Pokémon Legends: Arceus (Switch)

With how enormous the franchise has become, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact the name Pokémon is meant to be a contraction of pocket MONSTERS. Part of this is because while some creatures like Scyther, a man-sized mantis with scythes for arms, fit the term “monster” well, you also have creatures like Buneary which is essentially just a fluffy bipedal bunny rabbit. In Pokémon Legends: Arceus though, the game takes this particular monster catching role-playing game far into the past back when everyone believed Pokémon to be fearsome beasts that posed a threat to them, and in many cases they do have a right to worry, as in this title Pokémon can actually hurt the player character as the series diverts from the safe battles it’s relied on for nearly 25 years.

 

Pokémon Legends: Arceus begins when your customizable protagonist is contacted by a heavenly voice that entreats the player to seek out all Pokémon before plucking them out of the modern day and hurling them far back into the past. Landing in the region of Hisui, the player finds small scattered villages that look more like they’re from medieval Japan than the world they’re familiar with, and while a recent innovation in the form of wooden Poké Balls allows people to capture and tame Pokémon, many are still far too afraid of them to even attempt it. As you try to get your bearings though you are luckily discovered by the inventor of Poké Balls, Professor Laventon, who takes you in when he notices you don’t fear Pokémon as much because of your modern perspective on the creatures. Enlisting you in the Galaxy Expedition Team’s Survey Corps, you are given room and board as well as assistance in investigating how you ended up in this land in exchange for helping Laventon work on his Pokédex, a research log he hopes will help create a bridge of understanding between humans and Pokémon so they can live together more peacefully.

 

Much of your activities in Pokémon Legends: Arceus will focus on the continued development of the Pokédex, but notably there isn’t really one major antagonist pestering you as you do your work across the region of Hisui. The looming threat of the very space-time rift you dropped out of is instead given more focus, it unleashing bolts of lightning that have corrupted powerful Noble Pokémon across the region that need to be calmed before they cause trouble. This puts you in between the bickering Diamond and Pearl Clans who both revere such creatures and believe they are the ones with a true vision of a god they call Sinnoh, this quarrel not exactly heated but still a sort of political divide that influences the actions you need to take to earn their approval and get their assistance in your work to calm the frenzied Pokémon. When you are made to battle those characters, it’s often more an assessment of your worth and there are other elements progressing in the background like the continued development of your home base of Jubilife Village. There are simple but enjoyable narrative arcs to follow as you head to new locations and encounter new members of the clans, it perhaps a bit surprising the Pokémon franchise leaned so much into butting heads over religion but it still manages to do so without being too heated by focusing on fostering an understanding of working together even when people disagree.

When it is time to get to work, you’ll head out from your home base and select an area in Hisui to perform an expedition. With areas like coastlands, bogs, and frozen tundras there are enough distinct locations to host different Pokémon life and feel different to explore, the player needing to head home after every expedition but able to stay there usually as long as they like to try and research Pokémon. The most common and quickest way to get an understanding of a creature is to catch it, and there are many ways to do so. Simply throwing a Poké Ball or one of its variants might catch the creature so quickly you can practically run around and launch them with little concern, although many creatures will respond to seeing you by fleeing or turning aggressive. All isn’t lost if the Pokémon begins to attack though, as you can take one you previously caught and send it out to start a turn-based battle. Defeating a Pokémon will make it disappear, but you can throw a ball during battle to try and catch it, weakening it even increasing the chances of a success. It is surprisingly easy to catch even a full health Pokémon though and the ease of catching creatures is actually one of Pokémon Legends: Arceus’s big appeals since the Pokédex you’re creating actually has plenty of research tasks to complete not only to earn cash for useful items but also to help the society you’ve become a part of start to grow.

 

While the game has a main storyline full of missions tied to the space-time rift hanging over Mount Coronet, you can pick up Requests where people around Hisui wish to better understand or learn to interact with Pokémon. With many citizens scared of even a simple creature like the tiny bird Starly though it is a slow start, but one interesting element of advancing through the adventure is seeing that unease gradually softening as you assist with the requests. Sometimes it’s a farmer who believes there might be a Pokémon who could help till the fields faster, other times it’s someone learning to better love Pokémon because they met one that seems calmer and more in line with what they like. Sometimes it is about overcoming some form of ignorance by showing them the completed Pokédex entry on a Pokémon, but at other times it is important for you to show some of the monsters are in fact dangerous and need to be respected. The requests themselves are often fairly simple in what they ask of you, often just involving showing a certain Pokémon to someone or bringing them the right items, so the little story around the moment is perhaps more interesting than the actual task, but they are easy enough to complete along your journey and add a bit to that growing theme the game has overall of how growing understanding can lead to greater harmony, be it between different religious groups or different species.

 

There are over 200 Pokémon featured in Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and with the focus on finding and catching so many of them the game made sure they behave differently while out in their natural habitat to set them apart. While on the beach the adorable ball-shaped seal Spheal will happily roll up to you with no fear of humans, but the cat with a spring-like tail Glameow flees fairly quickly at the first sight of someone. The living four-armed boulder Graveler might pop out of an ore deposit, while out in the ocean you can see the manta ray inspired Mantine leaping in and out of the water. Catching some will be as simple as approaching them and throwing your Poké Balls but some might have more involved quests like one that requires you to find purple wisps all around Hisui that serve as a decent collectible to grab on the side, although the game’s technical limitations can hamper that quest a bit. The game already has some blurry textures when objects are up close and characters and creatures will have choppy movements when viewed from slightly far away, but it doesn’t really handle Pokémon spawning the best, some creatures and objects suddenly popping into existence when they’re fairly close to you. Usually the game tries to make sure this won’t hurt you, since some wild Pokémon will be aggressive, especially the massive Alpha Pokémon who are enhanced versions of regular creatures who will try to knock out your trainer if they spot you. When angry, the wild Pokémon will use their various elemental abilities to try and strike at you, so sometimes you’ll be dodging thunderbolts, poison blasts, and full on tackles from Pokémon while trying to catch or avoid them, although you do have some items that can stun some aggressive creatures and often running away will work as long as there is room to do so, this helped once you start to get ride Pokémon that let you cross water and climb cliffs that once limited your movement.

One interesting element of entering a battle in Pokémon Legends: Arceus is how swiftly fights can be resolved. Pokémon can have four moves set at a time, although you can change which ones they have set from the menu and they can learn more over time or from a fellow Galaxy Team member. Since the game is a role-playing adventure you can level up your Pokémon, a team of up to six of them gradually gaining experience as you fight or catch creatures or even do things like collect materials with them that can in turn be used to craft Poké Balls quickly when needed. Even when there is a gap of almost 20 levels between Pokémon though they can be on surprisingly even ground. The weaker one will take more damage and deal less since it doesn’t have the same stat growth, but it’s not surprising to see a third or more of the stronger Pokémon’s health bar taken out by a normal move. This keeps battles moving at a pretty rapid pace helped by quick animations, and even though you can get ganged up on where you have to hold off up to four opponents with only one of your team, thankfully the game usually makes them a bit less smart or even prone to just standing by warily to prevent you from getting overwhelmed. On the other hand, making damage so high can mean even quick battles leave a mark on your team and battles can be much closer, something helped along by a new idea called stances. Once a Pokémon has mastered a move they can activate a Strong or Agile stance before using it that costs more to use but has different effects. Strong Stance increase a move’s power but slows you down for a bit, potentially letting the opponent get in extra turns before your next attack. Agile Stance is almost the opposite, weakening the attack but making it more likely you’ll get an extra turn. This isn’t always a cut and dry process, sometimes a Pokémon is naturally faster or slower or certain moves like Quick Attack don’t need to be agile to give you another turn sooner. It’s an interesting strategic disruption and a useful one, letting you sometimes push harder at the risk of it not panning out or try to weaken your move to make sure you don’t wipe out a wild Pokémon you’re trying to catch, the battles in general enjoyably quick but not lacking in complexity before you even factor in the fact Pokémon can have different weaknesses or resistances based on up to two types they exhibit.

 

There is one other type of battle in Pokémon Legends: Arceus where it’s your actual character versus something like a Noble Pokémon. Here you will be given some objects to throw at a hostile creature that is fought as a boss, the monster having powerful unique moves you’ll need to identify and dodge properly to survive. Getting beat up by a wild Pokémon usually just leads to you losing items and during the boss encounters you instead just retry the fight, but these can be a bit demanding of your reflexes and require you to pick your moment to strike. Each of these encounters is unique as well, something like the plant-based ballerina Lilligant dancing around the arena while the large wooden ball Electrode will instead fill the arena with exploding underlings. These are usually for story-progression so they don’t tie into catching Pokémon too often, but they do provide a shift in action and often highlight a new Pokémon or a recently introduced variant. The Lilligant for example is a brand new Hisuian form, but there are also newly introduced creatures to encounter elsewhere like a bearded white reindeer called Wyrdeer who will evolve from the fairly standard reindeer Stantler. Evolution is often a reward for training a Pokémon to a high enough level, using certain moves enough, or using the right item on them, evolution available anytime from your menu once its available and turning a Pokémon into a new creature with new powers and potentially new types. Some will probably require you to look up online how to evolve the creature though, but there are a few hints found in the game’s interesting checklist feature found in your developing Pokédex.

 

The Pokédex isn’t just about catching creatures as you can fill out an entry on a Pokémon by performing different actions involving them. Some involve catching monsters under certain conditions like doing so at night, without them realizing you’re there, or while they’re in mid-flight, while others will instead focus on their battle potential. Defeating creatures with certain types of attack or seeing them use specific moves or the stances will go towards building up your entry on them, and while you don’t need to fill out every checkbox to have a proper entry on a creature, it does start to influence how you approach them. Maybe you’ll wait to catch the buttetfly-tailed fish Finneon until it’s nighttime, or if your attempt to catch the ghostly balloon Drifloon goes awry and you can no longer catch it without it seeing you, you can defeat it with a ghost-type move and earn some check marks that way. The game does get a bit absurd with some of the criteria, feeding the long-tongued Lickitung over 50 pieces of food would be difficult even if the creatures didn’t sometimes struggle with approaching your bait or even get stuck running in circles when they can’t find their targets. Because you only need to complete around 10 tasks and some are weighted to be more valuable than others as indicated by red arrows, you only need to go for such lofty goals if desired, but at the same time it does literally earn you money to research more and catching is so easy these goals are often quick ways to engage with the free wandering creatures around the world. In fact, since catching Pokémon is giving such a big emphasis, you’ll likely find yourself with plenty of copies of a critter and the pastures where they’re stored can get cluttered. Releasing some back into the wild is inevitable and you get small rewards for doing so, but there’s no good way to sort the ones you do catch automatically and an excursion out to catch more will likely leave your pasture menu cluttered all over again anyway. It’s a small but important concern as you start to try and do things like earn Pokémon you can only acquire through evolution, but hopefully this isn’t the last we’ve seen of this format of Pokémon game as it could lead to this being fixed and goals could be expanded into even more unique interactions.

THE VERDICT: Pokémon Legends: Arceus streamlines the catching and battling aspects of the monster-based franchise but does so with surprising effectiveness thanks to the elements that surround them. Catching creatures is often quick and easy interaction but that leans into the Pokédex’s enjoyable checklist feature that incentivizes a lot more Pokémon capturing, and with the wild creatures behaving in different ways there is still substance to enough of these interactions to keep it from growing rote. Battles are swift but dangerous, be they because you can be attacked in the Noble Pokémon boss encounters or because your team of Pokémon take pretty significant damage, but the stances and accessibility features like easy move swapping still allow for some tactics to find footing. Side quests could use a broader range of activities but in general the game also touches on strong enough ideas with its broader story elements to be worth paying attention to, this deviation from the typical Pokémon RPG mold making for a fresh adventure with a different sort of appeal than your usual Pokémon romp.

 

And so, I give Pokémon Legends: Arceus for Nintendo Switch…

A GREAT rating. There is still room for improvement in terms of things like the side quests’ gameplay substance and sorting out things like the exact requests of the Pokédex checklist, but Pokémon Legends: Arceus creates a pretty cohesive concept for a game despite splintering so much from the typical RPG format the series is known for. Catching is a simplified process but still compelling because you need to do it in different ways to build up your research levels, and while battles aren’t the major focus of the experience, the strength of Pokémon even when there’s a decent level gap between them means that when you’re in a fight, it can still be a meaningful experience. It doesn’t get too absurd either, an attack with a type advantage will wipe out weaker foes fairly easily and soon the level gap is significant enough to be felt, but it means indulging in the catching and material collection won’t build your team up so high that the battles you enter are inconsequential. It does feel like a few more trainer battles or ones that embrace special formats like when a person uses multiple monsters at once or you need to focus on your character movement over giving a Pokémon commands could spice things up, but the story is fairly good at providing you huge areas to explore and new creatures to find before covering some short but important narrative ground when you reach your destinations. The emphasis on spreading understanding not just between people and Pokémon but the two different clans is done well within that space as well and makes your actions feel connected to it since you’re not just fighting trainers to achieve that aim. Some technical clean-up would definitely help too, at one point a Pokémon even displayed a different creature’s name, and for some creatures like the ones that live in water there’s a bit of struggle since they are often partially submerged, like to dive, and the rendering distance means you might not even really see them in the first place while your Poké Balls are likely to plop against the water trying to catch them, but there are still ways to simplify activities out on the water so it’s not a full deal breaker when you do want to acquire some aquatic Pokémon.

 

Pokémon Legends: Arceus is a pretty effective package for a first step into this format for a company that has been pretty resistant to drastic change. It does feel like it needs to explore the space to realize what worked best this time to truly push this style of Pokémon adventure into reaching its full potential, but it succeeds remarkably well with the emphasis on research and capturing without jettisoning important series elements like the fairly layered battle system it even brings a few new ideas to. Considering the thematic center of this game is all about understanding, perhaps a better understanding gained from creating this experience will let a similar future title absolutely dazzle with its realization of the concept. Pokémon Legends: Arceus is still an exceptional adventure though because it took on a whole new angle for how Pokémon can be engaged with and did so with impressive skill on the first attempt.