Pokemon Legends: Arceus

(originally 2022, edited 2025-10-29)
The first time I had genuine fun playing a Pokemon game since Silver. They did exactly what they needed to do with the series to reinvent it. Get rid of the focus on competitive multiplayer–with entirely too complicated mechanics and systems, re-do capturing to make it more engaging, and add a whole bunch of QOL improvements to stop wasting players’ time. Yes, this is how you mix shit up.

The open world is kind of sparse but it doesn't matter because being able to wander around and see proportionally large and small Pokemon wandering around is incredible. I remember just walking around and looking up and seeing a Gyrados in the sky. Those little teases of power to come. Seeing an Alpha Haunter floating around that's the size of a small house...incredible. While they've been doing 3D for a while and kind of tried this with Sword/Shield this feels like the first time they married the spectacle of Pokemon Stadium with the Pokedex and capturing of the mainline games. In a very real way it felt like them delivering on the dream I had as a kid of waking up and wandering around a world full of Pokemon.

And oOo is the capturing good. Part of the reason it's great is because they pared down the Pokedex to "only" 242 Pokemon. And not only that but you can capture every single Pokemon without needing to trade. Previous games are almost impossible to complete the Pokedex. With the combination of needing to trade with your current gen, trade with multiple previous gens (which required insane setups where you'd trade between a DS and a 3DS using some server), or needing to attend events to get specific Pokemon, it was just a dumb task. You'd never do it. And how are you going to make the main task you're supposed to do in these games impossible for all but the most insane people?

Hell, even getting shinies and the new Alphas isn't even that hard. If you spend a little time hunting for Alphas you'll find them. And I saw maybe 3 shinies so far. In the literal 300-400 hours I've played every single main line Pokemon game since 1998 I NEVER saw a shiny once. It's like someone finally understood these games should be fun without needing to play them for hundreds upon hundreds of hours.

In all these ways I adore that this game shits on the ultra fans. Because it means normal people can finally have fun playing them again.

Complaints? Well, while they did change the combat to show you turn order and add in the whole Agile/Strong move mechanics which allow you to trade strength for going ahead of your enemy, they also made it so you can't swap out Pokemon when one faints. And in fact when you knock out a Pokemon the next one the trainer sends out gets to go first. Every time. Even when I had a Crobat come out with the literal highest speed in the game. Which turns into this incredibly stupid tit-for-tat where each person sends out a Pokemon, KOs the opponent’s, and then on and on. Even though I could have the best team of Pokemon–with the fastest, hardest-hitting sweepers–the opponent could just go first with a slow, hard-hitting Pokemon and knock me out. It's incredibly poorly designed. That being said this only really applied to the final boss fight where they have like 8 Pokemon which is incredibly unfair when each side’s Pokemon one-shots the other's Pokemon and you only have 6.

There's so many other little QOL improvements: experience being distributed to the whole party, getting a ton of experience for the whole party from capturing, getting experience for collecting resources, the whole crafting is simplistic but kind of nice how you can be self sufficient crafting Pokeballs, the general ease of capturing Pokemon, Pokemon evolutions not automatically happening on level up (by proxy of this: Pokemon evolutions from friendliness are finally clear). Agh it's such a good game.

I am excited for the next Pokemon game for the first time in forever thanks to this one. Excited to see how they hone up the rough edges.

(It’s funny reading that paragraph I wrote in 2022 now in 2025 with all the Poke-heads losing their minds over the last couple of releases. Jokes on all of them, I think Scarlet/Violet were even better. And well, we’ll see how I find the Legends of Zaza when I play it.)