Pokemon Legends: Arceus is brave. After years of relative stagnancy and careful iteration, it represents a major step forward for the Pokemon franchise. Sure, Game Freak and The Pokemon Company have made these changes in a game whose naming is clearly geared to angle it at a spin-off, but Legends Arceus is also set apart from Pokemon’s other side stories, which have generally speaking been more cheaply made and rooted in other genres. This is a spin-off with all the ambition and budget of a main game.
It is to Pokemon what the Nintendo DS was to the Game Boy – a “third pillar,” Nintendo argued, with a new Game Boy coming – until wild success meant that, no, the DS was actually the successor, and probably was all along, but for some light bet-hedging. Maybe that’ll happen here.
There are omissions from Pokemon Legends: Arceus, seemingly largely made to streamline things and tighten the scope of things. Pokemon being able to hold items is gone, for instance, a change that ripples into other systems like battle strategy and evolution methods. One of the biggest changes is the removal of passive Pokemon abilities, which sadly removes a thought-provoking complication when assembling a battle team.
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