Pokémon Legends: Arceus

Sometimes good ideas are not enough. Pokémon Legends: Arceus, for example, feels like a promising proof of concept for what could be a terrific finished game one day, as it indeed shakes up the stagnated Pokémon formula, presenting many fascinating ideas without any type of polish, failing to make great use of any of them.

Arceus’ story is an Isekai, the type where the protagonist is thrown into a strange, alien world they know nothing about. Here, it starts with the divine being Arceus – Pokémon‘s equivalent to God – speaking with us in a dark void. God asks about our appearance, mods our cell phone, and throws our character into a beach, where we meet a professor called Laventon, who just witnessed us drop from a rift in the sky. When we find our phone again, God does what any god would do and sends us a text message, giving us our main goal: “I bestow upon thee this Arc Phone and thy mission: seek out all Pokémon.”

The rub being the fact that we’ve been transported back to an age when Poké Balls have just been invented and people still fear Pokémon. After we prove ourselves capable of handling Poké Balls – apparently catching just three Pokémon is considered a heroic feat here –, Laventon proposes a partnership and invites us to Jubilife Village, where our character accepts a full-time job – even though they are just 15 years old. These are hard times, you see.

The first problem is that the Isekai element is not given too much thought: it’s supposed to be a mirror to the player’s situation and nothing more – it’s not even clear if the main character really came from the future or from another world altogether. People in the village will comment on our appearance (“What manner of dress is that?”), but speak our language without explanation. Sometimes, they will worry about the main character becoming stranded in that time – or world – forever, but the protagonist is silent, so they never give any input on the subject.

Sometimes, Legends: Arceus presents us with dialogue options, but rarely in situations that matter. And the choice is usually a fake one, too: if we decide not to battle someone, for example, the person will just keep challenging us until we accept. I don’t believe it’s unfair to expect that a game that offers us choices should at least acknowledge them: I’m not asking for proper, fully-developed consequences, with branching paths and such, I just want to say words and have characters – unlike my family – react to them, acknowledging that they were said. Here, these choices could have even been used to allow us to develop our character, giving us the means to decide how they feel about being in that world – or time – and making full use of the Isekai theme: we could have decided if they want to go back or not, how conflicted they are about it, how lost and out of place they are feeling in Jubilife.

After all, we don’t receive a warm welcome when we first arrive in the village. These people are struggling to make ends meet and so see us as just one more mouth to feed: “We’ve no food for freeloaders. Survival out here is a daily battle, you know,” a woman warns our character. Luckily, since Cyllene, one of the leaders of the Galaxy Expedition Team – the organization that rules Jubilife –, believes that a 15-year-old kid is old enough to earn their keep, we are offered a job in the Survey Corps, and tasked to capture and research Pokémon. The Galaxy Team will provide food and shelter, but first, we must prove ourselves in a trial or… die: “You will be expelled from the village to meet your fate – and perhaps your death – in the wilds,” Cyllene warns us about the price of failure.

People in Jubilife are deeply afraid of Pokémon. A woman named Berra, for example, tells us that she got traumatized after an attack in the wilds and now is too scared to set foot out of the village. A guard at the gates urges us not to leave Jubilife, as it is too dangerous, and Laventon is even more blunt: “Pokémon are terrifying creatures!” he exclaims. This sentence quickly becomes a mantra, being repeated verbatim by several characters throughout the game.

Legends: Arceus tries to build on this theme, but never goes too far: if it keeps telling us time and again that Pokémon are terrifying creatures, it’s because it’s too afraid to show that to us. One of the first sidequests is about a kid playing with a Drifloon and how this is a bad idea. Its Pokédex entry, after all, states: “Said to lure away young children and carry them off to the afterlife. Some whisper that Drifloon are formed of reincarnated human souls, but these rumors are as yet unconfirmed.” In other words, you can easily understand why adults are worried, for Drifloons indeed seem to be terrifying creatures… on paper. The quest, after all, ends up being about a kid befriending one without any issue. So, here’s the issue: Legends: Arceus only goes halfway. Despite all its talk, any actual interaction between an NPC in Jubilife and a Pokémon is a positive one (possibly because this is a series that targets children and has toys to sell, but what do I know). Either way, the game tries to build a theme it can’t or isn’t willing to fully commit to, which is a pity.

At least it tries in some areas. When a Pokémon evolves, they turn into a dark shape with bright eyes for some seconds, which can be a fearsome sight. Wild Pokémon can now hit our main character as well, and not just our Pokémon: boss battles focus on this change, putting us against an enraged Pokémon, and asking us to dodge their attacks while we throw balms at them to calm them down.

The point in Legends: Arceus, however, is not Pokémon battles, but filling out the Pokédex. There are no Gyms, no trainer battles in the wilds, and no League at the end: fights that evolve people’s Pokémon are always scripted story events. For the goal here is just to capture a lot of – the same – Pokémon, and battles are supposed to be just another way to understand these creatures better.

Therefore, the big change in Legends: Arceus is that capturing a Pokémon is not just easier but also seamless, as we don’t need to enter a battle with them anymore: we just need to spot a Pokémon in the wild and throw a Poké Ball at them. If the ball hits their back, the chances of capture even increase, encouraging a stealth approach –  which here amounts to just the usual “crouch to be less noticeable” tactic. It’s such an easy and simple process that scenes where our character is praised for capturing just three Pokémon become quite silly, making us question if everyone in Jubilife needs glasses.

Each entry in the Pokédex offers many tasks: we must catch many of the same Pokémon, catch them unnoticed or while at night, witness them using a certain move or evolve, or give food to them, and so forth. Each of these requirements earns points, and when we get ten, the entry is complete, taking us one step closer to increasing our rank in the Galaxy Team, which allows the use of high-level Pokémon and items. This means that the game has a simple, but effective gameplay loop: we venture into the wild, spot a Pokémon, throw Poké Balls at it or battle it, earn points in the process, go up in rank, receive better Poké Balls, and repeat the process with new Pokémon.

Since fighting is not the point, battles are quicker, too, with moves dealing much more damage than usual. This has a great effect on the feel of the game, as it means that battles can be more of a challenge now: a wild Pokémon that hits a super-effective move will probably one-shot a member of our party. This successfully leans into the “Pokémon are terrifying” theme, and the game even has some bigger, red-eyed Pokémon in the wilds – called Alpha – that are high-level and capable of wiping out our entire team if we come unprepared.

The only problem with this loop is that catching a Ponyta and catching a Drifloon is basically the same experience, as we just need to go behind them and throw a Poké Ball. There’s no evolution in the mechanic after the first hours – when we get the three types of Poké Ball – since better ones just increase chances of capture, and not how we capture Pokémon, and there are no surprises in store. Some Pokémon are rarer than others, of course, and some are affected by the time of day – Ghost Pokémon will appear at night, for example – but after spotting one, it’s business as usual.

Some Pokémon are aggressive and try to attack our character after spotting them, but we can just run for a few seconds in the opposite direction, wait for a bit, and return to try again. In other words, this is a game that can get repetitive, especially after the dopamine rush caused by the addictive jingle sound of a successful Poké Ball throw begins to lose its effect.

The Pokédex should have been more developed, too. If the whole point is filling it, completing each of the many tasks for a Pokémon entry should give us more than three lines of text and a list of their favorite foods – Breath of the Wild had more detailed text descriptions in its Monster Compendium, and most players don’t even know that thing exists.

Legends: Arceus also suffers from a repetitive overall narrative structure. It has several big areas to explore, and each one has a “Lord” Pokémon that needs to be “quelled” with the balms. Each area has its self-contained story to get to this Lord, but to call them shallow would be an understatement. The standout is the one in the coastal area that has a Growlithe finding the courage to take his late father’s place as Lord: it’s still a quite basic tale, but there’s at least a bit of character development and a forbidden love story thrown into the mix. Because most stories in Legends: Arceus lack even that and just follow the same template of “I either don’t trust you, or think you’re wrong, but if you win me in battle or bring me an item, you can proceed anyway,” which gets old very fast – especially since the game still has a lot of cutscenes and dialogue.

Finally, there’s the matter of presentation. Pokémon is one of the biggest franchises in the world, and yet Legends: Arceus looks like a low-budget project. There’s this early moment when we leave the village and go to the first wild area, and the camera tries to emulate that famous Breath of the Wild pan that makes us gaze at the environment and go “wow,” but the area is so lacking in elements and artistic flair that it ends up having the opposite effect, looking just deeply embarrassing. This is an ugly game, in other words, and this is not just about the lackluster textures – although they are indeed poorer than my account balance – but the fact that the artistic design is also bland and uninspired: there are few landmarks, few places that stand out in the environment because of their layout and visual elements, few places that boast a unique design in this world. There’s no need to compare the game’s polish with a modern behemoth like Zelda: Xenoblade Chronicles had much more detailed and imaginative 3D biomes than Legends: Arceus when it released back in 2010 for the Nintendo Wii. It’s not about technological prowess, then, but artistic vision. And Legends: Arceus lacks both.

If Pokémon Legends: Arceus feels like a prototype, it is because it makes sure that the core gameplay loop works, but refuses to go beyond that. It’s a step in the right direction, for sure, but it remains just that: a promise of a better future for Pokémon instead of already fully realizing its vision.

October 20, 2025.