Returning for a second to 2016, when Pokémon Go Released, I remember this prevalent attitude for the game that reshaped my thought process on the entire Pokémon franchise. Basically, before the game released in America, it released in other regions. This made sense for a game expected to be big, but was untested as to how big it would actually be. What wasn’t expected was the game was very quickly ripped and so Americans could download a foreign European version almost the same day as release over there. Again, the rollout was meant to be segmented so servers could be added accordingly but instead you had a flood of users you couldn’t have prepared for now jumping on and overloading the servers and causing the game to be unplayable for almost everybody. The solution? Across the internet there seemed to be one prevailing idea, kids (who were not the ones typically installing these versions) needed to get off the game cause it wasn’t for them. They only just found this franchise aimed at them, but Pokémon Go, that was for OGs. People who have been playing since 1998.
What is the lesson here? There are a few ways you could take it, but I’m going to focus on the one that starts the least controversy, for times sake, and point out the Pokémon series is like a snowball rolling down a hill. It doesn’t matter where or when you start, you are usually still there many iterations later still committed to the same loop. I might make the argument that if people were paying attention they wouldn’t be saying “Oh my god, the newest entries have gone down hill,” but lets be honest, it hasn’t been innovative for a lot longer. This is probably why Nintendo feels so threatened by games imitating their mechanics, Cassette Beasts and Beastieball are doomed to never have as wide an audience but at least they have something new to say. For its part Pokémon Legends Z-A feels like, at least to me, the best version of a Pokémon title that dosn’t want to be what one typically thinks it should be. This is a good thing. The problem becomes, as the series has become more and more popular, it has also continued this trend of assuming with less room for confusion people picking up the title know it, that its audience has never heard of Pokémon before.
Your arrival in Lumiose City is marked by the first noted change the series has undergone starting years ago, the replacement of a rival that shows up, acts like a condecending bully, then loses and tells you he will “smell you later” (which is the most 90s thing a person could say), and leaves. Maybe a rival doesn’t need to be as mean, but I could live with this change, if and only if, this well documented switch didn’t bring with it the lesser noted change that this swap was also meant to have this character to show players the ropes of a Pokémon game, and to constantly show up and streamline the player into a linear path as you learn everything the game thinks you need to. In the original games, Red, Green, and Blue, your rival picked a pokemon that inherently had an advantage over yours, you learned to catch a pokemon, then you were left to your own devices. Now? It feels like you are the only person in a universe filled with these monsters that has never seen or heard of them, with the game no longer having a brief setup to a explain the world, and instead tasking the first person you meet, in this case a guy named Urbain, with the task of explaining this over several interactions, and hours.
Instead of just telling me what wild zones and battle zones are, which only needs one brief scene, this is explained over several, with Urbain running off after proclaiming he has ‘something’ to show me, causing me to need to give chase, then get three pages of a tutorial to read, then getting walked straight through to battles he basically causes. All of this annoyingly framed with invisible walls because how dare I want to explore the city until they explained the things I already know to me. Seriously, even the new mechanics don’t feel so complicated that they need to hold your hand to understand them, and yet they make that choice for you. At one point, along a straight path in a battle zone all three members of the team your character has been forced to join wait, prepared to berate you if you accidentally ignore them in favor of the trainer you can plainly see in front of you. And just what is so important they need to stop you from having fun? Oh, potions, that have been in the game since day one or holdable objects, also here since forever. They don’t even explain their usage, just stop you to ‘remind you’ about them. Thank you for nothing, I guess? Weirdly I ecountered a trainer with a level 18 Pidgeotto in this area that I was ill equipped to deal with, and yet that didn’t have a tutorial for running, or checking levels. So the game even goes so far as to favor tutorials that are just blatently unnecessary compared to better serving ones.
Then you get to finally explore right? Oh no you don’t, the first serveral wild zones require tutorials because, why wouldn’t they? The entire concept can be summed up in one sentence. Pokemon reside there, go into them to train or catch pokemon. To quote Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, “I’m Finished!” Wow, simple. Somehow they stretch that out, but even then there aren’t really tutorials, just hey here is a wild zone, go through it before meeting me at the food truck down the street. Again though, any deviation such as trying to grab the item you can clearly see down the street and you are met with an invisable wall reminding you that the psychopath holding you hostage is waiting. In this there are a few tutorials that are needed. Having never played Pokémon Legends Arceus, I was unfamiliar with the changed combat, which is weird on its face. This was welcomed. Throwing pokeballs, which is a slight variation on mechanic as well, was also beneficial. But that was it, by the end of those there was nothing that needed explaination that could not have been introduced when I naturally encountered it, not requiring the game to force you out of your way to learn it as they do. It isn’t till the game teaches you side quests you actually have the freedom to explore, and even then the game stops all progress on the main goal of rising though the Z-A rankings.
The entire first ranking level of going from Z to Y is almost entirely through Urbain telling you what to do, then you doing it, then him taking you to the fight, and again entirely setting up the fight. In fairness the ticket system, needing to win battles to get tickets to participate in a ranking battle is valuable, but you are tought it as they slowly dip out explanations. This is, about, conversation number six explaining the night time battle area and ZA system, and this could have been given to me at any point during those other conversations so I could just go out and do it, but instead the game believes in telling you “Oh we will explain that, but its not right in front of you so there is no way you could possibly process it at this point,” which is just painful. We are talking about Pokémon, which in the west had a theme song that covers everything you could possibly need to know, “I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was,”‘ so simple. You have already outlined a system where I can be the very best, so let me do ithat.
This has become such a noticable problem latesly too as Nintendo continues to tow the line between developing games for kids, as well as kids at heart. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild for instance is perfectly accessable for children, as a Gamestop employee for years I have sold my fair share of copies to kids under 10 who would come back looking for games like it since they enjoyed it so much. It caters though to the idea that gamers are smart enough to pick up a game and play, figuring out what they are doing along the way. We saw the company continue this trend with Super Mario Odyssey and most recently Donkey Kong Bananaza. These games live their best lives when players have the freedom to experience and interact with their worlds at their leasure and in the way they want. Pokémon continues to seemingly struggle with this. Pokémon Legends Z-A has by far the worst version of this, so I would further argue it is getting worse, not better.
This combines, at least for me, with the fact Pokémon Legends Z-A continues to lack voice acting, meaning it requires some level of reading comprehnsion to enjoy. So who is your audience if this is the case. Even at the youngest of the Everyone audience you would require somebody to help if you lack this ability. I sold many a copy of games to parents confident they would be playing the game with their kid, even those saying they would use it as a tool to help them learn reading in conjuction with schooling. Which is cool, but again, somebody is involved to help facilitate the learning of the game itself. Thats on the worst end. On the best? I adopted the game in 1998, shortly after its initial release in America, in an era when gaming was seen as inherently childish so my mother litterally never took an interest in my interests. People didn’t predict the lasting success and popularity of either the medium or the art, so I was left to fend for myself and did just fine. Kids in America ( I can’t speak for the rest of the world) start to learn reading at around 5 in Kindergarten and while this may not create perfect understanding, this is also the start of learning deductive reasoning, which is between the ages of 4-8. This means you will either be unable to process the most basic barrier of entry, the reading, or have the capacity to figure out the inner machinations of Pokémon. In both scenarios there isn’t a stong argument for needing the first several hours of your experience to tell you, welcome to the world of Pokémon, now don’t go explore it.
Which brings us back to where we started, on the other end are people from their teens all the way into adulthood that are playing the game, it hasn’t just been for kids since the first people who played it grew up and became the adults who crashed servers then blamed it all on the games target audience, children, because they had some manifest destiny claim to the series as a whole. MOST of your audience doesn’t need tutorials, just keep one or two in for posterity. Pokémon Legends Z-A honestly barely needed a story beyond its namesake and all that has been established is that I can expect a lot of people telling me what I have to do instead of actually enjoy my time in Lumiose City, which is the last feeling you want to invoke with the introduction of your game.
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