Beaten: Feb 07 2022
Completed: Feb 10 2022
Beaten Time: 16 Hours
Completed Time: 50 Hours
Platform: Switch

Legends Arceus is the first game in a whiiile I’ve played while it was still the zeitgeist. I ended up getting it a week late because, well, Amazon took a while, and I really wasn’t in a rush. I’d heard good things over the week though, so I was tentatively excited for the game. I beat the game in 2 days.

Not only that, but I completed the Pokedex. For the first time. There’s something about what’s going on here that’s deeply satisfying on a base mechanical level, where even just traversing the land is satisfying. But I’m getting ahead of myself, I think. 

Legends Arceus is the new Pokemon game from Gamefreak, a game that’s equal parts tribute to the games I broke into the series with (Diamond and Pearl) and novel, completely new style of Pokemon game. It reminds me of a few other games, and honestly feels like the first time in a while elements from other popular games have influenced the main series of Pokemon games.

The big influence on display here has to be Breath of the Wild. It’s not really just BOTW with Pokemon though, instead it feels like loads of work was put in to fit an interesting game, one that evolves the Pokemon formula, into something mildly resembling BOTW. Instead, the games that it more reminds me of are things like SMT V, and Monster Hunter, and, bizarrely, Death Stranding. 

SMT V is the biggest one for me, personally. They both tried to fit semi-linear turn based JRPGs into a template that kinda feels like BOTW, and wound up in a similar place. Traversal is the focus, with encounters being massively influenced by the world you’re in and your positioning in that world. In SMT V it’s a pretty typical (for Atlus) “strike the enemy before they see you to get a preemptive strike in the encounter”, but Pokemon feels like they restructured everything they could around this new world.

Catching Pokemon without battling is the real sea-change here. There’s a brevity, a lean-ness to being able to just crouch down, sneak up behind these pokemon, and smash em in the back with a pokeball. You don’t need to weaken them, you don’t need to put em to sleep, you don’t even need to wait for the poke balls to wiggle three times afterwards (now it’s just one wiggle of varying size). It’s just so quick, and it feels so good. 

Granted, you can still battle pokemon. You can batter them a bit to make them easier to catch still, and you still battle with people who have pokemon. In the lore of the game they’re not “trainers” per se, but basically they are. You won’t run into just like, random people standing in the road who want to beat you up with their laser mouse anymore though. It’s mostly events through the story where you’ll get into these fights, and that’s when you’ll see the new combat system!

Where most pokemon games have a straight turn for turn one on one battle system, where for each turn you get, your opponent gets one, Arceus goes for a system based more off of FFX’s CTB system. Basically, depending on which action you take during a turn, your next few turns get shifted forward or back. In tandem with this is the introduction of move “styles”, where you can change a move to be less effective in order to shift your turns to be sooner or vice versa. It’s a cool change! They don’t let you break it to the extent that most games with this type of system do, but the fluidity definitely feels at home in this less stiff pokemon game. I wouldn’t call it 100% better or anything, as I’m a huge fan of the more rigid system too, but it’s cool for them to be playing with the actual flow of battle like this. It’s a bit vague in it’s current form though, with some enemy turns turning into 3 completely out of nowhere, which, along with the balancing changes (in general it feels like all moves deal more damage), can burn you pretty badly. Still though, definitely a cool thing to see.

That kind of unpolished vagueness can be brought into a few other areas of the game as well, I think. The menus in particular look great, nice and minimal and responsive, but when you get into the game a bit you might feel like some things are misplaced? In particular just, the whole interface around sidequests is lacking the ability to track more than one quest at once, which just makes doing sidequests more of a chore than they really should be. You just end up forgetting about them!

The visuals have gotten loads of criticism as well, and while in general I really enjoy the look of the game, there’s some weird bits that look extra rough. The water is very flat and has a small repeating texture on it, which can lend the game a tech-demo-ey kind of look when you’re flying around. There also seem to be some rendering issues with the wisp collectables, which are supposed to be small beacons of light but sometimes just.. aren’t there until you’re three feet away. Nothing is horrible, it’s just all kind of raw in a weird way. That’s kind of my style though, so it really didn’t bother me much.

Finally I wanna get into the story a bit. Er, not the story as in the narrative of it, more the setting. The narrative is about what you’d expect from a pokemon game, with maybe a hair more drama and surprise to it than you’d expect. The setting, on the other hand, is simultaneously super cool and very slightly uncomfortable for me.

So on the face of it, it’s cool. The game takes place in Sinnoh, the setting of Diamond and Pearl, but hundreds of years in the past (when Sinnoh was called Hisui). They go hard into the mythologically focused lore of those games (the extent of which was semi-unique to those games iirc), exploring Hisui/Sinnoh as a place with a history that was only ever implied. There’s what you’d expect, things like seeing where cities would eventually be built, where mines would be dug into caves, basically the “untamed” land. But the more interesting thing to me is that, well, you’re allied with an Imperial force, colonizing a land with people living on it. And this is where it gets a bit weird for me. 

Sinnoh/Hisui is based off of Hokkaido, the large island in the north of Japan. An island that has people who are indigenous to it, the Ainu. I can’t do justice to the history of Hokkaido here, both because I’m not knowledgeable enough and because I’d be here all day, but what I do know is that Hokkaido was invaded by Japan in the 1400s, and the Ainu were forcefully annexed. Even today, Ainu culture is… not exactly at the forefront of Japanese culture. Hell, the Ainu have only been officially recognized as a distinct culture by the Japanese government in 2019. 

So, it’s a bit weird for me when this game is actively drawing attention to Ainu culture (there’s some references in game!) and pointing to cultural differences between the Galaxy team (your faction)’s Feudal Japan and the indigenous Hisuian peoples (the Diamond and Pearl clans) as important, but not antithetical to peace. On one hand it’s really cool, and everything I just mentioned is especially fantastic when you think about how Pokemon games are primarily marketed towards children. On the other hand, Japan did not peacefully go to Hokkaido to study it, they annexed it forcefully. On the whole I don’t think it’s a huge deal, because it’s a kids game and if you don’t know about the history of Hokkaido to this extent then that erasure might not really register, but it still makes me feel a bit weird

Even with that weirdness though, this is the most fun I’ve had with a pokemon game in probably a decade, and despite some rough edges around the technical presentation and UX design I still put 50 hours into it in less than a week lmao