Pokémon Legends Z-A Game Announced: Returning To Kalos!

A new game has been announced by Game Freak as part of their Pokémon Presents 2024, and it already has fans of the series excited as it appears to be a continuation of the Legends series, which began with Pokémon Legends Arceus in 2022. However, the real hope from fans is that it will continue the story of Kalos, which hasn’t been seen for more than ten years.

Legends Arceus changed up the formula of a traditional Pokémon game, which has grown stagnant over the past decade or so, and seeing another Legends title is quite promising to many. More than ten years ago, fans of the series were introduced to the Kalos region, but the story of the games had been heavily chopped down prior to release. And while a Pokémon Z title seemed obvious at the time to flesh out the story, characters, and legendary mons of the region, it unfortunately never appeared.

Will Legends Z-A actually delve into the unsolved mysteries of Kalos? It’s hard to have high hopes, given GameFreaks’ poor track record. Especially not after the past two generations of games, but all of the potential is there for GameFreak to hit it out of the park.

To start with, Kalos, as already mentioned, is essentially untapped in terms of its story and various areas that were never fully explained. The third legend of the region, called Zygarde, never had its backstory truly explained, and the motivations of the villainous team at the time were quite lackluster. Also, a mysterious figure known as AZ was never quite explained at the time in spite of appearing a couple of times during the story. And given AZ’s name, he’ll hopefully be relevant to Legends Z-A.

And second is the promising return of Mega Evolution, which had seemingly been sworn off by GameFreak in spite of how much fans had been begging for its return. Mega Evolution is a once-per-battle effect where certain Pokémon would transform and become stronger. Since its removal, new gimmicks have been tried, including Dynamax and Terraforming, but neither has the visual spectacle of the fun of Mega Evolution to most fans of the series.

The true hope will obviously be that GameFreak introduces new Mega Evolutions to the game, but only time will tell on that front.

Finally, the game will not be released until 2025, which addresses an issue many fans have been pointing out since the release of Pokémon Sword & Shield. GameFreak is rushing their titles out without giving them proper development time. In truth, the core Pokémon audience is almost taken for granted and is just expected to show up and buy whatever is put in front of them.

At the start of the year, Pal World was launched in Early Access, and it broke the internet. While many were quick to point to what appeared to be direct copies of existing Pokémon in Pal World, the main attraction of the game was combining the fun of creature collecting and team building with elements from the survival genre.

Legends Arceus is the closest thing to Pal World, but it, too, has many flaws. The added development time for Legends Z-A should ensure that GameFreak puts out a truly unique and impressive title in 2025.

The setting for the game is also not a wide open region, nor does it appear to be like Legends Arceus which had a ‘home base’ with four maps that could be explored individually. Based on the game being called the “Luminous Urban Development Project” and the trailer showing the massive 3D outline of the city, the game could potentially see players’ journey entirely in this one location.

While that may sound limited, it does come down to just how large the cityscape is, as other games like Cyberpunk 2077 have shown it’s quite possible to turn a massive city into its own unique open world. That said, it’s still best to temper expectations until more news comes out over the year.

What are your thoughts on Pokémon Legends Z-A? Let us know in the comments below!

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