Pokemon Legend: Arceus be brave. After years of relative stagnation and cautious iteration, it represents a major step forward for the Pokemon franchise. Of course, Game Freak and The Pokemon Company have made these changes in the game, with the naming clearly intended to position it as a spin-off, but Legends Arceus also distinguishes itself from Pokemon’s other side stories, which are often cheaper And rooted in other genres. It’s a spinoff with all the ambition and budget of the main game.
For Pokemon, the Nintendo DS is what it means to the Game Boy — the “third pillar,” Nintendo believes, with the arrival of the new Game Boy — until the huge success means, no, the DS is actually the successor , and probably always has been, but for some slight hedging. Maybe this will happen here.
Pokemon Legends: Arceus has a few omissions that seem to be mostly about simplifying things and tightening the scope of things. Gone is the fact that Pokemon was able to hold items, a change that ripples through other systems such as combat strategy and evolution methods, for example. One of the biggest changes is the removal of the passive Pokemon ability, which sadly removes the thought-provoking complication of forming a combat team.
The changes are largely less stinging, as Legends: Arceus also dropped a major feature: the ability to battle other Pokemon trainers, either online or via a local connection. While there are online features in the form of a bag (a sanitized soulblood that shows you where other players died and you can return lost gear for rewards) and Pokemon trading, this is ultimately a single-player game . Your only showdown is against AI.
I don’t know what Nintendo and The Pokemon Company have in store for the future of the series, and a big question mark in the competitive community will be what happens next with missing features; if the next game is more traditional, if the combination of item holding and innate abilities Class of things return. But I know one thing: there’s no question that I hope some of the game’s new additions stick around.
Now, admittedly, I’m not a Pokemon pro. I went to some competitive events and watched the pros. Hats off to them, I was stunned by the sheer scale of metadata in this game finally made for kids. So maybe I’m not necessarily the best person to decide this – but I have, shut up and deal with it.
The main new addition to combat in Legends: Arceus is the ability to perform actions in three different styles. The normal style is what you know as Pokemon Moves, but the “Agile” moves hit faster but deal less damage, and the “Power” moves punch but slow the user down. This means that the turn order of the formerly sacrosanct Pokemon could be messed up. For example, you can perform agility moves to line up a round in which you may be attacked multiple times in a row, or go all-in with a power attack, hoping you won’t give your opponent a chance to attack twice.
I like this for a few reasons. On the one hand, it’s a little bit more advanced turn-based RPG system combat. For me, when I think about turn order management, I think of Final Fantasy X — not the first by any means, but the most memorable one for me. But it also reminded me of another thing: almost every game I’ve seen that uses this kind of system is single player, not AI. So I can’t wait to see how a system like this works in a competitive environment, and how it shakes up Pokemon metadata.
So yes. Too bad you can’t fight your friends in Pokemon Legends Arceus. It’s a shame that the options for playing and interacting with friends are so limited. But it works for this game — it sets the stage for the next exciting change to Pokemon that supports competitive gaming. I can not wait anymore.
