Pokémon Legends: Arceus - The Full Review
A full look at the most ambitious and satisfying Pokémon game yet
Okay, I already wrote about this game a few weeks ago, so you’ll have to forgive me. Outside of working, eating, watching the Super Bowl, sleeping, and spending time with my family, the only thing I’ve done has been playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus. It’s an immersive game that has given me everything I want out of a console experience, but where does it belong in the pantheon, not only of Pokémon, but in video games themselves? I’m going to write a full review of the game here, especially now that, I’m mostly if not completely finished with the game pending any announcement of DLC. I say “mostly” even though I’ve reached the last ranking within Galaxy Corps and caught all the Legendary and Mythical Pokémon I could, but it’s not a 100 percent completion just yet. Anyway, as for the review, here we go…
Gameplay – The Pokémon series has spawned a periphery of games that include everything from on-rails shooters to strategy games. The core games are simple JRPGs though, and they always have been. Deviating from that track probably was due for refreshment purposes, but given that the franchise is geared towards children first and nerd fanatics like myself second, they really don’t have need to tweak too much. That’s why Sword and Shield are fundamentally the same game as Red and Blue. Sure, there are a lot more Pokémon and even more refinement and bells and whistles, but the catch-to-raise for battling paradigm has remained unchanged at its core. Pokémon Legends: Arceus is not positioned as a mainline RPG in the series, so there was a lot of room to experiment.
Critics of the Let’s Go dyad of games in Generation VII said it was a cheap ploy to grab all the players who discovered Pokémon through the mobile Go! game. I didn’t play them, so I can’t comment, but that was also the fear for this game. Those fears turned out to be unfounded. The biggest innovation of Go! was the idea that you could catch a partner Pokémon without having to battle them. For longtime players like myself who felt ingrained to have a battle be the start of every chance to catch a Pokémon that wasn’t gifted to you or reanimated from a fossil, that required some inertia to overcome.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus took both core elements and created a stunningly easy-to-handle hybrid as your main driver of action. Getting used to switching between throwing your Poke Ball (or berry or other foodstuff or ball of mud) and your laden ball containing your partner takes some acclimation. Once you accidentally throw your Rowlet or Cyndaquil or Oshawott at a Bidoof at whom you meant to throw and empty ball three or four times, you get jogged into knowing to press that X button when you’re ready to do what you need to do. Once again, it is all about building muscle memory and doing some light thinking on the run. Thinking and memory will be your best tools to completing your Pokedex, because this game does not treat each Pokémon encounter as a monolithic experience. You will have to keep mental notes of which creatures will act like you’re not there, which ones are flighty, and which ones are just utter dicks. Seriously, I will never look at Paras or Parasect the same way again after seeing them turn into bunk-ass versions of the Guardians from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
That game specifically is what this game has been compared to quite a bit, fair or not. I mentioned in the prior post about this game that it was a bit unfair to Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and I stand by that. The aesthetics feel similar, and I’ll get to that in the next section, but it feels like this game has too much other going on to feel like a one-to-one franchise port. There’s probably a lot more of a Minecraft influence here than most people have caught on. You could say it’s like cooking in BOTW, but for as therapeutic as cooking was in that game, it’s got nothing on the crafting table in PLA. You cooked health-restoring items or fringe boosts/buffs in Zelda. In this Pokémon game, you can actually craft all of your tools. You pretty much have to craft all your Poke Balls at first until the income starts rolling in from surveys. It would be like if you had to forge your own damn sword in Breath of the Wild.
Comparing this game to a bunch of others does it a severe discredit though. What makes Pokémon Legends: Arceus stand on its own merits? What is the reason for it? Clearly, it’s not just to add the Sinnoh Pokedex to the modern collection craze. That was nominally accomplished with Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl. It wasn’t just to add new Pokémon ore regional variants. It certainly wasn’t to tug on the similar strings of the RPG series in a different manner. There is no “Pokémon League” here. You don’t have to dodge or challenge trainers on your path to the endgame. The mainline RPGs sell a world where Pokémon are your partners in everyday life and are so ingrained in the world that everyone, not just trainers, have them. However, the games themselves are so laser-focused on battling and training that, unless you played a boutique game like Snap or Café Remix, you might think all the trappings inform battling and nothing else.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is a new kind of paradigm. It’s a research game. You are thrown into a clime centuries in the past where the people are afraid of Pokémon and know scant little about them. Basically, you have to do all the field research to get a society from the point where they cower in their feet at the sight of the not-so-mighty Wurmple to where they are bold enough to extract DNA from Mew and create an unholy clone abomination that has been at the center of so much of the anime and game lore. Battling other trainers is probably a tertiary or quaternary task at best. The game’s genetic code is wired like a JRPG, but the way it manifests is completely different than in the mainline. The result is a refreshing take on the series that has legs for as many future installments as the classic formula. In short, the gameplay alone here elevates it into the pantheon of great titles, Pokémon or otherwise.
Score – 10/10
Difficulty/Satisfaction – There’s a bell curve with most Pokémon RPGs where the game is difficult at first, but once you crest a certain level, the game’s hardness only rests with how much you’ve leveled your team. Past games have had tough league champions that even appropriately leveled teams would have trouble with. It took me three or four tries to defeat Stephen Stone in Pokémon Ruby and at least two unsuccessful bids before taking down Cynthia in Pokémon Diamond. Outside of those outlier events, the late- and endgame runs in Pokémon games aren’t meant to cause you discomfort with difficulty. The lure is always Pokedex completion, breeding, item discovery, and catching the mythical or legendary creatures that are readily available to you after you beat the main game.
Even with 75 hours put in and most of the Pokedex completed, I still find myself in situations where I have multiple Pokémon faint in a wild battle or end up blacking out. The former isn’t so much a problem, because I’ve found that if all your Pokémon faint, you don’t black out and run to the nearest Pokémon Center like you do in the mainline RPGs. Mainly, that’s because there are no Pokémon Centers yet. So much of the game hinges on you facing direct danger from the Pokémon themselves. You can get into a battle with your level 85 Decidueye against a lowly level 2 Shinx, but the real danger is finding yourself surrounded on all sides by several members of that evolutionary family, all of which are aggressively major assholes in this game, after mistiming your dismount from your aerial Braviary transport and taking damage as you land on the ground. It doesn’t matter what level your Pokémon are or what level the wild ones are. They can pose a danger. Of course, as you get used to the game, the regular wild Pokémon aren’t so much the problem. It’s the hordes of Pokémon that appear in Spacetime Distortions that might leave you bruised and broken. Either way, there are kernels of difficulty here in navigation and yes, even in battle (Alpha Pokémon or battles where you unwittingly put yourself at a numbers disadvantage) that make this game unique from the mainline series.
But are these changes making the game hard for the sake of having a hard game? The answer is, outside of the annoyance of losing items out of your satchel while trying to take down the Incarnate Forces of Hisui (the Forces of Nature trio from Pokémon Black and White plus new addition Enamorus), a clear no. The best games make the hair stand up on the back of your neck while you’re trying to navigate through difficult stretches. The reward is always worth the risk anyway, be they items, money, or rare Pokémon. The series, at its heart, is made with children in mind, so you’re not going to get something that is wracked with frustration. This game is just challenging enough to keep you engaged for 40, 50, 70, maybe even 100 hours.
Score – 9/10
Story – One of the big knocks I’ve heard from people around social media is that the game’s story is weak. I couldn’t disagree with that more. I don’t know what those critics were looking for, and suffice to say, I doubt it was a dense, cutscene-heavy, Hideo Kojima-esque movie that you play a role in. Pokémon stories can be beautiful in their simplicity, like in Black/White or Sun/Moon. Perhaps the mistake is thinking that the “main” game ends with an event involving the revelation of who the “Sinnoh” deity worshipped by the Diamond and Pearl clans really is. After playing through that part, even with its credit roll and everything, it’s clear that that point isn’t an endpoint at all and that the things that develop after is not an “endgame.” After all, the game is called Pokémon Legends: Arceus, not Pokémon Legends: Diamond and Pearl. The “checkpoint” ending plays with a lot of people’s expectations of a “main” RPG quest and a postgame that has tons of other stuff to do. Remember, this game isn’t built like the mainline games in that there are no gyms, no league, no organized battle structure.
Further down the line after this midpoint, you get engaged in several missions regarding other legendary Pokémon that leads to another big inflection point with a huge twist that I am intentionally being vague about so as not to ruin the mood with spoilers. You can go to a site like Serebii and find out the complete roster of Pokémon, areas, items, and whatnot to be in the game, but knowing which legendary creatures or the full battery of Pokémon available will not prepare you for the story why of why your character fell through a wormhole. It’s that journey that informs the entire narrative of your character being thrust into the past and having to do all the heavy lifting on the whats, wheres, and whys of Pokémon that are taken for granted in modern-day game settings.
The story then is seen as, again, beautiful in its simplicity. Your job is to find out as much as you can about Pokémon in a society that doesn’t trust them. The people in that society also don’t trust you. These two things intertwine with each other in a story where you have to earn their trust by giving them the gift of information about the flora and fauna that surround them, that dominate their world. It is a simple tale, but one that uses these simple backdrops to create a beautiful tapestry that can be as detailed as you want it to be. There are, after all, 94 different “requests” you can fulfill, and most of them are available before the checkpoint false flag ending. It may not hit for some people, but after playing through nearly the entire game, I see it as perhaps the best and most fully-realized story in the Pokémon series.
Score – 10/10
Aesthetic – I mentioned in the initial post about this game that it strives for a certain vibe, that of feudal Japan, and really hits on it. The Pokémon design of course hits on this. Basculegion, Growlithe, Braviary and Lilligant, among others, take the distinct artistic style of that time and space and turn it into a vibrant manifestation of those pieces of art. The actual humanoid characters too, though not by their physical faces, but by the clothing and armor they wear. Granted, it’s not a total one-to-one animation of, say, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, as the Pokémon series has its own standard aesthetic that it uses as a backdrop for the little details added in that flavor a given region with all the unique little tidbits. I will say that Pokémon Legends: Arceus probably deviates the most from the standard backdrop setup and borrows the most from the real-life trappings.
The other half of this equation is that Pokémon Legends: Hisui is not just meant to be a prequel to the mainline RPG series itself, but an explicit forerunner to the Generation IV games. The setting not only should be closely tied to Feudal Japan and her art, but it should remind you that Hisui is going to become the Sinnoh that you know from the Diamond and Pearl and also the remakes of those games. The series unmistakably transforms the Sinnoh region, which you know in its fully rectangular screens, into a wonderfully vibrant and alive biome where features like the Great Marsh of Pastoria City or the Three Lakes would end up being. The characters themselves provide roots for ones who would come before them on the chronology of the series in real time but after them on the timeline of the game narrative. One such is your commanding officer in the Survey Corps., Cyllene, who looks an awful lot like Cyrus, leader of the villainous Team Galactic in the modern-day games. There are a few others who stand out, but I don’t want to be too spoiler heavy.
Overall, the game sets out to manufacture tradition without doing so artificially. The result is a loving, caring creation of a region that embraces real world and in-game narrative trappings to succeed at using all the studio space afforded to them in 3D and on the mainline console that Pokémon Sword and Shield fell short. Aesthetically, this game is perfect.
Score – 10/10
Graphics – Aesthetics and graphics are two different things, obviously. The main knock on this game before release was the graphical precision, and although the errors did not affect my overall enjoyment of the game while playing, I have to put my Serious Critic hat on for once in my goddamn life to go through the things that aren’t quite on the level here. For one, there’s an issue with “pop in” with mountains or hills or other geographical features that appear “out of nowhere” while moving at a high velocity through the terrain. There are also issues with the frame rate on moving Pokémon at a larger distance away than in your direct vicinity. This usually comes up while observing flying Pokémon that you can catch. They move at a low frame rate that makes them look tacky and out of place.
The big thing, and the thing that I’ve found hampered my experience actually playing the game most, is what happens when you approach an invisible boundary that you cannot cross. The screen fogs up and hampers your visibility, which is fine except that the “fog” doesn’t clear up until you not only face away from the boundary but you move a certain distance from it. The fog has caused me to fall from height or run into a Pokémon I wanted to avoid. Overall, that bug was the one I found most trouble with.
Otherwise though, I thought the graphics, when they loaded correctly, looked clean at worst and beautiful at best. One area where the devs succeeded was at the animation of running water. It looks so peaceful and refreshing, especially at waterfalls. The big successes they had really punctuate the corners they cut, and while only a few of those errors were truly inhibitive to the gameplay, I could see where the big video game nerds might bristle. Then again, I’m of the mind where I would pay more for a game and wait longer for it if I knew the people working on it were better compensated and had more time to smooth everything out. Thus is life, I suppose.
Score – 5/10
Sounds – The game drew so many comparisons to Breath of the Wild that the people making them looked like rote hacks after a while. Yet, the most hilarious thing about them was that if you played as a male character, the voices he’d make when he’d get hurt or do an athletic move sounded exactly like Link’s from that game and from Ocarina of Time. Nintendo surely has a thing for that sound aesthetic for an adventurer. Anyway, the voice acting (grunt acting?) wasn’t the only sonic thing the game borrowed from the Zelda series. Like in Ocarina of Time, if you approach an enemy, the background music becomes one of two proprietary tunes, depending on whether the Pokémon is a normie or an alpha. Like in Breath of the Wild, the music flutters in and out depending on how far you are away from base camp. You can spend time foraging around the area in silence, and sometimes, you get a jaunty lil’ tune in the background.
Unlike Breath of the Wild though, Pokémon Legends: Arceus has actual, fleshed out tunes rather than lo-fi beats to slay Bokoblins to. Each area in the game has its own tune or tunes that evoke the original score to the Diamond and Pearl games. They’re new takes on the old material. My biggest complaint is that I could be tappin’ my toes to one the numbers in the Obsidian Fieldlands, and then I come up on a Pokémon and the music goes dead silent or turns into the “there’s a Pokémon stalking you” tune at an instant. I don’t like my jams being interrupted. Either way though, it’s more of a nitpick. The game’s sounds are on point.
Score – 8/10
Catch ‘Em All? – The short answer is “no, you can’t,” but it’s far less infuriating than the reasons why Pokémon Sun and Moon didn’t have the full Dex right away or why Sword and Shield STILL don’t have them complete. This endeavor being the newest and, in my opinion, most ambitious take on a Pokémon RPG yet gives the team a lot of leeway on how much they can cram in at launch. Remember, you’re not just talking some simple animations on command in battle. They had to give each Pokémon their own mini-AI that went above the “don’t notice you/run away from you/aggressively attack you” tripartite. Just look at the Machop family. As long as you don’t provoke them, Machop and Machoke1 will not attack you. They will, however, run up to you and start flexing their copious and magnificent muscles. Little bits like that are so rewarding. The fact that they included 242 Pokémon with this much care was impressive, even though I would have liked for them to have included a few more families in the fray.
As for the availability of rare Pokémon, new designs or variants, and legendary or mythical creatures, Pokémon Legends: Arceus is unmatched in the series. The sheer fact that every legendary or mythical Pokémon introduced in Generation IV is available legally and quite easily in this game is a treat for gamers who, in the olden days of Pokémon collection, had to wait for cumbersome events at retail outlets to get legal legendary creatures. The new designs are all home runs in my book as well. Whether it be the mighty, blunt-force wielding fury of Kleavor or the moody and protective tufts of fur in Hisuian Zoroark, the width and breadth of new Pokémon for an adjacent game to the current generation is astounding.
Score – 8/10
Overall – The most telling thing I can say about how different this game is from the rest of the series is that I played Pokémon Shield for the first time in a few months after an hour or so of playing Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and I actively had to think about how to maneuver my character. This game is not just another Pokémon RPG, but it’s also still one of the most fulfilling and rewarding RPG experiences in the series. The bugs are there, but they shouldn’t keep you from getting this game now and sinking as much free time as you can into it. That is, if you haven’t gotten it already. This might be the best Pokémon game ever, and if it’s not objectively2, it might be my favorite game in the series.
Score – 90/100
I’ve only ever encountered Machamp in alpha form, and alpha Pokémon are geared to attack you on sight no matter what their normal disposition is.
Whatever that means anyway.