Pokémon Legends: Z-A is a fantastic return to (mega) form

After shaking up the Pokémon formula with Pokémon Legends: Arceus, its successor, Legends: Z-A, pushes things even further — and it’s a very welcome change of pace.

With Arceus, Nintendo and Game Freak demonstrated how much more vibrant, weird, and exciting the monster catching series could become with a few key changes to the classic formula. Arceus’ historical story and open-ish world made the Pokémon universe feel like a bigger, wilder place, just as the revamped battling and catching mechanics turned the familiar process of filling out your pokédex into a completely different kind of experience.

After years of the mainline Pokémon titles feeling like slight variations of one another, Arceus was a breath of air so invigorating that it was easy to imagine it becoming a new blueprint for the series. That initially seemed to be the plan with Pokémon Scarlet / Violet. But those truly open-world adventures were plagued by innumerable technical issues, and their uneven plotlines are best described as undercooked.

There was such a vast gap in quality between Arceus and Scarlet / Violet that it was hard to tell where the franchise was going. But with its dramatically revamped battles and more immersive world, Pokémon Legends: Z-A (which I played on the Switch 2) is a fantastic return to form. And it’s one that feels like another example of how the Legends games’ experimental features could become the new standard as the series marches into the future.

Whereas Arceus transported you to the distant past when humans were first learning how to coexist with pokémon in the vast Hisui region, Z-A picks up in the present shortly after the events of Pokémon X / Y and takes place entirely in the Kalos region’s capital. Longtime residents of Lumiose City remember how their home was nearly destroyed by a nihilistic maniac hell-bent on wiping out humanity and pokémon alike in order to make the world a more “beautiful” place. But as a tourist visiting Lumiose — a walkable metropolis inspired by Paris — for the very first time, all your character really knows about the city is that it is in the process of being built back stronger than ever.

Overseen and financed by the Quasartico company, Lumiose’s ambitious redevelopment plan aims to turn the city into a place where humans and pokémon can live peacefully alongside one another. Lumiose is flush with newly built housing for people, and the city’s Wild Zones — sectioned-off areas filled with naturally occurring features — are spaces where wild pokémon can thrive. But as smoothly as the redevelopment plan has been going for the most part, there is also a growing concern about the rising number of dangerous Mega-Evolved pokémon that have begun appearing in Lumiose without explanation, and your character eventually joins a squad intent on solving that mystery.

Part of what made Arceus feel so pleasantly different from other Pokémon titles was the way it drastically reworked familiar gameplay elements as reflections of its historical setting. You could still battle wild pokémon and other trainers in turn-based matches, but the game also put a unique emphasis on stealthily catching monsters without needing to engage them in fights. Tonally, Arceus was also darker and more foreboding than previous Pokémon entries, which made sense for a game where untamed alpha pokémon would frequently try to maul you on sight.

Similarly, Z-A frames the Rogue Mega Evolution phenomenon as one of the major reasons why your character has to be cautious as they roam around Lumiose. But almost all of the pokémon you encounter in the Wild Zones (and a few other places) are capable of knocking your character out with just a few hits. Once again, you have the ability to sneak through tall grass and bushes to hurl pokéballs at unsuspecting pokémon. Stealth catching often works like a charm when it comes to the game’s lower-level monsters you meet early on, but when it comes to alphas, you usually have to send a partner into battle.

Z-A’s wildly reworked battling mechanics are by far the biggest change. In place of the traditional turn-based system, fights now take place in real time with attacks being assigned to the Switch’s four face buttons and recharging on specific timers. At first, even simple battles can feel chaotic because of how many things there are to keep track of. You have to tell your pokémon which attacks to use, understand that attack’s range, and keep your human character moving in order to guide your monsters across the battlefield. If you use items from your satchel, you also have to be mindful of the cooldown timer before you can open the bag again.

The system took me a while to get used to because the mainline Pokémon games have always been about making measured, calculated moves. But once I got a feel for the way my Tepig could fire off an Ember attack and quickly follow it up with a Tackle, I could start to see how Z-A wants you to battle in a (slightly twitchy) kind of flow state.

Strategy is still important here — understanding your monster’s type advantages / disadvantages and its strongest stats can be the deciding factors in fights. But Z-A feels like a game that was designed with the idea of embracing the chaos that would result from groups of magical animals attacking each other with elemental superpowers. A well-timed Flame Wheel / Rollout one-two punch became a go-to combo once my Tepig leveled up. But there were more than a couple of instances where that aggressive approach to fighting stronger opponents left my pig monster in danger of getting hit before I could tell him to run out of the way.

Battling becomes even trickier once the game properly introduces Mega Evolution — a returning mechanic from the X / Y era that temporarily changes certain pokémon’s physical form and boosts their stats. In X / Y, you could only Mega Evolve one pokémon per battle, and the transformation would revert back if your chosen monster fainted before the match was completed. Z-A switches things up considerably by introducing a gauge that charges up with energy before you can trigger Mega Evolution by pressing the right joystick. As long as the gauge is full, you can Mega Evolve your pokémon (if they’re a species capable of doing it) as many times as you want, which is handy when you’re facing off against the Rogue Mega Evolved pokémon that function as some of Z-A’s boss battles.

The game eases you into its battles by making them a key part of how the story progresses. By day, Lumiose is a glamorous urban hub where people and their pokémon partners spend time relaxing at cafes, browsing museums, and shopping at boutiques. But at night, random sections of the city are transformed into battle zones where ambitious trainers participate in the Z-A Royale, a riff on the traditional gyms.

At the beginning of every night cycle, a Battle Zone lights up in red and becomes filled with trainers of various ranks who you have to defeat in order to collect a designated number of points. And once you’ve got enough points, you unlock a special, slightly more difficult battle that determines whether you move up a rank. In previous Pokémon games, it could be easy to blow through gym battles because of how leaders and their associated trainers all used the same types of monsters. But many of the Z-A Royale’s participants use more eclectic teams of pokémon, which requires more thinking on the fly. The Z-A Royale is also a fantastic showcase of what kinds of people live in Lumiose — there are socialites, waiters, and overworked delivery workers who all want a taste of glory.

Lumiose’s expansiveness feels like a big step forward after recent Pokémon games for the Switch. I spent hours wandering around listening to / reading people’s conversations, building an expansive wardrobe, and appreciating the horn-heavy, accordion-accented smooth jazz soundtrack. The city could use a bit more visual detail, but it’s a substantial improvement; Scarlet / Violet’s towns felt more like lifeless dioramas, and Arceus simply didn’t have all that many places where you could vibe for the hell of it.

There are also welcome quality-of-life tweaks. For instance, Z-A introduces a character whose entire job is to keep track of pokéballs that you’ve lost and return them to you. Little details like that feel like the game’s way of keeping resource gathering grind to a minimum so that you can focus on more interesting things. Other tweaks make your pokémon feel more like a partner. Rather than trees that you need the Cut move to get past, Lumiose is filled with rubble, tree stumps, and piles of sludge that you can only clear by summoning a pokémon and making it use moves that make sense. I got into the habit of using my pokémon’s Rock Smash to pulverize piles of cracked stones, but I was surprised to learn that the move wouldn’t work on stones located higher up off the ground just out of my monster’s reach.

Clever little details like that kept surprising me as I got deeper into Z-A and really began to feel a kind of immersion this series has never quite been able to achieve before. Dialogue is still written out in text rather than being voiced over, but when your character does a parkour move to climb up a building, you can hear them audibly exerting themselves. There is something very cool about seeing your pokémon conjure a wave just to wash away garbage or a lightning bolt to recharge a broken elevator. Meanwhile, the battles pull you from the sidelines and put you in the midst of the chaos.

Though Z-A and Arceus share a similar experimental energy, the new game is more polished and robust. Z-A is launching with an online battling mode, there has already been an announcement about a DLC expansion, and on the technical side Z-A feels much more like what you would expect from a flagship game meant to help usher in a new generation of hardware.

While I enjoyed playing Z-A on the Switch 2, I can’t speak to how the game runs on the original Switch. That’s important given how improved Scarlet / Violet were from Nintendo’s previous hardware, and that kind of performance gap here could be a deal-breaker for people who haven’t upgraded. But Z-A makes a strong showing as the Switch 2’s first major Pokémon debut, illustrating how this series is at its best when it gets experimental. And hopefully some of this good energy gets channeled into the next generation of Pokémon games.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A releases for the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 on October 16th.