This past week saw the annual Pokémon Day celebration, complete with game reveals and updates. Perhaps the biggest story of the day was the brand new look at Pokémon Legends: Z-A, with a three minute extended look showcasing actual gameplay, along with new features teased and a glimpse at the narrative premise of the title. To say it was exciting for me would be an understatement; in fact, I’d probably say it’s the most exciting Pokémon game in years.
The Nintendo Switch console has given us two entire generations of Pokémon, with their own highs and lows. To start, Pokémon Sword and Shield launched Generation 8 way back in 2019 with the DLC after in 2020, then followed by remakes Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl in 2021 and the release of Pokémon Legends: Arceus in 2022. The current Pokémon era of Generation 9 began with Pokémon Scarlet and Violet in late 2022, and it seems set to conclude with Pokémon Legends: Z-A later this year. Out of them all, there’s a lot that makes specifically Legends: Z-A stand out to me, so let’s dive into what makes potentially the end of the Switch’s Pokémon line the most exciting.
One of the most contentious issues with the recent generations of Pokémon has been its visual presentation. From the great Tree Debate of Pokémon Sword and Shield to the Microsoft PowerPoint-like frame rate of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, it has been rough. Legends: Arceus was a standout for being at least a bit nicer looking, despite much still being muddy and murky to look at. It was genuinely impressive at points to look out over the skybox of ancient Sinnoh and see dawn break over the land before Pokémon training became common place.
Legends: Z-A seems far better positioned to deal with the fallbacks of recent Pokémon games graphically. The overwhelming issue has been the environments, with Scarlet and Violet’s spotlight on open-world adventuring also showcasing some awful textures on what should be realistic natural things like cliffs and grass. The same is true for Legends: Arceus, which despite performing better is still focused on the natural world and forests, things that are very demanding to make look realistic and an area that Game Freak have been proven to be bad at.
What separates Legends: Z-A from the others therefore is its setting. Legends: Z-A is set entirely in Lumiose City in the region of Kalos, inspired by France and thus full of buildings and side streets. Sure, it has some natural areas, but these wild areas are contextualized by their surrounding buildings. The focus on a less natural, more artificial and human-made environment, to me, is a much better fit for the visuals Pokémon can deliver. The cities and towns in all the recent games have looked good, but it’s the open-area wilds that were downright Nintendo 64-like at points in their lack of polish. Making a game that’s entirely set in a city, the one thing that has looked good stylistically in all the recent Pokémon games, is a smart idea.
It’s not just the choice to change setting that may work in Legends: Z-A’s favor however, as there’s also the change in scale. Following on from Scarlet and Violet’s undercooked open-world, it’s a great idea from a design standpoint to scale back and try and hone focus on what Game Freak are able to accomplish with their experience at hand. They can make good individual areas on Switch, and the tightly controlled Jubilife Village of Legends: Arceus or the linear walkways of Pokémon Sword and Shield can even look great at times. Therefore, shrinking the scope of Legends: Z-A to a single city should allow them to use that experience in making good-looking enclosed areas and cities to an entire game. I’m honestly really looking forward to seeing what the developers and artists can do making an entire Pokémon game set in one specific place.
Behind the scenes, there’s even some technical differentiation between Legends: Z-A and other recent Pokémon outings. The lighting style used is now a lot softer, and this combined with the change to less realistic Pokémon models and a more saturated color scheme pivots the game’s art direction away from realism and more towards that of a cartoon or anime. That seems to be a great choice for Legends: Z-A, and one that proved successful for titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where a lessened focus on realism and embracing of color and soft lighting was able to create a sleeker and more stylized experience. Visual presentation is about more than just graphical performance, and with Legends: Z-A bringing down the scale, turning up the color and softening the lighting on character models, it’s creating a much more pleasant image to look at.
Let’s move away from the superficial visual element though, and instead turn our sights onto gameplay. Legends: Z-A is set to introduce potentially the biggest ever shakeup to the Pokémon formula with the introduction of real-time battling. Gone is the turn-based system of almost 30 years of Pokémon history – a method even used by the last Legends game – in favor of a combat style that every Pokémon anime fan has dreamed of.
Combat is now done by moving your character and their Pokémon, and selecting which move to use in the moment. Moves have their own reach and cooldown times, giving a real-time action combat vibe to Pokémon battles, and bringing the combat much closer to that as portrayed in the anime. Pokémon can even dodge the moves put out by the enemy trainer or wild Pokémon, with the player entirely responsible for how the battle plays out. No long-winded animations and text boxes to scroll through, and no RNG to decide which moves land and which miss. The power is in our hands for the first time!
This shift away from turn-based battles also comes with some other changes. As was seen in the extended gameplay look, it seems that Pokémon on the verge of fainting can now be caught once defeated. It’s an experience every kid has been through, feeling the disappointment in-game that once a Pokémon is knocked out it is gone for good, despite the anime’s portrayal being almost the complete opposite. Things are different in Legends: Z-A now though, and I can’t wait to try and catch my favorite Pokémon – or even moreso, their shinies – without fear of landing a killing blow to make it all disappear!
To me, all these changes we’re seeing with Legends: Z-A suggests that perhaps Game Freak has finally learned their lesson. After the mainline games felt increasingly rushed, and arguably in some ways became stagnant, Game Freak have taken their time to actually try something new. By the time of release, Pokémon Legends: Z-A will have the longest development time of any mainline game, a direct contrast to the fan complaint that the games have been rushed and pushed out as soon as possible. The Pokémon Company themselves even acknowledged that they can’t just keep rushing things, so not only did they acknowledge a problem – they’ve done something about it. This extra effort, to me, certainly seems to have affected the final product in an exciting way.
As well as a longer development time, I also just feel like the vibe for Legends: Z-A is different from other recent Pokémon releases. It feels celebratory of Pokémon’s legacy without dedicating everything to Gen 1 as is often an issue when Pokémon celebrates anything. The starters represent Gen 2 and Gen 5, and the game is even set within the most underrated region of them all with Kalos. We barely saw anything from Gen 6’s Kalos, with no expansions or sequels to Pokémon X and Y ever given. Now though we find ourselves revisiting the region on a new console, with all-new combat, and Game Freak are even embracing the long-lost fandom dream of a Pokémon Z by using the letter as part of the title. I just can’t help but feel like Legends: Z-A exists to prove a point: Game Freak is listening, learning, and is capable of doing something different and reinvigorating perhaps overlooked and underappreciated parts of Pokémon’s history.
The final reason I’m particularly excited for Legends: Z-A is also the most speculative, but I’ve just got to address it. Legends: Z-A launches late in 2025, with the Japanese trailer specifically citing sometime in autumn, so between September and November. The Switch 2 is also set to release this year, and for sales reasons is all but guaranteed to be coming during or before November. This would make Legends: Z-A the first Pokémon game to launch during the Switch 2 era, and it’s hard not to get excited by that potential.
A lot of the issues that plagued the visual and technical performance of recent Pokémon games comes down to poor optimization of the Switch’s limited power. You can make magic with the Switch, but it takes experience and time that Game Freak seemingly didn’t possess. One way to get around this, without actually putting in effort, would just be to brute force the specs of the system up so it would run poorly optimized things at least a bit better. The Switch 2 is set to be significantly more powerful than the Switch, so even if Legends: Z-A is a stuttering mess, players may have the nuclear option to just use the stronger console to run it better.
Now, ideally we won’t have to do this, and Game Freak will have optimized Legends: Z-A for the Switch it’s set to launch on, and will support the Switch 2 with an enhanced version of the game. As I said earlier, it seems they’ve learned their lesson and are playing into their strengths with this title, so I’d rather not regret all these words and they release another broken mess. Even so, the looming Switch 2 could present an exciting opportunity to really ensure that a Pokémon game actually looks and runs well in the year of 2025.
And that’s all the reasons that I’m really looking forward to Pokémon Legends: Z-A! From enhanced focus on what could make the visuals better, to series-altering gameplay changes, and The Pokémon Company actually listening to fans and doing what they said they would in giving a game longer to cook, there’s a lot of reasons I’m particularly hyped. Are you looking forward to Pokémon Legends: Z-A? Why or why not? Sound off in the comments below, and keep your eyes on GameLuster for more breaking gaming news and Pokémon coverage.
