Pokémon Legends: Z-A Uses Its Breakneck Pace to Smooth Over Any Dull Moments

By Farouk Kannout | October 30, 2025 | 11:30am

Video Games Reviews Pokémon Legends Z-A

Pokémon Legends: Z-A Uses Its Breakneck Pace to Smooth Over Any Dull Moments

While pretty much everyone can pick out a favorite design amongst the over 1000 completely unique Pokémon, the games themselves are far more uniform in comparison. Most mainline entries in the franchise have seen little to no evolution beyond a new cast of creatures, but the Legends spin-off series has proven itself to be one place where Pokémon has been able to level up its gameplay loops and mechanics. This started modestly with Pokémon Legends: Arceus back in 2022, and has now continued with the latest Pokémon Legends: Z-A, which is the most fun and fast-paced entry yet.

The basic premise of Legends: Z-A goes as follows: you play as a new tourist in Lumiose City, a Paris-inspired location first seen in Pokémon X and Y. After a serendipitous encounter with some city residents, you end up joining Team MZ, whose goal is to reach the top of the ranks in a local competition called the Z-A Royale. During the day, players will find themselves progressing the story, completing side missions, and catching wild Pokémon in the newly implemented wild zones, which are put up by the city in order to allow ordinary people and Pokémon to live side-by-side. At night, the competition begins as players face off against opponents in battle zones to earn points and rank up.

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Something that cannot be understated is how revivifying the quality of life changes and performance improvements that are on display in Legends: Z-A are when compared to other recent installments. Legends: Arceus suffered due to a comparatively barren world, and serious technical issues plagued Scarlet and Violet. Legends: Z-A, on the other hand, looks and runs noticeably better on the Switch 2, and Lumiose is a thriving place to explore. Rather than the usual sprawling region with interconnected biomes and towns, players traverse a densely packed city with back alleys, parks, and rooftops to investigate. The size of this smaller open world feels just right to keep the exploration exciting without becoming so big as to overwhelm. The game also includes a fast travel feature, allowing you to teleport to any notable location in the entire city once it’s been visited on foot at least once before.

The key ingredient of the Legends games is a renewed focus on the famous tagline “gotta catch ‘em all.” While there is certainly a thriving and beloved competitive scene to Pokémon, where players focus on the depth and strategy of battling, it is the collecting aspect that has broader appeal to the larger, more casual audience. With this in mind, Legends: Z-A has streamlined the well-established battling and catching mechanics, creating a simpler version of the active catching system from Legends: Arceus with fewer bells and whistles, and transforming battles from turn-based to action RPG.

Most battles in Z-A will end with your opponent defeated in literal seconds, after one or two moves being used at the most. With this installment’s more action-based system, each Pokémon’s four moves are on a cooldown, but can be spammed to no end otherwise. Other than keeping track of type matchups, and running around on occasion so that your player character doesn’t get attacked, no extensive skill is required as you button mash to victory. Even the rogue mega-evolution boss battles are unlikely to cause too much strife as long as players mega-evolve their own Pokémon and are generally aware of their type weaknesses.

Moreover, the amount of free items and resources the game throws at you is outrageous. Piles upon piles worth of various potions, TMs, pokéballs, mega shards, and more pepper the ground beneath your feet and the walls of buildings as you scour the city. You will often find yourself picking up items on accident as you run around, not even realizing they were there. No one should ever have any financial troubles with how much prize money is received from the battle zone sequences, and completing even just a few side quests will increase the rewards to greater heights. The only thing you will ever have to spend money on is the occasional pokéball shopping session, fossils at the Stone Emporium, and a lot of cool outfits so you can take photos looking fly with your team.

This is all to say that playing Legends: Z-A is an extremely undemanding experience—an absolute breeze where friction is almost never felt. This is ultimately to its benefit. There is none of the monotonous level grinding or backtracking from older iterations, and allowing players to do things like access their boxes from anywhere, or change their team’s moveset at any time, makes the game always feel immediately gratifying. The only real negative this has is that while nothing ever stands out as particularly bad, there will rarely be a moment in the hours of exploring that will really stick with you for the positive either. The most notable thing that can be said is that the game is surprisingly funny, with many character moments that were genuinely unexpected given the general writing standard of the series. My personal favorite was watching an elderly grandfather NPC do streamer aegyo.

Legends: Z-A has ultimately set the standard and new direction for what Pokémon already should have been for years now. It has cut out many of the flaws that caused previous entries to feel like a slog, and improved on technical issues in ways that it simply never should have had to. This latest game has aligned Pokémon and Animal Crossing as kindred spirits, where satisfaction is found through collecting and completion of the pokédex, the same way bugs and fossils are for the latter. These are cozier RPGs, and while that can lessen their impact compared to their more mechanically involved contemporaries, it feels more like a boon than a curse that this franchise is willing to embrace that identity. Even if none of it ever stays with you for too long after you put it down, for anyone looking to kill time exploring a world full of lovable flora and fauna, Legends: Z-A makes sure that it always feels fast and fun.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A was developed by Game Freak and published by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. Our review is based on the Switch 2 version. It’s also available for the Switch.

Farouk Kannout is a Chicago-based writer and cultural critic who loves writing about games, film/tv, and how we make meaning from culture broadly. You can find him at @faroukk.bsky.social.