Games

'Pokémon Legends Arceus' Is Nearly the Game I've Dreamed About Since 1998

The game plays fast and loose with themes of colonialism and capturing wild animals, while wildly updating Pokémon in the process.
Illustration of two protagonists from Pokémon Legends Arceus looking out over a clif towards a mountain in the distance, an assortment of Pokémon gather behind them.
Image courtesy of Nintendo

When Pokémon Legends Arceus was first announced, many people jokingly—but understandably—called it “Breath of the Pokémon.” It was a fair comparison, with the melodic piano playing over a sweeping pan of open wilderness. Breath of the Wild is still one of my favorite games of this generation, so having another Nintendo studio taking a similar swing was both exciting and terrifying. Game Freak had just pointed at the fences. Weirdly, those fences were located in the same area as a game I’d been imagining since the first time I played Pokémon Red on the tiny dark screen of my Game Boy Color in 1998. 

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Back then I didn’t understand how games were made, I just thought “wouldn’t it be cool if you could see the Pokémon running around in the tall grass?” Over the past 20-plus years, longtime Pokémon developer Game Freak has slowly inched towards that game I imagined as a child. Arceus leans into the feeling of exploring a wilderness, and the danger that approaching any animal would carry with it. They mostly stick the landing, forming new and fun systems that bring this wilderness to life, but not without significant issues, like a lack of  visual polish and sacrificing some of the personal bond a player has with their Pokémon.

A young boy wearing modern clothes runs down a hill path lined with trees, the foliage stops about 100 feet away.

Screenshot courtesy of Ricardo Contreras.

The opening conceit of the Pokémon games often includes some warning of how dangerous it is to go into the tall grass without a partner Pokémon to protect you from wild Pokémon—but without ever really materializing that danger in any meaningful way. In Arceus, the main crux of both the mechanics and narrative aim to give that sense of danger some materiality. Pokémon in the wild will attack you if provoked, and they don’t wait patiently for you to send out a Pokémon of your own to do battle. 

While the main series Pokémon games have always been set in modern times, this game turns the clock back to a moment when human settlements were sparse, and Pokémon were revered and respected from afar. You arrive through a portal, and are given the task to “seek out all Pokémon” by a voice that identifies itself as Arceus, the God of all Pokémon, so that you can meet them again and presumably return home. In the meantime, you make your home in Jubilife Village, the headquarters of Galaxy Team, an organization that has just arrived in Hisui and aims to study and catalog the Pokémon of the region. From this village you set out on survey expeditions to complete missions given to you by Galaxy Team and requests asked of you by the other NPCs. 

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A man wearing a lab coat and a purple beanie talks to a teenager and says "You see, I havea dream- to compile this region's first complete record of its Pokémon!"

Screenshot courtesy of Ricardo Contreras.

As part of Galaxy Team’s Survey Corps, you also work alongside Professor Laventon to create the world’s first Pokédex, reporting back in whenever you’ve discovered something new. In other mainline Pokémon games, the Pokédex is updated automatically whenever you capture a new species of Pokémon for the first time, but because this is the first ever Pokédex, you need to actually catalog the information yourself. You do this in various ways, like catching multiple of the same species or seeing them use certain moves, and each species has slightly different requirements to fill in their entry. There’s also a quest system where you help people with various problems, mostly as they relate to the coexistence of humans and Pokémon.

Many of the Pokémon that fans know and love are actually feared at this time, and the player character, as a modern Pokémon fan, must make them understand that they’re actually great pets—or, at least, very useful for holding down pickle jar lids. Each request gives you a small glimpse into the world, even if what you do can end up being as simple as “collect x Oran berries.”

Two people look at a Zubat as one of them says "I'll just take a look at those peepers, if you please, Zubat!"

Screenshot courtesy of Ricardo Contreras.

The dialogue is an often funny and interesting enough look at a world before Pokémon and humans lived together in cities that I’m picking up and doing as many as I possibly can just to get more bits of story. In one quest, a night shift guard asks me to bring them a Zubat, the classic bat Pokémon, to see how big their eyes are. “Obviously they must have enormous eyes to see in the dark!” As fans, we know that Zubat has no eyes, and seeing the reaction when the character also has this realization is just one example of the fun worldbuilding.

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This new setup hits a lot of the things that I dreamed of, but with these new systems come new issues, too. Game Freak hasn’t quite figured out how to make 3D environments that look interesting to traverse. Textures and lighting clash when looking over large expanses, and even though I was often too preoccupied with my immediate surroundings for this to fully detract from my game, every so often I would stop at the top of a hill or mountain to look out over the land and notice the repeating textures and low draw distance.

A sparse looking seaside where the trees stop not far from the player's viewpoint, and the water has a very obvious tiling wave pattern. The sky has nice sunset colors and clouds.

Screenshot courtesy of Ricardo Contreras.

It’s often not super clear when the nooks and crannies of the map are traversable or not, leading even small hills that seem easily climbable to become frustrations in Skyrimesque mountain climbing. For the most part, you are rewarded when getting to many of the obvious landmarks, either with rare Pokémon or crafting materials, but the traversal itself can sometimes be frustrating, even as you unlock more and more options, like rideable Pokémon. 

While the addition of research points has made filling the Pokédex a bit more engaging, the limited list of tasks that count towards research can mean that catching as many of the same type will sometimes be the path of least resistance. It even caused me to question the ethics of capturing such massive numbers of local fauna. Am I possibly affecting the ecosystem? The game doesn’t react as such, but this overall trend of “more is better” betrays the colonialist underpinnings of this game. 

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See, Arceus is set in the past, specifically in Hisui, the Pokémon version of Hokkaido, Japan. It’s a moment of industrialization and “modernization” that bears more than a passing resemblance to the real world Meiji Restoration. In real life, the Meiji Restoration not only opened Japan’s borders to trade and technology from other countries, it also began the colonization of Hokkaido and the forced assimilation of the indigenous Ainu people. 

The Galaxy Team Headquarters, a western style building with two wings off of a central building, and it's Galarian Wheezing smoke stack.

Screenshot courtesy of Ricardo Contreras.

You can see parallels to this history all over Arceus, from the Galarian (Pokémon’s UK analog) Wheezing shaped smoke stacks on Team Galactic’s HQ, to the dress of the two indigenous clans on the island, to the story of Team Galactic’s central hub being a recent settlement made up completely of newcomers to the island. You spend much of the game’s early hours helping the Pearl and Diamond clans, working with them to quell their Noble Pokémon, guardians who normally protect the clans from other wild Pokémon but have suddenly been thrown into a mysterious frenzy. You offer to help quell the beasts by throwing small packets of their favorite foods at them, an idea that for some reason none of the clan members came up with on their own. This “outsider comes in to help the natives” storyline fits right into popular colonialist narratives used to belittle native practices and then justify the assimilation of indigenous populations. 

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While the series has always played fast and loose with the ethical quandary of making animals fight for you, it at least has made attempts to reconcile that friction by emphasizing the protagonist's relationship with their Pokémon as the reason they’re able to overcome every challenge before them. Since its inception, each subsequent game in this series has had different ways for the player to interact with their Pokémon and forge a partnership that the original games could only suggest through dialogue. In Sword and Shield, for example, a camping mechanic allowed you to take a rest to play fetch, pet, and cook for your Pokémon in order to strengthen the bond between you. In turn, Pokémon you spent more time with would perform special actions in battle, such hitting for extra damage, or enduring a hit that would’ve otherwise KO’d them. 

Arceus has moved back to a system from earlier games, where a hidden “friendship stat” will change based on esoteric parameters. They still pay lip service to Pokémon wanting to be your companions, but the lack of these mechanics sticks out when the rest of the world is presented with a higher level of detail.

Ultimately, Arceus is one of the most ambitious leaps Game Freak has taken with a Pokémon game in a long time. While they still have some serious work to do with their environments and the story leaves a slightly bitter taste in my mouth, it says a lot about their mechanics that I’m committed to finishing my Pokédex for the first time in 20 years of playing Pokémon games. 

A woman stands in front of a fenced in pasture and talks to a teenage boy, saying "I wonder if there's anyone capable of catching enough Pokémon to fill all the pastures here..."

Screenshot courtesy of Ricardo Contreras.

At the same time, I can’t help but feel that the Pearl and Diamond clans already have Jubilife Village’s “how do we coexist with Pokémon?” problem figured out and have for some time: respect their autonomy to be wild animals. The urge to catch them all and the question of “is catching them all really a good idea?” lives both in this game and in myself as a series fan. Game Freak’s answers haven't been great, but asking the question is at least a big step towards a more nuanced Pokémon world.