Pokemon Legends Z-A really should have been a slam dunk for me. Arceus is my favorite non-romhack Pokemon game, and XY holds a special place as the game that brought me back to the franchise after skipping two generations. It seemed like a match made in heaven, and with the initial pitch of the game sounding like a Legends version of Haussman’s renovation of Paris, I was ready to see a 19th century take on Kalos just like Arceus treated us to the early history of Sinnoh. Alas, whatever the Legends moniker is supposed to mean, it apparently does not refer to being set in the legendary past of the Pokemon world. This is just a sequel to XY.
Still, there’s nothing inherently wrong with producing the Z the 3DS never did. The game makes a poor first impression with a tedious one to two hour tutorial that could have been an email, but things rapidly get better once it deems you worthy of freedom at the start of the fifth mission. At that moment, you go directly from being forced to follow the exact path the game has laid out for you to having access to everything in Lumiose outside of a handful of story areas and rooftops. It could be overwhelming for some players, but I loved being able to explore the city, take full advantage of the new avatar customization options, and build the party I wanted from the Pokemon available at that point.
I’ll come back to how GameFreak’s approach to world building develops from there, but for now, let’s segway to how Z-A‘s core gameplay loop works. Catching Pokemon is essentially the same as in Arceus: you either sneak around and try to hit them in the butt with a Pokeball for a boosted catch chance or you battle them and catch them when they’re weak like in every other game. The only new piece of the formula here is that Pokemon stay stunned for a couple of seconds after being knocked out, which gives you one chance to catch them with greatly boosted odds. It’s a welcome twist that helps a lot with catching low level Pokemon that you can’t avoid taking out in one hit. Other than that, you’re basically playing Arceus in a city most of the time.
As for battles, Z-A went with a real time system that will be divisive. You run around the battle area with your Pokemon vaguely following you and use Zelda-style Z-targeting to lock on to your opponents, at which point you can chose a move to use. Moves have cooldowns instead of PP, and the Speed stat somehow influences how long those cooldowns are. That’s all you really need to know for simple moves like tackle – you say to use it, your Pokemon runs over and does it, and then you wait for the cooldown to reset. Repeat until someone loses. It gets more interesting with more advanced moves that might set hazards on the map, give you an invulnerability window during the attack, or inflict status conditions. It still largely feels like the Pokemon battling we’ve always known, but at the same time it’s so different that old tier lists and strategies will be largely meaningless. It’s plenty of fun to explore in single player, and could potentially be even better in competitive since it trashed existing metas about as thoroughly as it possibly could have.
Even so, the new system comes with its own drawbacks. Most obviously, GameFreak completely removed abilities, presumably because it would have been too much to rework all of them to fit this system. It’s probably a positive if you’re a kid playing your first Pokemon game, since otherwise there’d be a huge amount to learn here, but if you’ve a series veteran, it’s very jarring to have so many Pokemon missing their defining features. We’re talking Eelektross that are weak to ground, Roselia without Poison Point, and newly snow-free Abamasnow. Beyond that, the system as a whole suffers from communication issues. The move screen only tells you the power, damage type, and cooldown value of an attack alongside a brief description, but that omits a huge amount of information in the new system. It doesn’t tell you anything about range, area of effect, piercing damage, windup time before dealing damage, the existence of invulnerability windows, and it’s not even clear what some of the status effects do unless you go looking for it. Some of these might sound like minor omissions, but when you try to use Self Destruct in battle and realize it announces itself so long before doing damage that you’ll never be able to hit anything except frozen Pokemon, you’ll wish the game had bothered to tell you.
The final new pieces of battle content are the Z-A Royale and Rogue Mega Pokemon battles. The former takes place at night and sees you running around a designated segment of the city beating the stuffing out of pushover trainers with teams of two or three. You earn points and medals for every trainer you beat, with points determining when you can advance the story and medals being converted into money at dawn. The most interesting parts are that you can ambush KO the trainer’s first Pokemon if you sneak up on them and that you can find cards that give you big bonuses for completing challenges. It’s a fun system, but held back by how useless the opponents are and the tendency for the game to spawn cards that aren’t achievable with your party. As for Rogue battles, they’re the answer to the boss battles in Arceus, except they’re kind of lame now. You battle a big Mega-Evolved Pokemon with an absurd health bar that can effectively only be harmed by attacks from a different Megamon, but even then you’re usually doing scratch damage. There’s a bit of fun to be had from dodging out of the way of the boss’s attacks, at least, though they’re so much easier than Arceus bosses that you’re mostly just grinding down that health bar painfully slowly. Completing these rewards you with a mega stone, and you are going to do a lot of them.
And a quick aside on Mega Evolution: I’m not convinced it has a positive impact on the game. So many Pokemon have mega forms now that it hardly feels special, and the mega forms are so strong and so routinely necessary for the story that it makes non-megas feel like wasted slots. Some of the new Mega designs are quite good, at least, but others just look like someone had a field day with the stretch tool in Blendr. It feels closer to the impact G-Max had on SwSh than how Megas were used previously.
Now let’s get back to the worldbuilding on offer. I have the impression that someone at Gamefreak really just wanted to make a Yakuza game. This gets really obvious during a chapter of the game that may as well just have been lifted from one of those, but you can also see it in the pacing of the sidequests and the decision to set everything in a small but (theoretically) dense urban map. Unfortunately, I don’t think GameFreak really understood what makes RGG’s series work. Yakuza maps are very small entirely urban, yes, but they’re also richly detailed and make use of every corner for some part of the game. Lumiose, by contrast, is largely a maze of undecorated and uninteractive buildings. Yakuza sidequests, like Z-A sidequests, basically all end in a fight, but they take wild and unpredictable paths to get there. Z-A sidequests largely start with “fight me” and then immediately end. Worst of all is that there’s almost no sense of progression. You get new wild areas to access after each chapter, yes, but they all feel similar and basically nothing else of consequence changes. Nearly everything else about Lumiose stays the same throughout the game. You’re not going to be finding new accessible buildings or side activities, bar some really minor ones, nor do you really even get new traversal abilities like in Arceus. There’s one sad glide ability you get halfway through, and that’s it. This is not a game that gives you the tools or reasons to explore.
The other part to worldbuilding is, of course, story, and it sucks here. There’s just not any other way to say it. Legends Z-A is constantly bombarding you with cutscenes if you’re doing the main campaign, but it features one of the flattest casts I’ve ever seen. Nobody has any motivations for doing anything, which the game actually points out, nor does anyone experience noteworthy character growth at any point. Your rival is the worst, because there’s an entire chapter devoted to how his obsessive belief that he needs to solve everyone’s problems just creates more problems for everyone around him, but then the game does literally nothing with that thread. He just keeps making problems for you to deal with. It isn’t the worst story I’ve ever seen in a game, but you are forced to engage with it for far, far too long for as low effort as it is. I feel like the scenario for Z-A was originally developed to be a 3DS game and it got revived with minimal modification in 2025. The plot is heavily tied to XY, but makes minimal effort to explain itself if, like most kids, you haven’t played it or, like most adults, it’s a distant memory. Many of the character moments would also have had more impact had they featured the cast you met throughout XY‘s journey instead of the crew Z-A hastily assembles over its final few chapters. There’s a whole lot of “I love Lumiose!” without ever providing much explanation for why most of these people care, let alone why you should.
It all builds up to what is possibly the most tedious final sequence I’ve ever been put through. You’re forced to do five consecutive battles against swarms of Mega Pokemon that have been given the absurd HP buffs of bosses without getting any of the fun extra mechanics of a boss fight. It’s a bunch of regular Pokemon fights where your opponents take a billion hits to go down, the targeting system is hopelessly outmatched by how much is going on, and anything that can’t mega evolve is almost completely useless. There’s no strategy to any of it since you can barely see what’s going on and have to make do with attacking whatever you happen to lock on to, and it’s only broken up by repetitive cutscenes and on-rails walking scenes. This all builds up to a final boss fight that has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. You fight two enemies that are just recolors over three stages that are completely identical. The enemies are typeless, so it doesn’t matter at all what attacks you use, have the stupid HP that is only hurt by mega attacks, and spam moves that your Pokemon has no hope of dodging, so there’s nothing to be done except mindlessly use whatever attack is available and use healing items at every opportunity. It would have been a terrible fight if it was only one stage long, but making you repeat the same thing three times with absolutely nothing of consequence changing is truly an abomination. It’s possible that the postgame is better, but I have no desire to play any more of this game after that.
And now a quick aside for some missed opportunities I couldn’t fit anywhere else: The avatar customization is the strongest it has been since SM, but it’s disappointing to not unlock anything significant as the game goes on and you’re largely locked into streetwear so that you fit in with the other party characters. It isn’t anywhere near as flexible or varied as the options in the 3DS games. There are a grand total of zero Kalosian Pokemon, which is deeply disappointing after the creative new forms in Arceus. There is a parkour system, but it’s so rigid that you can really only go where GameFreak wanted in the way that they wanted. Lastly, this has basically nothing to do with the gameplay of Arceus outside of the catching system and there’s nothing legendary about the setting. I don’t know why this has the title it does unless GameFreak sees Legends as a series of unrelated spinoffs instead of creative historical settings, which would be deeply disappointing.
Conclusion
Overall, this game is a mess. It had a strong enough post-tutorial start that I really thought it was destined for a good spot on my top games of 2025 list. The battle system has potential with more refinement, bringing megas back was a good idea in theory, and of course I’m thrilled to see meaningful avatar customization after that system was gutted in SV. But every step forward feels like it comes with two steps back. Some of this could be fixed eventually – I would not be shocked if updates refine the battle controls or presentation and the DLC might give you more to do on the map. But a lot of it is beyond saving. There’s no saving the repetitive campaign without an update big enough to be 2.0, and the story needs to be completely trashed. Even if the world is more interesting after the DLC, it’s hardly acceptable to have to wait four months and pay an extra $30 to have anything worth exploring. In the end, Z-A is a bold experiment, but not a successful one. I can’t recommend it.
Rating: 60%
Price: $70
Time to beat: 20 hours. I mostly rushed but did some side content.