Pokemon Legends: Arceus Review
“Pokemon at it’s best.” Written by: Kyle (@KDavisSRL)
First revealed during Pokemon’s 25th Anniversary Direct, Pokemon Legends Arceus was almost immediately met with mixed looks from people. Ranging anywhere from “This is what we’ve been waiting for” to “Wow, this is a good lookin’ Wii game”. You know, typical responses to modern Pokemon. Granted this game was also shown alongside Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl in that same Direct, so do with that what you will.
We saw the game again in August 2021, and the world was looking much more alive this time. Something more akin to what the final product would end up looking like. It showed off the new Ride Pokemon, as well as the fact that Pokemon will just try and straight up murder you in the overworld.
Now that the full game has been released, how does it stack up both as a game, and compared to other Pokemon games? Let’s take a look and find out!
Image Credit: Game Freak/The Pokemon Company
Pokemon Legends Arceus takes place in the Hisui Region. Essentially, it’s the Sinnoh Region in the distant past, in a time long before People and Pokemon coexisted with each other. You play as a silent protagonist who has been sent back in time by God to create the very first PokeDex. Yeah… really breaking new ground there, GameFreak.
Snark aside, the Pokedex is much smaller than it has been in previous games, only having about 240 Pokemon to meet in this game. With the smaller roster, this task isn’t nearly as much of a chore as it’s been in games passed. And as always, completing the PokeDex is really just a challenge for the completionists. But you will have to catch everything if you want to see everything this game has to offer.
The Hisui Region is split up into five different biomes, as well as the central hub of Jubilife Village where you report your findings in the wild to the Galaxy Federation.
During your travels you’ll also encounter Alpha Pokemon. These are the aforementioned murderous wild Pokemon. If you step into the sight of these things, RUN! In the early game you stand no chance at fighting these things. Though there is something satisfying about coming back later in the game to the first area and getting your revenge on the Rapidash that blasted your whole team.
There are also special boss battles with Noble Pokemon. These act as your checks for story progression, and are fought differently from normal battles. You have to throw these special Balms at them to calm them down. You can fight them in a battle to get them to stop for a few seconds and get damage in. You can also just as easily ignore that and dodge around their attacks and throw when you have an opening. They’re a fun change of pace from the standard battles, and they force you to think about your surroundings, and how to dodge their attacks.
Image Credit: Game Freak/The Pokemon Company
While you’re out in the overworld, battles can largely be ignored with a bit of stealthing. Hiding in grass, and chucking Pokeballs at unsuspecting Bidoof. Simple stuff like that. When it comes to having to do battles, they’re mostly still intact from the mainline series, with some minor tweaks to the overall flow. For starters, this game has a turn order that can be changed during the battle. Similar to games like Final Fantasy 10 or Octopath Traveler, you can see the upcoming turn order for characters. Pokemon can give themselves extra turns in battle by using Priority Moves like Quick Attack and Bullet Punch, as well as your Pokemon just having a better speed stat than your opponent.
A few of the Statuses in combat have also been changed from previous games. Gone are the Sleep and Frozen statuses. Instead they introduced Drowsy and Frostbite. Drowsy has a chance to have your Pokemon do nothing, and also takes increased damage from attacks. Frostbite acts as the counterpart to the Burn status. Each turn you lose some HP and your Special Attack stat gets cut in half until it’s cured. Personally, I’m glad that Sleep and Freeze are gone. Having your turns get taken away would completely kill the pace of this game’s combat system. It’s also nice to have some elements of Luck taken out for consistency's sake.
There are also two different types of Styles to use for your moves; the Strength Style, and the Agile Style. Strength Style has your Pokemon deal massive damage at the cost of your next turn. Agile Style on the other hand has your Pokemon do an attack at half power, but can potentially get you another turn. These two styles are such simple additions to the game, but can make battles feel much more dynamic than the battles of the traditional Pokemon games. It adds another layer to battles beyond what type beats this Pokemon. Using these Styles also takes up two PP uses, so you can’t spam them haphazardly.
When it comes to exploring Hisui, you’re given five different Ride Pokemon through the course of the game.
Wyrdeer is used for quick traversal around the different biomes. It can also be used to scale some walls and get to places that you shouldn’t be able to get to.
Ursaluna functions like the Itemfinder in previous games. I never really used it. The tracking on it felt off, and Ursaluna itself is kind of unwieldy.
Basculegion is used for water traversal. You’ll drown if you don’t have this thing.
Sneasler puts you in a basket and runs away to his house in the mountains where no one will be able to find him, or you, ever again.
Finally, Braviary will fly you places. The flying speed is much faster than Wyrdeer’s running speed, but you can really only make good use of this when starting from high places.
All of these Ride Pokemon are given to you one at a time, and you’ll get one in each of the different biomes that you explore.
Image Credit: Game Freak/The Pokemon Company
By far the biggest positive of the game is that it doesn’t waste your time with superfluous garbage. Gone are the days of holding your hand through 90% of the game. There’s a short tutorial on how to catch Pokemon, the three different types of Pokemon behaviors (Skittish, Aggressive, and Indifferent), and then the game basically lets you do what you want. When the game takes the reins off, they’re off. You’re free to explore the starting Biome and catch as many Bidoof as you want, get your face pressed in by a level 50 Rapidash, and learn that your character doesn’t know how to swim.
The Biomes in this game aren’t too big, so if you’re like me and large areas in open world games intimidate (or bore) you, it isn’t anything to worry about. The biomes are essentially five small areas, and with the Ride Pokemon, exploring isn’t something that will become a chore like in other games like this. The formula of catching Pokemon and building teams has also been retroactively streamlined. You can chuck Pokeballs at basically any Pokemon that you see, catch it, and your team gets experience. This makes it so that you can pretty much keep a team of 6 competently leveled Pokemon until you get the 6 Pokemon that you want to keep permanently.
There’s practically no need for grinding in this game since there’s no trainers in the overworld to battle against. You just catch Pokemon and battle Alpha Pokemon to keep your team decently leveled for the Noble Pokemon bosses. I really like that the game doesn’t flood you with characters all at once. It will gradually feed you new characters when they’re relevant to what’s going on, and when they’re no longer important, you don’t need to worry about them anymore. And the characters that do stick around, I actually really ended up liking.
The Professor and his assistant, either Rei or Akari, are fun little comfort characters for the player. They’re the ones that were there for you at the start, and they'll treat you to a bowl of ramen after you’re done with your mission. There’s also Adaman and Irida, the leaders of the Diamond and Pearl Clans. These two will show up every so often on your journey, and I really liked their dynamic. They’re from opposing clans, but you can tell that they have a sense of respect for each other. Volo is another character of note. He shows up a lot throughout your journey to give you a helping hand. He also has importance in the postgame, but I’m not gonna spoil that here.
Your Pokemon’s moves can be changed any time from the menu, so if you need certain moves for certain bosses, you can change it right away. No more having to remember where the Move Tutor was. In addition to that, moves can also be taught to Pokemon in Jubilife Village. This is the most helpful feature in this game. You can get a crazy amount of coverage moves from here for a very small cost. At the start of the game, I was able to give my Cyndaquil Aerial Ace: a strong Flying move that never misses. Check back there when your Pokemon evolve to see if they can get anything new.
This game introduced a few new Pokemon and new forms to old Pokemon. Personally, I’m not the biggest fan of them. Obviously things like this come down to preference, but they didn’t really do anything for me. To bring up a few examples:
Growlithe & Arcanine have cool designs. I like that Growlithe is designed after the Shiisaa from Japanese Mythology. But Fire/Rock is just about the worst type combo they could have given them. That’s the same type as Magcargo. If you’re getting compared to Macarago, you did something wrong.
Lilligant has become a Grass/Fighting type, which is almost as bad, but not quite to the level as Fire/Rock. She also shares the typing with the new Decidueye Form, so it’s a bit underwhelming.
Kleavor is a new Split Evolution for Scyther. I tried using it, and it just didn’t do well for me. Bug/Rock is an interesting type, but it can’t compare to Scizor.
Finally, Sneasler. Lord almighty, this is the most hideous thing that GameFreak has made in a while. This rejected Nightmare Before Christmas character is a Poison/Fighting type and has forever ruined the Sneasel Line for me. How do you go from Sneasel and Weavile; some of the slickest designed Pokemon in existence, to the vertical cousin of Alolan Persian? I have never had such a visceral reaction to a Pokemon’s design before. This thing is just flat out ugly. Sorry if you like this thing. I just needed to put that out there.
Now like I said, things like this are subjective. But to me, these new Hisuian forms and evolutions just don’t hit the same high that previous games did. Even the good ones like Zoroark, Goodra, or the new Qwilfish evolution, Overqwil, don’t hit the same as Alolan Marowak, Alolan Ninetails, or Galarian Darmanitan.
The gameplay loop of Arceus is pretty repetitive. Trainer battles are few and far between in this game, so the majority of your time will be spent catching Pokemon and improving your Adventure Rank. You only need to hit Rank 5 to finish the main story, and you level up your rank by catching Pokemon and filling out your PokeDex. But by the end of the game, that process will get a little tiring and feel like busy work.
Abilities are no longer a thing, which is unfortunate. It takes away from the uniqueness of Pokemon, and makes them all feel like one note damage dealers. And because there’s so few trainer battles in this game, you’re really just building a team of Pokemon that you like, rather than using them for type synergy, or for what their abilities offer in battle.
The closest thing that we have to Abilities is that in the Snow and Strong Sunlight, Ice and Grass types will have doubled speed respectively. Hold Items are also not a thing, but I can excuse that since this was before People and Pokemon lived together.
Image Credit: Game Freak/The Pokemon Company
Now, let’s talk about the unavoidable discussion: the graphics. You don’t have to dig deep into Pokemon Twitter to find small brained bozos cherry picking examples of “Pokemon look bad, lmao”. Here’s my hot take on the debate. It’s fine. This game just looks fine. It does what it needs to do. Is it Breath of the Wild? No. Is it Xenoblade 2? No. But it never tried to be and it doesn’t need to be.
Can the game look better? Yes, obviously it could. The PokeFlute doesn’t even have a texture on it. It’s just a white cylinder. No holes or buttons to play the notes, even. They pretty much gave you a straw. But for what the game wanted to be, I think that it looks good overall. However, saying that this game looks like something out of the PS2/Wii Era is a disingenuous statement. Have you ever played a PS2 game? I have. I grew up with that console. I can tell you from experience that for every great looking game, there’s also plenty of schlock.
The point that I’m trying to get to is that every game has its art style, and different developers will push the hardware as far as they need to to get the look that they’re going for. Graphics don’t make a game. Sure, looking nice helps, but there’s still a lot to love about what this game is, rather than what you want it to be.
I’ve been around the block with Pokemon discourse before. Ever since X and Y were announced in 2013 and GameFreak moved away from sprites, the community has always been split on Pokemon’s overall design. The argument only really came to a head with Pokemon Sword and Shield; the first mainline game on a home console. Personally, I think that this is the best looking Pokemon game on the Switch, and the best looking Pokemon game since Gen 5. Is Legends Arceus pushing the Switch to its absolute limit? No. But it doesn’t need to. Xenoblade 2 pushed the Switch to its limit, and while that game looks fantastic while the console is docked, it looks and runs like trash in handheld mode and has atrocious loading times. Legends Arceus doesn’t have those problems.
Summary
Pokemon Legends Arceus is a game where you can amass a Bidoof Army and imprison the God of space behind a fence. But it also gave us Sneasler, so the game isn’t perfect. If you’re looking for a modern Pokemon game that changes up the formula of the mainline games, I’d say that it’s worth checking out. The game itself is on the short side. If you’re just looking to play the main story, it should only run about 20 hours, so bear that in mind. There is also a postgame to play if you particularly liked this game. If you were never a fan of Pokemon, then I don’t think that this game will do anything to win you over.
If you’re like me and you’ve gotten tired of the Pokemon Formula, I’d give this game a look. Legends Arceus has streamlined the whole process of a Pokemon game, and I don’t think that I’ll be able to go back to a traditional Pokemon game again.