The best Pokémon game in years.
Note: For the sake of brevity, I’m going to assume the reader of this review is familiar with the concept of Pokémon and has played a Pokémon game before. Saves me a lot of work. Imagine explaining the basic concept of Pokémon to someone who’s never heard of it. ‘So, you imprison wild animals in little balls and make them fight each other. Why? Oh, to see whose little animals are the strongest. That doesn’t answer your question? What if I told you that your secondary objective is to capture every single animal you find in a vain attempt to catalogue every creature in the known universe because an old man who lives in the science lab next door asked you to? Does that help?’ You kinda had to be there.
Rowlet: Double-Threat
Me 'n George, goofing off at the photo booth like a couple of bros.
With a perfectly spherical body that is also his head, not to mention his cute lil’ bow tie, Rowlet is one of gaming’s top owls. He is small but agile and will viciously defend your honour should the need arise. I named mine George.
George is a good boy, with a surprisingly diverse move-pool and—
What? People don’t want a 2000-word review of Rowlet? They want a review of Pokémon Legends: Arceus? Weird, but fine, I’ll do it. But I warn you, I liked the heck out of this game, and a lot of that is down to Rowlet’s mere existence, so I’m not exactly unbiased.
Pokémon Oopsie and Daisy: A Sword and Shield Story
Writing this in 2022, a few months after the release of Pokémon Legends: Arceus, I can’t help but wonder if this review will age well because I can’t remove myself from the context that is the quality of recent Pokémon games. Well, mostly Pokémon Sword and Shield. It’s hard to shake the feeling that a portion of my enjoyment of Legends: Arceus comes from comparison to Sword and Shield. I believe that Legends: Arceus is a great game on its own merit, but I think it might be useful to understand how I felt going into it.
I can report having a standard love/hate relationship with Sword and Shield. I loved the new creature designs but hated the limited Pokémon availability. I loved the new battle mechanic—Dynamaxing your Pokémon to make the football-stadium sized—but hated how long the battles take. I loved the story (okay, liked) but hated its lacklustre execution. And most importantly, I loved the concept of the Wild Area, a fully 3D space filled with Pokémon to run around with, but hated how empty the place felt.
And I didn’t realise it at the time, but the same old Pokémon formula was getting a bit stale. It was easy not to notice as it was hidden behind a fun and evergreen battling system, but Pokémon needed a shake-up.
Praise Almighty Sinnoh!
All of the pictures in this review will be of George, in case you were wondering.
Along comes Legends: Arceus. This game feels like a defibrillator for the Pokémon series. It’s a shot of adrenaline, a cold shower in the morning, it’s Prince Charming’s kiss. Pokémon hasn’t felt this fresh or exciting since… well, maybe ever.
It starts with the small changes that had me happier than a Meowth on payday for those first ten or fifteen hours, despite the initial excessive handholding. Battles started and finished with lightning-fast ferocity, taking place right there in the overworld with no lengthy transitions to battle ‘arenas’ like in previous games.
I could catch Pokémon by sneaking up on them and throwing a ball. My Pokémon could interact with the overworld by collecting berries and minerals. I could let George out of his Pokéball and watch him until he did something cute, which never took very long, the little scamp.
But my favourite small change comes in the form of missions. I still remember the feeling when I first discovered them. My jaw dropped. ‘This game has side-quests?’ I cried. Maybe it shows how stuck in the past Pokémon games have been that the introduction of numbered side-quests made me squeal with delight, but here we are. The side-quests are mostly easy to complete, but they’re rewarding as hell, offer more incentive to explore the game at a deeper level, and add snippets of life to the NPCs.
But there are bigger changes, namely the emphasis Legends: Arceus puts on catching as opposed to battling—a deviation some might find disturbing. It’s strange, really, how in older games you only had to catch one of every Pokémon to satisfy the Pokédex. Really, if you were sufficiently leveled, most people would just run away from wild Pokémon rather than deal with a lengthy battle. Well, not anymore.
To fully complete most Pokédex entries, not only will you have to catch roughly twenty-five of the same Pokémon, but you’ll have to see them use certain kinds of moves multiple times, catch strong Alpha variants, complete side-quests, and more. As you level up your Pokédex, you unlock access to better items, so it’s always worth actually engaging with wild Pokémon in this game, which offers a huge amount of replayability.
Plus, you get stat-boosting items as a reward for releasing excess Pokémon en masse, so if you’re not catching and battling as many wild Pokémon as you can, you’re missing out.
Also new to the series is crafting, which turns out to surprisingly fun. Lots and lots of Pokéballs are necessary for a satisfying completion of the game, and while you can technically buy them, you’ll rarely have enough money to buy the sheer number of Pokéballs you’ll need to complete Pokédex challenges. So you make them instead. Crafting is fast, easy, and available on the fly, with plenty of necessary materials available in the overworld, incentivising the player to engage with the environment.
Who’s That Pokémon? No Really, What The Fu—
Speaking of the overworld, the Hisui region is the most exciting region Pokémon has ever seen. It’s heavily populated with Pokémon and nature and while it’s a little disappointing that the game isn’t a true open-world adventure (the region is split into several distinct areas, each only accessible from the hub town), those distinct areas are massive, and I honestly don’t mind exploring them individually.
They even manage to maintain that Dark Souls-esque thrill of exploring a section of an area you’re not supposed to be in yet by placing an extremely high-leveled Alpha Pokémon at strategic locations to stop you going too far. That, coupled with different modes of terrain traversal being unlocked over time means that there’s plenty of opportunity and reasons to revisit places you’ve been before.
I wouldn’t be doing the game justice if I didn’t mention the Pokémon new to Legends: Arceus. There’re outright new Pokémon that have never existed before, regional variants of older Pokémon, and new evolutions to Pokémon that I never expected. I mention this only to encourage any Pokémon fans from spoiling themselves by engaging with Pokémon media online.
I hadn’t seen a frame of this game before launch (apart from the reveal trailer) which went a long way towards keeping me surprised and engaged with the new Pokémon on display here. There’re also plenty of references to older Pokémon games which delighted me. Pokémon doesn’t have a heavy history of self-referencing—and too much can be downright annoying—but they hit a sweet-spot here (my favourite kind of reference being the subtle remixing of the score from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, which contains some of my favourite video game music of all time).
Keepin’ Hitmontop of Things
George may be the size of a football, but he possess the power of wrecking ball.
I’ve mentioned Alpha Pokémon a few times already, so let’s talk about them for a minute. Alpha Pokémon are wonderfully over-levelled and oversized Pokémon scattered about the region, made distinctive by their glowing red eyes. They’re normally incredibly hard to catch the first time you encounter them, but they also pose the biggest threat to you, the trainer.
That’s right! For the first time ever, you can take damage and faint in a Pokémon game! Doing so results in losing a chunk of your inventory and being sent back to base camp. I’ll be honest, I only whited-out a few times when playing, but that doesn’t mean the game is easy—I just learned early on that I had to keep my wits about me when exploring. True, Alphas can wipe you out the fastest, but even a low-level Shinx can do significant damage to the player, as can falling and drowning.
You also have your Pokémon’s survival to look out for, making plenty of Potions and Revives (both can be crafted) incredibly necessary. This aspect of survival is totally new to a mainline Pokémon game and adds an unexpected level of immersion.
Immersive. That’s the game in a word. It’s a wonderful feeling to fall completely into a game and overall this was my experience with Legends: Arceus, but I would be neglecting my true feelings if I didn’t dive into some of the game’s problems that make it fall oh-so-short of being a perfect Pokémon game.
De-Evolution
We’ll start with the graphics, which are fine. There. Bet you didn’t expect me to say that, given the abuse hurled at the game’s graphics pre-release. Fine, let me rephrase: I think they’re fine. Subjective. See? Now you can’t be angry. Yes, there’s some pretty bad pop-in—mountains and hills and trees load and disappear before your very eyes without even an apology. Distant Pokémon move at a hilariously slow frame-rate, and some of the less-important textures look a bit pixel-y (the Pokémon themselves have never looked better, though).
Honestly, none of that bothers me. The game has a lovely aesthetic and art direction that draws me into the world of Hisui in a way that other Pokémon games don’t (not basing the look of the game off bloody England helps. Another point against Sword and Shield). What does bother me is the game’s lack of online connectivity.
Confession time: I have nearly 400 hours logged in Pokémon Sword and 250+ of those hours come from engaging with the game’s online community, mainly its still-thriving online battling scene. It is baffling to me, then, that Legends: Arceus has so few online functionalities. You can trade with your friends and… that’s about it. You can’t even battle your friends, which you could do in Pokémon Red and Blue on the GameBoy!
Now, the game has enough to offer that you’ll still get your money’s worth with Legends: Arceus, but it can make the game feel a bit lonely at times. The enormous step backwards in terms of connectivity between players is disappointing, but I should mention that if you’ve a Pokémon Home account, you can now trade your Pokémon from Legends: Arceus with strangers online. Still no battling, though. Look, George is a round, green, fighting machine and I just want to show him off.
To touch briefly on the story of Legends: Arceus… Look, it’s there. Mostly it’s just an excuse to get you from area to area, unlocking new game mechanics as you go. Things do ratchet up towards the end of main game, and the post-game offers some neat sequences, but all in all, the story isn’t exactly compelling. It did a fine job hooking me with a few central mysteries, but there isn’t exactly a plot, nor do any characters offer any depth beyond their surface-level traits.
There’s no voice-acting, no cutscenes that don’t use the gameplay engine, and very little fanfare for some of the most exciting Legendary Pokémon to exist in the franchise.
Like No Game Ever Was
"And I said 'PikacHOO?' Do you get it?"
But despite dedicating a few hundred words to talking about them, my problems with this game haven’t come anywhere near to ruining my experience of it. Legends: Arceus is exciting, charming, and absolutely jam-packed with things to do (100%-ing this game will take you hundreds upon hundreds of hours).
It’s pretty clear that the developers set out to change the formula with Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Seeing them take risks like this after twenty-five years of running through variations on the same old Routes and Gym Leaders is delightful and deserves to be praised. Some of those risks didn’t turn out as well as others, but the very fact that they are even trying something new is exciting. My hopes for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are only that they take the new formula they laid out in Legends: Arceus and take it a step further, perfecting it.
Right now, I’m making my way steadily through the post-game and George is Level 83. I haven’t let him evolve, because when a Rowlet evolves it becomes less round, less perfect. George has fought gods and slain monsters. He picks up little berries for me when I throw his ball at a tree. He has stared into the abyss and the abyss flinched. He likes to have little conversations with my Piplup called Bean.
I wish I could talk to him too.
03/06/22
***
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