Pikachu

Even after a little under an hour of hands-on play, it’s clear that Pokemon Legends: Z-A is the most interesting and unique Pokemon title since, er… the last one of these, when Game Freak and The Pokemon Company put out 2022’s Pokemon Legends: Arceus. Now established as what looks like a permanent secondary strand of the ‘main line’ Pokemon titles, Z-A continues with the more bold and experimental development philosophy of Arceus – though this time, I expect further temerity of design – and with it, perhaps a more mixed measure of success.

Back when Legends: Arceus was released, we at VG247 were positively frothing with excitement at the thought of where this series could go. Seeing Z-A, we clearly approached this differently to Pokemon’s developer stewards. We envisioned ‘Legends’ coming to mean Pokemon stories set in the past – Galar as Victorian England, Unova’s Poke-New York in the roaring 20s, or Kalos in the grip of a less bloodless version of the French Revolution where the people and nobility settled matters with Pokemon battles.

In the end we did get Pokemon’s version of France, but not during the revolution. Z-A is once again set in Pokemon’s version of ‘today’, but this time it has a unique twist: the entire game is set in one enormous city, leveraging the status of Paris (in Pokemon’s world known as Lumiose City) as a major built-up area to provide a network of buildings, backstreets, tiny city parks and the like as a new sort of Pokemon world. In this, the spirit of Legends: Arceus is alive but in a mirror image – that game was sparse, full of rolling fields and the like where you’d crawl through long grass to try to surprise an unsuspecting critter or trainer. Z-A is dense, and while things like stealth still exist you’ll instead be hiding around the corner of buildings or behind a parked car.

There is a structural difference to the design of the world, then – but the real significant change comes in combat. For the first time in such a prominent Pokemon release, Z-A shifts to real-time battles. This is still absolutely a role-playing game – but battles now have an extra shot of action-like feeling to them.

Starter for 10-year-olds. | Image credit: Pokemon/Nintendo

Moves are no longer limited by ‘PP’ which drains with each use, for instance – they’re now on a cooldown. New alongside this shift is the fact that battle placement matters – if a Pokemon isn’t physically in the way of a move, that attack will simply whiff. Those previously-mentioned narrow city streets make tactical battlegrounds; a parked taxi is suddenly not just set dressing, but something you as a trainer or your Pokemon can duck behind to avoid incoming attacks.

The act of moment-to-moment play feels a little more segmented, too. The city is a civilized place, so battles can’t happen just anywhere. ‘Wild Zones’ are designated areas where untamed Pokemon roam free, and this is where you’ll be able to enter to catch and battle unaccompanied Pokemon.

Once night falls, trainers can head to the similarly-defined Battle Zones for fights. This is where the titular Z-A Royale takes place: the protagonist tasked with battling their way up from Rank Z through to Rank A. Gym showdowns are replaced with ‘promotion matches’ – gather enough points by defeating opponents in Battle Zones and you’ll gain a ticket that can then be used to go and fight a specific challenger in order to rank up.

The structural change is relatively fascinating and feels like it’ll satisfy. Such regimented segmentation always has the risk of feeling suffocating, but in this hands-on it all tracks and makes sense – and within each zone, some delightful moments await.

Gotta match em all up. | Image credit: Nintendo

I enjoyed, for instance, how perilous the Wild Zone I got to test could feel. The majority of Pokemon there were breezy to battle and acquire, and catching in particular feels more kind in this game because you get a shot (though no guarantee) at catching any defeated wild Pokemon even if you deplete all of their HP. This leads to a generally chill time that channels tooling around the world of Legends: Arceus chain-catching stuff looking for shinies. But then when exploring I clamber atop a rooftop and discover a high-level ‘Alpha’ Pikachu. Its eyes glow red, and it’s absolutely feral.

I try to fight it, expecting the usual Pokemon stuff – being relatively able to cheese through such a fight with healing items and the like. My notes tell a different story. Scrawled hurriedly in my notepad is the following, with grammar tidied and one word not suitable for a preview of a game for children replaced with a bit of blasphemy: “Terrifying level 40 Pikachu. Careful strength and weakness use gives you a chance. Actually, it’s too hard. Oh god, it followed me off the rooftop.”

It’s in this moment, jumping off a rooftop to what I think is safety only to be followed by this hulking, evil Pikachu, that Z-A most thoroughly clicks. Though it feels like tradition with Pokemon, such emotions do inevitably come with caveats.

For one, let’s talk about those environments. They shine in the battle zones, where those tight city streets lend themselves well to light-touch stealth encounters. Back in 1996, Pokemon introduced the concept of line-of-sight between Pokemon trainers initiating battle. If you meet gazes, you fight. Here, in an action RPG, with seamless fights, that concept comes to a pretty glorious natural conclusion. The tall grass stalking of the last game is a foundation; you add to that an urban labyrinth and you’re crouching behind a parked vehicle, or a conveniently-placed crate, waiting for a trainer to turn their back in order to land a sneak attack. Missions given to you in Battle Zones encourage you to engage in such tactics, too. In exploration, the fact you’re using such moves in real time out in the world means the act of using classic Pokemon skills to open up new areas and such feels much more organic than ever before.

But then there’s the flip side: in battle, these things are as much a frustrating obstacle as they are a tactical boon. I watched as a breathtakingly thick Pokemon took my orders to directly attack the enemy as one to stand behind a parked vehicle and whiff its key attack into it, because the enemy was on the other side. The world oscillates in that sense; the brilliance of simple stealth, but then frustration in combat. How static and dead it can often feel, but then a real sense of explorative joy when you stand high on a rooftop and see a distant collectible elsewhere in the city’s sprawl.

Hippos on the roof!? | Image credit: Nintendo

I guess what I’m saying is that it feels like Pokemon, right? These games have long felt like a jumble of strange and fascinating contradictions; of boons and trade-offs. Legends: Z-A feels like it too will strike that balance; sometimes brilliant, sometimes frustrating, but always strangely gripping.

All of this is said, of course, from the standpoint of an extremely short hands-on experience. These games run to as much as 40x longer than what I played; and so it is too early to judge. What I see, in the end, is Pokemon’s caretakers taking a characteristically large swing – with equally characteristic restraint. The result seems to me to be most likely more reminiscent of Legends: Arceus than not – and for my money, that was the best Pokemon game in 20 years. It perhaps is therefore no surprise that I’m eagerly awaiting its release next month – when I can judge the complete package in full.

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