Pokemon Legends Z-A

Playtime: 26.2 Hours

Finished 01 April 2026. (No joke!)

Played the Switch 2 version. I wasn't initially super interested in it but it came out close to the launch of the Switch 2 when not too many other games were available, and I got a decent deal on it after stacking a sale and some coupons. I've only played through the base game for now, stopping right at the gates of Wild Zone 20 after unlocking the Infinite Royale, since I got a little tired of the game and wanted to move on. There's still lots I haven't completed though - tons of remaining side quests, mega stones, colorful screws, and the rest of the Pokedex are still there for me to grind out. I also have the DLC to do; I've heard it's not great (and it's basically a Rogue-lite stapled to the endgame) but I'm hoping to have enough motivation to come back to this? I could see myself coming back to it someday for sure.

Final Party: Feraligatr (Toto), Gardevoir (Azura), Ampharos (Nimbus), Victreebel (Venusian), Charizard (LizardWizard), Heracross (Bois). Levels are in the low-mid 70s. I'm not super satisfied with the party I ended up rolling since it feels like a ton of these are kind of just given to you. Feraligatr was my starter, Gardevoir was a gift for early players, Ampharos came from the guaranteed shiny encounter, Victreebel was a true full-odds random shiny, Charizard was Mabel's gift, and Heracross was Bois, the one and only. While it was a good & balanced team, my Victreebel was the only one that really came from exploration & catching. If I do come back to this game someday, I'll probably think about building up a second team featuring more "interesting" mons (and maybe Aggron).

This game felt like a pretty large departure from any other Pokemon game I've played before, and not in a bad way. In stark contrast to the first Legends game (which I haven't played) focusing more heavily on the catching aspect of the series, this game is all about the new active battling system with the majority of your time spent in or prepraring for trainer battles.

The entire game is set within the confines of Lumiose City, which has been expanded significantly to feel like a decently full, if very compact game world. The scale of the city itself isn't actually that much of a problem, with more than enough content for the 20-30 hour runtime of the game. A huge part of this is due to the multi-dimensionality of the world, with lots of open space across both the streets & the rooftops giving the map a very open, yet maze-like quality that I found fun to navigate, though also a little bit frustrating at times. There's also a ton of NPCs, quests, collectibles and other activities available to make this one city feel more alive than most other Pokemon games in general. My biggest complaint on this front is that every dungeon you visit - the sewers, the Flare labs, etc. - are all tiny and hardly feel inhabited by stray Pokemon - with maybe one or two per room at most.

Speaking of the actual Pokemon themselves, the distribution of the wild Pokemon in this game is primarily confined to seemingly arbitrarily placed "Wild Zones". I don't like these, and they're the biggest drawback of this game's world being restricted to a single city. Throughout the game, various strips of land and public parks are gradually turned into an eventual total of 20 zones, each of which contains a small number of Pokemon that you can find in an ill-fitting facsimile of various biomes that most other games try to integrate organically via routes & locations. For example, there's one plaza that just randomly becomes a sub-zero environment for all the Ice mons, right next to a bunch of normal streets. Terrain feels limited, there's often only one spawn for several mon types, and the areas are so small the the Alphas are really difficult to dodge.

Thankfully, most of the focus on this game is in the combat, with the Z-A Royale being the main focus of both the game's story and actual gameplay flow. Pretty much every story beat and mission revolves around a bunch of trainer fights to boost your rank, with the ultimate goal (throughout most of the story) to reach Rank A. Additionally, there's an open Battle Zone every night where you can fight a bunch of roaming trainers. Being able to sneak up them for an advantage is cool, and the card system for challenges and bonus points keeps it feeling fresh, instead of just spamming your strongest moves ad infinitum. This feels like an expanded version of various endgame challenge fights available throughout the main series, except this actually involves the entire world. I don't think it's too farfetched for me to say that this is one of my favorite battle formats in the entire series.

The royale format is part of a much more significant change to the game's core combat mechanics, utilizing an active-time battle system somewhat reminiscent of Xenoblade 2 and 3. As the trainer, you can move around the field while issuing commands for your Pokemon to use moves or items. Moves are differentiated via cooldown time and execution style (ie. ranged, melee, etc.) instead of PP, given that this is no longer a turn-based game. In general, I'd say that it feels a bit less refined than the Xenoblade games, but the inclusion of the type matchups shores up the complexity, especially given that abilities are also missing in this game (just like in PLA). That said, there's definitely some clunkiness to this system that I just can't quite overlook; it's not quite as responsive as I'd like, with no way to command your Pokemon to use a move in place. They'll always waste time running right up next to you before firing off whatever move you tell them to, so in practice you end up wasting an extra few seconds for every single move you try to execute. This allows pretty much every NPC to fire off a move before you have a chance to carry out an action, so you take a ton of extra damage which is effectively unavoidable and really drags the game down a bit. Also, items naturally need to be on a cooldown to prevent spamming them in fights, but the actual timer & menu response feels extremely buggy; I've had the menu stick for several full seconds after the timer expires, leading to several of my mons fainting at inopportune times in the middle of a fight from no clear fault of my own.

As a follow-up to the Gen6 games, Z-A also re-introduces the Mega evolution mechanic - the best of the various gimmicks Pokemon has tried to introduce to the battling system throughout the years. In additional to all of the original megas, Z-A also introduces a few more - though my opinion on these are a little bit mixed. On one hand, it's nice to see a lot of new options, but a worrying amount of mega evolutions are just dumped on random Pokemon that were already good (why did Garchomp need 2 of them?), and some designs are absolutely awful, with Starmie being a pretty good example of this. It's also a little sad that this game doesn't have any abilities, since those tend to make a very big difference for certain evolutions; the only real exception is for Huge/Pure Power evolutions, which get a little extra stat buff. In any case, I really like how it's integrated into the gameplay itself; rather than a single use per-battle, you build up charge in your ring during a fight. You can trigger mega evolution with a full gauge (on Pokemon with a stone equipped), OR use "Plus Moves" that each cost only a part of the gauge, but are powered up like moves used by mega-evolved Pokemon. For all of the unfortunate Pokemon that still don't have mega stones, this is a really nice "generic" stopgap that allows all Pokemon to find a real use case, and the fluctuations of the gauges throughout the fight make the use of Plus moves and evolution an actual decision, rather than a trump card to sweep up everything.

Over the course of the story, there's a number of boss fights that don't involve a trainer battle, but rather pit your entire squad against various mega-evolved Pokemon, kind of reminiscent of the Raids available in the recent generations of mainline games. I honestly didn't like these much either; I don't think the nature of Pokemon's combat systems handles these well at all. While it's pretty cool how the trainer is involved in dodging stuff, the long invicibility phases that waste your Mega gauge and massive AoE attacks that your Pokemon are too stupid to navigate around are causes for frustration. On top of that, the fact that most of these Mega's Pokemon seem to have something like 20-50x more HP than they should be expected to have just makes a lot of the fights incredibly tedious rather than challenging, especially towards the end of the game. While they still feel like climactic battles, I feel like there's a huge opportunity for improvements here.

None of the Pokemon games have a particularly strong story worthy of any note, and this one's not really any different. There's some fun characters for sure; Lida's definitely my favorite for all of her goofy reactions, and several other side characters (like Corbeau, Naveen, etc.) have their moments, butI didn't play this game expecting it to make sense, and that's pretty much consistent with my takeaway after finishing up the main story. The most it does is basically to give a bit of closure to the Gen6 story, but that only comes after around 20 hours of mindlessly progressing up through the ranks. There's a ton of stuff that makes no sense or is poorly written, so it's hard to take anything in the game seriously. It is funny how terrible Urbain is though; the internet has already ripped him (or her, as Taunie if you chose to play as a guy) up to shreds for all the dumb stuff he does in the game.

I'd say the game was pretty worth my time overall; I don't regret the 26-ish hours I spent finishing up the base game, though I will say that I started focusing a bit more on the main story around halfway through to get access to the other wild zones and Pokemon. One aspect of this game that I find a bit underrated or understated is that your character seems to be slightly older than the typical protagonists of the mainline games; I'd say they're somewhere in college-aged or young adult territory. With all of the fashion available to you in this game, you can make your character look pretty cool (or cute in my case, since I decided to choose the girl). It's a nice change of pace from SV, which forces you to look like a toddler the entire game. I ended up getting a bit tired of the game after finishing the main story, but I might be interested in going back for the DLC, Dex completion, and all the other sidequests and collectibles that are available at some point in the future.