Some thoughts on Pokemon Legends Arceus

Talking about this game is tough for me, because on one hand I think the Pokemon fanbase devotes way too much energy towards being abjectly negative about the series well beyond what is necessary, but on the other hand, this game in particular is a genuine struggle to stay positive about.

I like a decent number of the ideas in this game. Pokemon has been stuck in its ways on mechanics for a long time, and shit like IVs has never been that appealing for much of any reason. I like that a Pokemon game is willing to set itself in an alternate, past era setting with simpler technology, which both creates a unique feel compared to the rest of the series as well as building up the lore of the franchise as a whole, without defaulting back to the Gym crawl that embodies 8 of the main 9 games. I like that they didn’t release the game as two separate versions with slightly different Pokemon, because that has effectively just been nickel-and-diming people and is a remnant of a bygone era when the inspiration for Pokemon was trading collected monsters via a link cable and the socializing that would accompany it (and people just use WiFi now). I think that conceptually, the application of the Agile and Strong attacks is a neat way to touch up the battle system, giving you an additional strategic decision to make in battles where you can choose to boost an attack with the Strong mode at the risk of getting hit twice in a row, or potentially increasing your attack priority in the sequence of moves by using the Agile mode to potentially get two moves in a row. I also like the quality of life additions, such as being able to choose which moves your Pokemon is packing on a whim rather than having to permanently make a decision on whether it should know a specific move over another one, or being able to evolve trade evolutions without the need of another game (seriously, nobody has ever liked trade evolutions).

Unfortunately…the execution of the game itself is a far more mixed bag. I have my share of grievances with Pokemon games of the last decade or so, but one thing I can certainly say is that, apart from the dreadful early game of Sun/Moon or a couple of the spinoffs, I’ve rarely ever been consistently bored playing a Pokemon game the way I have with Legends: Arceus.

For starters, it feels like this game prioritized catching Pokemon as a mechanic over everything else, and I generally find catching Pokemon to be one of the most boring aspects of Pokemon. Though the process may be a bit more streamlined, it actually is somehow more boring in this game. In most Pokemon games, catching new Pokemon usually takes some effort, and so it does come with some satisfaction when the ball finally clicks and you get your new Pokemon. In this game you just run around chucking balls at everything that moves and just build up a bigass box of Pokemon you will never ever use for anything. You don’t even bother getting into battle with most of them, you just kinda run around and collect everything that moves, which isn’t a particularly rewarding-feeling task whatsoever because the effort put forth is tiny and the reward is, at least in terms of my feelings of satisfaction, nonexistent. The game does kind of want you to resort to battling if tactics like ambushing a Pokemon to catch them fail, but in practice it usually boils down to “Oh it didn’t get in the ball, guess I’ll try a different one of this species of Pokemon roaming nearby instead”. This wouldn’t be as much of an issue on its own, but there are two major issues that this direction brings to the game: catching Pokemon is intrinsically tied to advancing the game; and the fact that the game is remarkably empty and lacking in much that actually gives purpose to those Pokemon.

In order to unlock new areas in this game, you need to fill out research tasks, which consist primarily of catching Pokemon or battling wild Pokemon in order to increase your rank. Doing enough of these is how you complete each dex entry, which gets you a sizable bonus toward advancing your rank. Battling most wilds is generally fairly tedious as it has always been, but somehow it feels even worse when compared to both the pacing of the rest of the game as well as being the problem in general with battles which I’ll get into a little further in. Necessitating I take out or catch a dozen Bidoofs doesn’t really make for that fun of a gameplay loop, especially if I’m in a later part of the game backtracking to an earlier part just to get enough points to rank up on the quicker and easier Pokemon. At least battles don’t require a flashy battle transition screen, which means the game does flow a bit better, but it actually fits into the pacing of the game less than previous games due to how much in this game is designed around relatively seamless transitions between exploration and battling.

The other key issue is that this game opts for a quasi-open world approach. I say quasi- because in actuality, it’s divided into big zones rather than being one big interconnected world, which means that you can’t just go from one place in the game to the next on a whim and what prohibits access from these areas is strictly story progress. Part of the issue with it being this open style is that they forgot to include actually cool shit to do besides catching and battling Pokemon. There’s a lack of variance across most of the maps, barring a few rivers and caves here and there, meaning most of the game feels pretty samey from beginning to end and there’s a ton of walking. Fast travel points are sparse, and there really isn’t even much to look at. I’m not one to get too into graphics, but there are significantly better looking games in this style even on the Switch, where exploration feels far more rewarding, both intrinsically and extrinsically. And that’s not even getting into other graphical issues, such as the ugly white pixel artifacts on certain models while in caves or objects rendering poorly until they are very close in view. Even for its many issues graphically, there were at least more visually striking areas in SwSh than there was in this game. The only other notable things of note in between Pokemon are crafting materials like rocks and plants…and I honestly don’t like crafting systems in most games, especially ones not heavily built around them. You get a clogged inventory full of useless shit that you keep around to eventually make into something useful instead of just…getting said useful shit. The fact you need to craft shit like Great Balls for a decent portion of the game just feels unnecessary. In addition, it does the same damn thing I am so sick of with this style of game, and it opts to use environmental ambience in place of music in far more places than it should. Pokemon without music feels especially soulless. This game just seems to hit a lot of the potholes for open-world games without really playing to their strengths, because it doesn’t even feel all that free, and I think it stems from a development team that just isn’t used to making this sort of game yet.

Battling has historically been the actual use for the Pokemon you get, and this game greatly downplays battling. There are far fewer trainers around, and most of them are an absolute joke even by Pokemon standards. This gets into another issue with this game: it’s exceedingly hand-holdy. I usually felt like any new Pokemon I found were substantially better than my active party and more than a match for anything that came in my way, which made me never feel inclined to do more than necessary or bother with the myriad of basic sidequests. I get that this is probably why the game is restrictive in its “openness”, to keep the player from just going to late game areas and catching juggernauts, but this ends up leaving this game feeling almost like it’s conflicting in terms of genre as a whole. Losing to any trainer just results in you being booted out and told to try again, given a full heal, and you’re faced with absolutely zero consequences, meaning that a wipe is effectively a free heal. The game tells you immediately whether a move is going to be super effective or not without you ever having to find out anything about opposing typing, which to be fair has been a thing in some recent Pokemon games, but still takes some agency out of the player’s hands in figuring stuff out. There’s a couple puzzles in the game in which it absolutely spoon feeds the solution to you without you even needing to ask anyone for pointers. I get that Pokemon games have a young audience, but I’ve never felt like I’ve had to try less in a Pokemon game than this one, and even if I was a kid playing it I’d probably still feel a bit patronized, because you can still give kids some amount of credit and satisfaction for figuring some of these things out. The only portions I felt like I even had to try were in the frenzy Pokemon trials, but that’s because these sections don’t play like battles and instead play out like these out-of-place action-game-esque fights where you have to time dodge rolls to not die and you repeatedly chuck sacks at the Pokemon until it calms down. I wouldn’t mind some amount of this where your player is involved in the battle in some way, but these boss battles that are in the game just don’t feel like they fit that well.

Again, there’s a lot of nice ideas in this game in terms of what they have to offer for the series going forward. I think Game Freak is starting to understand that the appeal of Pokemon games tends to be more tied towards the Pokemon themselves than the mechanics of the game you use them for. I feel like this game does show effort put forth in trying to make the games more about the actual Pokemon, although my issues with it ultimately are that it doesn’t really go about it in a way conducive to making the game more fun to play, and that they don’t quite stick the landing. The game still has a ton of cutscenes involving human characters who, while overall are better done here than the ones in a number of the most recent games (cough SwSh), still aren’t interesting enough to make me care about them that much, on top of generally just not being really all that well written (it starts like “Hi welcome to this strange world you teenage kid, now demonstrate that you can follow our orders and have some talent or you’re going to fucking die” is not great set-up and leaves the game feeling odd tonally). And where this game does put its focus just doesn’t really make for a fun experience.

Also as an aside, the new Pokemon designs for the Hisui region are some of the ugliest new additions in a long time. Out of the ~20 or so new ones, I like maybe 2 or 3 of them.

While this game shows some promise for some changes to come to the series, it fails to stick the landing and is one of the weakest Pokemon games I’ve ever played. It’s overly shallow, handholdy, and focuses on aspects I largely find to be less fun. It feels like Pokemon is trying to do what other, non-Pokemon RPGs do and adapt them for itself, yet it often feels like it's doing so without playing to the strengths of those aspects, nor committing to playing to the strengths of Pokemon. I hope Game Freak learns from some of the ideas put forth and implement them in a better game down the line.