Pokémon Legends: Z-A hands-on preview – real-time strategy

GameCentral gets a first look at how Pokémon Legends: Z-A handles trainer battles and its rogue mega evolution boss fights.

Despite all its technical problems, compared to other first party Nintendo Switch games, Pokémon Legends: Arceus was a welcome and much needed change of pace for the Pokémon series, after the rather uninspired Pokémon Sword and Shield.

Its influences can be felt in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet too (particularly certain quality-of-life touches), and many fans hoped it wouldn’t be just a one-off experiment. So many were pleased to see Pokémon Legends: Z-A be announced early last year, ahead of any Generation 10 games.

Z-A will serve as Pokémon’s debut on the Nintendo Switch 2, although it’s also being released on Switch 1, as a cross-gen game, and has been primarily designed for the older format. Which means this is more of a Switch 1.5 game…

It’s honestly hard to form a firm opinion on Pokémon Legends: Z-A at this point, considering the demo we played was very short, offering two self-contained slices of gameplay: the Z-A Royale and rogue mega evolutions.

As established in pre-release material, the Z-A Royale is a contest that only takes place at night and sees the city streets fill up with trainers looking for a fight. You take part and work to climb your way up to rank A, although what relevance this has to the wider story (which is similarly vague at this point) is anyone’s guess.

Aside from scripted story moments, trainer battles were largely absent from Pokémon Legends: Arceus, but Game Freak has reworked them to require a similar degree of stealth to that required for catching or avoiding wild pokémon.

Remember how Scarlet and Violet did away with the series’ tradition, where if a trainer saw you, you were immediately pulled into a battle? That’s back for Z-A, but this time getting spotted by a trainer gives them an opening advantage, with their pokémon able to score an early hit on yours when the battle starts. Conversely, you can do the same to them if you successfully sneak up behind them and land an attack on their equally unaware pokémon.

This avoids it feeling like Game Freak is walking back a welcome quality-of-life change but instead reintegrating an old mechanic as a cohesive part of Legends: Z-A’s gameplay loop. Not to mention it’s fitting for the premise of a night-time battle royale, where everyone’s on the prowl for opponents.

The fact that battles are in real-time – a first for the Pokémon games – also fits with the battle royale idea, though as far as we can tell battles are still one-on-one affairs. There is an online multiplayer option where four players can get into a free-for-all, but we don’t know if that’ll ever be a part of the main story.

Real-time battles are an exciting prospect, especially for anyone who grew up watchingthe Pokémon anime, where the laws of taking turns don’t apply. While you don’t directly control your pokémon, they follow you around the battlefield, meaning you essentially guide them out of the way of enemy attacks before launching a counterattack, with moves relying on cooldown periods similar to a MMO.

At least, that’s the idea in theory. Despite making a concerted effort to keep my pokémon on the move during battles, they still needed to stay still to use attacks and thus took hits from my opponent regardless. This is obviously to keep things balanced, since if pokémon could attack while moving, attacks would never land.

However, when I refrained from attacking, choosing to wait for my opponent to make a move, so my pokémon could dodge and hit them while they were stuck in their attack animation, my opponent didn’t act until I did, clearly sharing the same idea.

As a result, I wound up being rooted to the spot and just spamming attacks once their cooldown periods ended. It made trainer battles feel no different to the turn-based fare seen in the other games, which isn’t ideal when things are meant to be more dynamic and fast-paced, with positioning supposedly a key new element.

However, this was a very short demo, so we didn’t have enough time to experiment and only had access to a team of low level pokémon with very simple moves. Plus, this was clearly the beginning of the Z-A Royale, so battles were short and easy, demanding little strategy beyond making sure you have a type advantage, like sending a fire type Fletchling against an opponent’s bug pokémon.

There is clearly a lot of potential with the formula though and it is satisfying being able to immediately swap out another pokémon mid-battle. Although if a similar system is used in the next mainline Gen 10 game, instead of turn-based combat… we don’t know how we feel about that yet.

The second half of the demo – a battle with a rogue Mega Absol – was a lot more engaging. Throughout the story, you’ll encounter pokémon who are able to mega evolve on their own and they’ll clearly serve as boss fights akin to the noble pokémon from Legends: Arceus.

These already feel like an improvement since you don’t need to spend time throwing balms to stun them, before sicking your pokémon on them. You and your pokémon are side by side throughout the whole battle and any damage dealt to the boss makes them drop balls of energy you can gather to fill a meter that, once full, lets you trigger your pokémon’s own mega evolution. At which point they can deal more damage and even stun the boss.

Aside from feeling more involved than the trainer battles, since we were actually being attacked this time, this fight felt like it took proper advantage of the real-time format, if only because you can time Lucario’s Protect move to completely nullify the boss’s attacks, which was very satisfying to pull off.

Much like the trainer battles, this also posed little challenge, but that’s no doubt because it’s the first rogue mega evolution encounter in the game, with the Lucario we got as a temporary gift from hotelier AZ (one of a few returning characters from Pokémon X & Y). If these are anything like the noble pokémon, later fights stand to get a lot more hectic.

All in all, Pokémon Legends: Z-A stands to be another enjoyable and serviceable entry, but at the moment it doesn’t feel like quite as meaningful an evolution as something like Legends: Arceus or Scarlet and Violet.

We’ve only played a fraction of the full experience, but Legends: Z-A feels less like Game Freak is moving the Legends formula forward and more like it’s being moved to the side. It’s taking a different path but still not breaking any moulds.

Also, while the game runs at a smooth 60 frames per second and the graphics are undeniably better than the last couple of games, the visuals are hardly of the same calibre as Mario Kart World or Donkey Kong Bananza. Heck, Kirby And The Forgotten Land has nicer graphics.

This can be attributed to Legends: Z-A being a cross-gen Switch 1 game, although that doesn’t entirely excuse the rather flat art style and Game Freak’s continued refusal to include any voice acting whatsoever. Hopefully, some higher production values are being saved for when the studio makes something exclusively for Switch 2.

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