POKEMON LEGENDS: ARCEUS (2022)

click here to return to "REVIEWS"

i'm trying to think of when exactly i heel-turned on the pokemon series... i cut my teeth on third and fourth gen, returning back in time for gamefreak's arrival onto the 3ds with x and y, and the cracks certainly showed then, but nothing could have been more damning than the release of omega ruby/alpha sapphire, its absence of the beloved frontier explained away in an interview citing "well, who the hell finishes these games anyway?" and that sort of blew my mind, hearing a game director outright handwave inattention to the delivery of their own product with "oh, who cares?"

inattention... is certainly one word that comes to mind when playing pokemon legends arceus. the entire game feels cobbled together from breath of the wild's sloppy seconds, some mmo styled fetch quests and tasks, and youtube videos of pikachu running through an unreal engine wheat field, comments repeating one another with "THIS is the game eight year old me dreamed of playing!"

well, dream bigger.

here's the gameplay: you, the player, enter a map from rust with unloaded textures. in this ugly mess of morrowind bump mapping, you run around and collect resources. of the many things you can make with them, a pokeball is one, and that is how you'll build your team. once you've lobbed enough of the things at unsuspecting wildlife (or suspecting because you ran full steam ahead and threw the damn things like mad), your new goal is to train the team and fill out the pokedex... in addition to completing story beats, of course.

but let's talk pokedex. capture a 'mon and move on, right? wrong. capture 5 of that mon. kill 7. see it use 'ember' four times, and so forth. you do this for every single pokemon, these series of menial tasks designed to give players SOMETHING to keep them in their far cry 2 usermaps long enough so that they don't run through the game too quick. and you have to do this, by the way--the pokedex acts as gym badges do in the mainlines, each badge ("rank") allowing you to use higher leveled pokemon. don't give a shit about screwing around with budews and geodudes? well you better, and you better do it often lest you lose control of your own pokemon.

how about the battles? it's funny--i feel like the initial trailers made combat seem more involved than it really is, which is... your standard turn based affair, really. there's some reworked 'speed' stuff going on, but it's genuinely whatever you're used to from the mainlines with the strange addition of being able to walk around and harass the poor beast you're fighting (or, rarely, its trainer). it's fine, too--don't mess with what works. it's actually fantastic how smooth the transition is in and out of battle, too, a player in legends being able to cut through five starly in the same amount of time a bdsp player might take with just one. this begs a question, though: why no multiplayer? huh? it's the same battle system as anything else, so what's the excuse? why can't i go fight my friends with the shiny zubat i nabbed? gamefreak can't handle seeing me run around in an arena crouching really fast in front of the opponent?

let's get back to the map, again, where all these battles take place. there's not much going on in them. the moment you exit the city hub's gates and find yourself with newfound freedom (after an hour of excruciating tutorial), you see.... virtually nothing of interest. there are some poorly rendered trees out in front, and some... rocks to the left. some grass. there's mountains in the distance, but don't be deceived--this isn't an open world game. you aren't climbing that mountain. you're certainly welcome to piddle about around them, though, the only 'reward' for exploration ever being just finding large pokemon every so often (at turkey leg dangling higher levels, too). for all the ideas nipped from botw, creating intrigue in landscape design isn't one of them. it's just your very, very painfully average set of bump maps with repeating water textures, repeating dirt textures, repeating rock textures--

it's an ugly fucking game, is what i'm trying to get at.

"graphics don't matter!" graphics matter. they aren't the end all be all, but a book in light grey print on pages sopped with coffee certainly presents a more unenjoyable reading session than you'd like. it's questionable why the game is in this state at all, barely steps past the original alpha trailers. this is the part where i must iterate and reiterate: pokemon is THE most profitable media property in the world, eclipsing genuinely anything you or i can think of. gamefreak and the pokemon company bring in over 170 million dollars annually--so where the fuck has it all gone?

well, i can make a guess: straight into exec's pockets. these games hardly matter when the pokemon company's biggest source of income stems from merchandise of all things, so here's the position pokemon legends found itself in at gamefreak: the studio wanted to make a nintendo-hire-this-man type game, they were told "sure, and you'll do it in two years!" to which someone probably complained, asking why so little time, how they'd have to dramatically cut down the scope and intent, to which they were probably told "so?" among "it'll sell regardless" and maybe even "no one finishes these damn things anyway."

and that's where gamefreak found themselves, having to create a scope actually manageable. it has its good little bits that the team knew they needed to get right, like going in and out of pokemon battles, qol changes making managing a team easier than ever (choose when they level? choose their names after? hell yeah), and even the brief interest of just hearing a faint, familiar pokemon cry quite near you... but it all takes place in these ugly, lifeless worlds sorely lacking trainers, sorely lacking cities and towns and settlements at all, sorely lacking actual level design and creativity and care.

so maybe it isn't inattention. in all honesty, gamefreak probably did the best they could given the time they had and the ideas they wanted to work with, and they knew the shit that was bad... was bad. the end result is a barely fun gameplay loop with tried and true designs smothered in mediocrity, in fetch quests and genshin tasks, in a lack of art style and cohesion, in sandboxes that fail to justify themselves, in a story that i wanted to spend a paragraph writing about but what the fuck ever, it's a pokemon story, that shit was always going to be bad.

let me wrap this review up by describing the (spoiler free) circumstances leading up to deciding i'd had enough. i did my fair bit of exploring and leveling up, and it got very old very quick, so i plowed ahead with the story and ended up at a boss fight with baby's first dark souls mechanics on display--one i ended without even using a pokemon. this granted me access to a new area, and it was there that i found the same ugly level design but with 50% more brown. i hightailed it to a ruin (which was a large, square, empty box) and met a character who hated my guts. i found three bandits after a hyped up cutscene all to just face one level 23 pokemon, and then i returned to the ruin character who now suddenly loved me as a result, her character arc completed in the span of 5 minutes, and i then realized that if i wasn't playing any longer for the exploration, and i wasn't playing for the gameplay, and now i didn't even care enough to play for the story... then there just wasn't any reason to play a minute more.

gamefreak could've done better--even if you end up playing and loving legends, you may still find yourself agreeing with that sentiment. but they won't do better, and they won't have to when these games sell the incredible gangbusters amounts that they do. the pokemon company knows this, and that's why gamefreak's never going to get the dev time they actually desperately need. so long as half baked $60 early access crap like this is peddled out and sold in the millions, nothing will ever change. in other words...

should you buy pokemon legends, you aren't supporting a brave new direction to take the series. you're supporting a grindhouse dev studio forced into mediocrity, and that's the direction they've gone for the past decade, and it'll be the same till they or this series dies. just don't forget an arceus plushie on your way out.