like a world. This is a single city and feels so empty.

Even the battle system, the tournament it touted as this big thing going from rank Z to A, it cheeps out early on to jump you up a whole bunch of levels, just kind of showing how dull it is.

The game features the return of Mega Evolution, and thankfully this is something I can praise. Back in Gen 6 these were basically a I win button. Get 100 more stats in a Pokémon with it and little to no NPCs used them so it make beating the game easy. Now in the one bit of the battle system I can commend, you get a charging meter that you can use to activate a Mega Evolution if the Pokémon is holding the corresponding Mega Stone. This will last till that meter burns out, but you can fill up again by battling. Bonus is that you can use up a quarter of the meter to activate a more powerful version of the attack, so even non Megas can use it. Megas always do the Plus version of the attack though, so it is more often better to just charge up.

BUT the return of Mega Evolution came with the first thing that broke my excitement for the game. Announcing that the 3 starters from Gen 6 Megas, in a trailer… can only be acquired by an online ranked mode. While it would turn out that the online ranking is not as horrid as I feared and getting those stones took very little time, it turned me off so much I cancelled a pre-order for this game. As you can tell I still got it, but that was a pre-order with a lot of bells and whistles on.

There is a DLC coming out for this game, and I hope it improves on it a lot but… yeah this is a lot worse than Pokémon games that came out over a  decade earlier. I appreciate what they are trying to do with the battle system… but it needed so much more refinement and a lot of the requirements for grindy completion to be cut in half.

Rating : 🎮🎮

To watch a trailer of the game click on this link: