Rating of
4/5
The Perfect Pokemon Game: Aipom’s Paw Edition
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/19/25
The ‘Pokemon’ franchise has been going strong since the original games, “Pokemon Red/Green” debuted in Japan as Super Gamboy Enhanced titles way back in 1996. Unfortunately for the developer, Game Freak, they’ve also been in the same repetitive rut since 1996. The drill with ‘Pokemon’ games has always been that there are two complementary versions released simultaneously, which are largely identical, but feature a handful of different obtainable pokemon, thus encouraging trading between players with opposite versions. Likewise, the structure and plot-lines have been completely rote and formulaic, in which a kid or young tween decides to travel across their country, battling their slowly-acquired team of pokemon against 8 Gym Leaders who hold regional status and power, all while dealing with the nefarious shenanigans of Team *Whatever* as the evil organization attempts to subjugate the nation via pokemon-based organized crime and/or terrorism.
After I finally managed to ‘Catch ‘em All” for the first time way back in 2007 with my DS copy of “Pokemon Pearl,” I really fell out of love with the series. Not only was I not impressed enough with Nintendo’s DS successor, the 3DS, to ever buy one, but the idea of going through the same paint-by-numbers slog, only with EVEN MORE pokemon to catch, didn’t really pique my interest. What I wanted was a new ‘Pokemon’ game that broke from the tired, old formula the series was built on, and that NEVER evolved. Unfortunately, around the time I was hoping to see some variety out of the ‘Pokemon’ franchise, Game Freak decided to do just that, releasing a handful of ‘Pokemon Mystery Dungeon’ Roguelikes, which instantly took my already frowny-face disposition towards ‘Pokemon’ and turned it into full-blown disgust. A handful of other throw-away tech demos like “Pokemon Rumble” showed some promise, but never showed enough confidence from the rightsholder to become full-fledged spinoffs – which, I suppose is a good thing, since, ‘Pokemon’ is, at least STILL a proper Turn-Based RPG after all these years, where most other long-running RPG series have given into the Dark Side of Action.
What I really wanted was a new ‘Pokemon’ game that stuck close to the series’ traditional mechanics, but opened up the game’s world into a vast, explorable countryside. I also wanted a ‘Pokemon’ game to tell us a story set in the early days of pokemon training, perhaps when the crusty, old Professor Oak was a boy, and that was decidedly NOT about collecting Gym Badges, challenging the Elite Four, or stopping Team *Whatever* from taking over the world. Imagine my shock, then, when Nintendo, hot on the heels of the rut-worn, subscription-shackled flop that was “Pokemon Sword/Shield,” released EXACTLY the type of ‘Pokemon’ game I had been pining for, under the title, “Pokemon Legends: Arceus” (“PLA”). Oddly enough, “PLA” didn’t have a ‘complementary’ version released simultaneously, either… so what kinds of curses and caveats did it hide beneath its otherwise immaculate surface?
Presentation
To say that Game Freak has had a troubled history in game presentation would be a bit of an understatement. ‘Pokemon’ fans complained and complained that the studio, which started making 8-bit sprite-based games on the Game Boy Brick – with Super Game Boy color metadata baked in – wasn’t advancing as rapidly as it should… and they’re kinda right. “PLA” is a 100% modern 3D game with fully polygonal visuals and a number of vast open-world areas connected to a hub town… and very little of it actually looks good. While the pokemon 3D models have been refined over subsequent generations with polished looks and great animations – the evolution cutscene looks particularly cool in “PLA” – human characters seem to be beyond Game Freak’s ability to render in anything resembling a lifelike fashion. Yes, the game is very much anime styled and doesn’t even try for photorealism, but the animations for the human characters are just awful. They’re stiff, rigid, and formulaic, with facial animations in particular suffering from a sort of ‘lag,’ where something will happen, then a character will take a couple of beats before they react to it with a canned, overdone facial tic. And it’s not like the characters are particularly endearing based on their designs alone. Roughly half of the named characters in “PLA” are aggravating to look at, whether it’s the butch lieutenant who looks like Ellen DeGeneris, or the underage cowboy, or the narcissistic and flamingly homosexual prettyboy, there are just far too many duds in “PLA’s” stable of human characters, compared to the Gym Leader designs of older ‘Pokemon’ titles. Even the game’s professor – Laventon – is grating to look at as, in spite of being the only non-Japanese character in the game, he insists on wearing an idiotic purple stocking cap – complete with chinstrap – that makes him look more foolish than wise.
Outside of character designs being a mixed bag, environmental design is expansive and thoughtful… but largely beyond the Nintendo Switch’s ability to render properly. There’s a noticeable drop in overall visual fidelity when moving from the hub city to one of the open world region, with framerates taking a small hit, noticeable increases in jaggies and overall fuzziness of picture, and, let’s not forget, the insanely poor draw distances that lead to ridiculous levels of pop-in – which becomes especially noticeable once the player has unlocked the ability to glide around these areas.
Audio is likewise a mixed bag. The game is, surprisingly, completely unvoiced, with characters communicating solely through text boxes, without even a vocal quip to give the player some indication of what they would sound like. Pokemon all make their traditional cries – not their anime-inspired ability to only say their names – which is to be expected. However, the fact that many of these pokemon cries are from the Game Boy Brick and Game Boy Color eras means they sound pretty terrible… and nobody at Game Freak has come up with a way to adapt these ancient digital squawks into a higher-fidelity format for modern audio hardware. The soundtrack is the high point of the game’s audio presentation, featuring solid themes for common elements like battles and evolution, and pleasant background music as diverse as the environs the player will explore.
Technically, “PLA” is pretty solid, though it does have one major caveat revolving around networked play. It should come as no surprise that a first-party Nintendo game on a Nintendo console doesn’t crash or glitch out all the time. However, there are no options to rebind buttons, and some of them are a bit unintuitive. In the realm of networking, Game Freak seems to have learned its lesson from the Pokedex Scandal that rocked the release of “Pokemon Sword/Shield,” as all of the pokemon available in “PLA’s” Hisui Region are available to catch from the outset with no need to download any multi-gigabyte updates. However, there is one incredibly poorly-thought out mechanic in “PLA” that requires network connectivity and a subscription, and that’s the Lost & Found system. When the player dies in “PLA,” they are returned to the hub town, minus a random selection of items from their inventory. The only way to get these items back is for another player to find the lost item bag and return it to the Lost & Found system in exchange for points. While there is an offline work-around for accumulating points for a non-subscribing player (the game procedurally populates the map with numerous virtual lost item bags every real-time day), but there is NO way to get lost items back. Thus it becomes essential to disable the game’s auto-save feature and simply reset the system in the event of player death (which is incredibly uncommon outside of boss encounters anyway).
Story
“PLA” does exactly what I have wanted ‘Pokemon’ games to do for quite some time: Tell us a story about eh ‘Pokemon’ world’s past. In the case of “PLA,” the story employs typical Japanese isekai tropes by transporting a modern-day kid from either the real world or perhaps the present-day ‘Pokemon’ world (this really isn’t clear) into the past, to a time period roughly corresponding to the 1800s, into the Sinnoh Region – featured in “Pokemon Diamond/Pearl” on the DS – in a time when it was known as the Hisui Region. After a brief meeting with the pokemon known as Arceus in-game, but better known as God everywhere else, our custom hero is thrown through a space-time rift, as their cell phone transforms into a so-called Arc Phone, allowing for vague and cryptic interactions with Arceus, mostly in the form of a world map and quest list.
Our time-lost hero quickly meets up with Professor Laventon, a Western scientist, who is in the obviously-Japan Hisui region attempting to learn about the mostly unknown creatures dubbed ‘pokemon.’ Laventon’s ultimate goal is to create an Index of all known pokemon, cataloging their appearance, attributes, and behaviors – a PokeDex, if you will. Laventon himself is tagging along with a Hisuan government organization known as Galaxy Team, led by a hard-nosed and traditional samurai who wants to expand human knowledge about pokemon as well as human civilization into parts of Hisui where no one has ever dared to build a city before due to the large populations of wild pokemon.
Not everyone is as trusting of our mysterious hero, who fell out of what most people perceive as a supernatural disaster in the sky, so to prove ourselves, we must enroll in the ranks of Galaxy Team and do everything in our power to help them in their mission while also helping Professor Laventon with his PokeDex. Soon, however, the supernatural disaster grows worse, as the native tribes living in the uncivilized fringes of Hisui soon start reporting that their Nobles – that is, large, impressive pokemon that act almost like tribal totem animals to the locals – have been seen being struck by lightning coming out of the rift in the sky, sending them into frenzies, and causing them to become a danger to everyone – human or pokemon alike.
Thus it is up to our hero to solve the mystery of the Frenzied Nobles on top of all of their other projects. Over the course of our adventures, our hero will earn the trust of several Noble Pokemon who will aid in traversing the vast frontier of the Hisuan wilds.
Ultimately, it took me about 60 hours to complete “PLA’s” story and see the end credits. However, Catching ‘em All – which actually IS do-able in this game, thanks to its region-locked Dex – and ultimately confronting Arceus himself added another 25 hours to my playthrough. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing a snapshot of the ‘Pokemon’ world’s past, and the little details that Game Freak put into making the world seem less modern – I particularly enjoyed the little firework that shoots out of the top of a pokeball after a successful catch. However, I didn’t find most of the characters to be particularly compelling of enjoyable to talk to. Everyone is far too eccentric and self-absorbed, and their motivations are far too one-dimensional. Even the rival-proxy character feels paper thin, simply because she doesn’t get enough screen time or face time with the player to really develop an opinion on her either way.
Gameplay
“PLA” sticks fairly closely to traditional ‘Pokemon’ gameplay, which I greatly appreciated. The core of the game’s mechanics is battling, which is – as always – a turn-based affair in which pokemon take turns wailing on each other until one of them faints. The player can keep a team of 6 pokemon with them at all times, and can store a huge number of them in “fields” at a pokemon ranch connected to the hub town. Type advantages are still the main thing to take into account while battling, with each pokemon possessing one or two types that can cause them to take double damage, half damage, or no damage from attacks of other types. Some pokemon have unfortunate type combinations where they’ll take double damage from an attack twice, resulting in – yes – quadruple damage, while other type combinations are more beneficial, with double and half damage canceling out to normal damage, or double damage and no damage multiplying by 0 and making a pokemon immune to an attack type that would otherwise really hurt.
However, unlike traditional ‘Pokemon’ games of the past, the battles in “PLA” are not random encounters while walking through tall grass. Rather, each of the game’s sizeable open-world regions features areas where specific pokemon will appear. Sometimes rare pokemon will only appear at certain times of day or under specific weather conditions, but it’s always up to the player to choose to initiate battle, or simply run past them. Indeed, in a bit of role reversal, it’s usually the player who hides in tall grass, using the game’s stealth system, in order to get back-attacks and easier catches than directly getting into battle. Many pokemon are passive and will try to flee, while others will try to attack the player directly, even if the player has no pokemon out to battle.
Damage to the player is handled very much like it is in ‘Call of Duty,’ where getting hit causes the edges of the screen to darken, with subsequent hits darkening more of the screen. There’s an audio cue when the player can only take one more hit before blacking out and being returned to town (sans a random selection of items they were carrying). Likewise, avoiding damage for a while causes the darkened edges to shrink until they disappear, indicating a return to full health for the player.
Perhaps the greatest revision of traditional 'Pokemon' under-the-hood mechanics in "PLA" is that Game Freak finally normalized the relationship between IVs, EVs, and pokemon stats in general. Now, instead of each pokemon being blessed or cursed with good genes (IVs), every pokemon can boost all of its stats to the maximum without battling other specific pokemon (for their EVs), but rather by consuming Grit, which are items dropped by pokemon released from the player's pokemon farm. This change revolutionizes end-game pokemon min-maxing by making it infinitely less tedious, with the only significant differences between any given specimen of a pokemon species is where its Grit levels start and which two stats get opposing buffs and debuffs based on the pokemon's Nature (personality).
Another thing that I really like about “PLA” is that it’s possible for the player to get into a battle with multiple wild pokemon at the same time. Unfortunately, this particular mechanic suffers from the most ‘should have/could have’ oversights in the game. While in other ‘Pokemon’ games, some attacks can hit multiple pokemon – such as in double-battles – in “PLA,” every attack is single-target. Furthermore, while in other ‘Pokemon’ games, the player can send out two pokemon to battle simultaneously, in “PLA,” the player is limited to one pokemon battling at a time, even though the player can send out multiple pokemon to harvest resources from the environment simultaneously.
Since Hisui is largely unsettled frontier, money and shopping are fairly limited. Yes, Galaxy Team pays the player for research discoveries, and yes, there are wandering merchants and a dedicated item shop in the hub town. However, the player will definitely NOT have enough money to buy all of their pokeballs, potions, and whathaveyou, and will thus have to craft most of it from resources found while out exploring. Rock formations, fruit trees, and stand alone plants can all be gathered, with the player’s pokemon primarily doing the heavy lifting. Simply tossing a pokemon’s ball at a resource will cause them to appear, do a little animation, and return with the loot. Harvesting resources this way is also essential to build the bonds of friendship with pokemon species that can only evolve when they’re really happy and love their trainer.
Aside from the excellent, if not quite 100% perfect open-world mechanics added to “PLA,” the other major novelty to the game is how the player deals with boss battles. The Noble Pokemon who govern the various parts of the Hisui region serve as all of the game’s bosses, and instead of simply battling them as normal, the player must instead ‘placate’ them by throwing ‘balms’ containing the Noble’s favorite foods and scents instead of pokeballs. During Noble battles, the gameplay changes completely… and not for the better. Turn-based gameplay goes out the window in favor of real-time, 100% Action combat, where the player’s only recourses are to throw balms to whittle down the boss’ rage meter, and to dodge the boss’ attacks… and I really am NOT a fan of games revolving around memorizing boss patterns and dodging. At certain thresholds, it is possible to toss out a pokemon to battle the Noble, but that doesn’t defeat it, but rather gives the player an all-too brief time window in which to spam balms at the Noble while it is stunned and unable to continue its attack patterns. There is a certain terrible series that rhymes with Hark Moles that these battles remind me of – and the fact that I spent about 2 hours trying to placate Arceus (40 minutes of which consisted of an unskippable 5 minute cutscene, though) made me question why Game Freak would put something so different – and unwelcome – in an otherwise remarkable take on their wheelhouse of Turn-Based RPGs.
Overall
“Pokemon Legends: Arceus” feels like what I would get if I made my wish for the ‘perfect’ ‘Pokemon’ game using a cursed artifact. While the setting is great, the characters are incredibly annoying. While the open-world mechanics and pokemon battling mechanics are both fantastic on their own, they don’t quite mesh together 100%. While it’s great fun to explore the game’s world with the help of certain Pokemon Nobles, dodge-rolling around boss attack patterns to placate certain other Pokemon Nobles is the opposite of fun. Still, “PLA” is an overall positive experience, and I had more fun with it than I have with any other ‘Pokemon’ game in many years. Fans of the series who want something that breaks the old rut-worn formula without adding a whole bunch of network-dependent guff really owes it to themselves to pick up a copy of this game and confront God (with the ultimate goal of stuffing him into a pokeball).
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
