The Pokémon Legends Z-A Soundtrack Breaks A Series Rule—And Brings Lumiose To Life

By Madeline Blondeau | October 24, 2025 | 1:45pm

Video Games Features Pokémon

The Pokémon Legends Z-A Soundtrack Breaks A Series Rule—And Brings Lumiose To Life

In utility terms, music in the classic Pokémon games is linear. For the first several generations, the soundtrack accompanies the player’s preset path across Kanto, Johto, et al. It’s classic video game score structure—hear a track, let it loop, beat the level, move to the next track. Repeat motifs are reserved for battles or wild encounters; they’re hard, short breaks from the progression. For the player, new music is a ludic reward for each gym cleared, legendary captured, or place discovered.

Even if it’s possible to beat the original Gen 1 gyms in 59 different orders, the point remains: music is often a path for players to follow in the Pokémon series. Town to town, route to route, battle to battle. Scarlet & Violet—Gen 9—moved the needle somewhat with the implementation of certain open world elements from Pokémon Legends Arceus. Yet this, too, ultimately yields to the same flow. Regardless of the order in which they explore Paldea, players will determine how they hear the game’s score. Think of it like an interactive shuffle button.

Pokémon Legends Z-A is a radical departure from this approach. In a narrative sense, yes, there is a set order—key enemy encounters and sequential plot beats come complete with unique tracks. But where the score differs is in the player’s moment-to-moment experience outside of the story. Z-A shakes up the series’ rote structure by doing away with its hallmark wanderlust. Instead of another trudge across Kalos—the setting of 2013’s Pokémon X & Y—Game Freak locks the player in Lumiose, the region’s capital city, then throws away the key.

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Like Dragon Age II and Ys IX before it, Pokémon Legends Z-A takes place within a single city. Over a day and night cycle, NPCs are given daily tasks and routines; different Pokémon of all sorts roam the streets depending on the time of day. It’s akin to the day-to-day flow of games like Shenmue and Yakuza. The quest to be a Pokémon Master is off the table here—instead, players battle to the top of a late night underworld of everyday citizens keen to make a name for themselves. In their downtime, the game provides players with a plethora of side missions with unique story beats and rewards.

To reflect this shakeup, the game’s soundtrack bucks house structure and style. Carlos Eiene—whose career includes fan albums like Gen 4 tribute Sinnohvation—is one of the game’s several composers. Eiene’s smooth jazz takes on Pokémon games across every generation earned him a name among fans, and likely a spot on this soundtrack. It’s hard to imagine that the brassy, plucky score itself wasn’t influenced, in part, by his takes on series standards. The choice to anchor a changing urban setting around jazz is not only smart, but honest. From its early days in Basin Street bars and brothels, to its explosion in bustling speakeasies during Prohibition, jazz has embodied both the community and transformation within cities from its inception.

Cities, and the changes that come with them: this is the thematic, mechanical, and musical focus of Z-A. As such, the game’s score is not delivered to the player in series tradition. Instead, it breaks up the linear or selective arrangement of music by centering Z-A on three major tracks. This repetition has already become a point of contention, but in context, the choice works. Each loop of each song is another rotation of the clock—another day, another night spent in Lumiose. The scenery may change, and there may be new things to do, but it’s the same city. It’s the game’s sonic assurance that players are not on an epic journey to catch ‘em all, but entrenched in the day-to-day life of an established setting. The music will remain as long as there are people to hear it, and when someone leaves Lumiose, they will not forget these three songs.

Two of these tracks are the Lumiose City theme, which has unique variations for daytime and nighttime. This is what players will always hear as they traverse the city’s alleys and rooftops. While both tracks generally follow the same melody, each offers a distinct flavor that suits their respective times of day. Bright accordion is accompanied by sweeping harps and bell strikes, with soft piano sprinkled between the main refrains.

At night, a thick, funky bass groove and horn section kicks in to accompany the saxophone. While the accordion is still present, it plays a heavier hand in the song’s bridges than in the main melody. On top of this, the instrumentation for both tracks does change slightly between the town’s different districts. But the song, as it were, remains the same.

While a certain type of fan might call this move “lazy,” the 70+ songs and jingles in Z-A say otherwise. The Lumiose theme is meant to imprint on the player— to be something they never forget, and always associate with their time in the city. It’s even codified by the game’s script itself; an elderly in-game NPC on a bench in Lumiose remarks, “I don’t know the name of the tune they play around town, but I like it!”

(For what it’s worth: I definitely do too.)

The third major theme in the game is in the Battle Zones, only accessible at night. These are fierce hotspots for Pokémon battles. Their signature song is a laidback but uptempo track, with spacey synthesizers woven around an electric piano hook and groovy guitar lick. The song is in conversation with Lumiose’s nighttime theme—a more urgent companion to its slower, more pensive cadence. Together they make the city’s nighttime feel cool and mysterious, exciting but dangerous. Z-A is the sexiest Pokémon has ever sounded.

Jazz can be found elsewhere throughout Z-A’s score, too—not just in these three central arrangements. Dueling piano and accordion over jovial horn crashes lend a liberating je ne sais quoi to wild Pokémon encounters, for example. And the slow sway of light high-hat stings with plucked string bass bring an emotive, breezy elegance to Hotel Z’s hodgepodge lobby. Acid and cool jazz sit alongside big band arrangements and smooth compositions alike. Other genres in the game, too, are rooted in jazz—soul, funk, hip-hop, and electronica, to name a few.

This is used to an effective degree with the game’s cast. Major rivals have unique themes, which provide both harsh contrasts and exciting complements to the main score. A particular highlight is a track which plays when the player is trapped by rich aristocrat Jacinthe, then forced into an impromptu tournament. It’s a stiff, formal string—upper crust music for snobs, and the tonal antithesis to the rest of the soundtrack.

But that’s by design. Jacinthe is an amoral character with an indentured servant. She’s corrupted by her money to the point where human life and liberty means nothing in the face of her personal amusement. Yet she’s not played as evil—she helps the player at key points, and doesn’t have any malignant intent towards Lumiose itself. She also likes to cut loose and have fun; her battle theme is a cheerful, thumping club jam hooked around a ragtime sample and airy acoustic strum. There is still, however, a touch of violin—snobbery never too far away.

Even characters with questionable morals like Jacinthe are welcome in Z-A’s ranks, which makes its cast more interesting and textured than many past entries. The score embodies these complexities in its musical deviations. By taking the players away from their familiar central loops, each character is made more distinct—associated with a genre, style, or instrument. These diversions serve to make Z-A’s score as robust, nuanced, and diverse as its principal players. Their music stands out against the routine thrum of Lumiose.

Only for so long, though—soon, it fades back into that familiar accordion. Because it’s understood every battle before, during, and after this tournament will all be fought within Lumiose—a city which was here before the player arrived, and will be here after they leave. Its sound is eternal, unchanging, and unmistakable.

A penultimate battle against the game’s final boss features a third variation on the Lumiose theme. This version is grand—the sort of big, bright orchestral composition typically associated with the series. The score reminds the player, as they fight, what is at stake. That this song is in the DNA of this city, soaked into its cobblestone and foliage, and that it carries the weight of the city with it. It must go on—and the player must make it so.

The next generation of Pokémon will bring a new region. It will contain unique monsters, of course, and house an assortment of colorful characters with distinct glance values. But it will also contain towns, cities, municipalities, et al.—stops along a player’s journey, and the spine upon which the meat of progression grows. These areas will no doubt boast signature tracks, in line with series tradition. Yet when the player is finished in one of these new locales, their song will be over. It will be time to move on to the next track.

Nowhere will invite them to stay quite as long as Lumiose.

Madeline Blondeau has been writing about games since 2010. She’s written for Paste, Anime Herald, Anime News Network, CGM, and Lock-On, among others. In addition, she has written, hosted, and recorded film criticism podcast Cinema Cauldron. Her published fiction debut is due out between 2026 and 2027. You can support her work on Patreon, and find her on BlueSky @mads.haus.