Pokémon Legends: Arceus

July 17th, 2022.

My introduction to Pokémon occurred in the late 1990’s as I spent the weekend at a close friend’s house. It was a Saturday morning, and we were playing with a bunch of different toys in his living room and goofing off as Bonkers! played on the TV in the background.

At one point, my friend shouted, “I choose you” and tossed a transparent purple ball at me. The ball ricocheted off of my chest and fell to the floor, sending the two plastic pieces that made up the shell of the ball flying in opposite directions, leaving an odd little figure face down on the carpet.

I bent down to scoop the little orange guy up and glanced over him with curiosity, and I remember being particularly interested in his funny shaped tail.

“What’s this?”, I asked.

“Raichu.”

“What’s Raichu?”

“He’s from Pokémon.”

“What’s Pokémon?”

The way my friend jerked his head to stare at me in utter disbelief would make you think I had just insulted his entire lineage.

“You’ve never heard of Pokémon!?”

“… No?”

Before I could blink, he had already cleared the back of the couch and was sprinting into his bedroom. When he returned, he had a giant gray brick in his hand with a bright red cartridge resting in the back. We spent the rest of the day taking turns between Pokémon centers in each town.

That day introduced me to the Pokémon craze that consumed the world in the mid to late 90’s and shortly after, I ended up getting to play Pokémon Blue in its entirety thanks to my brother getting his own gray brick (The Game Boy). Then, on Christmas in 1999, I received my very own purple Game Boy Color along with a copy of Pokémon Gold.

I’ve loved Pokémon ever since. But as I got older, I’ve struggled to stay invested in the games. I stopped played after Gold and didn’t pick things back up until Black and White, then I stopped again until Sun and Moon, which I only made it a few hours into before giving up again… it just seemed like the formula had grown stale to me.

But all that changed in January when Pokémon Legends: Arceus released on the Nintendo Switch. This game would end up being the first Pokémon title I’ve completed since clearing Pokémon Gold back in 2000 and it ended up being the very first Pokémon game that I ever bothered to complete the Pokédex in.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus starts with you getting a cell phone from God before being thrown way back in time and arriving in the very early days of the Sinnoh region, which is known as Hisui. It sounds ridiculous, and, well, that’s because it is.

But the circumstances of your arrival don’t seem to matter for very long because shortly after your arrival you become a full-fledged member of the Survey Corps for the Galaxy Expedition Team and you find yourself tasked with capturing, training, and studying Pokémon to help develop a better understanding of this new world.

Much like the original Pokémon games, you get to pick one of three Pokémon to join you at the beginning of your adventure, but that’s about where the similarities end. In the original games, you would make your way from town to town, battling trainers and wild Pokémon alike to help level up your team in hopes of defeating the next gym leader to earn their badge and make your way to the Elite Four, or whatever the games ‘final few’ happened to be.

In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, you instead spend most of your time out in the wildness, catching Pokémon, battling Pokémon, running from Pokémon, and finding various ingredients to use to help you make useful items such as pokéballs, potions, revives, and other supplies you need on your adventure.

Battles with other trainers are still in the game, but they’re much rarer – and a lot more fun.

In fact, it wasn’t until I played this game that I realized how bogged down the other Pokémon titles made me feel in the constant cycle of walking a few feet, seeing an exclamation mark pop up above someone’s head, and then spending the next few minutes battling it out with them before repeating the process… with wild Pokémon encounters sprinkled in between with their own grind of fighting, capturing or running away.

That doesn’t happen here.

Whenever I battled another trainer, I was actually invested in the fight because it often had something to do with the story and I never felt like I was extremely over or underpowered. Things never felt like they went on too long thanks to the much faster style of battling with the new ‘Rapid’ or ‘Strong’ style attacks and the ability to walk around the battleground as the fight unfolded to see the action from every angle helped my immersion tremendously. This small detail made me more invested in battles than I’d ever been in the series, and I still find it funny when you walk too close to an attack and get blown back from the impact.

As for wild Pokémon, the process of capturing them is significantly sped up as well and most of them can be captured simply by tossing a pokéball their way, similar to the Pokémon GO mobile title.

Some creatures are very timid, and in the case of Bidoof, clueless, and those Pokémon will let you slap them right in the face with a Pokéball – and most of the time, it works!

But with some creatures you have to be more careful, particularly with Alpha Pokémon, which are just like their regular counterparts except they’re about five times bigger, have glowing red eyes, and distorted roars that will blow the speakers out on your Switch if you’re playing in handheld mode.

The Alpha Pokémon, as well as more skiddish Pokémon like babies, and other just generally aggressive monster, are best caught hiding in the grass and tossing some food out to distract them before slapping them in the back with a well-placed pokéball to try and get a critical catch.

Sometimes they’ll still break free and if they don’t run away, they get angry. In these cases, you can always send out one of your own Pokémon and duke it out to catch them while they’re weakened from battle – or you can just start out this way from the very beginning and if you hit an unexpecting Pokémon from behind with one of your own Pokémon, you’ll get a free turn for catching them offguard!

This gameplay flow completely changes the dynamic of the Pokémon series, and it is without a doubt my favorite improvement. It doesn’t feel like a chore to move from point A to point B while dreading the encounter. Instead, I can go between the points taking any path that I like and if I do end up getting in over my head, I don’t have to battle until I faint or select an option titled “Run” – I can actually just turn around and run!

Exploring these unique open areas was the highlight of my time with the game and I really enjoyed working to build my perfect team. The only real drawback I experienced was that each area seemed to share an overlap of certain Pokémon leading to a lack of diversity among the cast of monsters. There were still plenty to chase after and each zone still had at least a handful of Pokémon that wowed me once I encountered them, but it did feel a little stale when first starting out in a new zone after the first three.

This is the first Pokémon game I can remember that captured my interest in regard to the story. I loved the idea of exploring a brand-new world with a village full of newcomers who were excited and terrified of what they might find out in the wilderness – and that fear is only amplified by an ominous hole in the sky swirling around the highest peak… an ominous hole that you fall out of at the very beginning of the game!

I loved all of the characters that I came across. The Pearl Clan, Diamond Clan, and Galaxy Team were filled with interesting characters that carried great personality for a game with zero voice acting.

In each area, you encounter and ‘calm’ a Noble Pokémon from one of the clans, and during the preparation phase for each one you’re introduced to two or three new characters with familiar ones popping up along the way to keep the main plot moving along. I don’t think I despised any of them, even the Diamond Clan member you’re meant to hate has a certain stupid charm that made me smile each time they showed up.

Late in the game, you get to pick one of the clans to help out and I found my decision boiled down to simple preference based on which clan members I liked more from the story. I enjoyed all of them, but the Pearl Clan simply had more characters that I clicked with for various reasons including their comedic timing, artistic design, and interesting backstories!

Once the credits rolled, I started to feel like the game was really just getting started.

After completing the main objective, I found a plethora of new requests waiting for me back in the village and the very first one I took led me to an encounter with the mythical Pokémon Darkrai which was a very unexpected and pleasant surprise!

Once things were wrapped up with the main story, I was suddenly tasked with completing the Hisuian Pokédex which included hunting down and capturing several mythical and legendary Pokémon, as well as some more elusive monsters who are exclusive to spacetime rifts which occur randomly in areas out in the wilderness where Pokémon are pulled from the past, present, and future – like Porygon and Bastiodon!

Some of the Pokémon you catch late game can lead to humorous moments back in Jubilife Village, such as seeing the God of Time being contained by a tiny fence where your stored Pokémon play.

In most games, once I’ve wrapped up the main story, I find it hard to continue playing or caring about the side objectives. But the way this is presented in Pokémon Legends: Arceus actually feels like a natural continuation of the main plot which motivated me to keep playing. It really just felt like the credits weren’t supposed to show quite yet.

During my time in the endgame, I actually found myself enjoying the freedom to take things at my own pace and would constantly set out to complete a request or find the next mythical creature only to divert off the beaten path and start farming Chansey to try and wrap up my research on their species, or I would start hunting down other players lost items to return to them for some rewards.

It took me a while to complete all of my objectives but because of the way the game flows, I never felt like I was grinding or repeating the same task over and over and over despite the fact that in some cases – I was doing literally that!

The continued effort of chasing down and catching rare Pokémon pays off when you get to face the title character and come face to face with the very God who sent you back in time to begin with…

… and then you beat the crap out of them before stuffing them into a neat little ball to carry on your belt!

Pokémon Legends: Arceus has received some gripes for its graphics, performance, and lack of diversity in its monster line-up. I can understand some of these complaints but if I’m being honest, I don’t think any of that was truly detrimental to my experience.

I thought for sure the graphics would distract me but once I was sucked into the world, I really couldn’t get myself out of it. The only performance hiccups I really noticed were dropped frames on certain flying Pokémon and when I played in handheld mode the vibration was so strong it felt like it was going to shake the enamel off of my teeth.

The lack of diversity is the only point of contention that stands out to me, but if I’m being honest, I think the smaller cast is likely the only reason I was able to complete the pokédex and see the true ending of the game.

Yes, there is a true ending when it’s all said and done, so keep playing after the initial credits!

Pokémon Legends: Arceus takes almost everything I ever wanted in a Pokémon game and brings it to life. When I started playing, I suddenly felt like that kid being assaulted with a tomy Raichu toy again… It was a fresh new world for me to explore at my own pace, filled with new mechanics and challenges that made the experience better than ever – and I never felt like I had to do anything.

As I mentioned near the start of this review, Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the first Pokémon game I’ve completed since I finished Pokémon Gold 22 years ago.

It’s also my favorite Pokémon game and easily one of my favorite games of all time.

I’m hopeful that the next games in the mainline series learn from some of the experimentation in this title and that they bring the open-world and less repetitive mechanics forward.

If not, well, here’s to hoping for Pokémon Legends 2!