So a new Pokemon game came out last year; a new Legends game at that. Legends Arceus is one of my favorite games in the series (if not my favorite) at this point, so I was pretty excited about this! I only got it in December (yay christmas!), and after getting it I basically played it for a week straight over break. Pokemon is a rather divisive franchise with its games, often for good reason, but I do always try to get my own opinion on the games before I look at them too thoroughly. And after playing through the game, I can safely say that, yeah, it’s pretty good I think.

My playthrough of the main game was about 45 hours, with another 20 coming from the DLC. I did not complete all sidequests, I did not get every Pokemon (there is exactly one that requires a grind I didn’t wanna do), and I did not complete the DLC’s postgame. I won’t be discussing the DLC much, as it’s its own beast, but it’s good.

The story wasn’t groundbreaking, but it did its job well. You’re a tourist who gets looped into helping out with AZ (a character from X and Y)’s hotel, and you have to explore and protect the city during the day while fighting your way to the top of a city-wide battle royale at night. It's solid! Not riveting, but an interesting premise.

I do wish there was a little more meat to the latter bit—the premise is going from rank Z to A, but you wind up skipping a whole lot of letters in the middle. I don’t mind skipping, but I do wish there was just like… a little more in between skipping and where you skip to in order to ease between the two segments, because they are notably different (the latter portion focuses more on the story and characters). I like the latter a lot more because of this, but I do think a little bit more content to ease the transition would’ve worked. Otherwise for the story, the climax to the game was great, and I did like how the characters were executed throughout.

Speaking of, I really liked the characters! They were definitely a highlight for me. I wound up liking pretty much the entire cast by the end, even returning characters from X and Y who I could not have cared less about originally. Even Canari, the streamer character who I figured I’d wind up hating, was actually pretty funny and likeable. They didn’t get streamer culture right, of course, but they did make her a fun and interesting character, and they did actually do Internet culture decently. Your main three teammates have a good dynamic and interesting character arcs, and after the big skip, all of the opponents you face are a lot of fun, too. Especially a big fan of the forcefemmed dragon lady, the lesbian with the Chandelure fit, and the CEO mafia boss that’s straight out of a y/n fanfic

And also him. Love this guy

Gameplay is cool. They changed combat to a real-time system, which I think was a really interesting twist! It’s flawed in execution—I think that the way Pokemon move around the battlefield is clunky and weird, especially when they can’t get to a spot and just get stuck for 10 seconds trying to go there—but I think it’s a really interesting change that’s fun to play around with! I hope future Legends games iterate on it. The catching system of Arceus is back, which I quite like! I wish Poke Balls had different weight classes in this one, just so I could get some more distant shots, but I am glad that there’s such a large variety of ball types to use.

The boss fights are a real highlight of the game for me—after you jump up in rank, you start finding “Rogue Mega Evolved” Pokemon and having to do battle with them. These fights are really well designed! They’re actual boss battles with attack patterns you have to plan around and dodge, and some of them are actually a little challenging!

Speaking of the megas, while there aren’t any new Pokemon, they added a lot of new mega evolutions, a lot of which I really like! There’s a couple that are just okay, but most range from good to excellent. (Especially the DLC megas, they’re great.)

DLC mega spoilers

They gave Absol a SECOND MEGA??? PEAK!!! Was it deserved? Probably not. But by god do I love it! Especially since I had one on my team!

And Meowstic's mega is super cool too!!

Player movement in this game is flawed, but pretty solid. You move too slow to want to traverse the city by foot, which sort of sucks for a game with sidequests and items scattered throughout the city. I just wish they brought back rollerblades! That would have been thematically appropriate and not too much faster! Also, there needs to be a way to get back up to the top of a building you just fell from. There’s a lot of being on rooftops in this one, but there aren’t really any easy ways to get onto buildings from the ground, bar ladders and Holo-Vators (which are fancy ladders). It’s not all that terrible, but it’s kinda annoying. Other than those two things, though, movement is good! It’s fun jumping between buildings, dodging attacks is a lot of fun, and while stealth is quite janky, it’s a neat option.

Shockingly, the graphics aren’t great (it’s a modern Pokemon game), but they’re serviceable. The only issues I noticed were textures being a bit low quality and minor stuff like balconies being plastered on. Otherwise, it looked fine! The game is nowhere near as buggy as Scarlet/Violet were, too—I can’t recall running into any bugs, and the only performance issues I had were with the final boss of the DLC. Outside of that one circumstance, the game ran really well, which I wasn't expecting for the Switch 1 release!

And the music is great too, of course. It doesn’t have the highs of Scarlet/Violet or Arceus, but it doesn’t have the lows, either. I wish there were more tracks that played out in the city, but the handful that we have is pretty stellar. They got insaneintherain on the team, that’s so cool!!

Carlos absolutely KILLS it here

Overall, I liked it a lot! I get why some wouldn’t, but I personally was really engaged by it, to the point where it might be my personal favorite game in the series above Arceus. I think I’d recommend it most to people who played and enjoyed either Arceus or Scarlet/Violet, as this game is very much a combination of both in execution. I’d probably give it like an 8.3/10. Fun stuff!