Pokemon Legends Z-A has made me realize what I miss about the series, and it's up to Gen 10 to fix it

On some level, it makes sense that Pokemon Scarlet and Violet folded in the gameplay elements of Legends: Arceus (and by extension, the upcoming Pokemon Legends: Z-A). When it was released back in 2022, Arceus wasn't just financially successful, it was popular and appreciated by the fanbase and critics alike for taking steps to update a now very well-trodden formula. By blurring the lines between open world exploration and turn-based combat more than any Pokemon game had before, the first Pokemon Legends game felt fresh and innovative!

But when Scarlet and Violet came out, the influence of Legends was overpowering. There was a greater emphasis on throwing balls in the overworld, said world itself was redesigned to be more open, and the titanic time-displaced Pokemon felt reminiscent of the enraged Noble Pokemon from before. And again, I can see the logic of copying something successful, but I have to ask – what's the point in a spin-off series when the original games begin to mimic them?

Ditto

With Legends having carved out its own niche, I don't really like seeing the core series starting to muscle in and share that space. For one thing, it diminishes the importance of Legends as a series and reduces it to a stealth pilot, a simple testing ground for a once-legendary series that no longer feels confident enough to innovate on its own terms. It's also inevitably going to make the core series less interesting by default, as all its ideas will have already been showcased by Legends eighteen months earlier.

It would benefit both series to stay in their respective lanes. Legends has already got a groove going where it's experimenting with more open gameplay, and that's great! Let it forge new, unconventional paths for the series and see what happens. Gen 10 obviously has to innovate or risk stagnation, but there's an obvious step for it to take that Legends hasn't considered yet: maybe it's time to refocus Game Freak's efforts and work on those really-not-very-good visuals.

It really is getting perplexing. The limited Switch hardware was never really an excuse when there are plenty of perfectly pretty games working within those restraints. In fact, there have been good-looking Pokemon games on the Switch 1, just not in the main series! The Mystery Dungeon remake took a wonderful watercolor approach that made everything look like an illustrated copy of Wind in the Willows. But in retrospect, part of what made that so great was that it felt anomalous and fresh to have a Pokemon game that didn't look like a late-stage alpha build of itself.

Beauty contests

Now, everybody I saw watching the Legends Z-A reveal pulled a bit of a face at the graphics, a great collective disappointment that the Switch 2' s superior hardware apparently wouldn't be used to fix modern Pokemon's boxy, unsophisticated aesthetic. Sigh. Fine, I guess I can swallow my disappointment that Legends apparently isn't going to look better than a low effort PS2 remastering, but that leaves a perfect space for Gen 10 to be the pioneer and actually pretty itself up – perhaps by biting the bullet and going back to pixel art 2D again.

What advantages has 3D actually brought to the Pokemon series? The polygonal models never really fit the style of these 2D cartoon critters, the world design doesn't translate particularly well to a three-dimensional space, and the gameplay never did much with that extra axis. It's not like it influences turn-based battling in any way.

Contrarily, Emerald and Platinum were good-looking pixel games, and even Gen 1 and 2 are still charming-looking in a basic sort of way, doing their best and doing it well. And with how much both Pokemon and Nintendo love engaging in nostalgia, the step back seems palatable.

Don't get me wrong – I know all this is unlikely. It's just a wishlist. Still, all I know is that while both Legends and the core series can exist independently of each other, that idea can't work if Gen 10 is very much dependent on its expendable scouting series first. By drawing a clear line between the two siblings, both of them can flourish and find their different strengths.

Why can't the Pokemon franchise remember its best ideas?