## 2025-10-18 Fuck The Pokemon Company. You can probably guess how I’m playing this game but I’m not gonna confirm or deny those guesses. IYKYK. Annnnnyways, with all that said, **Pokemon Legends: Z-A** is pretty good. Don’t let the FOMO hit you too hard. I’m not sure if I like it more than **Legends: Arceus**. It’s a lot more focused on battling, which is interesting because of its “Xenoblade for babies” approach to real-time combat. The issue I have the more I play is that there isn’t really much depth to that real-time combat, and you sort of just cycle through cooldowns of attacks. Maybe that changes in the future, but yeah. The only interesting wrinkles I’ve found is timing Protect to counter moves, and the fact that large pokemon have better AOE potential and don’t get knocked back. The second part is important because pokemon have to go to a specific spot in front of your trainer to do an attack, and the further away they are, the more free hits the enemy can get on them. Things I do like: player customization is fantastic, especially after how disappointing **Pokemon Scarlet & Violet** were in this regard. The characters are cool. I actually like how condensed Kalos is. You’re gonna see a lot of the gamer hive-mind talk about how it takes 7 minutes to travel through from end-to-end like that’s a bad thing. It’s not, and I’d get fed up if it was any bigger. This is also made up for in the game’s verticality. The rooftops are fun to run around on. I just wish there was a way to mark spots. Maybe there is and I haven’t noticed yet. But a lot of areas have high-level pokemon that you want to come back to later. As it stands, the game’s…fine. More interesting than the usual pokemon fair, and better paced once the terrible tutorial is out of the way. I’ll always like the **Legends** games more because of that last point: everything from combat to catching to movement is so quick. Really hope that gets into the next mainline title.