Pokemon Legends Z-A

[Maf]

 

Post trailer when it goes up

 

Best guess is where Pokemon Legends was about going back in time to ancient Sinnoh, this will be about going to the future of Kalos

 

Also Pokemon X/Y and now Z. Kind of glad they’re seemingly skipping Black and White. X/Y is so much better 

 

“Releasing simultaneously” 🤔

Teaser Trailer

 

 

[Maf]

So the entire game will take place in Lumiose City. Presumably each zone will have its own theme but in theory it’s quite a choice to have a Pokemon game all set within a city, given how these games are about nature. I guess they’re also trying to make the complete opposite game to Legends: Arceus which was all nature

[HandsomeDead]

Pokémon Yakuza

[DANGERMAN]

4 hours ago, HandsomeDead said:

Pokémon Yakuza

Like A Dragonite

[mmmark]

This could be really cool set in a bustling city and being a bit like detective Pikachu movie. Presumably Switch 2, but probably not release day. 
 

[OCH]

I imagine limiting the game to Midgar one city will offset the graphical shortcomings of Violet and Scarlet.

[Maryokutai]

 

Quite like what I'm seeing here and how they experiment with the formula with these spin-off titles. Combat in particular looks pretty cool, with attacks having different ranges, startup times and cooldowns, meaning positioning and timing are factors now as well. The city setting actually did remind me a tiny bit of Yakuza and if they can make it interesting to explore this could end up being quite a fun little title. Also quite happy Mega Evolutions are back. I think people mostly disliked them for messing up the competitive aspect, but this being a pure solo experience it's a great opportunity to revive the feature and some of those IMO pretty sweet designs.

 

Visually it's obviously still generations behind, but at least cleaner and more detailed than Scarlet/Violet, though I'm aware that's a low bar to pass. It's only coming out at the end of the year though and after half a year of Switch 2 games it might be a bit tough to go back to something like this (unless it's cross-gen, maybe we'll see it again in April).

[Pikman]

I'm not sure about the dodging attack part, that looks kinda clunky/easy to make mistakes.

[mmmark]

The new Pokemon Z-A trailer is offensively basic. 

[Maf]

Unsure if the trailer is just flattering but certainly looks a bit better than SV and the first Legends game. Might be because it’s narrow, smaller streets and rooftops is helping with that. Although rumour is underneath the city there’s a whole cave system so maybe it gets a bit uglier

 

I remembered from the first game that you could move around and watch the Pokemon fight. But now it looks like the Pokemon are moving themselves? I love this if that’s what happening. More dynamic Pokemon fights is always going to be better. Thinking about the first game again, though. I hope they make the end game easier this time. The really high damage and 1 v 3 Pokemon fights were kind of crazy before.

 

The big thing remains the structure of the game. The first 20+ hours of Legends I absolutely loved. Exploring, catching, finding cool Pokemon. It felt really alive in a way these games never have. But then you get to the next area and have to do it all again. And again. And again. And by the end I had certainly had enough and never thought once about going back to it. It’s just not a game that held up for a long play time. It was wow-ing in the beginning but as it wore off it was like oh, this game is to shallow to last 40-60 hours or however long it was

 

So hopefully they got some good ideas to flesh this game out more. It needs multiple more layers of depth and goals to be more interesting

 

But hopefully it’s good. They’ve been working on it for about 3 years at the end of 2025 and it’s a sequel so the foundational work should be done already. 

 

[one-armed dwarf]

I hope to wait long enough and jump in with a sequel that seems to get most things right and fix previous problems. Like, whatever one ends up being the ACII of them all

 

Maybe this is that, it looks pretty intetest8ng

[Maryokutai]

On 27/02/2025 at 16:06, Pikman said:

I'm not sure about the dodging attack part, that looks kinda clunky/easy to make mistakes.

 

I get the feeling 'dodging' is just trying to get a read on the enemy and moving out of the way. Ultimately this will still honour typings so if you're at an advantage you might not need to think much about defense and more about picking your openings on offense.

 

That said I do like that it shows certain moves in a new light, for example when they show Protect in the trailer and it basically works like a guard/parry. That move always felt weird in its turn-based iterations ('might fail on repeated use' isn't that interesting of a mechanic).

 

This could end up being very basic in the end, with brute-forcing everything being a legitimate option. It's a Pokémon game after all. But I remain optimistic for the time being.

[Maf]

Re dodging this has sort of been talked about before on here, but how does this work with slow Pokemon. Or even just really big Pokemon. How does a Venusaur run around the field? 
 

Maybe they’ll adjust speed and defence stats in this game which could make it really interesting. They already made radical changes to how some moves worked in the last game. Pokemon running around the battle is super cool, but it also raises a lot of questions

 

This is just a random thought. I don’t always like evolving my Pokemon because I think some are cooler in their earlier stages, but obviously the problem is they end up really weak and kind of useless by the end of the game. It would be cool if they really shifted the stats so smaller Pokemon are generally faster and have a greater chance at dodging while evolved Pokemon are tougher and take more hits to kill. Give weaker Pokemon a chance to be useful.