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

Beaten: 2/26/2022 Playtime: 101 hours Holy fuckin' hell. Where do I begin with this game? This is probably the hardest game I've ever had to quantify a rating for because it surpasses all expectations, yet is one of the worst-developed games of this genre that has been released in the last decade. It's truly a testament of the Pokemon franchise setting the bar so incredibly low that a mess like this can still be so enjoyable. I've never had more fun playing a Pokemon game than I did here. But this game is far from perfect. It looks and plays like a game released 15 years go. This may be my longest review yet but I really want to qualify how I feel about this game. So without further ado, my review: Pokemon finally invented the open world RPG genre in 2022. It's honestly sad how long it has taken the most made-for open world franchise to actually go open world, and even then it's locked through various regions which can only be traveled to through the village hub and not from one region to another. This game fails to meet the expectations that every other game in the same genre is expected. I can't excuse Game Freak for its pure laziness with the biggest franchise in gaming. This game looks and plays like a 20 year old game. Halo:CE came out in 2001. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess came out in 2006. Fallout 3 came out in 2008. Skyrim came out in 2011. Breath of the Wild came out in 2017. Pokemon Legends: Arceus came out in 2022. Technically this game is an utter, inexcusable mess. I've seen an Eevee ascend to the heavens out of nowhere. The camera is criminally bad and will frequently get stuck and refuse to turn, the camera doesn't automatically follow you so you have to turn it every time you turn directions, and the camera bugs out incessantly when you're in the water, at times freezing in place while my character travels nearly out of sight. I've had dozens of pokemon disappear like Houdini as I threw a pokeball because either: they left some arbitrary area their spawn is designated to, or because the space-time event ended. I understand if they run from battle they should no longer be catchable in theory, so maybe a solution could be that they get a speed boost that you can't keep up with if you tried to chase them. I have to travel to the village to travel anywhere else in the map instead of simply being able to go there; for instance to travel north I must first travel south to the village then go back to the northern-most region. The FPS in this game dips frequently despite it's utterly shitty graphics. The textures are so distractingly ugly I don't understand why they even bothered making grassy textures. I'll see pokemon in the distance move at 2 FPS at times. Catching pokemon in the water is very gimmicky. There are numerous story moments in the game where another character says they're going to do something that would require the game developers to animate the character outside of simple walking/running animations, so the game just cuts to black, throws in a little whistle noise and pretends like you just saw some epic cut scene. This game has an option to go in first-person mode by holding left trigger, but it has no option to simply play in first-person. The developers went to the trouble of creating this feature, only to make it inaccessible for whatever reason. My guess? Laziness. The game is not hard. It is, however, more challenging than past entries in the franchise. This was a welcome shift for me, as I have always wanted Pokemon to either be harder or to add difficulty options. A great example of how this game can beat your ass is in the introductory territory, with only your level 1 starter pokemon, has an Alpha pokemon that you can choose to battle or even try to catch from the very beginning. It was one of the coolest moments I've ever had in a Pokemon game. Truly memorable and I think will be referenced for decades to come as a defining moment in the new direction of Pokemon games. I wasn't a fan of the boss battles. They were boring and repetitive and added nothing to innovate the gameplay. I hope this mechanic dies as soon as it began. I would like to commend this game for finally figuring out these special, more powerful pokemon types. They've been experimenting with this for a while and I've never felt like they did it right until now. Alpha pokemon are fantastic. They're bigger. They're badder. They're harder. But they're ultimately the same pokemon like all the others, just as they should be. I really enjoyed the part alpha pokemon played in this game. I love the depth that this game has with its pokemon. All the pokemon behave differently and interact with you differently. Some are friendly, some are timid and will run away from you, and some will charge you. Psyducks will randomly get headaches. Mr. Mimes will use reflect out in the wild. Gyrados can fly (who knew?). Sudowoodos will freeze and act like a tree when they see you looking at them. Aipoms will follow you around and dance for you. Pokemon can be snuck up on while they're sleeping in the fields. All these things are what make this game truly magical. It brings pokemon to life in a way they never have before. Next up, the story. Look, the story is weird. There's far too much dialogue for the very little story there is. You spend hours at the beginning of the game reading meaningless dialogue that doesn't progress the plot in any way. Or you spend hours skipping through the dialogue. Both options will still take you hours. The story makes no sense but I guess it is an improvement from past games because it's not completely childish. It gets a little dark and twisted, and even almost gets interesting by the end of it. Honestly nobody has ever cared about the story in a pokemon game and I would much rather Game Freak focus their development on the gameplay rather than the story, since they seem to be too lazy to be able to do both. For the first time ever the story and the game's completion is locked behind completing the pokedex. I loved this revitalizing the importance of the pokedex. Sadly, completing the pokedex is locked behind many, many tedious collect-a-thons. To complete the pokedex you have to find all 28 of the unowns, you have to find all 100+ of the wisps, you have to solve this sea mystery where the only clue given to you is in Pokemon Diamond/Pearl, so this game expects you to dig up the clue from a past game. You have to find out super weird ways to evolve certain pokemon that require very specific time, weather, moon conditions, and some of them even require you to use a move a certain number of times for them to evolve. But none of this information is made available or even hinted at so you're left having to google it which to me was really immersive-breaking. Ultimately I had tons of fun playing this game. Otherwise I wouldn't have spent 100 hours playing it. But it is so goddamn insulting that the developer, Game Freak, for most successful game franchise is so incredibly lazy that they produced this mess of a game. When you compare this game to other Pokemon games, it's a 10/10. But when you compare this game to other open world RPG games, that's a different story. Hell, if you compare this game to open world RPG games released 15 years ago this game probably doesn't even crack the top 20. It looks bad. It runs bad. It plays bad. But it's got one of the most magical worlds to save it from its development team, and that is the world of Pokemon. I love the direction this franchise is moving to but I really need more effort by the developers in future games because this lack of polish will get old, fast.