After years of watching the Pokémon franchise stumble through its transition to full 3D—delivering technical messes alongside genuinely innovative ideas—it’s a relief to report that Pokémon Legends: Z-A finally gets the balance right.
This isn’t just another incremental step forward; it’s Game Freak confidently planting its flag and declaring that yes, they can make a polished, ambitious, and genuinely exciting Pokémon game in the modern era.
A City Worth Calling Home
The most radical departure Z-A makes from Pokémon tradition isn’t its action combat system or even its performance improvements. It’s the decision to set the entire game within the boundaries of Lumiose City, the Paris-inspired metropolis that charmed players in Pokémon X and Y. Five years after those events, Lumiose faces a crisis: wild Pokémon are invading the city limits, creating dangerous conflicts that necessitate designated “Wild Zones” to keep humans and creatures separated.
You arrive via train as a young adult—and yes, an actual adult, not a ten-year-old child embarking on an implausibly dangerous journey alone. Your character’s peers discuss getting jobs and paying rent. It’s a small but meaningful shift that allows Z-A to tell a more mature, nuanced story than the series typically attempts.
Almost immediately, you’re adopted by Team MZ, a group dedicated to protecting Lumiose by day while climbing the ranks of the Z-A Royale competition by night. This framework gives the game something previous Pokémon titles have sorely lacked: a genuine sense of community and belonging.
The Yakuza Approach to Pokémon
Never before has a Pokémon game’s setting been so integral to its story and themes. By confining the adventure to a single city rather than sprawling across an entire region, Z-A is able to tell deeper, more character-driven stories. You have a crew of friends who hang out at your hotel, who show up throughout the city to help in battles or just chat. Unlike traditional rivals who vanish after delivering exposition about type matchups, these characters develop meaningful relationships with you and each other.
The comparison to Sega’s Yakuza/Like a Dragon series is impossible to avoid—and that’s high praise. Z-A is civic-minded in its storytelling, focusing on what it means to protect and nurture the community you call home. The game wrestles with genuinely thought-provoking questions: What happens when multiple groups inhabit the same space but have conflicting needs? Who should be prioritized when those needs clash? How do we balance urban development with environmental preservation?
Z-A doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does provide compelling metaphors for real-world civic and environmental challenges while emphasizing compassion as the foundation for solving them. (There’s even a literal benevolent mafia faction, just to complete the Yakuza parallel.)
Side Quests That Actually Matter
Z-A stuffs over 100 side quests into Lumiose’s streets, and delightfully, most don’t involve battling other trainers. You’ll help a Furfrou groomer teach her Scyther styling techniques. You’ll assist a perfume maker in sampling Pokémon odors for her wares. A café worker needs you to lure Trubbish away from her establishment, while an electrical worker requires help chasing Pokémon away from his malfunctioning elevator.
These quests are frequently silly, occasionally touching, and always creative. They involve battles, yes, but also catching specific Pokémon, teaching moves, trading, evolving creatures, acquiring items, and even parkour challenges. It took me 35 hours to roll credits while staying mostly current on side quests, and I still haven’t finished them all in the post-game.
These missions serve a crucial purpose beyond padding playtime: they make Lumiose feel alive. The city isn’t just a backdrop for your adventure; it’s filled with people (actual non-trainer people!) living their lives, each with their own quirks, problems, and personalities.
The Silent Treatment Problem
One glaring misstep mars Z-A’s otherwise excellent storytelling: the complete absence of voice acting. During regular gameplay and text-box dialogue, this didn’t particularly bother me—I’ve played decades of silent Pokémon games. But during major story cutscenes, watching characters dramatically gesticulate and move their mouths with zero sound emerging is jarring and immersion-breaking.
This wacky pantomime feels increasingly absurd in 2025. Every other story-heavy franchise has embraced voice acting. It’s long past time Game Freak caught up and hired some actual voice actors, at minimum for key narrative moments.
The Technical Elephant in the Room
Let’s address the Copperajah in the room: performance. After Scarlet and Violet’s disastrous technical state at launch, Z-A needed to prove Game Freak could deliver a functional product.
On Nintendo Switch 2, Z-A runs beautifully. A smooth, consistent 60 FPS makes exploration and combat feel responsive and polished. NPCs and objects still pop in somewhat suddenly, but it’s substantially better than Scarlet and Violet’s wonky phasing. Character animations maintain proper framerates. I encountered no game-breaking bugs, no Pokémon stuck in walls or floors. Loading screens flash by so quickly you barely have time to read the tips displayed on them.
For the first time in years, I played through an entire Pokémon game barely thinking about performance issues. That alone feels like a minor miracle.
But what about Switch 1 players?
Having spent several hours on the original Switch hardware, I can report that Z-A runs significantly worse there—though still better than Scarlet and Violet at launch. Loading screens are longer. Textures are noticeably blurrier. The framerate targets 30 FPS but frequently dips below that, especially when rotating the camera with lots of action on-screen. Object and character pop-in is severe, sometimes creating absurd scenarios where a cutscene tells you to check out a crowd down the street, only for that crowd to be completely invisible until you run toward it.
None of these issues are game-breaking, and if you’re accustomed to Scarlet and Violet on Switch 1, this will feel like an upgrade. But taken together, the numerous small performance problems accumulate into an experience that feels shoddy and unpolished. It’s 2025; we’ve seen numerous larger Switch 1 games from smaller studios run perfectly well. The fact that Z-A struggles on that hardware is disappointing, even if understandable.
I hope this is the final Pokémon game on Switch 1, because this song and dance is getting tiresome.
Ugly City, Beautiful Exploration
Visually, Lumiose City is… not much to look at. The environment consists largely of the same five or six building exteriors repeated ad nauseam—flat, ugly images with windows and balconies painted Looney Tunes-style onto walls. Most structures can’t be entered. You’ll see the same parks, cafés, and paving stones again and again.
However, the building interiors you do access are detailed, colorful, and cozy-looking. Character models are more expressive than ever, with greater visual variety in NPC designs thanks to distinct facial features and differently colored outfits within trainer classes. Character customization continues improving, offering extensive face and outfit options with no gender-locked clothing and the ability to mix and match colors for a wider variety of looks.
More importantly, Lumiose being visually uninteresting doesn’t mean it’s uninteresting to explore. This is where Z-A succeeds where Arceus and Scarlet/Violet failed: both those games offered vast, empty worlds devoid of meaningful exploration rewards. Their enormous fields contained randomly scattered items and the same Pokémon everywhere. Caves were empty tunnels, mountaintops barren, landmarks unrewarding.
Z-A takes the opposite approach. By shrinking the world to manageable size, Game Freak filled it with thoughtfully placed rewards. Sometimes these are items like TMs or collectible Colorful Screws waiting at the end of amusing platforming segments. More often, they’re rare Pokémon.
While most Pokémon are confined to Wild Zones, some creatures lurk throughout the city streets, and finding them is genuinely thrilling. At first, you’ll only spot common species—Pidgeys pecking in parks, Kakuna dangling from trees, Trubbish munching garbage. But explore thoroughly and you’ll discover alleyways, courtyards, and rooftops hiding rarer monsters: an Ariados dropping from a sewer ceiling, Gastly leaping from dark corners at night, a single Eevee trotting down a narrow backroad. I squealed upon finding a rare Dratini on a painstakingly reached rooftop. These moments make exploring Lumiose an absolute delight.
Revolutionary Combat
I’ve somehow gotten this far without discussing Z-A’s most revolutionary change: Pokémon is now an action game. The turn-based system is gone. And it works brilliantly.
Game Freak’s achievement in translating the familiar system of monsters, moves, status effects, items, and types into a completely different genre is genuinely impressive. Instead of taking turns, you move your character around the battlefield while monsters fight. Your Pokémon follows you by default, giving you indirect control over positioning and allowing you to dodge opponent moves. Hold ZL and your Pokémon squares up with its opponent, letting you select and use moves.
In wild Pokémon battles, you must also keep your trainer out of danger—they can be damaged and knocked out, adding fascinating strategic layers to positioning for optimal offense and defense.
I worried this would devolve into mindlessly spamming offensive moves, but that’s far from reality. The indirect movement system, while slightly clunky initially, introduces interesting positional strategy as you balance dodging and attacking. The moves themselves are delightfully complex, reimagined for action combat while retaining their essential spirit.
Short-range moves execute quickly but put you in danger. Long-range moves require wind-up time but keep you at safe distance. Moves like Protect and Detect function almost like parries. Fire Spin and Sand Trap create area-of-effect zones you can lure enemies into, while Spikes scatters hazards across the battlefield.
Status effects received overhauls too: paralysis drastically slows movement, while confusion causes Pokémon to wander erratically. Mega Evolutions got revamped with meters to fill, the ability to Mega Evolve multiple Pokémon in single battles, and Plus Moves—essentially Mega Evolution-powered attacks usable by any team member under the right conditions.
The best part? This system still rewards veteran Pokémon knowledge. Everything functions roughly as you’d expect, just in action format. While I hope Pokémon doesn’t completely abandon turn-based battles, I’d love to see the Legends series adopt this action system permanently and continue refining it. Arceus revolutionized catching Pokémon; Z-A has revolutionized battling. I cannot wait to watch the competitive community dissect this system and develop its meta.
Challenge and Balance
The campaign offers varied difficulty. Casual players will likely breeze through some sections—the Z-A Royale, where you collect points defeating trainers to trigger Promotion Matches and rank up, is surprisingly easy. It’s trivially simple to sneak up on opponents and knock out their first Pokémon in one blow, then crush their second immediately after.
This may be intentional, as you can increase monetary rewards by defeating as many trainers as possible before daybreak, encouraging you to Rapidash through battles. But the Royale’s ease nonetheless diminishes the sense of accomplishment, particularly when the story forces you to jump 17 ranks at once at one point. It prevents the game from becoming an agonizing 100-hour slog, but it still feels silly and undermines the Royale’s importance.
Challenge exists elsewhere, though. Wild Areas feature powerful Alpha Pokémon that can summon gangs of smaller creatures to overwhelm you. Most difficult and most fun are story battles against Rogue Mega Evolved Pokémon. These monsters are big, mean, and often target your trainer directly, forcing you to carefully balance dodging attacks while positioning your Pokémon to whittle down massive health bars.
Some Rogue Mega Evolutions have devastating second-phase attacks—turning the entire arena into bullet hell, creating copies of themselves, or spontaneously appearing behind you for brutal swipe attacks. Game Freak ensures all its new Mega Evolutions get memorable moments through these encounters. Just wait until you face Mega Starmie!
The Verdict
Pokémon Legends: Z-A finally feels like Game Freak hitting its stride in the 3D era. Lumiose City may not be visually stunning, but exciting Pokémon encounters, well-written characters, and amusing side quests make it genuinely fun to explore while serving as the perfect vehicle for a more intimate, emotionally mature Pokémon story.
Z-A’s complete battle system overhaul from turn-based to action works surprisingly well, managing to be intuitive for veterans and engaging for casual players while introducing intriguing possibilities for competitive play. While the game could use performance help on Switch 1, it’s a marked improvement over its predecessors and significantly better on Switch 2.
After several years of finishing Pokémon reviews with a deep sigh, it’s refreshing to once again be excited to keep playing for hours more. Z-A isn’t perfect—it desperately needs voice acting, Switch 1 performance remains concerning, and Lumiose isn’t winning any beauty contests—but it’s the most confident, polished, and genuinely enjoyable Pokémon game we’ve seen in years.
