I finished Pokemon Legends Z-A
I finished this game on the train to GDC. I had a good time! It is a fun game, and very nearly a wonderful game. But it definitely feels like something that changed a lot during development.
Pokemon is the only brand I am stupid about; I generally play all the games in the franchise where you can catch and battle Pokemon. I think my favorite of the last many years has been Pokemon Legends: Arceus, which was loads of fun to play, and very "action-y" feeling, with running, dodging, and a lot of Pokemon you could ride like vehicles. Some people thought it looked bad, but I thought it was the best-looking Pokemon game of the last decade, by a lot.
Z-A is, I guess, a sequel, but it abandons a lot of the stuff that I most admired about Arceus. The action-y stuff feels kind of shoehorned in, and the traversal actions are a lot more limited and odd. Specifically, there is a very weird gap-crossing jump which can only be activated in midair. Once activated, it allows you to make a weird U-shaped swooping leap?? The way you move in the air genuinely makes it quite hard to tell where you'll end up. It's so odd that it feels like it's from another videogame.
The combat feels like a half-step between a truly "action combat" Pokemon game and a JRPG. It's splashy, spammy stuff - all abilities are on cooldowns and enemy pokemon attacks can hit your player character. Some fights are less about launching attacks and more about making sure your trainer character physically avoids the enemy's attacks.
Unfortunately, this means that the whole game really ends up becoming about Pokemon positioning. Where your character is standing affects where a Pokemon will launch its attack from. If it's a ranged attack, they'll run over to stand next to you before firing it off. This can be super inconvenient. Dodge rolling away from an attack and then firing off a command would sometimes cause my Pokemon to just run into the attack themselves. I spent a lot of time being annoyed at my Pokemon and feeling incompetent!
But - I insist - The game is still fun! It is absolutely fun to obliterate an enemy Pokemon with a massive move that fills an entire city intersection. It looks cool and it feels cool and it feels like the Pokemon Company is slowly approaching a modern realization of the promise they made to our imaginations 30 years ago.
But as fun as it is, it's not wonderful. The fighting is more about spamming attacks and making mistakes than about planning and preparing for fights. I'm used to Pokemon games having those moments where planning and preparing actually matters, but I didn't really encounter anything like that in Z-A. I can forgive that, though! I've been wanting to play an action combat Pokemon game since I was a kid.
I did spend a lot of time thinking about how Arceus felt so much more like a proper action combat game than Z-A did. It had turn-based combat, but it had real-time stealth, and Pokemon you could use as vehicles. Movement decisions felt like they mattered. I did not often feel like they mattered in this game.
The biggest thing that made all of this worth it for me is that the world is filled with very silly side quests. I have been told that this makes the game feel like a Yakuza game. I haven't ever gotten more than a few hours into a Yakuza game, but I understand that they are stuffed with extremely funny side quests. The Z-A quests are all about making you laugh, and I was routinely impressed.
While the joke quality is strong, the story material is mid-to-bad. That said, I don't normally judge the stories of Pokemon games the way I judge the stories of other games. They have been pretty bad for a pretty long time, and I don't really expect to see that change. They are clearly focused on appealing to very young kids, but they don't seem to respect very young kids, and don't seem to trust themselves to tell a story for older kids that younger kids could still muddle through. (Several older Pokemon games, I think, fall into that category! But they don't make 'em like they used to.)
It's clear that there is some internal creative tension in the company over who their audience is - babies or teens? - and the Legends games are the compromise. Arceus really seemed like a game for teens, with action gameplay appropriate for older kids and a story to match. There are some dark twists in Arceus's third act where characters treat you in an emotionally unfair, cruel way, in a genuinely interpersonally mean way, and I found myself thinking: at last!! A Pokemon game for anyone older than 8!!
Z-A walks that back pretty hard. The characters are all teens, but there's no emotional tension and no complex or dark moments whatsoever. I thought the fashion maven character Naveen was really well-written... but he was so well-written that he just drew further attention to how anodyne and forgettable the other characters were!
The issues with Pokemon narrative all seem to come from some kind of internal goals struggle. The games are routinely simpler and limper than they need to be - to the point where it sometimes feels like they are letting their assumptions about a very young audience get in the way of doing ambitious or emotionally complex stuff. Scarlet and Violet tried out a lot of narrative design techniques, and had some really emotionally dark moments! But all the cool stuff happened in the last third of the game. Every risk and innovation was all piled up on top of itself in the last few hours... almost as if they were afraid of scaring off younger kids in the first half.
I don't think they should be scared of this stuff. I read some of the gnarly Pokemon shonen manga when I was, like, nine. I was so, so excited about the sequence where a Nidoking actually tries to kill the protagonist. The protagonist stabs out its eye with a rock!! They run around in the forest bleeding and screaming! This, to me, was exciting! I genuinely think these games are failing their audience when they keep everything anodyne and placid.
Throughout my time with this game - with the jank ass action gameplay, the spammy combat, and the weird limp story - I kept marveling at how much fun I was having. It really is greater than the sum of its parts. It really is a lot of fun to explode an enemy Pokemon with a giant earthquake in the middle of Paris. It really is fun to Mega Evolve these fuckers. I love Mega Evolution.
However I also spent the entire time I was playing this game thinking about how much more fun I had with Arceus! I may be a freak to love it, but that game was great, and it had the most beautiful stylized skyboxes of any game ever. Genuinely. You should play it and see them!