Video game thoughts: Pokémon Legends: Z-A and the Ocarina of Time Switch 2 remake

First off, the Copperajah in the room—yes, I know I’m reviewing a game that was released nearly a year ago. It’s taken me this long to play through it all, including the DLC. Part of that is because Pokémon Legends: Z-A is a hefty game content-wise – which I am not complaining about at all – but part of it is because I’ve been very busy and dealing with some health issues which have prevented me from enjoying video games as much as I’d like (which hasn’t been fun, but things are on the upswing at least).

And my verdict? To put it simply, I find I have a love-hate relationship with this game, and I’ll break down why. (This post is full of spoilers, so best to read after you’ve finished the game unless you don’t mind spoilers.)

I think it would be the most efficient to divide this review into the things I think Game Freak did right with Z-A, and the things that flopped. So first I’d like to talk about what I did enjoy about the game.

The gameplay, IMO, is spectacular. It’s like they took everything they developed for Legends: Arceus (which I thoroughly enjoyed) and amped it up, including, for the first time in the core-series, real-time battles that work surprisingly well. Real-time battling is a completely different monster (or pocket monster, if you will) from the turn-based battling used in the core series up to this point, and I totally dig it.

Battles in Z-A kept me engaged and alert, constantly trying to stay one step ahead of my opponent and utilize my Pokémon’s moves and their recharge times strategically, rather than just mashing A and spamming a super effective attack, which is generally all you need to do to defeat NPC opponents elsewhere in the core series. Real-time battling transforms (perhaps even Mega Evolves… okay, I’ll stop) the way you fundamentally approach battling, including move selection. Stat-raising moves, status moves, and strategic moves like Protect and Detect actually make sense and have a place in a Pokémon’s moveset during the game proper, not just competitive play.

That, plus the frantic exhilaration of trying to coordinate your Pokémon while simultaneously avoiding a wild Pokémon’s fury, and tactically utilizing Mega Evolution (which is very nicely spotlighted in this game, along with lots of fun new Mega Evolutions), make battling a truly thrilling experience for the first time. It’s a really refreshing change of pace from the way Pokémon battles worked for the previous 30 years* of the franchise, and I hope they keep this direction moving forward, if not in the usual core series, then at least in the Legends games.

(And, of course, let’s not forget the most important part of real-time battling, which is that it’s much closer to the way battles are conducted in the anime, and that’s something Pokémon geeks have wanted for a long, long time. I… may or may actually call out my Pokémon’s moves and try to sound all cool when I’m playing Z-A by myself. Don’t tell anyone.)

Another thing I really enjoyed about Z-A was the setting. I loved Pokémon X and Y and thought Kalos was an exquisitely designed region, so I was sad when there was no follow-up game to XY. Z-A feels like the sequel we should have gotten back in Gen VI and makes up for it in some pretty satisfying ways. A central part of the plot revolves around getting closure for the things that happened in XY, and you also get to see a few familiar faces and discover what’s new in Kalos in the five-ish years since the events of XY.

Back when Legends: Arceus released, there was some fan speculation that all Legends games would be set in the past of the Pokémon world, so I’m sure Z-A came as a surprise to everybody given its contemporary setting and futuristic, borderline-cyberpunk trappings. But I found it a welcome surprise, and I like the idea of the Legends games exploring various stories around the Pokémon world and its history that wouldn’t quite fit in to a regular core series game.

Also, there are side quests galore in this game and it’s so satisfying compared to Scarlet and Violet’s utter lack of side quests, or anything else to do outside of the main quests except battle NPC Trainers and catch Pokémon. New side quests pop up after just about every main quest is completed, and the Mega Dimension DLC provides you with a fresh and hefty gaggle of side quests to get distracted by. I was in side quest heaven. (I also really appreciated that side quests popped up on the city map as soon as they were available so I knew I wasn’t missing any—in Legends: Arceus, I permanently missed at least one side quest because I didn’t see it while roaming around Jubilife Village, and it stopped being available after a certain point in the story, which made me very sad because I am an OCD completionist.)

And I felt like Mega Dimension just improved on this with all the hyperspace zones and the loop of entering hyperspace zones, collecting Hyper Berries, and using them to make donuts so you can keep exploring hyperspace zones. It added a bit of a roguelike element to the game with a grind that I found really engaging, especially because you’re also entering hyperspace zones to try to fill out your Mega Dimension Pokedex and find specific Pokémon for side quests.

Also, Lumiose is extremely fun to traverse with all the scaffolding, the ability to navigate the rooftops, a good bit of varied terrain, and wild Pokémon everywhere. The city feels like one big puzzle, especially when you’re trying to figure out how to get to where you need to go for a side quest or a specific Pokémon, and it’s so satisfying when you finally figure out how to get to an item that’s been taunting you on a scaffolding platform. I think the navigability of the city was extremely well-designed and I have to give the developers a lot of credit for that. Having an entire game take place in a single city (a very large city, but still) and have it not get boring must have been a big design challenge, but I think Game Freak pulled it off well.

Finally, can we just take a moment to appreciate that you can fully customize your character again? One of the things that aggravated me about Scarlet and Violet was how you were stuck in a ghastly school uniform the whole time** and most of the accessories were rather forgettable. In Z-A, I finally felt free to be myself again and enjoy the singular experience of running around Lumiose’s back alleys in a trenchcoat and fedora, talking to myself like a film noir detective.

So, those were all good points. Unfortunately, those things were difficult to enjoy in the face of some glaringly bad writing that, for me, really threw a wrench in what could have been another game on par with Legends: Arceus, and honestly makes me worry for the future of the core series.

Similarly to Scarlet and Violet, Legends: Z-A has an interesting premise that is unfortunately marred by uninteresting main characters and a lack of emotional depth to the storyline. I really liked the whole thing with AZ and Ange, and seeing Zygarde get a chance to shine and contribute to the lore was really nice, since in XY it was relegated to a postgame secret battle while Xerneas and Yvetal got all the attention. But the plotline really flopped in several key places and times where it should have been the strongest and most gripping, and that made the overall story difficult to enjoy despite the good ideas it had.

First, the pacing is a little odd. You spend about the first two thirds of the game kind of meandering around Lumiose City, briefly encountering characters who seem like they should be important, but flit out of the scene too quickly, making you wonder why they were even there. Then, once you arbitrarily skip ranks (more on that in a moment), those characters are reintroduced to you in an outright onslaught, not giving you any room to breathe as suddenly all your rank-up battles are against these NPCs who did turn out to be important, and have entire protracted subplots that you have to get through before battling them. The storyline is imbalanced far too heavily toward the end of the game, and I wish these big battles against major characters had been spread more evenly throughout the plot.

I also wish that had been the biggest problem with the storyline. Overall it just feels like the plot doesn’t want to commit to any real emotion or thought. Characters and plot points have tantalizing potential to be more interesting and more relatable than they actually are, and I felt like I was constantly waiting for the other plot shoe to drop and it never did.

Stuff just gets handed to the main character far too easily—like when Vinnie lets you skip a bunch of ranks in the Z-A Royale simply because a) your character is apparently a special snowflake and b) I guess the developers thought making you actually work for something was beyond the attention spans of today’s gamers. I honestly hated this. If the Z-A Royale is such a prominent part of the plot, to the point where it’s in the title of the game, I want a proper Z-A Royale experience. Reaching Rank A when I’d been skipped up several ranks just because the developers wanted to hurry the plot along didn’t even feel like I’d earned or deserved Rank A.

I was looking forward to the slow, character-building grind of actually proving my mettle against each rank… and they took that away from me. They fed into the entitlement culture that’s plaguing our generation. I’m not okay with this.

And plot points that look like they’re going to be genuinely suspenseful just fizzle. I kept wondering who the villain was going to be, and there was no villain. While this worked great for the Rust Syndicate, who are a bunch of absolutely adorable antiheroes (Corbeau is definitely my favorite character in the game, and also I need to figure out how to get my office looking like his), there’s never any real sense of threat or urgency throughout the plot. I mean, AZ doesn’t even tell you about the whole Ange thing until very near the end, and I really wish someone had explained the situation to me earlier, so I wasn’t just running around Lumiose doing the Z-A Royale just because AZ wanted me to. I was 100% expecting Jett to be a villain because she totally looks like she’s hiding something… but no, she’s perfectly tame and really does just want what’s best for Lumiose. Yawn.

The big message of the storyline is what people can accomplish when they come together, even though they may have different backgrounds and priorities and points of view, which is a good sentiment, don’t get me wrong. But a lot of these characters had the potential to put up much more of a fight for the protagonists than they actually did, and as a result, again, doing what had to be done to save the city felt pretty effortless.

The lack of suspense is unfortunately exacerbated by the climax, which utterly fails to elicit any excitement, and sometimes just doesn’t even make sense. I mean, Taunie/Urbain decides to battle you to see who should go inside Ange… and even though you inevitably win, they decide they’re going in anyway. Which made that entire battle completely pointless and I’m not even sure why it existed. If you’re going to railroad me, at least make it more subtle.

To make matters worse, when Taunie/Urbain and Floette go inside Ange and it starts rampaging, there’s just not enough of a sense of urgency because they’re on their Rotom Phone constantly reassuring you that they’re fine. I didn’t feel excited when I defeated Ange because it felt like nobody was ever actually in danger in the first place. It was a really unsatisfying culmination of what I think was supposed to be a friendship built over the course of the game, but ultimately just fell flat like so much else (more about that later).

Overall it just feels like the plot of Z-A is afraid to allow the player to take risks, afraid of pathos, afraid to step out of the nice little box of everyone getting along and nothing truly scary ever happening to anyone. I’m not saying Pokémon games need to be ultra-intense, but if you emotionally dumb them down to a preschool level, it’s really alienating and boring for anyone over the age of 8. Ironically for the first core series game rated E10+, Z-A has the most childish plot I’ve seen in the whole series.

And the characters, for the most part, aren’t even likable. Taunie/Urbain (the character who appears depends on the gender of the player character) and Lida are bafflingly one-dimensional. Taunie/Urbain has nothing more to them than “I love helping out around Lumiose, and also I’m trying to find someone” and never goes any deeper than that. They have no real emotions or insecurities and never connect with the player character, even though they’re supposed to be the main supporting character. Even at the end of the plot, when it’s revealed that Jett is their grandmother and wants them to take over Quasartico, their reaction to the revelation is weirdly blasé, like, “Whoa, that’s crazy, but okay I guess”. Taunie/Urbain could have had so much more to them that would have really made the player empathize and connect with them, and the game had plenty of time to do that, but opted not to.

And Lida is also irritatingly flat. She’s attending dancing school and wants to Mega Evolve her Starmie, but that’s it. She has no deep motivations, no emotions (besides getting annoyed at Naveen for comic effect), no sense of growth throughout the story. You could very safely remove her from the narrative entirely and it would make no difference, making me wonder why she was even there. It was frustrating because she’s a superficially cute character, but just being cute with nothing else to your being means you never get past cute into charming and endearing.

Naveen actually had the best character development out of all three main characters, by far. When you first meet him he’s sullen, withdrawn, and cynical, only helping AZ so he can use Hotel ZA as his studio and escape his overbearing grandmother. Near the beginning of the plot, he’s downright irritating with how uncooperative he is—at one point in the plot, he actually has the audacity to watch his favorite gaming streamer while Team MZ is trying to figure out how to handle rogue Mega Evolved Pokémon that are posing a threat throughout the city. Which is just insane. You don’t sit and watch a gaming stream while lives are at stake and you’re supposed to be helping. Are kids these days really that out of touch with reality? This makes me sad for humanity.

(This might have gotten under my skin especially badly because I hate when people are too absorbed looking at screens to pay attention to what’s going on in real life. Shortly before playing Z-A, I actually experienced an incident where a close family member came to spend the day at my house, but she spent most of the time with an earpiece in, paying more attention to her friend’s gaming stream than to her family. I found that rather rude, and I don’t like being treated like that in a video game either.)

However, ironically enough, by the end of the game he was actually the only character I felt like I’d forged a true connection with. I could see his attitude toward me progress from annoyance to appreciation for my contributions to the team, so it seemed like an actual triumph when we actually started feeling like friends who had each other’s backs. And I also liked at the end of Mega Dimension, when he had a real heart-to-heart with Ansha about how to deal with his difficult family situation and gained the confidence to move forward. It was the sort of experience that I desperately needed with Taunie/Urbain and Lida, but never got.

The supporting characters are also a mixed bag. Some of them, like Corbeau and Grisham and Griselle, are nicely done, but others needed work. I was annoyed with how cliché Ivor and Gwynn were—do we really need yet another meathead Fighting-type specialist and goth Ghost-type specialist?

Canari got on my nerves super bad. She’s rude and temperamental and has no life outside of video games, and yet she’s super popular and has a huge fan following just because of her gaming streams. She can also somehow get away with just sitting in her office playing video games literally all day and all night, and grandpa Tarragon not only has no issue with this, but supports her in being a screen addict. I feel like this is sending all sorts of questionable messages to teens—like that you can be a self-absorbed jerk as long as you look cute and know how to build a brand. Or that you can get away with being glued to your screen 24/7, and you’re never going to wake up one day and be 30 and overweight with back problems and no social life. Not really sure what they were thinking with Canari. (It's also just a little lazy to have another Electric-type specialist who's an online content creator right after Scarlet and Violet with Iono. At least Iono isn't a total jerk. Some originality would have been appreciated here.)

(Someone in the fan community once opined that they thought it would have been a lot better if Canari actually wasn’t even real, and was always Tarragon pretending to be a teenage girl via hologram. I wish they had actually gone that route.)

And it wasn’t just the new characters who had problems—I’m really disappointed with how Emma was handled. She was such a wonderful character in XY, and I was very excited when I learned she was going to appear in Z-A. But in this game, she’s spectacularly boring. She’s relegated to just teaching the player character about Mega Evolution and hunting down information for them, and like most of the other cast gets no character arc. Plus, she’s obviously wearing her Expansion Suit, but never once in the game does she use it—not even during the Ange crisis when it would actually have been really helpful. She’s a depressingly watered-down version of the XY Emma and it makes me sad.

By far the worst character in the game, though, is Jacinthe. She drives me crazy and I don’t know why they thought including her was a good idea. Jacinthe is an absolute psychopath with how she traps people in her hologram zones and coerces them into battle tournaments for her own entertainment, and puts people into indentured servitude if they lose to her. She’s such a completely unpleasant person that I feel like she doesn’t even work well as a video game character. I think the only role she should have had in this game is as an antagonist, because if anyone in Lumiose is a real villain, it’s the criminally insane Jacinthe.

Which is why it drives me up the wall how everyone is so quick to forgive her sociopathy, just laughing it off as one of her quirks and appreciating that she ultimately teams up with everyone else to save the city from Ange. But she’s clearly just saving the city because she wants to continue tormenting its residents, and she never shows any sort of remorse for her actions, or even some sort of a sympathetic motivation. I found Jacinthe downright disturbing, and I’m also alarmed at her popularity in the fan community. I just feel like something has gone very wrong here.

And Mega Dimension. I won’t say I went into it with high hopes for the story, but I started to feel a little hopeful when Korrina showed up and Ansha was adorable. And when the point in the plot came when Ansha was going to reveal her motives for wanting to catch Rayquaza for her mom, I was like “yes, this is the DLC’s big emotional reveal that’s going to solidify Ansha’s character and make me believe that the Game Freak writers can get something right”.

And… Ansha said that she wanted to catch Rayquaza because she read about it in a storybook and thought it sounded cool.

And I just groaned. Is that really the best motivation they could come up with? And why is everybody so enthusiastic about the whole thing? Why are we messing with the balance of nature and catching a demigodly Legendary Pokémon just because a child thinks it would make a cool present for her mom? This plot sounds like it was written for 5-year-olds, and after that happened I just kinda lost all faith in the game’s writing.

What makes it worse, though, is that at the very end of Mega Dimension, after you catch Rayquaza, the main characters have a conversation with Ansha where she vaguely alludes to her actress mother being busy with a shoot and Ansha wanting to find something worthwhile to give her that will make her happy, and it just felt like the germ of a really impactful bit of character development that never saw the light of day.

I would have loved for the game to actually show Ansha feeling insecure because her mother is a celebrity actress and Pokémon Champion, feeling lonely because her mom is so busy with work, in her desperation thinking that she can win her mother’s attention by catching a ridiculously powerful Pokémon, but realizing by the end that the most valuable thing she can give her mother is to be happy and live her best life, which is what she tells Naveen regarding his strained relationship with his grandmother. That would have made so much sense and made Ansha a truly sympathetic character. But, again, it’s like Z-A just has this aversion to emotional depth.

Oh, and Korinna was a bit of a disappointment too. I was excited to see her again, but she never had any more to her personality than “I’m the Mega Evolution Successor! I have to help all the Pokémon and see all the Mega Evolutions because I’M THE MEGA EVOLUTION SUCCESSOR EVERYBODY”. It got old quick.

One of the main things I like about RPGs is a story and world and characters I can get invested in. If I’m adventuring through a video game world, I want to share my adventure with fictional people I can care about, for a cause I care about. The characters and plot in Pokémon Legends: Z-A just feel half-baked, and although the gameplay was very fun, it was difficult to enjoy in the midst of so many writing mishaps.

I’m not asking that every Pokémon game have some sort of mind-blowingly amazing plotline. But stuff like characters with more than one personality trait, characters who actually grow throughout the course of the story, and a plotline with actual suspenseful and exciting moments are the sort of thing you learn in a junior high creative writing class and should be second nature to professional writers. When I play a video game, I don’t expect the electronic equivalent of War and Peace, but I do at least expect a story that actually tries, unlike Legends: Z-A.

Between this and how much I disliked the writing in Scarlet and Violet, I’m now a little apprehensive about Pokémon Winds and Waves. If the new trend for core series Pokémon games is a gameplay-focused experience with a really tepid plot and cardboard characters, then I’m not sure I want to play core series Pokémon games anymore. So I’m hoping Winds and Waves pleasantly surprise me. If not… well, there’s always Pokopia.

I also wanted to briefly discuss how I am legitimately excited for the Zelda: Ocarina of Time Switch 2 remake after seeing Eiji Aonuma’s gameplay video. When the game was first announced, I wasn’t exactly hyped. I’m not a fan of what’s come to be known as the 1:1 remake, i.e. essentially the exact same game with higher-res graphics and a few minor updates. Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl felt like such a slog. I borrowed the Zelda: Link’s Awakening Switch remake from my niece, and only got to the first dungeon before I just got bored and gave it back. So I was very worried about what this new Ocarina of Time treatment would look like.

And… I was blown away. It’s not like they took the original game and just spiffed up the graphics a little. They’ve recreated the entire game from the ground up, including new mechanics, new dialogue, fully redesigned characters, and gorgeously lush environments that I could get lost in just like I got lost in the N64 OoT world as a youngster. It looks like what would happen if the team behind Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom made Ocarina of Time, and I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what we’re looking at. If you’re going to remake games at all, this is what they should look like and play like. Not just converting pixel graphics into polygon models and calling it a day. When I get around to getting a Switch 2, I’m definitely adding this iteration of OoT to my game library.

As a final note, I wanted to mention that I don’t complain about games to be a mean person, or to bring others down if they did like the game. If you did like Legends: Z-A, that’s great. I’m very happy for you. I don’t complain about games because I think it’s cool to hate on them. I give my honest critical opinion because I care. I like entertainment that tries to tell a good story and tell it well, and if it doesn’t do that, I’m disappointed. I have always genuinely enjoyed every Pokémon core series game up until Scarlet and Violet (okay, and Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl, but those were just bad remakes of great games), and it makes me sad to see the writing end of the games slip so badly into mediocrity. I’m not okay with it – it makes the games less enjoyable for me – and I need Game Freak to fix this issue so it doesn’t affect any more games moving forward.

Okay, yep, this is long. But I expect a certain standard of quality from my big-name video games, and like my buddy Chris Lintott says, this is my hill I will die on. Or at least faint on and have to go to the Pokémon Center. (If Chris is allowed to have a hill about how people pronounce the acronym for the Royal Astronomical Society, I am allowed to have a hill about decent writing in video games.)

*I remember when the first Pokémon games came out. I… I feel so old.

**I don’t have anything against the idea of school uniforms, but the Naranja/Uva Academy uniforms are just so… tacky. Suspenders, really? And also I just don’t like the fact that you can’t change out of your uniform. I felt so restricted. Couldn’t there have been some other way to show you’re a student while you’re out and about in Paldea, like just wearing the school badge on your top or a hat with the school logo or something?

Maybe it’s also got to do with the fact that I’m American and didn’t have the experience of growing up with mandatory school uniforms. In junior high, one year my school decided to implement school uniforms to address complaints that kids were getting made fun of for not wearing brand-name clothes. Problem was, the uniforms were optional, and all you had to do to opt out of them was have your parents sign a form. So naturally, all the well-off kids opted out of uniforms, and then they got to pick on the kids who were still wearing uniforms. The uniform thing only lasted for that one school year. I think there’s a lesson to be learned there.

(I’m probably also a little traumatized by those uniforms because they were khaki pants and hideously uncomfortable polyester polo shirts that actually irritated my skin and gave me a rash. They were just about the ugliest thing you could ever make a kid wear, which was a really horrible idea for students at a time in their life when they feel especially self-conscious about their appearance.

… That school was just a series of unfortunate events. I hope kids nowadays have a better junior high experience than I did. But anyway that has nothing at all to do with Pokémon.)

P.S. Can we just talk for a moment about why it’s really important to respect everybody’s opinion, no matter how much you disagree with it? I had a very stressful experience not too long ago where I was on a message board, and someone posted a topic asking what everyone thought of the ninth generation of Pokémon games. I gave my candid opinion that there were some highlights, but I was disappointed with the Gen IX core series games (i.e. Scarlet and Violet and Legends: Z-A). Then the thread was inundated by a bunch of people defending Gen IX, saying how much they loved it, that it was sure to be nostalgic in hindsight even if you disliked it in the moment, etc.

And I just felt kind of ganged up on, like all these people were telling me I was wrong to be disappointed in the Gen IX games. Look, I get that it’s hard to swallow when somebody says they dislike something you like. But responding by attempting to invalidate that person’s opinion doesn’t help things any. If you want to like the Gen IX games, that’s fine. I’m not going to try to stop you. But I would appreciate not feeling like other people think I’m the bad guy for having a critical opinion.

The experience was so souring that I quit that message board. It’s hard to feel like you’re part of a community when so many of the other members of the community don’t allow you to have a different opinion to them. That’s fine. I’ll just rant about my opinions on my blog where I don’t get any responses. That’s what blogs are for.

I’ll also just go hang out with some scientists. I’m glad they enjoy my company.