A Charming Problem - Pokemon Legends Z-A

Pokemon Legends Z-A, is an evolution of the Legends format introduced with Pokemon Legends Arceus, now with real time battles, set in the Paris-inspired Lumiose City. With rouge mega evolved Pokemon running amok in the city, join forces with AZ and the rag tag group of friends in Hotel Z, as you battle you way through the citywide Z-A Royale tournament and discover just exactly what is causing the rouge Pokemon to Mega Evolve and cause havoc.

Introduction

Pokemon Legends Z-A is a lot better than what it looks like. While the game is rough around the edges, and does feel flat (both physically and in terms of gameplay) in certain places, I have found quite a bit to enjoy in traversing the city, and discovering how the different locations in the city actually map to the different kinds of Pokémon that are there. There is quite a lot of nooks and crannies that you can get lost or stuck in, and I regularly found myself running around and exploring quite a bit.

The battle system gets an amazing upgrade from the Legends Arceus game, now allowing for fully real time battling, with considerations to the positioning of both your Pokemon and your opponents Pokemon. There is quite a bit going on with regards to the positioning, as you can actually move your Pokemon around so that your enemies attack may miss, or you can use an area of effect move to hit multiple Pokemon at the same time.

Story and Dialogue

Personally, I do not play Pokemon games for the story, or the plot. I don't particularly care. I know that is a bit sacrilegious for Pokemon fans, but for me the allure of Pokemon has always been the core gameplay loop. I did go into Legends Z-A with a bit more of an open mind regarding the story, as both the fans, and GameFreak themselves made it seem like this game would somewhat continue story threads from the older games, but I do have some issues with the way the game handles its story and dialogue.

Dialogue

I cannot stress how much I disliked how much dialogue is in this game. I do think they could've shaved off quite a bit of dialogue while keeping the intent of the story.

There is a constant barrage of text boxes all the time. I do want to point out, that I did in fact button mash through several dozens of text boxes, and I was still able to follow the story quite comfortably.

In all honesty, I don't know if GameFreak should do something about it, while I didn't personally enjoy all of these text boxes, I know quite a few people who has.

Z-A Royale

Taking a bit from Need For Speed here, Legends Z-A has you roam the city during the day, catching and battling Pokemon in the Wild Zones, which are these zones designed by the City that has Pokemon living in it, while at nights one of these Zones gets designated as the Battle Zone, sometimes those zones may be outside of the wild zones as well.

You go into these Battle Zones at night, and challenge trainers, with each trainer you defeat you collect a certain number of points. Once you have accumulated enough points you get to do a promotion match with a certain trainer, who you would have to find on the map, and then defeat. You will then move up a rank.

While you are in the battle zones at night, there are these challenge cards that you can pick up. Completing them offers rewards including points to improve the speed at which you rank up. The challenges can be as simple as "Knockout 3 Pokemon with water-based moves", to more varied and complex challenges, that often require you to swap out Pokemon in your party, which adds some good variation if you're up to it.

At the end of every night, your points carry over into your rank progress bar, but also at the end of the night, these points are also multiplied by a multiplier to provide you with the game's in-game currency that you can use to buy items, Pokeballs, and items in the customization shops.

This is a bit of a spoiler, but as you are progressing in the game, there is a portion of the game where the game skips you thirteen ranks up in a single promotion match, and while that felt a bit cheap to do, looking back at it I realize that it would have bloated the game with with too many unnecessary battles.

Battle System

The new battle system relies a great deal on the positioning you choose for your Pokemon. If you are too far away from your target, your Pokemon will have to close the gap, or even return to you before executing certain kinds of moves. Different moves have different thresholds of needing to be close to you or the opponent. That does add a layer of strategy as well, because much like Pokemon Legends Arceus, you can be attacked and you incur damage. If you incur too much damage you faint, and you automatically forfeit the match. As a result, you will need to keep moving, always keeping an eye on the Pokemon and on the match at hand. This is especially needed when you are in a Wild Zone, and there are multiple Pokemon targeting you and your Pokemon.

Another interesting thing about the battle system, is that the game allows you to use physical objects as cover, or as shields, blocking you from getting damage. It is important to note however, the opposing team can also use the same thing to protect themselves.

One of the things I thought would have been cool, would have been if the moves that you use would have actually affect the environment itself. You know when you use a fire move, it would cause the trees or grass to burn, the water moves make make puddles of water everywhere, stuff like that.

Throughout the game, since you will be battling multiple Pokemon throughout, you will be required to lock on to certain Pokemon that you want your Pokemon to target and defeat before moving along to the others. I don't know if this is a bug or just a skill issue, but multiple times throughout the game, if I attempted to lock on to a Pokemon, I would have to press and un-press the lock-on button up to five times before the game registered that it needed to lock on to the Pokemon I wanted targeted. It was actually quite a frustrating part of the battling, that made me on multiple occasions simply turned the game off.

Despite my personal random issues, I do think that this battle system was one of the more fun battle systems I've played, not just in Pokemon, but in general. There is a lot of interesting ideas on display here, and I do think expanding on the battle system in the next Legends game, will continue to improve the enjoyment.

Mega Battles

The easiest way to think about Mega Battles, is to think about a raid battle from an MMO. You basically team up with your Pokemon, or with one of the friends you made along the way, and you are transported to a completely sectioned off map, where the mega evolved Pokemon is using indicators, choreographing its attacks and giving you a chance to respond. Obviously as the match goes on, this gets progressively harder to do, with more and more moves being dished out at you while you struggle to keep your head above water.

It was honestly an interesting way to handle these, the game also allows you to start at different stages once you defeat certain section of the health bar, in case you die faint.

It does allow for more interesting battle mechanics to be used, and often times they did in fact make use of it. I know there were multiple times where I really had to work to get this done.

Quests / Side Missions

The game also offers you side missions as part of the main game and just as something you can do after. I did do some, but it is important to note that there are close to two hundred side missions. Each with varying rewards, some provide you with items, and others help you progress and complete your Pokedex.

A good number of these missions also come from the detective agency, the main game will actually take you there for a mission to introduce the agency, and then you can visit the agency throughout the game to complete it, as a break from the main game.

Most of the side missions do in fact come from random NPCs throughout the city, allowing you to get more rewards, and learn more about the NPC and the city itself.

Customizations

A surprisingly bigger part of the game was the customizations on offer. There are so many shops around Lumiose City that provide you with new haircuts, new colours for outfits, new outfits entirely. Different styles of hats, backpacks, shoes, shorts, sunglasses, everything!

Not only that but many of the customizations are offered as a reward for doing side missions. I did do several extra side missions for the sole purpose of getting more rewards like this. While I did have my issues with the side missions, I do think that the customizations that are available are genuinely pretty impressive for Pokemon, and I do hope going forward we get more customizations. It would have been nice if there were some generic pieces for the Pokemon as well.

Mega Dimensions - DLC

I unfortunately did not purchase or play the Mega Dimensions DLC, while I am aware that a huge portion of the replayability of the game is in this section of the game, after my almost 30 hours of gameplay throughout the base game, I personally was not excited to go back in. Even though, it did look quite interesting.

Multiplayer

Believe it or not, the game actually has an online component, where you battle through the same Z-A ranks every season, while claiming rewards in an almost battle pass like way. I cannot say I bothered to play it, but I do believe for fans of the game who are itching to really eek every drop of gameplay out of this game, the multiplayer portion is a fun way to do it, that is in fact, baked into the base game.

Conclusion

Despite the many issues that persons online may have with GameFreak (myself including), and Nintendo, the fact remains that there are good bones here. While I cannot recommend it for just any and anybody (see Pokemon Pokoepia), Legends Z-A is a clear evolution of the Legends franchise, and there is a lot of good to experience here, if you play Pokemon or enjoy Pokemon in anyway, Legends Z-A will actually be quite a wonderful time, quirks and bugs alike.