Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the Most Freeing Pokémon Game So Far

By EMILY BUSH/Staff Writer

During my time playing it, both in constructing this review and in my personal time, Pokemon Legends: Arceus has blown me away. With such a new engine and mechanics, it feels like a brand new experience, much like playing my first Pokemon game was.

As the newest release in the main series of Pokemon games, Legends: Arceus immediately had high expectations from fans. Game trailers, while appearing unpolished, showed promising gameplay of the first truly open-world experience through the Pokemon format. The graphics were unimpressive for the system, and animations and designs for the new Pokemon felt lackluster like they did in previous games. Many of the criticisms came from these points, as players wanted the environments to be denser with foliage or Pokemon.

However, I don’t want these sorts of things to weigh down the game as a whole. I want to focus on the important aspect of a Pokemon game–the gameplay itself.

One thing that I have to admit as a long-time Pokemon player and a fan is that this game is, hands down, the freshest and most freeing game that GamesFreak has ever made. This is mainly because of how it completely breaks the traditional cycle that Pokemon has established over the past twenty-four (almost twenty-five) years. The Pokemon games from previous years held a more linear approach to the roleplaying game system of simply grinding to beat the next challenge as well as a linear map that does not require a lot of backtracking in terms of exploration. There wasn’t much room to do your own thing unless you hunted for color variants of Pokemon called shinies.

In Legends: Arceus, the fields where you catch Pokemon and conduct research on them are vast and encourage the player to return to them to complete their research and collect every variant possible. Also, with incentives like outbreaks of certain Pokemon within the areas, players can continuously return to previous areas in search of new Pokemon or to expand their collection.

My favorite aspect of the game so far is the method of catching Pokemon. This has also been changed from previous games. Pokemon walk around in the open world and can be snuck up on, baited in with berries, and distracted with mud balls to gain an advantage and catch them without initiating combat, something required in previous games. This combat-less system allows players to enjoy the feeling of hunting Pokemon rather than having to walk around aimlessly in tall grass, then fighting, then having the possibility of catching a Pokemon.

While the game is not exactly a graphical masterpiece, it is a wonderful transformation of gameplay for the Pokemon franchise. This was exactly the direction that the franchise needed to jumpstart young players and bring in new people who may not have preferred the old system. The mechanics are complicated enough to entice experienced players, but they are easy enough to pick up for anyone. This game, by far, is one of the best Pokemon games, and I highly recommend it.

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