Pokemon Legends Z-A is a confident, city-bound shake-up for the series that looks great and plays fast, but trades away variety in the process. The result is a fun, polished adventure that leans hard on its battle systems and leaves little room for anything else.
After the success of Legends Arceus, expectations for Game Freak’s next experimental entry were high. Players hoped for anotherareas open-world adventure with deeper exploration and freedom. Instead, Pokemon Legends Z-A narrows its focus to Lumiose City, swapping distinct biomes for dense urban where battling takes priority. It’s a striking shift that highlights how far the series has come technically, yet also how cautious it has become with scope.
Z-A isn’t a disaster. It’s polished, fast, visually impressive, and clearly designed to showcase the new hardware and refined battle systems. But after the novelty of its new battle features fades, what remains is limited exploration and repetitive mission design. It’s a game that proves Pokemon can work in a tighter, singularly focused playground, but loses a lot of its open-world charm in doing so.
Pokemon Legends Z-A screenshots
What is Pokemon Legends Z-A about?
Set entirely in Lumiose City, Pokemon Legends Z-A reframes Kalos as a metropolis obsessed with battling. The main story centers on the Z-A Royale, a ranked circuit where trainers climb through increasingly tough opponents while uncovering the forces threatening the city.
Mega Evolutions are a constant presence, and Rogue Mega Evolution boss encounters serve as major set pieces. Side content and Wild Zones orbit this battle-first design, keeping the focus firmly on combat over traditional exploration.
Fans of Legends Arceus will be familiar with most of Z-A’s mechanics. Turn-based pauses are gone, replaced by a fluid system that lets players move freely, issue commands, and catch Pokemon without breaking pace. This all-new real-time battle system defines the experience in Lumiose, demanding quick reactions and strategic team-building in what may be the most dynamic combat the series has attempted.
Lumiose City: A hostile getaway with endless battles
Legends Z-A puts battling at the center of almost everything. The pacing is quick, and encounters encourage you to adapt on the fly with a carefully built team rather than taking long pauses to swap and plan. As you rank up, Alpha Pokemon hit harder, random trainers start using Mega Evolutions, and elites push you with tougher setups.
Rogue Mega Evolution boss fights are the standouts, demanding pattern recognition, well-timed dodges during openings, and decisive commands to finish the job. When the game offers these challenges, it is exciting, fun, and reliably entertaining.
The trade-off is saturation. Main missions stack fights back to back, sometimes with nothing more than a potion sound effect in between. To progress, you spend many nights in the Z-A Royale accumulating points. Most side quests are essentially educational battles that teach the same mechanics you are already practicing. For players who enjoy the constant pressure of combat, this is a dream. For everyone else, it’s a slog to get to the content waiting on the other side.
Often times, what’s waiting for them is more battling. Which isn’t to say the story isn’t good. In fact, the strong characters and emotional story elements were incredible compared to previous Pokemon titles. But you’re forced to fight each character multiple times, sometimes as an excuse just so they’ll talk to you, and at that point I’m ready to depart from battling and dip into whatever else Pokemon Legends Z-A has to offer.
Wild Zones? More like petting zoos
Exploration is possible in Lumiose, but it naturally feels more claustrophobic than Scarlet & Violet’s sprawling Paldea region. Wild Zones offer breaks between bouts, but they are small, often the size of a town square or shady alley, and usually feature a limited set of around seven Pokemon. A couple lean on snow or sand for flavor, yet most lack the personality of the larger biomes seen in more traditional games, making most forgettable.
Because only a handful of Pokemon spawn at a time, seeing different species can require clunky despawning routines instead of natural variety. In Scarlet & Violet, you could run around an open field and see hundreds of Pokemon in a matter of minutes. In Legends Z-A, you venture into a Wild Zone to see maybe a dozen, then have to find a park bench to kill time or wait several minutes for the spawns to roll over.
There are over 100 side quests, including a few charming detours, but many funnel back to more battles instead of broadening the experience. So many side quests mirror the same format. My Pokemon is acting weird? Please battle it. You don’t know how Poison works? Let’s battle. Compared to Legends Arceus, variety has taken a step back.
Outperforming all other Pokemon on Switch
Thankfully, where Z-A outshines every Pokemon game – and needed to, after the disastrous state of Scarlet & violet at launch – that’s come before is performance. Models and textures look strong, animations sell impact, and effects-heavy moments hold up.
Load times are brief, with seamless gates into Wild Zones and only short transitions when entering buildings or fast traveling. Big skirmishes, busy streets, and boss arenas stay smooth, making spectacle-laden Rogue Mega encounters land well. When the camera pans across Lumiose or a flashy move like Draco Meteor fires, there was no observable performance dip.
There are some gripes about flat building textures or lack of modeling terraces, but those things are in a blind spot when taking in the city as a whole. How each game interprets favored Pokemon is a huge selling point for these games, and one thing Legends Z-A undeniably nails is how the Pokemon look, feel, and move.
Verdict
Pokemon Legends Z-A is a confident experiment that proves the series can thrive in a dense, battle-driven setting, but it also shows the limits of that focus. Its real-time combat feels fantastic, and the presentation is a clear leap forward for the franchise. Lumiose City looks alive, and every encounter feels deliberate and fast.
However, the same design that makes its battles so thrilling also narrows the experience. Exploration is confined to a handful of compact Wild Zones, most of which feel repetitive and lack the personality of past regions. Side quests try to fill the gap, but too many are tutorials disguised as distractions. Once the excitement of mastering the new battle system fades, there isn’t much else to hold your attention.
Legends Z-A is solid, fun, and technically impressive, but it’s also safe. It delivers an enjoyable stay in Lumiose City, yet it never captures the freedom or variety that define Pokemon at its best. For a franchise built on discovery, that makes this entry feel only okay when it could have been great.
Pokemon Legends Z-A makes shiny hunting a lot harder & players are furious