Let me preface by saying that I grew up obsessed with Pokemon. I had the cards, the plushies, the toys, the merch, and even the battery-operated Pokedex. I watched the shows and movies and dreamed of surfing atop my Level 100 Blastoise. Even as an adult, I made it a point to visit the Tokyo Pokemon Store in 2017. I even remember loving Pokemon Y when it came out, and its central location, the Paris-inspired Lumiose City. The music and atmosphere were super cozy and X&Y were among the last great Pokemon titles – a massive Pokedex (the Kalos Pokedex had 721 Pokemon), with quality presentation, balanced gameplay, and a ton of new features. So I should be the target audience for Pokemon Z-A. Instead, I am taking a principled stance and refusing to even play it.
Why am I depriving myself of the ability to play the new monster battling simulator, you may ask? We, the fans, deserve better.
I’ve heard many arguments for a boycott of the series, and certainly agree with a lot of them. But for me personally, there’s one simple reason. Pokemon is one of, if not the most lucrative IP in the history of the world. Everything with the name Pokemon on it prints money. And yet, like a roided-up Hydreigon, this weird overpowered beast with three heads (The Pokemon Company, Game Freak, and Nintendo) has been releasing games that are somehow steadily dropping in quality for a decade now.
It started when longtime series director Junichi Masuda apparently stepped down from the position of director of the mainline titles after Pokemon X & Y. Thinking back to his work on Gens I through VI and especially Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire, it is puzzling to me how hard the other directors dropped the flaming hot torch he carried. Now Masuda has transitioned from Game Freak to The Pokemon Company in an executive role, and the future of Pokemon is filled with spin-offs and more cheap remasters. Kids nowadays have no idea how good we had it.
Quality? Who needs quality?
Recent mainline entries from the 3DS and Switch generations have been such a rollercoaster, with hype and hope ultimately crashing down into disappointment and frustration. I had a hard time even finishing Pokemon Scarlet. I was so disappointed with Pokemon Sword that I shut it off immediately after beating the Elite Four and didn’t even finish the endgame. By contrast, I really enjoyed Pokemon Legends Arceus – it was a mixed bag in terms of presentation, but also a genuine creative endeavor that tried a lot of new things, so it definitely gets points for effort.
With a couple of years’ delay from mainline titles and Nintendo’s war chest, not to mention the help Game Freak had received from the likes of MonolithSoft, who assisted in developing Pokemon Legends Arceus, you’d think that would be plenty of time to churn out a quality game.
But the three-headed beast knows that the fans will buy any game with the name Pokemon emblazoned on it. They know that they can get away with smaller budgets and shorter developmental cycles. They know that Pokemon’s core Millennial-aged audience will tune in based on nostalgia alone. So even though they know that they’re releasing subpar games, they do it anyway, to hit sales deadlines solely dictated by the merchandising machine that demands as much content as humanly possible to release simultaneously with the cards, the anime, the plushies, etc., quality be damned. And time is no longer an excuse, as it’s been 3 years since Pokemon Legends Arceus.
So it isn’t the time. It is not a question of the horsepower of either the Switch or Switch 2. The original Switch can run titles like Skyrim, The Witcher 3, and Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Designing and rendering a singular city should not be an issue. But Z-A’s many building fronts are often completely devoid of any geometry or textures. Looking at screenshots and playthroughs, I’m reminded of PSX games such as MegaMan Legends, where developers were looking to use the least amount of polygons to get the job done. There is also egregious pop-in, which was also an issue in Scarlet/Violet. What’s more, frame drops and stuttering are ever-present. The game not only looks like something that came out nearly 20 years ago, it cannot even maintain 30fps consistently.
If it looks like trash, smells like trash, and plays like trash, it might just be trash
I have heard every argument under the sun from fans attempting to defend how this game looks (often they say, “It looks good for a Pokemon game”, which is simply accepting the subpar quality as a given!), when there are free mobile games that have much better textures, lighting, character designs, and backgrounds. I have heard that players of Pokemon Legends Z-A are encouraging their fellows to close and open the game periodically to prevent memory leaks and crashes, as well as to help cut down the loading times.
Beyond the poor performance, the game’s presentation also suffers. Due to the lack of voice acting, you’ll be doing a lot of reading, even though the characters are expressive and animated enough that it feels like you’re watching a pantomime.
Why should we accept such poor quality control and a lack of basic voiced cut-scenes as a given? Wasn’t the argument for cutting down each game’s Pokedex that doing so would allow Game Freak the time to focus more on each game’s quality? Instead, we now have the worst of both worlds. Poor quality visuals and performance, and a much smaller Pokedex of 230 Pokemon. It’s not solely due to Game Freak, as the trailer for Beasts of Reincarnation proves that they can make a pretty game if they want to. So what gives?
If it ain’t broke, break it. Then break it again!
But the issues with Z-A go deeper than the surface level. The actual gameplay is janky. There are no traversal options beyond simply walking and running. No rollerskates, no bikes, no mounts. And they somehow revamped the battle system, the one element of Pokemon that was consistent, predictable, and beloved by longtime fans as allowing for challenge and player freedom, and made it objectively worse. Now, attacks are done in real-time, with cooldown timers for more powerful moves instead of PP.
In theory, this could be cool. In practice, it looks and apparently feels like a cheap, buggy mobile game. Your Pokemon will need to move into position to pull off certain attacks. So there’s a lot of wasted time where they’ll be moving closer or further from foes. They will be missing attacks for seemingly no reason. They’ll glitch out behind objects and terrain with no way to manually move them other than forcing them to use an attack you might not want to, and certain attacks, like Gyarados’ Hydro Pump, will simply just miss due to your proximity to other Pokemon and their relative height.
How is it that there is no way to manually command your Pokemon to move a few steps to the left or right? Why is it necessary for a Pokemon switching into battle to take a moment to give out a battle cry, thus costing you a turn and all but guaranteeing damage? This is a step backwards – you are essentially punished for predicting a trainer’s Pokemon swap-in. All they had to do to improve the battle system was to make things faster. Perhaps have a bar showing the turn order. Instead, there’s now a plethora of small issues that should not exist at all. The map is also very small. Limiting the game’s scope to Lumiose City after the massive biomes of Legends Arceus and the open-world of Scarlet/Violet
Your mileage may vary, depending on what you’re looking for…
That’s not to say that it’s all bad. Z-A introduces some cool new features, such as the ability to quickly swap out your Pokemon’s 4 attacks outside of battle, so you can tailor their moveset for each challenge. The focus on trainer battles seems cool, and this time around there seems to be a pretty extensive story, even though the characters and plot don’t seem very gripping.
For someone like me, the exploration, team-building, and battling are paramount to my enjoyment of the series, with the catching and Pokedex completion a fun diversion. I don’t really see the hook of setting the game within a single city and tasking the player with typically boring minor fetch quests that lead nowhere.
Everything I’ve seen from Z-A has been done better in other games. What’s more, Z-A delivers an amount of content that would be borderline tolerable for a $30-$40 portable game. At a price point of $70 ($60 on the original Nintendo Switch), with $30 day one DLC that essentially sells players cut content and the endgame, we’re looking at something that’s $100 for the complete experience on Switch 2. This absolutely does not seem worth it to me, but then again, I am so disillusioned with the franchise after a decade of subpar titles that I have a tough time getting into the mindset of your typical Pokemon fan who isn’t shouting from the rooftops for better games.
For instance, I tried talking to a younger friend/acquaintance about the shortcomings of Z-A, which she is dead set on purchasing. She says that she’d been saving up for it for months, and she is looking forward to how shiny Pokemon are apparently easier to catch now. This is a mindset that is beyond my comprehension. I have moved on to more rewarding games, games that don’t waste my time, money, and over two decades-long investment in the franchise by insulting me with products that are unfinished, unpolished, and buggy.
When Pokemon Scarlet hard-crashed on me and I lost well over an hour of data, I was annoyed, but gave them a chance. After all, Scarlet/Violet released in 2022, the same year as Legends Arceus. I had a little hope when I heard the next mainline game was delayed. But color me shocked to find that Legends Z-A is not just lazier than the last two games, but just as buggy and unpolished, with a smaller Pokedex and a scope limited to a single city. But don’t take my word for it.
Many fans out there are similarly disappointed. Even the most diehard Pokemon fans, the stalwart defenders on the Pokemon.com forums, admit that it isn’t worth $60-$70. And often, when fans rightly point out the flaws such as the limited Pokedex, they get dogpiled on by diehards. This isn’t how we inspire change in the franchise.
Apparently, this game “only” cost $13 million, but it seems like even less. It turned a profit instantly.
I guess that’s what you get when you allegedly spend only $13 million on a game, as that’s the leaked budget for Pokemon Z-A. I commend Nintendo for their success and for making a big profit, but at a time when major AAA releases can rack up budgets of hundreds of millions, don’t they at least want to try to give the illusion that Pokemon is a prestige franchise, and not just a cheap cash-grab?
One wonders what could have been, in a world where Pokemon games were given actual time, effort, and attention to detail. We might have had a franchise to rival Monster Hunter in terms of its quality and hardcore appeal. Instead, Pokemon remains a braindead, surface-level monster battling simulator with embarrassingly bland graphics and presentation. And because Pokemon Legends Z-A sold over 5 million copies in its first week, the prospect that the franchise could improve anytime soon is slim at best.
This is probably also why Nintendo doesn’t put Pokemon games on the Nintendo Switch Online Classics service, because the three-headed beast knows those older titles are just flat-out better, and they can’t compete with games made 20 years ago. Fans still play Pokemon Emerald mods and nuzlockes. Hardly anyone who takes games seriously talks about the last three games, unless it’s to discuss how much wasted potential they had.
A good friend of mine says that this game is devoid of the soul and spirit of friendship that sparked so many Millennials’ love of Pokemon in the Gen I-II days. Have a look at his thoughts below.
Right now Pokemon Legends Z-A is sitting at a 4.7 User Score on Metacritic. If that isn’t an indictment on the absolute state of Pokemon, I don’t know what is. Even though I still think of myself as a Pokemaniac at heart, I also recognize that I am no longer the target audience for these games. And that stings a little. But I do have to admit to a little jealousy towards the most devoted fans, who can still appreciate these titles for what they are and find many hours of enjoyment from them, warts and all. What do you think about Pokemon Z-A? Let us know in the comments.
About the Author – Joseph Choi
Filipino-American gamer, professional shepherd and farmer, author, and filmmaker/videographer living in Central California. First consoles were the Game Boy and Sega Genesis, and I’ve been gaming since then, with a focus on Nintendo and Sony consoles.
