Pokémon Legends: Arceus (video game, monster collector, JRPG, open world, turn-based RPG, fantasy) reviews & ratings - Glitchwave (2023)

I've never been a Pokémon fan. I think the games are insanely easy, and the mainline titles through the decades feel like they don't want to change. They introduce changes here and there that either are negligible to the gameplay, tacky, or otherwise scrapped altogether when the next ones come along. By embracing influences from another tentpole Nintendo title and other games, Arceus is finally ushering the series to a new, exciting direction.

Arceus, the open-world of Pokémon titles?

Let's get this out of the way. Arceus isn't an open-world title, well at least, the way the maps are laid out. They're more akin to Monster Hunter: you have a starting camp where you can do various things to help you out in catching your Pokémon, and the maps are divided into regions you can go to and from your starting village. That doesn't mean that openness isn't found somewhere else. When you start the game, you're pretty much landlocked, but that changes as the story moves along, and you gain different traversal options that makes exploration effortless throughout these maps. These make hunting for specific Pokémon less of a hassle when you can just quickly move area to area by using these traversal options, which are definitely inspired by BOTW.

The maps are fairly sizable and some of them are really well thought out, like I'd remember where to go without opening the map because the landscape is so distinct. The game fully adopts a day/night cycle along with different weather, though so far I only noticed that it's either raining or sunny. The skyboxes are very pretty to look at.

Catching them all

Pokémon now roam the maps, with the exception of certain types of Pokémon, you will be able to see Pokémon freely running around the landscape. The random battles are all gone, now you can choose if you'll engage in battle or not. There are two ways to catch Pokémon: you can either do it the old-fashioned way by battling them into submission or just by throwing a ball and hoping that the Pokémon is willing to become part of your ever growing stable. Opting for the latter is the best choice for weaker, smaller Pokémon, while the stronger or feistier ones are harder to catch without a fight.

Throwing balls outside a fight is as simple as aiming your chosen ball of choice to the Pokémon you want to catch. Different balls will have different arcs depending on their weight, and certain Pokémon are more likely to be caught by certain balls. You can increase your chances by crouching in tall grass, hitting them when they're backs are turned to you(complete with a satisfying audiovisual cue, backstab!), or waiting for them to sleep. If these doesn't work and the Pokémon notices you, they will start attacking you, or running away. If they start attacking you, you either engage them to start the fight or you should run away. If you stay long enough and get hit, you'll eventually faint and your precious items will get lost.

A wild Pokémon appears!

Onward to battles. To engage in wild Pokémon battles, you just throw your own ball with a Pokémon inside it to start the battle. Throwing it behind the enemy will give you an advantage because you caught them unaware. The option to throw a selected ball to battle is a welcome change, what this eliminates is having to go through your menu and having to change who is the first Pokémon in your lineup as usually in the previous games, whoever is in that slot is the one that will head into the battle. See a Geodude throwing rocks at you? Handily switch to your water-type Pokémon by just clicking L or R and then throw it back. It's very intuitive and convenient.

Once the battle starts, it feels seamless because where you engage the wild Pokémon is where the battle will happen. Say goodbye to bland, infinitely reused battle backgrounds as now the landscape of Hisui is your battleground. This sometimes makes for a hilarious show. The first moment you get, try throwing a landlocked Pokémon into water.

You're also part of the battle now, well, at least visually. You can move your character while the fight is occurring, and the great thing about this is you can get caught in any of the Pokémon moves. Try asking your water-type to cast Aqua Beam and stand in the crosshairs and watch your character get blasted. This only applies visually as this won't result into you fainting, no matter how many times you get caught. You can also pretend to be the trainer of the wild Pokémon by standing behind them.

Sometimes, there will be distortions that will appear throughout the map that will house a lot of unique, rare, Pokémon that can only be caught in these distortions, and most of them will appear bunched up along with other powerful Pokémon, ready to beat you senseless. These distortions also has a lot of treasure to be found just scattered on the ground, and I found almost every evolution stone I have from these distortions. These only appear rarely and when they do, they only stay for a set amount of time before the area returns to normal, so better run towards one when you find them, as the risk versus rewards is well worth it.

Another new addition are alpha Pokémon. These Pokémon have better skills, stats, and are much larger than their non-alpha counterparts. These are harder to catch but well worth it. In fact, I find that alpha hunting is pretty fun, as most of them appear in the same place at the same time, and they're huge! The cuddly ones look even ridiculously cuddlier as their alpha counterparts.

Cyndaquil will remember that

A welcome change is now, your Pokémon will remember every move that they learn, what this means is you can swap out freely between old and new moves. The Move Tutor is back, and this time, they'll only ask for money, so seemingly, it's simple to just buy all the moves money can buy, but money is very precious in this game, at least for me. Still, this new change of you being able to swap out moves is very cool as it allows for more flexibility when heading out as you won't need to rack your head as to what moves to keep, in turn you can just change your Pokémon's moves rather than swapping them out altogether for other mons.

Front and center

The Pokédex now plays a bigger part than ever before. Each Pokémon now have tasks associated with them, and finishing these tasks will reward you with points. Tasks range from the standard catch x of these Pokémon or defeat x of these, to beating them with certain moves, to more unique ones that are just specific to a selected few. Getting enough points will earn you a star, and the stars are the only way for you to catch and command higher level Pokémon. This encourages players to engage with more Pokémon in different, varied ways. Does it mean that gym battles are no more? Yes, they are gone, but the storyline battles make up for those, Still, unlocking the next part of the storyline require you to have enough star levels, and by the end of the game, at least for someone like me, I was just trying to get to enough star levels to see what's next. I kinda feel as the game went on the points they're giving out do not change, so it feels just a tiny bit grindy, but it helps that moving across the land and doing battles feels so much better now.

Walking around, Hisui, on a quest to fulfill requests

Arceus now has proper sidequests you can take at will and will earn you different rewards, from your common 10 Pokéballs, to new hairstyles, to new photography styles from the photography shop. Some of these quests are fun and easy to do, like tasking you to get this specific Pokémon to perform certain tasks for villagers, while others task you to get rid of certain Pokémon pestering them, to helping people from your team set up new campsites for you to start your tasks with. These are very welcome as they truly add longevity for the game, and you can ignore them if you've got your fill of sidequests. I just wish that some of these actually rewarded you with rare Pokémon, while some tasks do end up with you catching them, it would've been nice to actually get them as rewards since your request lists will show you what rewards you can obtain.

People that will challenge you on the wild are also gone now, you can willingly choose to battle other people in the village, but other than that, these are gone, which is a good thing as I didn't like them before. The only bad thing about this is that it means this avenue of earning a steady stream of income by sending out a fully decked out Golem to fight their puny Eevee is gone.

There are quite a number of things you can also do in the village, from getting haircuts, buying new clothes(the clothes are awesome, Japanese-style), and even farming for specific crafting materials. I ended up spending more money on the clothes store more than the vendors.

Hey, listen!

When Sword and Shield were first announced, all eyes were on these titles as these were the first mainline Pokémon title in 3D(we're not counting Gale of Darkness). For me, gameplay-wise, it delivered nothing new that was exciting, but otherwise it was your old, regular, Pokémon romp, but the story was atrocious. Don't give me that "this game is made for kids" crap, even as a toddler, I'd be insulted with the story. Usually RPGs, JRPGs in particular, go out of their way to put kids into world-ending situations and make them ultimately come out on top, but SwSh went out of its way to preach that adults should handle these adult situations, while simultaneously being useless. You're handwaved every step of the way.

The story in Arceus heads the opposite way with themes of camaraderie sprinkled throughout, and how ultimately, teamwork blows out distrust and alienation out of the water. This is a proper JRPG story now, no more heading to gyms for some flimsy reason, you have a purpose why you're doing the things you do. It helps that the in-game cutscenes are more in line with what you'd come to expect with RPGs now, so finally, we have a Pokémon game story has that proper JRPG storyline flair, complete with the tropes you've come to expect along with that. It's a far cry from SwSh's honestly offensive story.

The focus now is less on how you're going to be the very best Pokémon trainer, the focus of the story is in finding out how people and Pokémon can coexist peacefully, and I commend them for trying out something new and something that goes against the grain from the previous stories.

The Breath of the Wild Pokémon

While not the revolutionary game that is BOTW for Zelda titles, it is still the next evolution of Pokémon titles, and a very welcome one at that. Most of this is thanks in no small part to BOTW's influences. First, the ways you can navigate the maps are very convenient are directly influenced by BOTW. The ways the land are laid out, especially the first one, is very reminiscent of the plains of Hyrule. Design cues are taken advantage of from BOTW: the way they show the names of new places and bosses, the ways they show the level up screen, the little audio clips, some I'd even say are directly lifted from BOTW, the influence is very, clearly there. This works great from the most part, though some of those, for example the audio cues, sometimes border on parody. When it comes to music, most of it is also reminiscent of BOTW, and there are some great tunes in here. The greatest ones are the understated but still moving pieces.

Will we see more Wilding of the Nintendo titles? Only time will tell.

Accentuated the positives, now for the negatives

The game still has faults, and these are them for me. First, while building the Pokédex is more meaningful now, I've mentioned it before, but they could've added more variety to the points you receive while filling out tasks. in battle menus, some of the functionalities in the overworld still exist. I think at least 3 or 4 times, I wanted to throw a ball, but I end up making my Pokémon attack. Some of the user interface in general is unwieldy and cumbersome.

Now let's go to inventory space, this is very precious in this game and the way you get more inventory space is through a person that teaches you how to become more efficient in sorting through your items. This person charges you for every item slot added to your backpack, and by the end game the costs are enormous. I find that money is a bit hard to come by in this game, but then again I haven't tried looking for more ways to make more money.

The starting village at first is impressive but then you realize the people don't move, well some of them do, but they do not leave their place and the others are stuck, like they're in a Twilight Zone episode, and they only move their heads to talk to you or follow them when you speak to them.

One of the traversal options is stupid, that or I'm stupid. You'll know it once you start doing it.

For the most part, the designs of the characters that populate Hisui are really good, in fact I'd go so far to say there are only two poorly designed characters in the game, so this might not actually part of the negatives, but I'd like to put this in anyway.

Water Pokémon are a bit shafted in this game, as it's quite hard to tell where certain water-type Pokémon are. In fact, this leads to the illusion that there are only a few water-types in the game, which I'm unsure if it's true or not.

Boss fights now take place in arenas and involve you doing actiony things, you can beat the bosses this way or when enough actiony stuff has been done, you can send in your Pokémon to finish the fight or just put the boss into a coma while you pummel it senseless with actiony thingamajigs. The problem is one of these fights is poorly designed. While the others are very simple dodging affairs, one fight in particular takes place in a very oddly shaped arena, and this boss has a move that blocks all the other areas you can maneuver to. You cannot regain your character's HP, at least I think you can't, so you're left with waiting for that boss to pummel you. I think the developers realized that these fights that are action-packed(debatable) might prove to be too much for your regular Pokémon fans so they put in the option for you to continue the fight with where the HP bar of the boss was when you fainted.

The game is still generally on the easy side, but the bosses and especially the endgame ones do put up a fight, so there's that to look forward to, but you definitely can't just work your way through the game with just one Pokémon easily as you can before. I'd actually count this as a positive, that they're making the fights a bit more challenging.

The graphics if you're getting nitpicky are a bit on the jaggy side, but I tuned it out fairly quickly as the art style is really nice and I was busy playing the game. Sure, it may look emptier than BOTW, but it gets the job done. I'd argue BOTW is also empty, but I don't need people descending on me so let's leave it at that.

On battles again, I find it frustrating that a bunch of Pokémon can gang up on you but you can only have one Pokémon battling out for you, so oftentimes, especially in rift distortions, these are tough fights to win. I wish we could also send out multiple Pokémon at once.

Last one that I can think of, I wish that Pokémon could follow you around because it's a shame not being able to see your Pokémon venturing out with you. You can take them out of their ball but they just stand there, you can talk to them, that's it.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, Arceus succeeds in incorporating its influences from Breath of the Wild, adding a much needed change to the Pokémon series, and hopefully, the developers learn from this game as they can only go up from here. Coming from a non-fan of the series, this game has got me preoccupied quite nicely, and I feel like most of the fans of this game will be left with wonder, exploring the land of Hisui from shore to shore. If you're new to the series, this is the place to start with the series, and if you're a lifelong fan, you'll get to rekindle your love once again with these little critters.

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