Pokémon Legends: Z-A - A Budget Game At A Premium Price (Review)
- James Stephanie Sterling
- Oct 24
- 10 min read
Pokémon Legends: Z-A
Released: October 16th, 2025
Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: Nintendo, The Pokémon Company
Systems: Switch, Switch 2 (both reviewed)
Pokémon Legends: Z-A has kicked up some online discussion about whether the series should have voice acting by now, and I think it’s a fair question - not necessarily because voice acting in and of itself is the issue, but because the lack of it is a symptom of a far bigger problem. It’s a problem that’s been going on for a while but it’s really come to a head with this installment.
What really should be talked about is how, despite being one of the most lucrative media franchises in the world, Pokémon is some real cheapskate shit.
Basic visuals, lifeless animations, barren environments, simplistic gameplay systems, minimalist audio, there’s a litany of cut corners that might be seen as laudable budgetary restraint if not for the thick fog of complacency that clings to every threadbare facet. Z-A is not just modestly made, it’s frugally cobbled together in ways that no other game could get away with.
By this point, Game Freak makes Bethesda look industrious. The laurels are crushed flat from how heavily they’ve been rested upon, and when you look at just how shielded from criticism the series has been over the last decade, it’s easy to see why.
Look, I don’t hate this game. I’ve as much nostalgia for Pokémon as anyone else, and they put Ekans in this one, so obviously I’m going to be tricked into liking it more than I should. The thing is, Pokémon Legends: Arceus represented a genuine step forward for the series, and Z-A just throws all that advancement in the fucking bin.
The move from open wildlands to a single city environment certainly doesn’t help. While the rolling hills of Hisui were far from lush, they were downright dense with detail when compared to the sterility found in Lumiose’s uninspired streets.
Z-A gives us a bland collection of mildly textured buildings that cannot be entered beyond those few relevant to the story. Shops throwing up holographic browsers outside their front door provide an excuse to cop out of including more interiors than is absolutely necessary. Windows and other building details are glorified Jpegs, visual effects are nominal at best, almost all 3D models are copypasted to the nth degree, and everything looks so flat.
Many of the NPCs stand statically upright like Playmobil figures, staring lifelessly ahead as if to emphasize how cheap the whole thing is. The main characters aren't much better - Canari can apparently play videogames with her hands on her lap while generic bleeping sounds play because animating a gamer doing gaming is too much to expect from the makers of this immensely profitable series.
Lumiose is a place of absolute bare minimums. In fact, “minimum viable product” is a term that kept coming to mind as I trudged my way through Z-A's empty world of plastic people and cardboard houses. Enough work has been put into the game to make it functional, but to want much past that is to have standards far in excess of those who threw this shit together. It’s more product than game, crafted purely to get as big a return for as little investment, effort, and thought as possible.
On top of that, the grifters selling such shit are charging a $10 premium to run the fucking thing at 60fps. It’s rather screwed up that I’m the one bracing to be portrayed as the villain yet again by a fandom that’s being quite genuinely taken for granted and exploited.
Oh well.
Legends Z-A maintains the basic framework of its predecessor, being a more immediate and action-focused take on the Pokémon formula. You can capture creatures in real time without the need to battle them, upping your success rate by catching them unawares. That said, they’re notably more petulant this time around, so battle is often necessary. This is likely due to the fact that conflict is now as seamless as ball tossing.
Turn-based battles are gone in favor of real-time combat… sort of. In essence, you’re still issuing commands to creatures that exchange blows in sequence, making it more akin to an active-time system than truly direct action, but it’s still a significant shakeup that could be legitimately great if it ever gets the refinement it clearly needs.
First, the positives - battling feels so much livelier and more challenging now that everything is on the clock, and governing attacks with cooldowns instead of restricting how often they can be performed improves the flow of the entire game. Cooldowns also make status moves far more attractive.
When it comes to the solo experience, anything that didn’t deal direct damage has always felt like a wasted turn, since any confrontation is normally over in a round or two unless you aren’t leveling up as you progress. Z-A’s fights pack more “turns” in, making passive damage and stat buffs an attractive prospect between more direct attacks.
While it’s still fairly easy to reach a point where walloping enemies in one or two hits is the most efficient means of progress, I found way more bang for my buck with indirect abilities overall.
Immediate overworld battles make physical positioning a tactical consideration. Moves have their own ranges or areas of effect, and certain abilities make movement a pivotal part of how they function, such as warping a Pokémon next to its trainer after landing an attack. Timing your commands can allow for dodging the opponent’s offense in several ways, which is certainly nice in theory.
There’s promise to the system and I love a few of the ideas on display. If only the battles themselves weren’t a bloody mess.
Fight controls are serviceable but awkward as they try to also cope with ball lobbing and player movement. This manifests in little issues such as requiring you to manually disengage and reapply targeting if an enemy trainer switches Pokémon, or the target lock inconsistently breaking when environmental geometry gets in the way. The camera struggles a fair bit at times too.
Audiovisual feedback isn’t great with so much happening onscreen at once. Something as important as your monster’s health can get lost in the shuffle as you concentrate on other things, and the low HP alarm is drowned out by a cacophony of sound effects unless you mess with the audio balance. Battle updates scroll onscreen with such speed as to be borderline useless but still can’t keep up with what’s actually happening. It’s chaos, and not in a fun way.
Gauging attack range is trickier than it should be. Pokémon try to close distances at an unreliable rate, moves come with their own animations of varying length, and you have little else besides a basic vibe to figure out what and when your offense will hit. On top of that, the enemy will be spamming moves and encouraging you to do the same, which puts a dampener on more nuanced tactics.
By far the biggest problem is the laughable Pokémon AI, which struggles with pathfinding even in a world as sparse as Z-A’s. The little bastards are as likely to negotiate their way around a solid object as fruitlessly attempt to attack through it, and since they’re bound to the player by an invisible leash, it’s very easy to disrupt them by moving. Of course, they’ll happily walk over traps or AoE effects as they reposition themselves of their own volition.
Your Pokémon can miss their attacks for any number of silly reasons, be it facing the wrong way, forgetting to move into range, or whatever else. The oversized Alpha type Pokémon deserve special mention for being big enough that their attacks’ hitboxes may be too high up and shoot harmlessly overhead. Battling is like a layer cake of design flaws.
None of it is so bad it’ll cost you a whole fight, but it’s nonetheless the kind of unpolished experience that would only be considered acceptable in a Pokémon game. Combat’s core concept is welcome but its execution is clunky, rudimentary and oftentimes amateurish. For all their increased potential, most fights really boil down to repeatedly hitting a confirmation button as each move becomes available and hoping your dumbass monster doesn’t fuck up.
When it comes to simplistic jank, however, nothing can surpass Z-A’s implementation of “stealth,” the increased focus of which shines a searing spotlight on how archaic and undercooked the game truly is.
While sneaking in bushes to get the jump on Pokémon was a part of Arceus, such creepery has a more prominent role this time as an integral part of progress. Lumiose’s titular Z-A trainer tournament has participants stalking each other to acquire tickets and qualify for ranked battles. Each night, a sector of the city becomes The Purge, where danger looms high and trainers battle each other on sight.
Here is where stealth is given its time to shine… and falls flat on its face in the sorry process.
Narratively, Battle Zones are supposed to be full of paranoia fuel, with opportunistic trainers bushwhacking each other - this would of course require far too much development on Game Freak’s part, so in practice every opponent stands out in the open and you have to make your Pokémon attack theirs without being spotted. Doing so essentially gives you a free hit and avoids having a similar freebie scored on yourself.
Battle Zones aren’t designed with stealth in mind, because that’d be a good thing. Instead, you have to keep the enemy’s line of sight broken with whatever sporadic details exists in the environment. The idea is to get your Pokémon - which rival trainers apparently can’t see - close enough to hit theirs without the trainer seeing you first. If they do spot you first, it is immediately treated as if you were the one ambushed, even if your Pokémon was in the literal process of hitting theirs.
In my experimentation, any attempt to start a battle face-to-face was treated as if I was disadvantaged, which makes pathetic sense on a meta level since enemies can't actually sneak up on you with their almost nonexistent AI. Instead of giving us the Battle Zone as presented in the story, we have this inelegant and unbalanced situation where we’re supposed to just imagine we were snuck up on whenever we're attacked. What a dumb fucking system.
Seriously, what an absolutely stupid and lazy load of crap. I won’t apologize for calling it lazy either, because that’s what it is. Let’s be honest, this can’t truly be called a stealth system - it’s an approximation of one, hamfistedly appropriating the existing barebones gameplay in a way that gives players the gist of a concept rather than actually delivering on it.
I’m not sure anything Game Freak’s done has been a bigger self report than the Battle Zone's shoddy design. It throws the studio’s bankruptcy of fucks into sharp relief.
Can you imagine a world in which Pokémon games were made to a standard which the publisher could easily afford instead of the respective equivalent of pocket money? Can you imagine if they had the audiovisual presentation and richness of gameplay fans expect as standard from Nintendo’s first party titles? I don’t advise you to envision it, because it only makes the reality more fucking tragic.
Besides, the game keeps your imagination occupied. For example, Lumiose is full of sports courts where NPC “battles” are represented by combatants standing still and staring at each other. Just like with stealth, or Canari’s gaming, or so much else, we’re supposed to mentally fill in the blanks where the game just couldn’t be bothered to show us anything. Essentially, we players must become game designers by finishing the development of Pokémon Z-A in our fucking heads.
Anyway, at least we finally have good character customization options. It’s taken far too long, but Lumiose’s many outfitters provide a range of clothing that’s oceanic in breadth when compared to previous games. Needless to say I’ve spent much of my time going through all the hats, boots, bags, and skirt-shorts hybrids because actual skirts or dresses don’t exist due to either silly modesty or further laziness.
One of the most fun and interesting parts of Arceus was the fact you could ride a growing assortment of Pokémon to better navigate the world and open up new methods of exploration. This was not carried over to Z-A, despite such a bland city benefiting tremendously from having a more fun means to get around. It’s another example of how this game simply couldn’t be fucked to put in more than the very basics.
Mounts have been replaced with awful “platforming” that challenges players by exploiting the lack of a jump button to make easily traversable gaps and ledges completely unnavigable. Eventually your magic phone will help you do a weird double jump with a horrible swinging arc that feels bloody awful to use. It would’ve been great to scale buildings on a monster rather than use shitty elevators and ladders, but it’s a key feature that was actively cut from the game during development.
Depending on how grown-up you want your framerate, they’re charging between sixty and seventy dollars for this shaved skeleton of a game.
Pokémon’s insipid writing has eroded my tolerance at last with Z-A’s garbage script. Yet again I’m scrolling through silent dialogue to read cultlike sentiments about how “wondrous” Pokémon really are and how “people and Pokémon need to work together” - the usual thematic dead ends that are never meaningfully explored. I’m surrounded by supporting characters who’d be bloody tedious if they weren’t so fucking detestable, and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of this one-note world populated by total imbeciles.
[Note: I agree with responders a little, the story has its moments, but its slow pacing killed my interest by the time it got to the interesting mob arc. I find Team MZ irritating, especially after the scene in which a kid is peer pressured into telling you - a stranger - about uncomfortable family issues. Mostly though, I’m just sick of Pokémon’s world after two decades of vapid nonsense. That might be a little unfair to this game’s plot, but series fatigue is a powerful drug.]
I’m not sure there’s anything else I want to discuss further. It’s not like anyone at The Pokémon Company felt the game was worth any attention, so why should I? Given a skeleton crew of developers who had chump change to work with, Z-A’s lack of investment and shameless content cutting is evident throughout the entire vapid experience.
This is the culmination of years of complacency. Game Freak has been taught time and time again that it can pump out any old guff and people will buy it in droves. It’s a disgusting attitude, and it’s been laid so bare here that even a portion of the series’ usual adherents have finally started to see it. What a shame that Pokémon Legends: Arceus pushed the series forward only to see its sequel drag everything right back again.
A shame and an abject waste.
If you took out the branding and populated it with generic creatures instead of marketable pocket monsters, Pokémon Legends: Z-A would be rightly seen as a sub-mediocre and sloppy RPG, the kind with 115 "mostly negative" user reviews on Steam. Game Freak knows how much grace the public affords Pokémon and has taken the absolute piss with it, churning out a cheap budget game with a premium price, expensive DLC, and a ten buck markup to get a decent framerate.
The audacity of this exploitative cash-in is honestly quite disgusting. At least Ekans is in it.
4/10
