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- However, Arceus is easily one of the deepest and most engaging Pokemon side-games, and while it isn’t exactly BotW with Pokemon, it combines aspects of Monster Hunter and Pokemon Snap into a compelling experience. Still, Arceus could be a glimpse at the Pokemon franchise's future.
www.pcmag.com/reviews/pokemon-legends-arceus-for-nintendo-switchPokemon Legends: Arceus (for Nintendo Switch) Review - PCMag
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Is it a challenging game with a good story, amazing mechanics, and is the best game we've had? It definitely has its moments, in all three respects- it's pretty chill overall, but has exciting difficulty spikes; the story is nothing to write home about, but it's charming throughout and caught me off guard a couple times; and all the gameplay ...
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- Score: 8
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- Verdict
- Pokémon Legends: Arceus Review
- More Reviews by Rebekah Valentine
By Rebekah Valentine
Updated: Jan 29, 2022 12:26 am
Posted: Jan 28, 2022 5:00 am
Up until now, the "main series" Pokémon games have been strictly turn-based RPGs following a young protagonist on a quest to become a powerful Pokémon trainer. Each successive game has layered on a slate of new Pokémon to wrangle and, more recently, increasingly absurd and bloated mechanics to try and spice up a system that fundamentally remained unchanged. So at last, we have Legends: Arceus: the reinvention we asked for. Developer Game Freak has scrapped nearly everything I’ve come to expect from a typical Pokémon game — Gyms, random encounters, an Elite Four, trainer battles on the overworld, an evil team bent on world domination — and started over, rethinking even its most basic systems like Pokémon encounters and evolution from the ground up. A lot of this impressive transformation pays off, in that we get to interact with creatures that have never felt more alive in more dynamic ways, but Pokemon’s evolution is not yet complete, because the semi-open world around all of that feels like an unimpressive afterthought due to its bland emptiness.
There are many and varied reasons why people come clamoring back to Pokemon year after year, but at the heart of it perhaps is the enjoyment derived from collecting a veritable army of interesting monsters, customizing and bonding with a specific team of powerful ones, and overcoming increasingly difficult challenges alongside them. In that regard, Legends: Arceus is still the Pokémon we know and love. But everything surrounding it — how you encounter these creatures and learn about them, how you fight against and alongside them, and the challenges you face together — has been flipped on its head.
The way Legends: Arceus completely reimagines how you go about capturing and battling Pokémon is exemplary. Pokémon wander the overworld as they did in Let's Go and Sword and Shield's Wild Area, but instead of touching them to start every fight, here you have a buffet of options for how to approach each encounter. You could, for instance, toss a PokeBall right away for a capture attempt, or send out one of your Pokémon for a battle, or play it safer and use items like berries to distract them or mud balls to stun them. Some Pokémon will flee the second they see you, requiring you to stealthily hide in tall grass to get a good shot in. Others might attack you directly – your actual character, not your Pokémon – and you’ll have to dodge-roll or take a hit to your limited health bar. Granted, this doesn’t sound like a radical idea if you’ve ever played an action game, but for Pokemon RPGs this level of real-time action and peril is a new and welcome change that properly casts Pokemon as the actual, dangerous critters they are.
Rowlet
Oshawott
Cyndaquil
Even more thrilling are the occasional "space-time distortions" that appear across Legends: Arceus' five separate, self-contained biomes, bringing with them a bevy of rare and powerful Pokémon rapidly spawning in and out to create a scene of delightful chaos. And then there's the pure, delicious terror of running across a massive, red-eyed "alpha" Pokémon in the wild and having it chase you halfway across the map. Listen, you haven't really experienced Pokémon until a Chansey has blasted you straight into the ocean with a well-placed Hyper Beam. All of this makes the creatures of Hisui feel much more lively and dynamic than any previous game, though naturally it doesn’t approach the level of detail we see in something like Breath of the Wild.
You haven't really experienced Pokémon until a Chansey has blasted you straight into the ocean with a well-placed Hyper Beam.
“
Pokémon Legends: Arceus takes place in the Pokémon world before many of the technologies and discoveries about Pokémon we’ve come to rely on in the main games were made. Your PokeDex, for instance, is styled as a hand-written notebook instead of a digital index. With no PCs to store Pokémon, you instead leave them in a pasture at Jubilife Village (though storage and withdrawal is still convenient and quick). Pokémon breeding and eggs hadn’t been discovered yet, so that system isn’t available; nor is it yet known that Pokémon can hold items. Trading Pokémon with others still exists both locally and online (though we didn’t get to test it), but Pokémon that would normally evolve by trading now evolve simply by using certain items you can find through normal play. The past was a simpler time, certainly, but in many ways it’s a lot more convenient!
It doesn't hurt that Legends: Arceus is much more difficult than any Pokémon game in recent memory, especially when you combine the turn-based battle mechanics with the more action-oriented movement required to set them up in the first place. Wild Pokémon overall just seem to do more damage across the board, and even early on you can run across massively powerful Pokémon that will wreck your entire team and your character if you're not careful. In the first area, for instance, wandering down a particular path will put you right in the sights of a massive, red-eyed Rapidash at an unreasonably high level. You can run if you like, or try to catch it and risk losing, but there's no denying it's a sobering early moment for those who are used to Pokémon games being a cakewalk. This is a welcome removal of Pokemon's historical training wheels, especially for fans like me who have been craving more challenge from Pokémon for years. But it does lose a lot of the series' past accessibility as a result (and there’s no easy mode), which is worth keeping in mind given its wide-ranging, all-ages fanbase.
There are plenty of good real-world reasons why Game Freak thought an overhaul was in order, but in the world of Legends: Arceus, battling and catching Pokémon is the way it is because you are, by and large, actively inventing both as you go. Rather than the usual plucky young pre-teen setting out on a gym challenge, you play as a modern-day teenager flung through time and space to a past version of the Sinnoh region from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, known in its own time as Hisui. You're instructed by a mysterious voice to meet every Pokemon, and then dropped near a settlement called Jubilife Village, where Pokemon are known as terrifying creatures that humans must fear and avoid. This pleasantly surprising twist allows for a completely new perspective on the, frankly, quite frightening monsters we've been collecting for the last two decades, as you join an expedition team instructed to investigate the 242 different Pokémon that live in the region in an effort to help humans learn to live safely and peacefully alongside them.
Legends: Arceus is much more difficult than any Pokémon game in recent memory.
“
And what better way to do that than by compiling a PokeDex? Except this, too, is not the PokeDex we're familiar with. Beyond just catching every Pokémon once to complete the encyclopedia, you can only fully fill out an entry by completing a number of bonus tasks unique to each monster. Catching at least one is required, but other research tasks include things like battling a certain number, witnessing them using certain moves, encountering them in specific ways or at certain times, and more. For example, a Bidoof will be one of the first Pokemon you catch, but to fully research it you might catch multiple, evolve one into Bibarel, defeat several in battle, or finish a sidequest in Jubilife Village where a bunch of Bidoof are causing an annoyance. Such sidequests are available aplenty, and help the citizens of Jubilife work through their fears of the monsters they live alongside… and even learn to love them.
If a good remake is defined by its loyalty to the original, then Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are very good remakes indeed. They are Diamond and Pearl down to nearly every detail, looking nicer than ever before with a few small tweaks, most of which are pretty good ones. It leaves in some of the original’s roster flaws, but they’re l...
Read the full Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl Review
Filling out the PokeDex improves your rank in the expedition team, which is required for certain progression milestones and rewards, but it's also a wonderfully fulfilling task on its own because it's so open-ended. I often found myself wandering off from the main story path into forests, caves, mountains, and rivers looking for new monsters to catalog, watching them move, and spending time getting to know them so I could discern how best to tackle each new research task. When combined with the new capturing and battling systems, Pokémon Legends: Arceus' main loop of visiting a new area, working on the PokeDex, turning in progress, and repeating proved fun and enticing for hours on end.
But fun as it was to catch and catch and catch Pokémon, Legends: Arceus' brilliant new systems come with a major downside: they all exist within an ugly, empty world.
Filling out the PokeDex is a wonderfully fulfilling task on its own.
“
Now that the Switch has multiple lovely, stylized open-world games with big grassy fields and roaming monsters, this particular world comes off as especially disappointing. With the singular exception of its pleasant skies, it's just not nice to look at, ever. Its five areas, which include the Obsidian Fieldlands, the Crimson Mirelands, and the Cobalt Coastlands often look depressingly similar to one another. Textures are ugly and repetitive, grass and trees are excessively simple and obvious, and the water effects are utterly bizarre, especially when Pokémon are swimming. Objects pop in and out at close range, and large wild Pokémon spotted in the distance run at an agonizingly slow framerate that makes them look like stop-motion animations. And to be very clear, none of this is a rarity – it looks like this constantly, in both docked and handheld mode (though handheld is a bit better), and often kills the immersion of running around what should be an exciting natural world stuffed with Pokémon.
What all this means is that what you're doing for almost the entirety of Legends: Arceus' first act is catching and battling, over and over again. And that system is strong enough that it does manage to keep things interesting most of the way, though admittedly after the first 20 or so hours of repetition I was starting to flag. Interspersed boss fights with powerful lord and lady Pokémon that actively mix up the action game mechanics of their battles help freshen things up, though I could have done with a few more actually challenging trainer battles than the story threw at me. But then I reached Legends: Arceus' ending…or should I say endings?
When you see credits roll about 30 hours in, the “ending” you’ve seen is really more of an act one finale, leading directly into a robust second half with 20 or 30 additional hours of sidequests, battles, legendaries, and more. That on its own is great, and a lot of that extra content is pretty fun, too, including a seriously tough boss battle and some excellent legendary Pokémon hunts and fights that really make use of Legends: Arceus' overworld creature-catching and item-use mechanics for interesting, strategic encounters. In fact, they made me wish more of the earlier Pokémon encounters had forced me to make better use of my toolset for stealth and stunning – those felt like missed opportunities in hindsight.
But one massive piece of Legends: Arceus' second half sucks: finishing it. The actual, for-real ending is gated behind two absolutely massive and frustrating collect-a-thons. One of the tasks is to collect 107 of an item scattered across all six zones, with absolutely no guide as to where any of them are beyond the number remaining in each area. The other task is, unsurprisingly, capturing every Pokémon available – a job made agonizing by the fact that many are extremely rare. At one point, I spent several hours doing the following: leaving Jubilife Village for a certain area, flying to the very specific spawn point of a Pokémon I needed, seeing it was not there, warping back to camp, going back to the village to reset the spawns, and repeating until I found what I needed. I similarly spent hours sitting on a mountaintop, waiting for a space-time-distortion to appear in hopes that it might, maybe, have the Pokémon I needed. And if I accidentally made any of these Pokémon faint or flee, too bad. Do it all over again.
I spent several hours repeating the cycle until I found what I needed.
“
This is so, so far removed from the Pokémon fantasy I wanted to see the series evolve into. I understand that Pokémon has always had these kinds of obtuse, repetitive challenges for its rarest monsters (remember Feebas in Ruby and Sapphire?), but never have they been required to achieve a main story ending – not even back in the good ol' days where catching 'em all was still the slogan. And given the modern reinvention of the series we see here, this sort of tedious mandatory activity should’ve been the first thing to be discarded.
I am left feeling torn about Pokémon Legends: Arceus. On the one hand, its revamped systems are utterly revolutionary to the franchise. It sheds both stale battle mechanics and an outdated progression system that sorely needed a shake-up, and the new replacements are incredibly fun even after hours of repetition. But while Legends: Arceus is the cl...
Review scoring
good
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is an ambitious revamp that successfully revolutionizes the defining Pokemon experiences of catching and battling, but is unfortunately set in a drab, empty, and at times tedious world.
Rebekah Valentine
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- Rebekah Valentine
Jan 26, 2022 · Pokémon Legends: Arceus feels like the truest realisation of the fantasy of Pokémon — a wonderful surprise considering this is notionally a spin-off title.
- Nintendo Switch
- Contributor
Jan 26, 2022 · Which is what makes Pokémon Legends: Arceus so refreshing: it’s genuinely surprising. It does this by shifting the timeline back to long before the modern games in the series, during a period...
Jan 26, 2022 · Pokemon Legends: Arceus isn't the open-world Pokemon game fans have been waiting for, but it's still the most ambitious Pokemon experience yet, and a fun collect-a-thon in its own right.
- Lead Analyst, Consumer Electronics
- Nintendo
- 2
Jan 26, 2022 · Pokemon Legends: Arceus is a significant reimagining of what makes a Pokemon game, with an exciting level of flexibility that's only slightly hampered by a slow early-game grind.
Jan 28, 2022 · The Pokémon Legends: Arceus game honors past Pokémon games' core gameplay while infusing new action and RPG elements. You'll need to catch, survey, and research wild Pokémon in a long-gone era of the Sinnoh region to create and complete the region's first Pokédex.
