Pokemon Legends Arceus Review: Start of an Evolution

Every time I play a main series Pokemon game, I know what to expect — pick a starter Pokemon, beat trainers and gym leaders to level up your team, make your way to the Elite Four, watch the credits roll, and then decide if you want to create a competitive team for multiplayer battles. It’s a formula that developer Game Freak has perfected and repeated to the point that it’s been ingrained in my subconscious, but it’s also one that has been in dire need of change.

Enter Pokemon Legends Arceus, a game that feels like a Pokemon game and has all the elements of one, but doesn’t regurgitate what we are used to seeing. Instead, it introduces us to some welcome changes to how we normally play a Pokemon game and gives us a glimpse as to how the series could, for lack of a better term, evolve.

A familiar, yet new world

Pokemon Legends Arceus lets you play as a protagonist who literally fell out of the sky due to a time-space rift. Its setting takes you back in time to when the Sinnoh region, the setting for Diamond and Pearl and known back then as Hisui, was a rural landscape just starting to develop. The people who take you in are part of the Galaxy Team’s Survey Corps, a group of individuals whose mission is to explore their surroundings and the wild Pokemon that inhabit it. Soon enough, you become a member whose mission is to help create the world’s first ever Pokedex.

One of the great ways Legends Arceus ties in the existing universe together is that it features concepts, people, and names that have existed before but presents it to us in a way that’s entirely different. The Pokedex, for example, is now an actual tome filled with pages detailing the various Pokemon you encounter and not some high-tech gadget. The people you meet from Commander Kamado to the traveling merchant Volo also look familiar because they are the ancestors of notable characters from previous games. These small details make you look forward to seeing what new, yet nostalgic concept, design, or feature will show up next.

Your mission to catch every Pokemon takes you various biomes throughout Hisui from marshlands to forests to snowy mountaintops. Each area is expansive and lets you walk around exploring its landscape, picking up crafting materials, or running into the various wild Pokemon that are seen wandering around. This layout feels like the wild areas in Sword and Shield mixed with the natural simplicity of Pokemon Snap.

Super effective features

Each biome is home to dozens of Pokemon and in order to fill your Pokedex, you will have to not only catch them once but also achieve various goals relating to each particular species. For example, you can catch various Wurmple, defeat a set number of Starly, or witness Cyndaquil utilizing Ember a set number of times to fully complete their respective entries. Achieving these goals, catching Pokemon, and then reporting your findings to your professor nets you survey points, which let you rank up to the next Survey Corps level to let you train higher-level Pokemon and progress through the story.

In addition to these area surveys, you can also speak to villagers to take on requests which usually involve catching a certain Pokemon or completing a Pokedex entry. These side missions are entirely optional but they reward you with various items and offer a unique appreciation of a species you may have never considered before. Who knew Geodude made a great pickling weight?

Because many of your actions will involve catching Pokemon in the wild, it is refreshing that this feature has been completely reconfigured. Instead of needing to engage a Pokemon in battle like in other games, you can simply throw a ball at an unsuspecting Pokemon to catch it. Some ‘mon are timid, and will run away if they spot you. Others will get aggressive and will attack you if you’re not careful. This new catching style is also reminiscent of how you would have to work for certain shots in Pokemon Snap and lets you survey certain Pokemon in their natural habitat.

Hunt or be hunted

Pokemon battles themselves also feel more dynamic simply because they take place right where you are. If a Pokemon escapes their ball or becomes aggressive, your best bet of catching them is to throw one of your own Pokemon out on the field and attack. The lack of a transition screen means that these encounters feel more real and make you feel like you are fighting alongside one of your pals. In fact, you can even walk around the battlefield and get pushed back by certain moves if you stand too close to the action. These little touches create a fluid experience never before seen in a Pokemon game.

Commands and attacks also retain their familiar mechanics, but your Pokemon can master attacks now the more they use them. Mastering them lets you then choose if you want to unleash a strong or agile style of that move which can determine the turn order in a battle. A strong attack, for example, does more damage but means the opposing Pokemon can then attack more often before your next turn. Because battles are more straightforward — no held items, no abilities, no being asked to switch out when an opponent brings in a new Pokemon — they feel fast and considerably more difficult than in past games.

Actual battles with other trainers are much less frequent here as there are no trainers waiting to lock eyes with you or gym leaders to defeat. Instead, the story will introduce you various wardens and other notable characters whom you will have to defeat. Aside from these story-related fights, there are no other battles in the game with trainers or even the ability to compete online with other players. This move makes it feel like a very different experience if you are used the main series games. And, this isn’t a main series game so that’s totally understandable, but the issue is that the game lacks variety due to some of these omissions.

Not very effective performance

The act of filling up your Pokedex, for instance, comes across as repetitive. Once the magic of discovering how natural battles feel or how life-like it can be to engage with Pokemon in their natural environment, you are then left with a game that feels relatively empty despite having so much potential to be so much more. What’s the point introducing a sleek way to teach your Pokemon moves if they serve you no purpose other than fighting off a wild Pokemon where attack power outweighs strategy and planning? Or why even feature trading in the game if you can find every Pokemon and make them evolve without needing another player’s help?

Visually, the game looks lush and colorful from certain angles, and a lot of thought and detail was clearly put into designing the characters you meet and the central settlement of Jubilife Village you will frequent. From a distance, however, you will notice blemishes that are hard to excuse when compared to a robust game like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which came out back in 2017. Instead, you will run into muddy textures, pop-in issues, and performance drops that will make certain models in the distance look like a stop-motion animation.

These frame rate issues also affect how Pokemon appear on field, as some won’t even load until they’re right next to you. To make matters worse, Hisui is pretty barren and underdeveloped and only features one village for you to explore. Everywhere else you travel to just features wide open fields with no defining features to make them feel truly memorable. Even the quick-travel camps you can set up just feature the same bare-bones layout and serve as places to rest or reorganize your supplies.

So much potential

There is, however, a natural beauty to certain areas such as seeing the lighting from a sunset reflecting across the surface of a river or having a battle right below the whirling vortex that encircles the peak of Mt. Coronet. The soundtrack also pulls you into its wonder and features arranged music from Diamond and Pearl, adding another layer of intrigue and nostalgia to this new, yet familiar region. It’s a shame your surroundings don’t often match the quality of some of these arrangements.

For those of us who have grown familiar with the structure of Pokemon games for over 20 years, Pokemon Legends Arceus feels like a wish come true. It outshines the open-world concept of Sword and Shield and revisits the natural elements of the series and their environment first introduced in Pokemon Snap. Not everyone will appreciate the departure from the main series, however, and the lack of battles, missing multiplayer, and small number of Pokemon make for a very different experience that leaves you wanting more. The ideas and potential are definitely there, and if this is just a small sampling of what Game Freak can do with the series — we can’t wait for more.