I haven't play the dlc yet but the base game was fun! I spent hours with different team combos and taking my sweet time with it overall. I really like the idea of being able to flex your team, change moves at anytimes, and just have fun doing pokemon battles. It's really refreshing take and I want more of it!

Game is not bussin frfr

Overall Score: 7.5/10 Steam Deck

I was not too big on this one , because of it being limited to Lumiose city and I was not fond of that idea, but it seemed interesting gameplay wise.

The gameplay is pretty good, it was a great idea making it active, but the overall experience is hindered by stuff like the overly long tutorial, which lasted 3 freaking hours, the city, which is pretty uninteresting to explore. The gliding kinda helps that situation, but not much. I just wish the city had distinct districts. Generally the first 10 hours were pretty mediocre and I thought to myself that this is the worst Pokemon game I've played. Things change when Megas are introduced though. The rogue mega evolved Pokemon were pretty cool as each felt like a unique fight, my favourite being mega banette which multiplied itself and made the fight a whole mayhem. The whole za Royale system was nice, but started getting tiring by the end, especially considering that I had to collect tickets every time for the promotional fight. The final fight was cool, not really great or good, but nice and not a typical Pokemon final fight. The final zygarde fight, which was three phased was pretty nice. I didn't like the new Megas except for greninja, victreebel, delphox and Starmie ( hated at first, but the edits of it running with Naruto osts changed that). My team was this: Greninja, Charizard, Victreebel, Starmie, Bois (Haracross) and Noivern. Side quests are not worth it honestly and visually the game isn't good.

For a Pokemon story the story was quite good. We go there as a tourist and get enlisted by urbain, because he wants to make a commercial about hotel z, we end up joining the AZ team and start the whole adventure of climbing the royal ranks and fighting rogue Megas. The game tried to give characters personality and each one especially later had their own arcs and managed to do it and make them memorable. Τhere was a streamer , a muscle head, an emo boss who looks evil,but is a sweetie, a nasty rich kid and finally ex kid members of team flare who are been oostracized by society, because of their past. Then there is AZ and his past actions leading to the troubles of today with the tower, his lore was cool generally, though pretty bare bones, his death still felt really cool and was shocking considering it's a Pokemon game we are talking about. Kinda sad that Urbain's plot point about the person he is looking for wasn't explored.

All in all, it's a good game, it could have been fantastic,but it is what it is.

Legends ZA é uma baita surpresa, teve um salto de evolução muito grande em relação ao Arceus, um modo de combate em em tempo real melhorado, ofereceu quests possíveis de concluir, áreas para capturar pokémon, os alphas continuam difíceis, mas aquela característica de capturar na surdina, de draftar item que o arceus trouxe foi o único ponto negativo. é um baita jogo, cheio de conteúdo, a historia deixou a desejar. Recomendo o jogo, finalizado dia 14/12/25 com 36h18min de gameplay

Legends Z-A shows that GameFreak can make a great game using a concentrated effort and a lot of non-main mechanics which can have great synergy. Specifically, it gives the player enough gameplay aspects to carve their own game loop, including around a lot of their poor pacing decisions.

ZA Royale is the closest we have to Routes in this game; they're confined areas you need to navigate to fight trainers and progress to the next game state. You can navigate around paths and architecture to find items and sneak up on trainers. The items in this case are mini challenges for how to battle, which give extra progress and an excuse to think a bit more when battling. These are fun in moderation, appearing every 2-3 hours and taking 15 minutes.

The other part of routes is catching mon, which can be done in wild areas. These allow you to battle one or a dozen Pokemon at once who also will attack you. It's really fun to run in there and repeatedly dodge everyone while getting your mon to wittle down the field and throw balls in-between dodging. Also fun are overpowered alpha mon encounters, which may involve brute forcing them with type effective moves, drawing them out from the wild area pack for a fair fight, or cheese them with Toxic and run around them taunting.

In-between routes are cities, or in this case city. You can get from one end to the city to the other in 2-3 minutes, so they have crammed this city with a bunch to explore. When going to a main quest, there are multiple side quests within eye shot, and you can think of it kind of like stars from Odyssey, but with the reward of money, items or XP candies. Some of these side quests are piss easy; show a mon to a NPC or crush their themed team in a minute. But some have some mustard, exploring a new subarea, a timed challenge, or a specific one-on-one matchup.

Each part of the city also exhibits a lot of creative and super fun exploration, thanks to the use of vertical space and platforming mechanics like rolling and hover. There are scaffolding bits akin to older cave puzzles which have you platform around, as well as rooftop to rooftop navigation, which rewards you with a bunch of trinkets. The game has a lot of good side items, with instant rewards like moves and held items, and redeemable rewards like mega shards and colourful screws.

If you follow the main quest line, you'll encounter horrible pacing including a lot of consecutive duplicate quests, the most infamous are Rogue Pokemon. Rogue Pokemon are one-on-one boss battles you have with a Pokemon as you try to chip away damage while dodging different attacks and advancing its phase. There's enough variety of targeted/AoE attacks to make it pretty fun to dodge them while collecting mega power shards to enable big damage. But doing it back to back to back is monotonous.

So, it's up to you to balance your load to make stuff not repetitive. The game starts by wanting you to bulk load side quests during the unskippable long day in-between ZA Royales and lots of unskippable dialogue. If you try to explore the whole area during the day for trinkets when the game first lets you as a break, well those trinkets don't refresh except for one point midway through the game. The best way to pace that is to use benches before they tell you about it to shift between gameplay elements and watch YouTube while mashing A through the story.

This pacing sentiment extends to team composition. As wild areas unlock, mon you catch in there are too underleveled to be viable for your team. But alpha mon are a few levels higher and have really good EVs, which make them very hard to fight and catch. It's up to you to seize the opportunity to get these to use and keep team and move composition fresh and interesting. I went through 30 different members overall and constantly swapped out my ride-or-die mon for new cool faces.

And this is where the side stuff adds extra rewards for different parts of gameplay. The colourful screws can add buffs for catching mon or getting more mega shards or surviving tough mon encounters. XP candies can help put one or two lower level mons in-line with the rest of your alpha roster. Money and mega shards can purchase new mega stones to aid your shifting roster and moves can help fill in type coverage deficiencies. Catching mon and other item acquisitions level up your research tree which gets new moves.

Juggling these side mechanics and rewards in the right way leads to interesting experimentation and strengthening your team and no grinding. Juggling these side gameplay loops with the main gameplay loop means you get space between repeating tasks and a satisfying gameplay synergy. If you exhaust one of these mechanics you'll have a less fun time, but balancing all of them lead to a very satisfying experience. If you know how to dodge the game's bullshit, this is an easy recommendation.

liked battle gameplay, looks are what you see in trailers sadly, story is good except for your team leader/rival coming off as selfish and a bit too 1 dimensional with their main character trait being "it will work out we can do anything" whe WE is you the main character.

Banger soundtracks as always and happy there's no Ed Sheeran at the end of the game for credits

Pokemon ist und bleibt einfach Pokemon - während die Grafik immer wieder Abstriche macht, ist der allgemeine Stil sehr schön gehalten.

Trotz des Settings in einer einzigen Stadt wird das Geschehene nicht langweilig und es gibt genug zu tun.

Die Geschichte ist interessant und die Charakter-Dialoge teils sehr amüsant. Allgemeine besteht eine sehr schönbe bunte Vielfalt bei den Charakteren!

Im Großen und Ganzen ein gutes Spiel mit ein paar Abstrichen hier und da.

Video dazu kommt noch

8.5/10

My first ever game on Switch 2!

Right off the bat, it's nice to see the game running at smooth 60 fps.

I was not happy when I first heard that the entire game would be taking place within a singular city. They do a good job with making it feel like a big playground though since the entire story and events of the game are in this one condensed area. That being said... I got sick of the city very quickly about half-way through and reaaally missed the expansive areas of Legends Arceus. As a disclaimer, I played Legends Arceus on an emulator so I had a much gameplay experience in terms of graphics resolution and performance, which means I thoroughly enjoyed it without all the technical limitations of the original Switch. This game does everything it sets out to do and on Switch 2 I see no faults in terms of this. But that being said, the graphics and overall aesthetic are lacking to me. Buildings are just rectangular shapes with flat textures pasted on them. The freakin' balconies aren't even real they're just flat images lol.

The zones are also incredidbly lacking in their ability to provide different landscapes. A small secluded area filled with snow is absolute shit compared to the large icy landscape from Arceus. The previous entry had oceans, mountains, caves, volcanoes, ruins, fields, and all sorts of terrain that made the place feel and varied and interesting. The fact that the DLC for this game is just a distorted city-scape is INCREDIBLY disappoiting and lame. Everything being contained in the city also really screws up the legendary encounters because they just randomly show up in the boring city locations rather than iconic and recognize places like Cerulean Cave, the Whirl Islands, and pretty much every legendary Pokemon location. It takes severely lesses the experience and feeling of wonder and discovery.

Gameplay is fun but, and I will continue to scream this at the top of my lungs, DIGIMON DID IT FIRST. I love the active combat and have wanted the series to go in this direction for so long. I need this spin-off to continue in this direction and improve upon it. Don't take out the real-time aspect and continue to add instead of take away.

Story is bland. Not as bland as some other entries (the finale was cool), but it doesn't feel like it pushes any of the series boundaries and feels more like a side-step.

Waiting for the DLC to come out.

dommage que gamefreak a juste fait des effort sur l'histoire a la fin l'histoire et repetitif a la mort y'a pas de doublage et c moche malheuresement dommage le gameplay et plutot fun en vrais et aussi on peut pas sauter c horrible

love the story and the new battling system i liked more then i was expecting but after you beat the story there isnt much else to do other then side missions, online battles and shiny hunting. i was hoping to see some sort of PvE raid thing with the new battle system.

perfect