3/5 ★ – Cieluim's review of Pokémon Legends: Arceus.

Legends Arceus is a pretty ambitious game that honestly falls short in a lot of aspects. This game is one that a lot of people have high expectations for, but for me while playing, it wasn't the best. But PLA managed to charm me sometimes, and that's worth acknowledging. The music is phenomenal, the Pokemon/trainer designs are top notch. When it comes to the art of Pokemon, they usually never miss, and it's always a treat. But It is a little hard to enjoy the music when it is constantly interrupted and slow to start. The "real time" overworld Pokemon attacking the trainer and Noble Pokemon fights are surprisingly nice, they really do help give excitement and anxiety to the world, and help players make their own stories. It's honestly quite wild to see them try this approach, if they wanted to keep going with it, they have potential to expand on this, but it may get set aside to the wayside since they are treating this game as a spin-off/experiment. The new catching elements are great, but the lack of Pokemon Temperaments makes it feel stale surprisingly quickly. Additionally, the new battle mechanics are fun, but fall short from a lack of battles and evolution throughout it's campaign. If there was way to give more progression to the player, it might've helped with the game's battles, but there aren't many to begin with and it isn't a focus for the game. Everything else from the game is quite bad, the story isn't engaging, the dialogue seems boring and unimaginative, characters don't have much to them aside from surface level impressions. Lack of voice blurbs is jarring when it feel like something easy to add. Everyone knows the reputation this game's performance and graphics have so I won't bother getting into it lol. Aside from it's flaws, they have a lot of interesting ideas, and I think this experiment can pay off if they listen to the criticisms it has. It's a good step in the right direction but I honestly felt like there could've been much more? I still believe this game just needed an extra year, it's unfortunate it wasn't given the time to grow. I didn't fully enjoy my time, but I will acknowledge the great aspects of this game and I think people who love Pokemon will find a lot of enjoyment, but taking into account the franchises history, it's hard for me to let some of these criticism not effect my enjoyment. The graphics and performance were "acknowledged" but it feels like it was barely improved, almost everything feels rushed and unpolished. Overall, a good game with major flaws, if you want to play this game, ask yourself what you value in a game and the Pokemon games specifically, if you're looking for a fun, engaging story/characters or interesting gameplay mechanics, you're not gonna find it here. But, if you're looking to run around and see Pokemon interact in the wild, I think you'll have some great fun here. Don't be afraid to try it if you want! Oh yeah, lemme know if you like reading this? Just doing these for fun. Thanks for reading. *Spoiler comments* I wanted to mention in this part, the pacing of the story feels all over the place? It felt the middle feeling stale and some parts rushed, others slow and stretched out and it felt that the ending was abrupt, and from what I researched on other aspects of the game like the "True Ending", it feels unfulfilling for the protagonist. I just don't understand if, why did they bother adding time travel shenanigans, I personally found they didn't do much with it I suppose lol.