Pokemon Legends: Arceus Review
Pokémon Legends: Arceus, the 2022 Pokémon side game from GAME FREAK for the Nintendo Switch, flaunts exciting open-world gameplay and fun new features for the series which is immediately squandered by a terribly linear plot, mountain of unrewarding one-off side quests, awkward and inconsistent controls, and enough cliché dialogue to put little children to sleep.
Starting Off
The game starts with the main character finding themselves falling through a giant space-time rift, blacking out, and eventually, someone finding them washed ashore on a beach with amnesia and offering them a place to stay. Cookie-cutter plot setting? Check ✅.
The open-world setup is lively and fun, and the cell-shaded visual style is reminiscent of Breath of the Wild. You can sneak around, run, and ride on mounts, throwing PokéBalls at unsuspecting Pokémon without engaging them in combat. You can also engage them in combat, but who has time for that?
I gleefully ran about for the first few hours catching every Pokémon in sight, and I admit: it was great fun. It was a bit disappointing to get to the second and third areas to find a bunch of the same Pokémon, though; eight generations of Pokémon, and we couldn’t replace some of those Slowpoke with Lotad or something? I figured out early on that leveling up was far faster catching Pokémon than battling them; so I ran around avoiding battles like the plague and throwing PokéBalls like a madman.
Gameplay Mechanics
Speaking of PokéBalls, you can craft them! How exciting! There’s also a ton of other shit to craft, but I never found a need for any of it; ten item boxes chock full of materials that will never see the light of day again.
The backpack limit leaves much to be desired, given that each item I come across is different from the ones before and takes up a separate inventory space. So, five steps from camp, I’ve got to turn around to empty my backpack again, or just start littering everywhere. You can purchase inventory spaces--one slot at a time--from the soon-to-be richest man in the world; you just need to listen to the same marketing pitch every time with an ever-increasing price tag. Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything else useful to spend all this collected money on, so take my money.
The controls of the game feel as if they were just an afterthought cobbled together by a couple of interns right before the game launched. Halfway through the game, I’m still throwing a Pokémon instead of a PokéBall and vice versa because they toggle. You run by pressing in the right stick, unless you’re mounted; then, the right stick doesn’t do anything, and you need to press the B button for some reason. I always seem to press the wrong button for the map, Pokédex, and everything-else screens, and finding the quest screen is a quest in itself.
Pokémon battles in Pokémon Legends: Arceus are fairly consistent with other games in the series; however, the whole story is rooted in a time when humans are just beginning to embrace Pokémon. It’s a world without champions, without Pokémon gyms, without rules. So, trainers sometimes throw out 2 or 3 Pokémon at the same time... except for you... because reasons.
Final Stretch
The second half of the game is all cutscenes and dialogue with a handful of battles sprinkled throughout. It feels like watching a movie except you need to constantly press A to get to the next sentence and occasionally walk a few steps or blast another Pokémon with Hyper Beam, all the while being fully replenished after each encounter. I never seemed to be properly prepared for battle, having four or five of my team as low-level Pokémon just there to gain experience, but that didn’t seem to matter; using a Pokémon with type advantage seemed to far outweigh any level gaps.
Riddles could use some work, too; the NPCs telling the riddles immediately solve said riddles of what to gather, and... aha! They also just so happen to have all the items in their back pockets; how convenient. Perhaps the characters pick up everything they can find lying on the ground like I do and pay the man back in town to show them how to roll their clothes even tighter... Anyway, why tell me riddles at all if you’re just going to give away the answer in the next breath?
Conclusion
Eventually, I slogged on to the end to be rewarded with more cliché story telling and a big happily-ever-after. All in all, Pokémon Legends: Arceus was a fun experience until it got boring.
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