Pokémon Legends: Z-A Nails This Particular Game Mechanic

In Pokémon Legends: Z-A, much of the experience of the franchise is adjusted and reinvented to feel familiar but new. Unlike Legends: Arceus or the mainline traditional games, there is a particularly narrow scope to not only how you explore the world presented to you in Z-A, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Everyone has a different take on this latest adventure in the Pokémon series, but there’s one particular game mechanic I hope is here to stay, at least in some regions of other games to come. Let’s talk about how Battle Zones are one of the most fitting ways to actualize the Pokémon world in a game to date.

In Pokémon Legends: Z-A, you are playing the game with a day-night cycle. During the day, you have objectives to accomplish, as well as things to do and places to explore within the city. During the evening, Battle Zones are constructed where trainers face off against one another to rise in the ranks and become the greatest trainer in Lumiose City. The interesting mechanic here is that Battle Zones only appear at night, meaning that you’re constraining a central game mechanic in the franchise, Pokémon battling, to a particular time of day.

While the limited time doesn’t necessarily work for me, the dedicated space in which you’ll purposefully battle works wonders. Rather than come across trainers just ready to fight for any given reason as you explore regions in other Pokémon games, I love this worldbuilding that accompanies having dedicated spaces for trainers to duke it out. It’s a bit more believable that you’d likely have spaces in which trainers actually do their training.

While it does look a little silly in the confines of Lumiose City, with its alleyways and tight corridors, it’s exciting knowing that if you’re out to level up your Pokémon, there’s a dedicated space where you and others are doing so. It also eliminates the pesky surprise of trying to get from one space to the next without having to face off against someone just because you walked by them.

In a more open-world experience like Pokémon Scarlett and Pokémon Violet, could this mechanic work? I think if there were different spaces in which trainers were battling in a way that felt like a collective competition or effort similar to Z-A, we could see this carry over. Similar to how Legends: Arceus teased out the idea of an open-world Pokémon adventure, I’d love to see the presence of dedicated battle areas tied to the story of what comes next. I know some have been critical of the confinement central to the story in Z-A, but I believe it aids the story in a way the series desperately needs.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A is available now for Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. Let us know in the comments if you’re enjoying the newest entry in the Pokémon franchise!