Anyone who unfortunately follows my personal Bsky account is pretty aware of my feelings towards the new Pokemon Legends game. If you've been following me for maybe a bit longer than a few months, then you'll also know about my feelings towards the modern state of the series in general.

I'm literally autistic over Pokemon and I have been since 1998, so I talk about it a lot and I have a lot of emotional investment in the series. Whenever a new Pokemon game is out, it will be taking up a lot of space in my mind. Thus why I decided to move a lot of this into a blog post to avoid flooding my shortform personal platform any more than I already have...

Anyway, while I'm a massive Pokemon fan, I did not buy Legends Z-A, nor have I played it... nor do I really want to play it, even for free. This isn't the first time I've abstained intentionally from buying a brand new Pokemon game for more than just financial insecurity, but this is the first instance where I've done so without feeling any sadness on missing out, and as someone who loves Pokemon as much as I do, it feels a bit unsettling.

While I love the series (likely more than any other series), though, I've also been long aware that when you love something, you need to be honest and push back a little when this something is doing detrimental things. Love is not permissiveness of bad habits as the object of your love melts into some nondescript pile of rot. This is apathy, neglect, several other terms depending on what the object is, but it's not love. To criticize is often to show that you care, I firmly believe that.

the part where i talk about sword & shield lol

The first time I fully abstained from a new release and became vocally critical of the series' direction was with SWSH in 2019. I'm sure some people would read this and roll their eyes, thinking my reasoning was purely because of the cut Pokedex. It was for several reasons, but I often see it brushed off as simply people angry over "Dexit" when that was far from the only problem.

Cut Pokemon were fine. Similar games such as Digimon never include literally every single monster, this was something that I feel was ultimately inevitable, but the issue here is that Game Freak lied about why they cut out Pokemon. This was the first major lie of many, and I had a massive problem with this. Anyone who shared my position back then likely remembers the reasoning.

"We need a smaller Pokedex to rebalance the competitive aspect and make it better." While in the same generation introducing several of the (at the time) most broken Pokemon in comp history such as Zacian, Fishious Rend Dracovish, Galarian Darmanitan and etc. They have always done this, they self-evidently don't actually care about competitive balancing when considering this and the fact that they never do rebalancing updates for Pokemon games. This is also the generation where Wi-fi single battles were completely neutered, causing every competitive singles player I watched to make a since-permanent exodus to Showdown and never return to new releases after an initial playthrough. Game Freak and etc are infamous for not giving a flying fuck about their competitive scene, even their VGC players get treated like shit, and are essentially forced into a pay-to-win scheme. This was blatantly just not true.

"We need a smaller Pokedex because we are redoing models and animations." This was the most flagrant and disrespectful lie, and I can't believe anybody actually believed them. Anyone who played XY and Sun/Moon/USUM is very well aware that every single 3D model in SWSH is the same as they always were with maybe a few exceptions (can't remember if SWSH is when they reworked Charizard or not, my bad if it is). Barely any new animations were present in SWSH either, and a ton of them were famously clowned on for being so low-effort and awful-looking. They did not rework or really improve any of this, they just lied to you to try to sate your displeasure, and this is the reason why Dexit was bad, not simply because I'm "mad they cut out Pokemon." Game Freak doubled down on this by the way, even after people pointed out how the models were one-to-one. Once again, I don't need to explain the shittiness of this. I wouldn't have even cared much if they reused models if they just didn't... lie about it. And keep lying.

This compounded with SWSH later on reintroducing a ton of cut content as paid DLC. No amount of "but other massive game corporations do it" will assuage me of this; I DESPISE the concept of cutting content from a finished game and holding it at ransom for more of the player's money. This is flagrantly greedy, knowingly manipulative of a dedicated and emotionally invested fanbase, and yet another instance of Game Freak lying about why they cut Pokemon out. Partially it was because, yes, they had to eventually; but the other major part was because they wanted to take more of your money later on. There's no other reason.

I have since played a gifted secondhand copy of Shield and at the time of release, I watched several playthroughs and then many more in the following years. I'm familiar with the game, and while it's... relatively inoffensive excluding the corporate shittiness behind the game, I don't think anyone would argue that this game is even close to on-par with anything from the true golden era of Pokemon (GSC all the way through to B2W2) and is frankly a downgrade from even Sun & Moon in several respects. To me, SWSH primarly demonstrated that Game Freak really should never have taken Pokemon in this sort of "open world" 3D direction, mostly because they just cannot develop this sort of game successfully. However, they continue to try it to resounding failure with respect to making actually competent modern AAA video games. Subjective "I had fun"-isms aside, as well as fallacious "but it makes money so it must be good"-isms, these are just not competent games even compared to significantly older Pokemon series entries.

...Which is why it surprised me that they went on to do even worse with Scarlet & Violet. I bought and played Scarlet, even the DLC, because from prerelease information I thought it looked like an improvement from SWSH. I was wrong. I did have fun, but these games are just atrocious and completely inexcusable, though the DLC did improve some things (I still regret buying it; it should've just been in the base game). After Scarlet, I told myself to never buy a Pokemon game on release ever again, for real this time, until Pokemon games actually start to meet a level of game quality that isn't just... insulting to my basic dignity. lol

This is old news, though. I just wanted to set a foundation, I guess.

the part where i talk about the lawsuit thing

Please try to be fair-minded when reading this next part: The Palworld lawsuit extends beyond the scope of "Palworld vs Pokemon." I'm urging you to see beyond your personal feelings towards Palworld, regardless of any dubious statements you've read about the game online; Nintendo is 100% the bad guy in this situation, and you should not be supporting them. If anything, you should be vehemently against them as an exemplar of corporatocracy within the gaming world.

Since I know a lot of Pokemon fans aren't aware of this, Palworld/Pocket Pair isn't being sued over Pal designs looking too similar to Pokemon designs. I very often see this being spread around and it's not true. They are being sued over vague, generic game mechanics that Nintendo did not invent, but used their army of lawyers to harangue patent offices over until they were given "ownership" of these things.

Nintendo is already long-infamous for being excessively litigious and destructive towards indie developers and fan projects. They despise the people who would dare to try and preserve their games via emulation and etc. Their lawyers are even self-admittedly litigation-happy. Nintendo would spit in your eyes for a penny, they deserve none of your good will as they are in the modern day and they are absolutely not your friend.

They've (somehow lol) patented some of the most basic monster catcher game mechanics with the express purpose of destroying an indie developer, and this is only AFTER said indie developer's game became successful. Many of these patents were even filed after the lawsuit began. This has wider reach than just Palworld; it affects development of indie games going forward if it's allowed to stand, essentially placing a chilling effect where people will be too worried about being smote by Nintendo lawyers to try to make their games. Pokemon does not deserve a monopoly on the monster catcher genre that it didn't even invent, and often borrows/steals from itself. This is not a good thing and I implore you to please not "yay Nintendo yay Pokemon" over this situation if you just hate Palworld. It's one the most cartoonish displays of corporate greed I've seen in the gaming world in a long time.

This is another huge reason why I (and many, many other people) struggle to financially support Pokemon games anymore. I don't want to give my money to a corporation that doesn't respect me as a gamer and is openly hostile towards indie developers and fans, sometimes to the point of financially destroying them. They are here openly stating their desire to stifle growth and innovation in the monster catcher genre (and gaming overall) for the sake of their own profits and monopoly.

the part where i talk about legends zaza

I'm in disbelief at the state of this game, and I already expected it to be at least on the level of Scarlet and Violet. Aside from a few graphical improvements, it is somehow much worse. I was actually wanting to buy it up until relatively close to release, until more information came out, as well as my issues with Nintendo's recent corporate and legal practices.

This is the most expensive Pokemon game in series history. It is $100 USD, and I include the DLC because it is so blatantly finished game content that was cut out on purpose just to sell back to you later. Do you think it honestly deserves it? Especially if you have played several older Pokemon games for thousands of hours like I have, is this game actually, objectively worth one hundred dollars? Worth the launch experience of Emerald, Platinum, and B2W2 combined?

What I Like About It

I figured I should add this to show you that I'm not purely negative. I am very critical with my interests but I don't want to be negative, I wanted to like this game and I want Pokemon games to be good probably more than most people. There are still some things I like about it, but I warn you that it isn't much.

The best part of this game is clearly the character customization, something that Pokemon has inexplicably removed in any meaningful sense from their games since XY for no reason at all. I'm happy to see that it's back and looking so detailed, it was a long time coming. Sadly though I have no confidence in Game Freak keeping this feature in their future Pokemon games, at least nowhere near this extent, just based on their track record of removing features that everyone liked for no reason. Nice that you can make a cute character and take cute pictures with your Pokemon, though this honestly seems like the only fun thing to do in this game.

This is a freebie for any Pokemon game, but the music is pretty nice. It's not my favorite of any Pokemon game ever, and imo not especially memorable, but it's at least pleasant.

Trainer character designs and models are also mostly good but this is always a strong point for me. Pokemon has very good designers on their art team and they usually do good work, particularly with human characters. Lately more and more new Pokemon designs seem a bit bland to me, but the trainers themselves are basically always to my liking, though this is mostly a subjective topic.

The new megas are mostly to my liking, but there are some that I think just fucking suck if I can be honest. Standouts (in a good way) would be Malamar, Drampa, Scolipede, Barbaracle and Chesnaught. I think all of these have very good designs and actually convey the idea of "mega evolution" successfully. Dragonite and Scrafty are some of my personal favorites though I personally think they're just a little bland in the objective design sense.

Also I like Corbeau. Even though he's a loan shark written to not be a bad guy, for some reason. lol. I like villains so idk why this game has none in it, he should've been more evidently meant to be evil.

"It's a Pokemon game. This is just how they are."

Why are so many Pokemon fans just resigned to this? It's depressing. These games were not always this bad and I know most of you are old enough to remember that.

For over a decade you have been conditioned into thinking these games were always this dogshit. They just were not, nothing like they are in the Switch era especially. This isn't to say that Pokemon games have ever been some sort of masterworks; people for some reason like to assume this is what I'm saying when I tell them these games used to be good, which is a ridiculous "so you hate waffles"-ism, but whatever.

If you actually think that this is just "how it is and how it will/should be," and you aren't a Switch-era newcomer, I seriously implore you to look back on your time with the older games or even revisit them. Please be honest with the trajectory of quality this series has taken, and try to fight that indolent part of yourself that insists that it lay back and allow the decay of something you love because you've just grown used to it and don't feel like making a change. We all deserve better quality for our lifetime of loyalty to this series. It is nothing without us.

"Graphics aren't everything."

I've been hearing this since 2019 with regard to Pokemon and it is well beyond tired. The sentiment behind "graphics aren't everything" works with bloated, overdeveloped AAA titles that purport to show you every pore and strand of hair on a character's head. This does not diminish a game when it isn't there. Where it does NOT work is with respect to basic aesthetic sensibilities and solid art direction.

There's a reason why most people fucking hate bland-looking brutalist architecture. Why people hate clinical, sterile spaces blasted by cold desaturating light. Why they find the colloquial "male living space" unpleasant to be in. They are ugly, uninteresting, diminishing of your mood and they make you want to be anywhere else. Being in an unpleasant environment and looking at unpleasant things is actually something that is so important that, when taken to the extreme, can actually be diminishing of your health, and this extends into video games as a form of art.

Human beings are visual creatures with a unique attunement to the artistic, we like to look at nice art, nice things, nice environments. Graphics do matter to this extent, and modern Pokemon games are just inexcusably hideous. There are sincerely better-looking games on the PS2 and Gamecube, even from Pokemon themselves, because these games were made with an actual art direction in mind and an understanding of style. Z-A doesn't have this, and just looking at the world will tell you as much. Same for ScaVio. I understand this point has been made to death, but it seriously needs to be absorbed: Switch Pokemon shares a console with BotW and TotK, it should be at least as good-looking especially considering how much more money Pokemon pulls in than Zelda. There is no excuse.

Watching hours of Z-A made me feel like I was in a cold waiting room. I do think that the character and Pokemon models themselves look good (the non-cutscene animations less so), but the world is just self-evidently bland and atrocious. You'd think since they made the map of this game the size of a pea (and apparently delayed this game for ONE YEAR...?), they'd have more time invested into making the world look better and more alive, but it's sincerely barely an improvement over ScaVio's world, and I mean that.

Though I like the character models, the ugliness of the 3D world clashes very hard with this and makes it even more discordant and unpleasant to look at. What actually does matter the most here is the art direction, which is the actual technical thing that most people are complaining about with regard to Pokemon's graphics.

The reason why games with "low quality" graphics like the handheld Pokemon titles still look good to a lot of people is because they had a cohesive art direction and an understanding of how to use stylization, which created a believable world for the player. You could get truly invested in these worlds because the characters actually looked like they belonged there, everything fit together, and they had their own style despite not having ultra 4k cocksucker fidelity or whatever. This is not the case with Switch-era Pokemon games, which seem to want to really blast their graphics up without understanding what sort of art style they even want to go for. The worlds are plain and ugly, devoid of life, and the characters look completely misplaced. This was also very apparent in ScaVio where humans and Pokemon were over-textured and the world a bland smeary undetailed mess. Z-A at least has appropriately-textured character models with a more appealing anime art style similar to SWSH (likely my favorite part of SWSH), but the bland world lacking any sort of identity beyond "shitty 2009 Gmod asset map" remains, and it completely ruins any sense of immersion or attachment I could have with this place.

Game Freak have had near a decade to figure out how to create a 3D world that even seems alive to the point that their handheld titles did, and I can barely tell if they've even improved at all since SWSH. They just don't care.

Gameplay

Graphics aren't everything. I agree with the basic premise. So what about the rest of the game?

As far as I've seen and watched, this game is in large part a several hour-long tutorial padded with a lot of worthless cutscene dialogue that mostly just seems to waste your time (It is a JRPG, but I found so much of this dialogue just meaningless, and I'm someone who enjoys slow-paced dialogue-heavy animanga and VNs lol). Then when you actually get to play it, there doesn't seem to be any stakes for losing to wild Pokemon or trainers. Even PLA had stakes, so this is a downgrade. You can even catch Pokemon after making them faint in this game, which was previously a difficulty feature that you had to play around. Pokemon games have long had a streak of progressively removing difficulty from their games, and this game might be the most intensely babified one yet just from watching gameplay.

I'm surprised at the amount of people praising the cooldown-based battle system. I think this is only because Game Freak poorly crafted turn-based combat due to their need for slow-ass flashy animation bloat and excessive babification, so it made people sick of "turn-based battles" when in reality they are predominantly sick of Game Freak's inability to develop a modern turn-based system that's actually fun and challenging.

The battle system in this game just looks like button mashing. You use your strong move, but since you have to wait for a cooldown, you just smack your next one, then on and on. It's like something from an MMO but significantly more incompetent and mindless, I seriously don't understand the praise.

Also, you skip the majority of the alphabet while doing those rank-up battles. They cut most of their potential content with regard to battling, in a Pokemon game, which centers on battles but allegedly especially so in this entry. What the fuck? Even I felt insulted when I saw this on stream for the first time and I wasn't even the one playing.

I barely even need to mention the dearth of exploration potential this game presents. Z-A's Lumiose city is a city for ants. You can go into maybe five buildings. The "wild areas" are a joke. There's nothing that jumps out at me as interesting enough to make me feel an urge to explore it; it's all the same. A huge part of the fun of older Pokemon games was exploring the new region, and this game is absolutely, utterly devoid of this.

The lack of new Pokemon just sucks from the exploration perspective, too. Finding new Pokemon was always one of the best parts of Pokemon games (shocking). PLA at least had a handful of new regional forms and evolutions spread over a much more varied albeit disgusting-looking world. Z-A has like ten new mega evolutions in it, and honestly like a fourth of them are kind of... undercooked? "Oh, but there's more in the DLC!" That DLC should be in the base game. I am judging this game as it's presented to me and you should, too.

I play a ton of Pokemon ROMhacks and fangames. I've been spoiled by actually well-designed turn-based Pokemon gameplay in this way as well as tons of fun and extensive exploration. Often they don't even need to change much to make it more fun. Game Freak could easily just return some of their past difficulty and add some simple new innovations that fangames have been using for DECADES, but they've made it clear time and time again that they think their player-base are zombified iPad kids, so who cares I guess.

"These games are easy/dumb because they're for kids."

It's really hard for me to not just tell someone to shut the fuck up when I hear this one. I despise this excuse. If I take this to its natural conclusion, you think kids don't deserve quality games and stories. Kids shouldn't have challenges presented to them, or have their mind sharpened via interesting gameplay. Why? It's so disingenuous, you know that kids media doesn't need to be bad, easy, or mindless. Some of the most acclaimed and beloved video games and other pieces of fiction in history were aimed at all-ages or even children specifically. What a stupid point. Please try to have more respect for children. They aren't that stupid or incapable, they are just developing.

I would argue that it's even more important for children to experience good quality games and etc fiction. Video games are often good for refining motor skills and several other cognitive processes, so feeding them dumbed-down button smashers with minimal strategic elements even seems detrimental to me, but I will leave it at that.

The Sacrosanctity of "Fun"

Despite the pretentiousness of this section title, I'm not ever, ever the type of person to tell someone directly, personally that they should "stop having fun" with anything, because I think this is counterproductive and only inspires people to dislike you. I think the presence of people who allegedly do this is largely overblown, though.

I will, however, criticize the use of "I'm having fun" as an excessively common deflection of criticism towards modern Pokemon games. Thousands of people have fun playing predatory gacha games, does that suddenly make the way they prey on people with gambling addictions alright? Are you suddenly incapable of criticizing the practice because some people "have fun" with it? Are the criticisms invalid? Of course not. Why is it any different for Pokemon, which is owned by a similarly predatory billion-dollar corporation? What relevancy does having fun with it have to the discussion?

I realize most people don't realize that they're doing this, but the ultimate result of this sort of thing is just shutting down any criticism in general. It's a validation of chronic indolence, devaluing of reasonable concern from your fellow fans, and a rejection of necessary discussion.

"I'm having fun" when used as an attempt at arguing in favor of game quality is just silly though, and I see this a lot with Pokemon, even with adults. I shouldn't have to say that this is subjective and has nothing to do with the objective quality of a piece of media. I also have often had fun with many objectively shitty games, anime, manga, etc. lol. This doesn't mean I'm going to wield it at people who fairly cut into them; they're right. What would even be the point I'd be trying to make? It's irrelevant.

urgh

There is no universe where you could call me a "grifter" or "shill" or any other meaningless, negative buzzword I often see thrown at people who criticize the state of modern Pokemon games as a means of denegrating our thoughts and feelings. I'm far from the only one, either; there are hundreds of thousands of huge Pokemon fans just like me. I think the other huge portion of the fanbase just doesn't want to admit that.

According to leaks, Pokemon games are given abysmal dogshit shoestring budgets for what they are and should be. This is in contrast to the nauseating amount of money that the Pokemon brand rakes in, even just with their games. They are completely able to invest more into making good, quality games again, they just choose not to because they've been encouraged to get away with their bad behavior for so long.

PLZA was made on a budget of I believe around 13-14mil USD (very similar to every other entry since SWSH) with a tiny dev time of like a few years, and they'd only need to sell a few hundred thousand copies to break even. They just want to gut you of your money more and more for less and less, no matter how much you complain as you swipe your card. I don't know how much more plain it needs to be. Nintendo and Game Freak do not give a shit about you or about Pokemon, they give a shit about your wallet and taking advantage of your loyalty, because they know you will buy no matter what. They do all of this while beating down on fangames, indie devs, and people who try to preserve their old games, suing people into the ground and ruining their lives in some cases. How can this not piss everyone off? I don't want to be taken advantage of for loving something, that's why I've stopped financially supporting their games (both Game Freak and Nintendo) and continue to enjoy Pokemon in my own way instead.

I'm already very low-income. I can't afford this ramping up of prices on mainline consoles and games in general even if I wanted to (Switch 2 can sincerely suck my balls too. stupid ridiculously overpriced tablet of Mammon lmao), and this is partially a result of continued permissiveness of people who have enough financial security to blow money away at the expense of the rest of us who also need leisure and entertainment. This is also seeping into other game corporations as well; they are seeing Nintendo get away with their bloated prices and trying the same shit. I'm asking you to consider who it might be affecting when you make these sorts of purchases; I understand that you're "having fun," but you do not live in a vacuum. All these little things add up into the problem presented today, even if it may not be affecting you yet, it will catch up with you someday.

What's the conclusion to this bigass ramble? If you love Pokemon, please play more Pokemon fangames, ROMhacks, or other monster catcher games; especially indies. You will remember the fun of Pokemon and of the monster catcher genre again, realize the actual potential of Pokemon (+ maybe get pissed off about it like I did lol), and maybe gain a new perspective as to why supporting these practices is harmful to the future of the series, and likely to video games as a whole.

^{bonus tip: you'll note that i only ever suggest you don't buy their games, not that you don't play them if you really want to. i'm sure you have a friend down the road who could loan you their copy of whatever pokemon game you want to play. y'know.}