There’s a new Pokémon game, and it’s been a while since I talked about the IP on this blog, so… I’m reviewing the new game! Legends Z-A, released for the Nintendo Switch, is a continuation of the Legends series of games. If you’re unfamiliar with that series, well, just imagine Genshin Impact or Breath of the Wild but with Pokémon and fewer activities to enjoy.

It’s an ambitious direction for developer Gamefreak, and I think it has a lot of potential… but will they be able to capture that potential? There’s only one way to find out!

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Pokémon Legends: Z-A

Une critique hon hon hon

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The Context

Let’s begin by talking about Pokémon in retrospect. How much value is there in a review of a Pokémon game if you don’t know the reviewer’s opinion on Pokémon as a franchise? So many generations have been raised through these games now, so our hearts aren’t all in the same place.

I’m a Pokémania kid. One of my friends had the Pikachu-styled Game Boy. Another had the fancy Mew card. I had a lot of toys, a lot of plushies – Bulbasaur, Poliwhirl, Vulpix, Mew, and so on… There were these rubber balls with Pokémon encased within. The Digivice ripoffs styled after Pokéballs and Pokédexes. My first experience with colour theory came from an educational PC Pokémon game where you made cards and stuff. I even had a model-making set where you baked clay into statues, but it was so complicated to use, I only ever made Mewtwo.

I watched the TV show until the Orange Island stuff, but I didn’t see the rest until I was a teen. I then stopped with Sun & Moon because of how ugly it was, and never returned, though I think the alt-timeline movies with Ash that’ve been coming out since XY‘s end have been the best movies of the franchise (sans the remake). Two of them even made it onto my Top 50 Anime of the Decade list.

I also liked the special episode focusing on alt-timeline Ash, and I’ve been really happy about Pokétoon coming back because I loved the original run of episodes. They always do such a fantastic job at giving life to the world of Pokémon, in films, in shorts, and in specials. It makes me wish there were a modern Pokémon Channel game to show them all off.

There was a brief moment when I stopped keeping up with the franchise (I missed Gen 2 entirely!) but Gen 3 pulled me back in. I was a subscriber of a local unofficial Pokémon magazine named Pokémon World, I had every game—Dash, Box, Channel, you don’t want to know how much I played Trozei! But, in all honesty, I wasn’t really a fan of the mainline games. I liked R/G/B (and I still do), but I’ve never been able to slog through G/S/C. I didn’t like the route design or encounter design of R/S/E, I didn’t like the heaps of mandatory tutorials added into FireRed and LeafGreen, I did enjoy the multiplayer of Diamond & Pearl, but Platinum burned me out of the franchise.

I must’ve put thousands of hours into Pokémon games by that point. I know for a fact I put over 200 into Pearl alone—never mind Diamond—and I 100%’d Colosseum and have beaten the first generation of games multiple times. Though uh… I’ve never seen a natural shiny before. That’s the only downside of being a genwunner.

At that point of burnout, I think I felt how a lot of the old Pokémon fans did at the time: every mainline Pokémon game was the same thing. They never meaningfully improved, they relied heavily on gimmicks, and they often walked back any improvements made by the previous entry. They were always behind the competition technologically and artistically… Really, I can only enjoy the same game so many times before I start to hate it.

I didn’t play Black or White very much when it came out, and despite making many attempts to finish it, I never have. They’re repulsive to look at, lack any sense of exploration, and are full of forced tutorials. That’s really where my interest in the games vanished entirely, and even today, I think adding that many new Pokémon species in a single generation was a terrible decision.

The low quality of the true Pokémon games was only made more apparent by the many spinoffs, and I’d argue that the spinoffs were at their best during the DS generation. On console we had the big RPGs, and on DS we had… Ranger, where the cities felt lived in, the dialogue was funny, and there were memorable sidequests. Mystery Dungeon, where the graphics were beautiful and the stories were actually interesting. Conquest, where the gameplay was actually good and a modicum of respect was given to the player’s intelligence.

Were I to write a Top 5 Pokémon Games, off the top of my head with no prior thought, it’d have to be… Pokémon Colosseum Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers Pokémon Ranger Pokémon R/G/B

That being said, it’s not that I believe nothing of quality has been made since the mid-2000s; I just haven’t played many of the later titles.

I played Pokémon Y because the marketing for it got everyone at my college hyped up, and even the guys who only played FIFA and Call of Duty were all excited to see the franchise return after the dark age of Black & White. It was hard to not get caught up in that storm. I enjoyed the post-game (a first for the franchise!) but hated how linear and handholdy the main game was. Thinking back, I’m sure I only made it to the end because of the game’s online features, which integrated everyone at school into the journey and made it feel like a big experience. It’s definitely worse off without the launch week hype and the 3DS’s online play servers to carry it.

I played Pokémon Moon on launch, though I technically played most of it twice, because I lost my save on the final island and had to restart. That game is 90% tutorial. Even once you reach the final island, you’re still running into Pelipper and being handed free potions. I wouldn’t wish that game upon anyone. How do you turn an ocean of islands into a linear path!? I didn’t get beyond the opening cutscene of Ultra Moon.

When it comes to the Switch games, I’ve barely played any. I do hold a fondness for the region in Sword & Shield, because it’s based on the country I live in, and the anime series set within it (Hakumei no Tsubasa) was very entertaining… but I didn’t play Sword & Shield. In fact, I don’t even know any of the new Pokémon species introduced after Sun & Moon. I couldn’t name one of them! Even after playing this game! For Switch, I’ve only played the Luminescent Platinum romhack for BDSP. I dropped it during Victory Road, but I enjoyed running around the underground, at least.

Speaking of romhacks, I used to be an active browser of Pokécommunity in the late ’00s, and I played a handful of romhacks back then. Off the top of my head, I only remember the worst. Stuff like the Ruby Destiny series, or Snakewood, or the many abandoned Team Rocket romhacks. Brown was alright though! I remember those terribly-balanced Japanese Touhou romhacks from back then as well, but I’m not sure if they were good enough to be called “alright”.

In these past handful of years, I’ve tried some of the modern favourites. Gaia is a decent if generic mainline entry, a solid 4 or 5 out of 10 experience, very forgettable and mindless. Unbound, a current darling, has the typical romhack issue of heaping piles of edgy plot onto the player while using plentiful legendaries for a cheap cool factor.

Being realistic, I don’t think a good Pokémon romhack exists yet. Even the more minimalist ones still focus on adding lots of new Pokémon without thinking about how their placement in the world affects the rest of the game, ditto for new types, new moves, new mechanics. Rule of Cool seems to hold the throne of Romhackington, but no one’s really trying to make a good game—not Gamefreak, nor the fans. I do still have to play Odyssey though, so hopefully I don’t hate that. And I did enjoy Meme Sapphire, problems aside.

But to me, a good mainline Pokémon game would mean: 1) Every Pokémon species in the game matters. 2) The initial rooms and routes are simple and linear; the latter ones are complex and easy to get lost in. 3) There are no tutorials. 4) Movesets are very limited. 5) There’s a reason to spend meaningful time in every location. 6) Battles don’t involve spamming A through redundant textboxes. 7) If a location catches my interest, I can go there.

In understanding that the Legends subseries is not equivalent to the mainline series of games (regardless of what Gamefreak insists), I still think a lot of these points can fit into the collectathon-style gameplay loop Arceus first introduced… Or, wait, maybe Let’s Go introduced it… I hadn’t considered that.

These are all things that have been done before, though never all at once. I view the series, first and foremost, as an RPG series, and like with any good RPG, I expect to need to manage my resources, delve into dungeons, walk into places too dangerous for me to handle, and learn about the towns and cities of the world through exploration. That is the genre Pokémon first adapted, transporting the concepts of Dungeons & Dragons into a modern setting, where mimics were Pokéballs, the forces of evil were Yakuza, the villain’s tower was a skyscraper, and the last great war was… World War II.

Nothing really matches that feeling of exploring a world, as a youthful character unaware of reality, and catching glimpses of the melancholy beyond. It’s why I loved Kemono Friends so much, and it’s why so many loved Adventure Time. It’s the contrast between childhood and adulthood—the past and the present. That’s why, despite hating Ruby and Sapphire, I enjoyed Diamond and Pearl. Because, in 2007, at the end of Summer, with the noises of a Summer Festival taking up the atmosphere, I sat on a grassy embankment and began my hunt for three mythical lake spirits. Fireworks filled the sky. Fittingly, my strongest memories of Ruby & Sapphire are of exploring the Unown ruins, digging the manual out of the box and checking the alphabet inside to confirm I was doing things right. Well, that, and having to rush to a wall socket because my GBA’s battery was running out and the cutscenes just wouldn’t stop to give me time to save.

Naturally, I was disappointed to learn that Legends Z-A was taking a step back from the Legends Arceus approach of… focusing on historic legend. Instead, it’s set in modern-day Lumiose, Pokémon‘s equivalent to Paris! I could literally walk to France and experience the dumping ground we call Paris, but sure, I’ll visit it in a game.

The Game

Life in Lumiose is one of day and night. Don’t worry; it’s not that Gen 2 type of day and night, and you won’t have to wake up on a morning to boot up your Game Boy to travel to an NPC to raise the happiness of a Pokémon so that in a week you may evolve it. No, time passes in this game faster than in real life. You’re not beholden to any lifestyle changes in order to catch certain Pokémon; you’ll experience it all naturally.

Let’s start with daytime. During the day, you can explore the city in search of wild Pokémon. Run around and catch them, Legends Arceus style. Or Palworld style. But… not as collection-heavy as either of those games; the amount of Pokémon in any given area is very limited, and a majority of the main map is filled with throwaway NPCs and empty rooftops.

Yes, rooftops! That was, during my early game, one of the two main gameplay features. Platform along scaffolding to reach rooftops where unique Pokémon live! …sometimes. A lot of the roofs have nothing on them, but one may have a Dratini or something, so you’ll want to check them all. There are some collectable items up there, too. Some buildings even have insular courtyards that can’t be accessed in any way other than jumping down from a rooftop. I don’t know if any of these areas had exclusive Pokémon hiding in them, though.

Your catch rate success chance is displayed as a series of arrow icons whenever you’re about to throw a Pokéball. I’m not surely exactly what affects this, but in my experience, sneaking up behind your target and throwing a Quick Ball at them works 90% of the time. If you fail, just run away and return to reset aggro and try again. Faithful to its predecessor in the region, the Quick Ball is the only ball worth using. You could use Net Balls against bugs or Dusk Balls at night, but they’re ultimately just a niche version of a Quick Ball sold at the same price.

There’s a store where you can buy as many Pokéballs as you want, and for every failed attempt to catch something, you’ll be refunded, so you never have to worry about running out. If desperate, you can release a Pokémon via the PC (which is accessible at any point), and it’ll give you back the Pokéball you used to catch it.

Oh, and since I already mentioned Palworld… if you played that, you might be a bit shellshocked by the lack of interaction the monsters have with their environment in this game. They don’t really do anything. Most of them stand around blankly, some will react to you getting closer with interest, fear or aggression, and a very small handful have an interesting idle animation such as Dedenne’s secret snack here.

But don’t expect them to play with one another or mess around with parts of the environment or respond to your existence once you catch them. They’re very soulless compared to competing games’ monsters, as are the NPCs!

There are two types of NPCs: mobile and static. Static NPCs A-pose in their set location, never moving, waiting for you to talk to them. Mobile NPCs follow a preset path on a loop and can’t be interacted with.

The second gameplay feature is, of course, fashion. This is an X &Y spinoff, so they’d be crazy to not include outfit customisation. You get to choose your skin colour at the start of the game, and that can’t be changed, but everything else can. From the pause menu, you can change your clothing, your eye shape, eye colour, and any misc. features such as freckles and beauty spots. For some reason, changing your hairstyle specifically requires a trip to the hairdresser.

As you progress, you’ll unlock new options. You’ll also be able to afford more clothing from one of the city’s many clothing stores. Sadly, 90% of your options are ugly as sin, and if you like girly fashion, there are no skirts. Short skirts? Long skirts? Nope. At least we can remove our hats in this game. Still, the limitations can be fun to work around.

Speaking of limitations, let’s talk photography. Either by stopping at a café or bench, or by simply opening up your camera menu, you can take a photo. First person and third person are both available, and you can even adjust the expression of NPCs to one of: happy, angry, or sleeping. This works on people and Pokémon. Well, it works on static people and Pokémon, but as I said earlier, mobile NPCs can’t be interacted with. They may briefly pause if you push a camera in their face, but the glitchiness of it makes me think that’s unintended behaviour.

Now, given that my nickname in an MMO was “Photojournalist”, my main gaming pastime is snapping pics in Star Rail, and my favourite game of 2025 (which I reviewed earlier this year) is all about photography, I did, naturally, spend a lot of time with this game’s camera functionality. I don’t think many people will care, but for my own sake, here’s a quick camera review.

It’s very limited. No light alteration, no repositioning, no lens options. You can’t even crouch while taking a selfie! Zoom in too far and characters and objects will dither out of existence. Zoom out too far and the game’s low resolution will render everything a blurry mess. You have a small number of expressions—most of which are pretty impractical—and a slightly larger number of poses, though you can’t use many static poses if you lack the space to stretch your limbs. In a lot of regards, it’s similar to Star Rail‘s camera (even sharing most of its filters), though Star Rail uses animation sequences instead of static poses, which gives it some flexibility. But some smart camera usage and inventive use of the provided presets can give you a lot to work with.

Here are some examples. 1) Using the ‘Mega Evolution’ pose to show a character pinning something to a corkboard. 2) Turning the ‘finger-heart’ pose into that shy ‘finger on cheek’ expression. 3) Using the ‘reaching’ pose as a run animation. 4) Capturing the idle animation mid-blink for a gentler expression.

What you can’t get around, annoyingly, is the limited number of expressions. I’d say that the neutral expression and the two smiles are usable, but the rest (angry, shocked, sad) I struggled to find any use for. With fast reflexes, you can move in first person then switch to third person, adjust the camera angle, and catch your character’s blink cycle from their idle animation, but this idle animation won’t play once you’re in third person, so you’ve only got a second to work with. Get it right and you can at least find an open-eyed expression that isn’t plainly neutral.

Oh, also, there are NPCs who will style you in a random outfit once per day. The outfit is rental and will disappear if you change your clothes, and since they’re random, they’ll almost always look terrible. But if your character is as cute as mine, she’ll still look good in horrible outfits.

Anyway! Back to main gameplay. The final activity for daytime involves Wild Zones, areas within the city where a fixed set of species roam. They’re not very big, and they hold less than ten species (including weather-limited ones) so there’s not much exploration to be had here. They’re interesting on the first visit, but quickly become the parts of the map you’re least likely to revisit.

All of these features remain during the night, however a chunk of the map will now be taken up by a red border. Inside, trainers will be waiting to battle you. Beat them up and you get points (required for main plot progression) as well as money (required for the more important progression: fashion). You can collect challenge cards along the way, which will pay out more points and money if you succeed in their demands.

For the most part, battles are a series of quick one-shots, so this becomes the main way of making money. As you improve your rank through main plot progression, the challenges become more demanding, but they pay out more in return. Battles don’t get any more difficult, however, so the scaling of things feels artificial. You get more money because you’ve made more progress through the plot, but you’re not playing any differently to earn more money.

Also, a big emphasis is put on the ‘ambush’ mechanic, where you can sneak up on a trainer and KO their Pokémon before the battle begins. This certainly speeds things up, and the enemy’s method of detecting you is quite buggy, so you can go undetected even while loudly sprinting around so long as you’re prepared to exploit the AI. One time, a trainer vanished in front of my eyes, so I assume they’re set to despawn and respawn elsewhere on a timer. You can cycle around the battle area one-shotting freshly-spawned NPCs for as long as night lasts.

All of this is, I hate to say, constrained to the city. You don’t get to leave, and listen, this isn’t the prettiest city I’ve seen in a Pokémon game. You’ll turn a corner and get an eyefull of… this.

There are some nice places. In Switch-era routine, the prettiest building is the one with your starting bed inside it. There’s a river area that reminds me of the city from the fifth Pokémon movie, which is a good place to be likened to, I’d say. But most of the sights are very forgettable. I only really remember a garden where you can encounter Goomy (but only if it’s raining), and a dreary canal in one of the Wild Zones with a Sharpedo I failed to catch multiple times in it.

You do spend a lot of time in the city, though, so it is memorable (by sheer brute force), but there are a few good landmarks that stick in the mind, and there are some sidequests to do. They’re largely fetch quests or quick battles. Some escort quests, though. They even copied the Patamon quest from Digimon World, which makes me wonder why they didn’t copy any of the more interesting encounters from that game. Or the more interesting environments. Or the more interesting mechanics…

Moving on! Uh… the NPCs are uglier than ever before. It’s honestly impressive how repulsive they can look. For music, there’s one city theme that you’ll be forced to hear variations of on loop for a large majority of your play time. Only a few buildings have interiors, though they’re purposeless. There’s nothing to actually do in the city. Most of the locations are wasted space. Heck, you can only sit on a small percentage of seating throughout the city. We’ve come a long way since the time Pokémon proudly bragged about how you can finally sit down, haven’t we?

There is a story, but it’s a Pokémon game, so its only real purpose is to remind you of what it feels like to spam the A button to slowly skip through pointless lines of text. It’d be easy to forget that feeling now that the battle system isn’t textbox-based, so this is a good way of getting nostalgia for the bad old days. As you might expect, a good couple hours of story is dedicated to tutorial stuff, but most of the sidequests are tutorials as well, so it’s not as succinct as you’d likely want.

But the primary questgiver for sidequests is Emma from X & Y, and the completion tracker is Mable from X & Y. Now, to be fair, I’ve never met anyone who cared about Mable, but seeing Emma again is a great reminder of how surprisingly solid Y‘s optional Detective questline was. She looks a bit different now that she’s older, but her body language is the same as ever. The memories came flooding back as soon as I saw her idling like a dork. Good times.

The main plot point of this game is the main gimmick: Rogue Mega Evolution, a mechanic where certain wild Pokémon (as part of the main story) undergo Mega Evolution and need to be battled out of their frenzy. They play out much like other battles, except the enemy in question drops colored spheres when you hit them, like a contestant in Kingdom Hearts 2‘s Struggle tournament. Also, they turn the environment into a blank arena. It’s very exciting! That’s sarcasm; you can’t one-shot these things, so it’s an extended series of pressing ABXY on loop to chip away at the creature’s inflated health pool while occasionally stepping left or right, no strategy required. The developers still felt the need to force-feed you tutorials while you play these battles, though.

I imagine this mechanic was intended to be a way of showing off the different Mega forms to players who may not have seen them before, but I’ve always found the concept to be lame. A Digimon-style evolution that only applies to Gamefreak’s favourites, but rather than turning one creature into another (ala Bulbasaur to Ivysaur), they just add more detail to an already-established design. The results are always messy.

Thankfully, they have at least attempted to fix Mega Evolution’s main gameplay flaw. Well, it’s more like they were forced to, as you’ll be fighting Rogue Mega Pokémon and may not have a Mega Stone equipped to anyone. Now, you can store up Mega Energy. You can use 100% of it to Mega Evolve one Pokémon (so long as the developers gave it a Mega form), but you can use a much smaller percentage of your Mega Energy in order to power up any Pokémon’s move. Even a Panpour can get a Mega-powered Bubblebeam, so whichever underrepresented favourite you may have, it’ll benefit from this change. Nowadays, most of my favourites have Mega forms, but I’d rather not turn any of them into an ugly mess of a design, so I appreciate this change in every regard. Mawile’s is cute, at least.

Another thing they were forced to implement is the ability to run from trainers, because enemy Pokémon can (Yakuza 7 style) glitch on terrain and get permanently stuck out of reach, and without a way to run, you’d be potentially stuck forever. Speaking of battling, there’s a new battle system. You send out your Pokémon, your opponent sends out theirs, and then you press the move that’s super effective against the enemy. The enemy Pokémon faints, the enemy trainer sends out another, and then you repeat the sequence of one-shots until the enemy’s full party of 2 or 3 Pokémon is fully KO’d. Moves are cooldown-based rather than turn-based, but it’s still very Pokémon; rock beats scissors, after all. Sometimes the cooldowns even reset if the enemy Pokémon faints, though it’s not consistent, so I don’t know the exact details of why the cooldown reset happens. It won’t matter; you don’t need to learn.

The big difference from days of old is that combat takes place in a 3D space, so things such as the travel time of projectiles or the speed of an attack become quite important. An item like Quick Claw goes from forgettable to incredible, but moves like Substitute and Dig become worthless. Buffing moves such as Swords Dance felt pretty terrible too. DoT attacks like Whirlpool or Fire Spin have been turned into environmental hazards that linger, meaning you can just walk out of them to avoid most of their damage. They’re like Spikes, which are terrible now! Multi-hit attacks can last longer than the duration of Protect or Detect, turning them into reliable damage against stall units. There are also moves that vanish you briefly, so you can time those moves to dodge enemy attacks.

The stall playstyle felt much improved to me. Ignoring that I was mostly one-hit KO’ing everything despite frequently swapping party members in and out, a bulky team seemed like the way to go. Glass cannon characters seem less valuable because switching in and out has been massively nerfed and damage is very reliable so long as you use good moves. Bulky characters can even act quickly if they use a fast-acting move, which could be lethal to a DPS-focused character. It brings me back to the early Gen 3 competitive days, when Snorlax and Blissey were monstrous threats. I say “early”, but for all I know, those two are still overpowered in Gen 3…

If you’re a fan of mixed-stat characters that have odd amounts of defensiveness in their kit (in such a way that left them weak in older battle systems), you’ll likely be happy with the changes made here, at least in the sense that your favourite Pokémon are stronger now. I joked earlier that they didn’t copy enough from *Digimon World, *but one serious case is the speed stat. Move timings are fixed in this game, so the speed stat is relatively useless. You’re still beholden to Hydro Pump’s worthlessly long animation if you wish to use that move, and nothing you do can fix that.

It’s a quick, mindless way to battle, and due to how streamlined everything is, it can be a fun way to play. There’s not much to engage with, but if you want to pass time in a Pokémon setting, this is certainly the most frictionless method of doing so. In that way, it reminds me of KAMiBAKO, which I reviewed earlier this year; if you want an engaging experience, you’ll find it pretty depressing to slog through, but if you want the cathartic experience of absent-mindedly following a shopping list, this game works perfectly… almost. It does grow a bit boring halfway through, and the terrible story is always going to provide some friction.

The absolute worst part of the battling experience has to be the lock-on system. You don’t get a combat UI unless you target an enemy, which you achieve by holding down the left trigger. Then you can issue an attack. Now, if you let go of the trigger, or you move the camera to check your surroundings, or the enemy dashes out of sight, or the enemy uses a vanishing move like Dig, your lock will be broken. You’ll have to reposition and reconfirm the target lock before you can issue any commands. But you can also lock onto terrain entities, other Pokémon, and sometimes even an object spawned via a move. Switching between locked targets is a clunky affair.

What this mechanic is, in simple terms, is a battle against the camera. You always have to keep the camera in mind and be prepared to fix it in a snap. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the main enemy in the game is the camera, and rather than fighting against any trainer, you’re fighting against the camera. It’s an intentional design, but I question how fun “fighting the camera” is as a mechanic. I feel like they’ve implemented one of the more frustrating aspects of 3D gaming as a core mechanic.

It’s also not very accessible, as you need to keep that trigger held down in order to do anything. You can let go during move animations, but it never felt intuitive to do so, and I never really got used to the idea of locking on to an enemy, because once my brain was in that classic “issue commands to my ‘mon” mode, all the 3D aspects of the battle system vanished and I was back playing turn-based Pokémon (albeit ATB.) The lock-on system is a rare but frustrating reminder that superfluous mechanics exist to justify the added dimension, and their primary purpose is to turn off your ability to take a turn.

The shallow battle system combines with the empty worldspace and boring story to create a game that, once the novelty of a shiny new thing wears off, becomes hard to engage with. It didn’t take long for my desire to continue playing it to vanish.

The reality is, there’s barely anything to do in Legends Z-A. You can explore the city, but there’s little to see, and the sights are ugly. You can take photos, but the camera functionality is limited, and there’s not much to photograph. You can dress up, but most of the clothing options are ugly, and basic categories of clothing are missing. If you really wanted a task to complete, you could 100% your Pokédex, but that mostly involves running into an area and throwing Quick Balls at everything. In less than 5 minutes, you’re done.

Crucially, there’s no benefit to doing any of this. The core experience involves following the story. You mash A through a bland cutscene, you follow your quest marker, you get another cutscene, maybe you battle something or someone for a minute, then repeat. Playing like that, it’s barely even a game… but what else is there to do?

For $20, this is an okay experience. It’s light, and you won’t want to sink much time into it, but you’re still in a Pokémon world doing Pokémon things, and if you’re a fan of the IP, that can carry your interest for an amount of time. Once that time is up, there’s no need to keep playing, and I don’t see myself ever returning to play it again.

But if one thing sets it apart from the pack, I enjoyed snapping pics in this game more than in previous Pokémon games, or in any other monster collectors.