I love Pokemon’s turn-based battle mechanics. For nearly 30 years, Game Freak has tuned its rock-paper-scissors style combat to near perfection. Different generations have added new mechanics and gimmicks to keep things fresh, but Pokemon’s battles have always been built around turn-based combat. With Pokemon Legends: Z-A, however, Game Freak aims to redefine what a Pokemon battle is, a fact which, naturally, gave me some pause. Yet after over an hour with the game, I’m convinced they might have pulled it off.
Pokemon Legends: Z-A opens with your character arriving in Lumiose City by train. Unlike Arceus, there is no time travel; Z-A takes place in the present after the events of Pokemon X and Y. Outside of the train station you meet a trainer, either Taunie or Urbain depending on who you pick, who will give you a starter Pokemon: Chikorita, Totodile, or Tepig. Before I was able to pick the Totodile, the clear winner of the three, we were thrown into a Wild Zone a few hours later in the game.
Wild Zones are scattered throughout Lumiose City and are home to wild Pokemon waiting to be caught. The zone I explored was crawling with Houndours and Bunearys. The Wild Zone covered a few blocks of Lumiose City, and was much smaller than the expansive areas we saw in Arceus. Based on a few quick glances at the map, this zone seems like one of the smaller ones, but even the larger Wild Zones appeared to be much smaller than any of the regions from Arceus. However, these Wild Zones appear to use Lumiose City’s density and verticality to their advantage. I found some back alleys and rooftops that hid items and special encounters, including a level 40 Alpha Pikachu that sent me flying off a multi-story building and electrocuted its way through most of my party. Fortunately, there are cafes dotted throughout Wild Zones that can heal your Pokemon for a small fee. If you or all your Pokemon get knocked out, you’re sent back to a Pokemon Center outside of the Wild Zone.
Those who played Legends Arceus should feel at home with Z-A’s catching mechanics as, fundamentally, not much has changed: sneak up on an unsuspecting Pokemon, line up your throw, and chuck a Poke Ball. If you’re spotted, you can send out a Pokemon of your own and weaken it before tossing another Poke Ball. It’s just as intuitive as it was before, albeit with fewer tools at your disposal. In Arceus you could craft Smoke Bombs to hide, throw berries to distract, and hurl balls of mud to stun Pokemon yet I didn’t have access to any of these tools in my session. It’s unclear if these have been removed from Z-A, or if they simply weren’t available in this demo.
During this portion of the demo, I was also encouraged to experiment with Z-A’s character creator. Like Scarlet and Violet, you can bring up the character screen in the menu and tweak your character’s hair and facial features on the fly. Z-A has a lot more clothing customization options than both Scarlet and Violet, too. I didn’t spend too much time tweaking my character because of time constraints, but there seems to be plenty of fashion accessories to mix and match.
After a stint in the Wild Zone, I dipped my toes into the Z-A Royale, a city-wide tournament that tasks contestants with battling through the ranks in order to challenge tougher and tougher opponents. Each night, trainers gather around the city and you’ll need to defeat them to earn a Challenger Ticket. Once you’ve collected enough points, you can participate in a Promotion Match to increase your rank.
Positioning plays a key role. When you issue an attack, your Pokemon automatically moves to a spot where its attack can connect and locks in place, leaving them open for a counter attack.
During the Z-A Royale, trainers prowl the streets at night with a Pokemon by their side. If you manage to sneak up on them, you’ll do some free damage before the battle starts. At the outset, combat feels much more frantic than a traditional Pokemon battle. Attacks are on a cooldown, and you can throw out as many as you’d like regardless of what your opponent is doing. This doesn’t mean you can ignore the opposing Pokemon, though. Each move has a speed rating that determines how long the wind-up is, and some moves could leave your Pokemon vulnerable for an extended period of time while others could fire off right away. Moves like Quick Attack, for example, have priority over moves like Flame Wheel, which traditionally requires a bit of a wind-up.
Other moves, like Whirlwind, Double Team, and Toxic Spikes, have also been redesigned to fit this format. In previous entries, Whirlwind forces a player to switch Pokemon, but in Z-A, it knocks the opposing Pokemon back to free up some space. Double Team, like Protect, appeared to make your Pokemon invulnerable for a period of time. Meanwhile, Toxic Spike, a move that normally punishes switch-ins, now leaves physical traps on the battlefield that will poison an opposing Pokemon that makes contact with them. Seeing how different moves translate to Z-A’s combat style was a highlight for me, and I can already think of so many opportunities to use Pokemon’s vast moveset to its full potential here.
As you’re exploring these cordoned off Z-A Royale areas, you’ll come across Battle Tickets. These offer challenges that, when completed, net you extra points. In the segment I played, these challenges ranged from landing sneak attacks to hitting weaknesses. They were all fairly simple, and most could be completed in one battle with a little extra forethought. That said, I do hope these Battle Tickets get tougher as you progress, as I can see them becoming a chore if the challenges never evolve beyond what I saw. Checking off these challenges while defeating trainers was the most efficient way to rank up in the Z-A Royale, and within 15 minutes or so, I was prepping for my Promotion Match.
Promotion Matches feel like Z-A’s take on gym battles. These battles take place in an arena rather than the streets of Lumiose City, and you can’t sneak up on your opponent for an advantage. The trainer I fought was a cook packing Simisage, Simipour, and Simisear. While I didn’t have much trouble dispatching his Pokemon, his play style did seem a little more defensive than the rank-and-file I challenged beforehand. Most notably, he was quick to throw up Protects against my super effective attacks. By his third and final Pokemon, I was a little more deliberate when I’d fire off an attack to account for his Protect and its cooldown.
The demo ended with a frantic battle against Mega Victreebell that played out similarly to the Mega Absol fight from my first preview. Mega Victreebell was launching attacks left and right, and I had to find openings with my Houndoom to land super effective hits. As I dealt damage, glowing orbs scattered around the arena that eventually let me activate a Mega of my own. Mega Evolved Pokemon can only stay like that for so long, though. Once the meter on the bottom left runs out, they return to their standard form. Collecting more orbs can extend its Mega Evolution, but not by much. Despite having a few Pokemon that could Mega Evolve, I opted to go with Houndoom because of the clear fire type advantage. However, even with the type advantage, Mega Victreebell did manage to knock out my Houndoom, forcing me to send out a different Pokemon while I tended to Houndoom’s wounds with items.
These fights are reminiscent of the Frenzied Pokemon battles from Pokemon Legends: Arceus The difference is that you don’t need to quell the boss with balms before you battle it. Instead, you are calling out attacks and dodging hazards from the beginning. These battles are much more dynamic, requiring you to split your attention between positioning, attack cooldowns, and HP bars. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but there is some depth here that could lead to challenging fights later in the game.
Throughout every section of my demo, Pokemon Legends: Z-A ran flawlessly on a docked Nintendo Switch 2. It’s hard to gauge an exact frame rate without extensive testing, but it looked to be 60 frames per second without any noticeable hitches. Of course, Pokemon Legends: Z-A is also coming to the Nintendo Switch, and we have no idea how it runs on Nintendo’s last-gen hardware. Hopefully its performance is smoother than Arceus and Scarlet and Violet, but we’ll have to wait until next month to see.As promising as Z-A looks, there are still a lot of unanswered questions. I’ve played around two hours, but I still haven’t been able to explore Lumiose City at my own pace. What else does the city have to offer? Does it tie in to Pokemon X and Y in any meaningful way? Are there new regional forms like we saw in Arceus? How does multiplayer work? We’ll get answers to these questions very soon when Pokemon Legends: Z-A drops on October 16, 2025.
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