The year was 2013, Lumoise was the city, and roller skates were all the rage. When you weren’t taking time out to ride a Skiddo across town, battle in a café or try out this newfangled Mega Evolution, you were doing tricks on your roller skates. Those halcyon days are long behind us. Pokémon X&Y are ancient, nobody roller skates anymore and Lumoise is not the city it once was. In Pokémon Legends: Z-A, it is much, much larger.
An urban redevelopment mission is underway with one core goal in mind: to turn the city into a place Pokémon and people can truly share. And boy have they done a lot – both to the city and to the game.
After getting off the train in the capital of the France-like Kalos region, you quickly see what the city has become. Back in 2013, Lumoise was a little more than two ring roads, with 10 ‘spoke’ roads reaching from the central hub to the rim. The geography is much the same in 2025, but buildings aren’t so much obstacles as they are your new playground. Much like in Assassin’s Creed, (almost) every rooftop is in reach. As long as it’s outside, there’s (almost) nowhere you can’t go.
This is important because the entire game takes place within the confines of the city. That may seem hair-raising, considering the number of biomes and regions seen in typical Pokémon games, but it really isn’t an issue. A few dozen hours in, and you’re still exploring new rooftops, catching new Pokémon and heading to newly converted patches of turf that have been given over to wild Pokémon.
These Wild Zones, as they’re dubbed, are essentially self-contained biomes, zoned off using holotech that keeps ordinary citizens out and wild Pokémon within. You can go in and catch Pokémon using the cool new dynamic battle feature, or you can leave them be. The choice is yours.
This dynamic battle system is very cool, shifting this series from turn-based battles to real time, where you actively run around and dish out commands to your current Pokémon. Rather than using traditional PP (stamina), each move has a cooldown. Transitioning between Wild Zones and the rest of the city is seamless, and you use the same system of attacks no matter where you are — whether that’s using Rock Smash on a boulder or Water Gun on an enemy Pokémon.
The battle system is nothing new in the wider scheme of things. It’ll be pretty rote for anyone who has played World of Warcraft, for example, but it’s new for Pokémon which has historically stuck to its guns on 1v1 battle systems where you and your Pokémon stand rooted to the spot. It feels, in many ways, like the boss battles from Pokémon Legends: Arceus, but throwing moves instead of rocks.
But where things get really like Arceus is once night falls and the Battle Zones pop up. This is all part of the Z-A Royale — a letter-based ranking system to prove once and for all that you are, indeed, the very best, like no one ever was.
The Royale is a fun twist on traditional trainer battles, and as soon as you enter the zone, you’re fair game. Much like your Hisuian predecessors, this has you sneaking around like a ninja. The aim is to unleash an opening attack on a rival trainer and their Pokémon while literally crouching behind a bush, sign or bin. There’s none of this ‘When your eyes meet’ nonsense — this is brutal, all out backstabbery of the Pokémon kind. Not only is this fair game, but it’s actively encouraged by the app governing the tournament. You get missions to do this that give you bonus points. Get enough points and you can take on a Promotion Match to rank up.
Your opponents will tell you they’re taking part so that they can impose their own weird ideals and schemes on the city, like outlawing non-taxi based transport so they can monopolise urban mobility. But you’re an upstanding citizen (brutal backstabbery aside)! You’re in it to heal Lumoise, the city you only just arrived in!
Heal it from what, you might ask? Well, that newfangled Mega Evolution is no longer new. Everyone knows you hold a keystone, that your Pokémon holds a shiny marble that corresponds to their name and then you can unlock a form of temporary evolution that massively boosts their stats and gives them a cool new look.
What is new, and an emerging threat to this metropolis, is Rogue Mega Evolution. Certain Pokémon are evolving without the necessary stones, causing them a lot of pain and wreaking havoc. You have to end their pain by beating the tar out of them so they revert back to normal before they go on a rampage. It’s classic Pokémon logic.
But wait, there’s side missions! Pokémon fans are well known for being distracted by shiny things, and in this case, it’s missions given to you by the local detective agency – why would you do the main story stuff when you can cosplay as Detective Pikachu? There are dozens of these side missions scattered across the map at any given time, and they can be anything from a Pokémon-themed fetch quest to a battle request. They’re generally not difficult, but they offer some subtle guidance on type-based match-ups for newer players and unlocks new rooftops to explore.
But, wait, there’s even more! There’s parkour-based collectibles hidden around the city (Kalos gonna France), so you’ll be bounding around like some kind of Pokémon Ninja Warrior, there’s research quests to do and more. While you may not leave Lumoise, why would you want to when there’s so much to see, do, climb and catch?
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the Nintendo Switch 2 manages to take all of this in its stride, and the game plays admirably well in both handheld and docked modes. That’s to be expected, but as we were only able to test and review on the newer hardware, there does remain a question mark over the game on the original Switch hardware, given the long-standing performance struggles of Scarlet & Violet in particular, which the Switch 2 patch was able to effortlessly brush aside.
