I’m unsure of how Pokémon Legends Z-A came about. However, if its leaked budget is to be believed, I think it paints a clearer picture of how Game Freak, the series’ stewards, managed to put together such a cheap-feeling game for a multibillion-dollar franchise.
This isn’t to say there haven’t been cheap Pokémon products and games before. I can’t imagine that the mobile puzzle game or the many, many toys cost a lot to make. However, in terms of the video game industry, these games always have at least some sheen or obvious quality put into them.
Despite its obvious success at overtaking Battlefield 6 in the UK gaming charts, to summarise how this game feels, my partner was watching me in bed and turned to me, asking, “Is this an official game?”
Pokémon Legends Z-A’s Story is an Inclusive Albeit Stale Callback
It’s not all bad news, though. While Pokémon Z-A has a lot of problems, it isn’t “unpolished”. It wasn’t crashing on the Switch 2; it maintained a steady framerate docked and undocked, and it certainly is a complete video game. There are some elements of it that mean a lot for the overall progression of the mainline franchise, even in this spin-off. It’s that particular side of it that I got my fun, but it’s just a game that, top to bottom, feels cheap.
This feeling seeps into the story, where the player character comes to Lumiose City, and outside of them being a tourist, it’s never fully explained why. It then immediately flings you into the wider plot that acts as a sort of epilogue for AZ, a character from the 3DS games, X and Y.
If you didn’t play those, don’t fret, the game will endlessly remind you of AZ’s past as a maker of ultimate weapons and being cursed with an extended lifespan. Outside of that, there are only a couple of other major connections that have lore implications for those who follow the stories.
It’s not hard to follow PPokémon Legends Z-A’s story, regardless. It’s fairly droll, only deciding to zap into life towards the end. It will also inundate you with endless text boxes filled to the gills with dialogue that I found myself thumbing through as fast as possible. Again, don’t worry, it regularly finds its way to reiterate itself at least once. Almost as if Game Freak knew.
Pokémon Legends Z-A Battle System
To take a mild break from misery, I do have to say that Pokémon Z-A’s battle system has not only reinvigorated the series, but also my love for Pokémon battles. I used to adore battling in Colosseum, taking on the 100-trainer gauntlet, and getting friends together to smash critters together.
I think I fell out of “love” with Pokémon’s battling because of how stale it became. Outside of flashy ultimate moves, it has no sense of style. Legends: Arceus introduced a small wrinkle, wherein wild Pokémon battles, the player could get damaged too. It’s not something often depicted in the games, left to the more lively anime and manga.
Z-A keeps this element, and it pays off. While the game has this unbearable clinical feel to its presentation, that hint of danger spices up the battles. What also spices things up is how battles are done now.
Rather than turn-based, Pokémon Legends Z-A uses a real-time battle system with moves assigned to cooldowns, rather than running on points. That means you won’t be running out of moves to use, but you have to effectively build a loadout that suits the Pokémon within the rules of this particular game.
It’s made easier with Pokémon no longer tied to just four moves. This feature was brought in the last Legends game, and I’m so glad it’s here again. These can be swapped in and out as you please, with each face button on the controller assigned to it. You don’t control the Pokémon’s movement outside of this, making obvious dodges of moves with massive area of effects a screaming match with a video game that cannot do anything about it.
It does free you up to dodge and move around the fight, where I found myself strafing fights in a dizzying circle as the battle raged. With the real-time battles not feeling as much of a slog, I actually found myself seeking out fights.
Pokémon Legends Z-A World is a Lifeless Husk
The game runs on a day and night cycle. During the day, the city is “bustling”, I guess? It feels lifeless, with characters standing around and a lot of flat architecture. While Legends: Arceus felt “flat”, it at least had the wide open spaces to clamber about, leading to natural discoveries.
Z-A’s Lumiose is meant to be Parisian-themed, but it’s genuinely boring. It’s also where you can see how that budget leak could be true. The game’s main and only location isn’t just lifeless, it’s cheap. Massive streets and whole blocks of nothingness, with only scaffold obstacle courses to really do. Other than going from objective to objective, there’s no need to explore the city for anything.
Legends: Arceus split its town and wild Pokémon apart, which made sense from a story point of view. It took place in the past, so you know, Pokémon-Human relations hadn’t particularly been worked out fully. It gave a modest open world, but left it to the player to drill down into it.
Here, Legends Z-A opts for a clinical approach, highlighting everything on the map and siphoning off wild Pokémon into “Wild Zones” that increase over the course of the game. Compared to Arceus, these Wild Zones suck that element of danger out of everything.
In Arceus, you could find yourself in a sticky situation at any point. In Z-A, it’s so cordoned off and all about designated fun zones that there’s just an entire element lost between games.
Then the game switches to night, and these “Battle Zones” appear. Here, the game designates areas for you to battle in, with additional challenges that can be picked up. Each battle earns points – as do challenges – and eventually you’ll earn a Challengers Ticket for the game’s Z-A Royale, where you’re tasked with working your way from Z to A in the rankings.
As with Legends: Arceus, Z-A features some form of stealth to it. Sneaking up on Pokémon to catch them makes it easier, and sneaking up on other trainers can quickly knock an opponent’s Pokémon out before the fight starts. It’ll never not be funny seeing a nearly six-foot orange lizard “sneak” over to an opposing critter, launch a volley of fire, and the other trainer being “surprised” by it.
The whole battle loop feels great, and it’s genuinely a lot of fun. Fights can get quite tense as I wait for the timer to tick down on the ability to use a move or item, with my favorite Pokémon near death.
Rogue Mega Evolved Pokémon Brings the Tension
These moments of tension are found quite a lot in the game’s major boss fights. Rather than just taking on a series of trainers, the theme of the controversial Mega Evolution, a super version of the final evolutions, comes back from X and Y.
Within the story, it should only be possible for Pokémon to do this with a human partner wielding a special stone. Instead, Rogue Mega Evolution is infecting the wild Pokémon around the city, causing them to act out because it hurts them. This means you and the band of teenagers that hang around the 3000-year-old man in a hotel have to help calm them down by fighting them.
It’s a loop, and one that works as the game is fairly brief in comparison to others in the series. However, by the time I’d finished the third round of these types of fights, which vary in quality massively. Some are super thrilling, while some just outstay their welcome massively. Particularly, the fight right at the end of the game, which I am convinced was deliberately done so in some vague attempt to make things a little dramatic.
Battles aren’t immune to the cheapness either. As with other Pokémon games since the big move to 3D, the animations are poor. There’s an attempt to ensure everything fits, but too often I’ll see Pokémon sliding along the floor or just pulling a default while performing a move. Sure, I can see that the game’s couple of hundred large roster might be tough work to animate perfectly, but I’m not asking for perfection. I’m asking for maybe Pokémon to open their mouths when shooting energy beams or point an arm forward when firing off a projectile.
Too often, the game looks as though plastic figures are just being smacked into each other. Slowbro, a Pokémon I used through about 75% of the game, learned Surf. It’s a classic Pokémon move and one that, in the 2D days, was represented by a big sprite of a wave firing across the screen. In Legends Z-A, that’s still the case, but only localised to the battle, and yes, I watched a default position Slowbro sort of glide without a care on the wave. No little arms pointed back and forth, no little touches. I think we can drop the utilitarian approach to these games now, but that’s just me.
Pokémon Legends Z-A does feature multiplayer, with a ranked mode and private games available. This is pure chaos, but in a good way. It’s not something I’d want to play at length, as I tapped out after four rounds, but it’s a free-for-all with four players and three Pokémon a piece. With every player spamming buttons and early doors showing that some people are just bringing in Charizard, I managed to rack up points by having Slowbro surf over everyone.
Pokémon Legends Z-A Multiplayer Has Major Issue
The multiplayer highlights one of the many little problems the game has. Just things that feel like oversights that a game with more care put into would possibly catch. So in the multiplayer, for instance, you can only take three Pokémon in. Rather than letting you just dump three out of your party and into storage, it forces you back out to manage your party and then back into the online mode to get into a game.
You can set different teams to use in multiplayer, but unless you go in prepared, there’s no way to set this up the first time without dumping your party.
Some parts feel archaic, like the inability to skip any cutscene in the game outside of the big, elaborate animated ones. There’s no dialogue fast forward for sections you might have to repeat after failing, and those elaborate cutscenes are completely void of dialogue, making them feel empty and, well, cheap. Any items used, and you die to a boss? You lose those items at the checkpoint.
Nighttime comes, and you’re mid-battle with a Pokémon? It doesn’t continue from that point; it just resets the entire world. Madness.
For as much as the battle system iterates in a way that can push the whole series forward, the rest of the game shows that Game Freak needs to change. These games can’t keep coming out in such a state, because as the prices increase, this isn’t worth the buy in right now.
What Happened at Game Freak?
The question remains as to what actually happened. Was it budgetary reasons, or was it the Switch 1 hardware hampering things? Was it relatively short development time for the game between Arceus and Z-A? We’ll never know, because not only is Game Freak shtum about these things, but Nintendo is like a black box that’ll never be cracked.
Whatever the case may be, Pokémon Legends Z-A isn’t worth the time investment. Especially if you’re a Pokémon collector. Yes, a core element of the entire franchise has problems right now. That’s what Game Freak is doing, making headaches for trading Pokémon. If you want to “Catch ‘em all”, you need a compatibility chart.
Thought you might be able to snag some fresh starter Pokémon or something uber rare? Think again. Trading, a key part of the game, isn’t available to Z-A in the way that the series has operated for a little while.
Trading from Z-A to Home, Pokémon’s subscription service to let players store and transfer collected critters from different games, isn’t going to be available until next year. That’s going to be a limited affair too, as Game Freak won’t allow all Pokémon to be transferred to games where they don’t appear. Transferring to Z-A from Home also locks that Pokémon to Z-A until Home opens up.
Speaking of online blunders, those ranked Pokémon battles are required to acquire a particular Mega Stone for Froakie, X and Y’s starter Pokémon, which you obtain through a side quest. If you don’t have Nintendo Online, there’s no way to get the stone in the game as of right now.
The same goes for the other X and Y starters’ final evolutions, Chesnaught and Delphox. I put time into Chesnaught and discovered I can’t even use it to its full potential, as I have to wait for Season 2 of the online multiplayer to kick in. I’m unsure if I’ll even stick around long enough to get the stone for Season 1, and have zero idea if they’ll reissue them or put them in one of the in-game shops in a future update.
Pokémon Legends Z-A Review Final Thoughts
It’s these mounting tiny issues, combined with a drab world that’s not only lifeless and clinical, but it feels cheap. Pokémon Legends Z-A feels as if Game Freak did not care much for it, despite the clear effort put into reinvigorating one of the core elements of the entire series.
With Legends: Arceus, I felt a need to go back and uncover what I’d missed. With Z-A, I just don’t think I’ll give it another look, unless I wind up reviewing the DLC in February too.
2 / 5
| Pros | Cons |
| The new battle system is genuinely fun | Total lack of flair, feels cheap |
| Multiplayer is a good time in short bursts | Parts of the game are archaic in nature, like no skippable cutscenes |
| Compartmentalised and clinical to a fault | |
| Lumiose, the one location, is lifeless |
Platforms: Switch, Switch 2
Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: Nintendo
Release date: October 16, 2025
