Dogma Pokemon Legends: Z-A Review

While Pokémon has been one of my favorite games to play since I was a child playing Pokémon Gold on the Gameboy Color. I am torn by two things here. I’ll admit for years I’ve hoped that Pokémon would step up and update the game play mechanics, when it comes to the Pokémon Legends series they have done exactly that. The game play for Pokémon Legends ZA is absolutely fun and takes a step in the right direction when it comes to battling with your Pokémon in real time, side-by-side, Mano y Mano (that’s hand in hand in Spanish) . Online rank battles are fun and will probably be the main game modes hardcore competitive players will find themselves playing most of the time. While the game play and battle mechanics feel good, I can’t help but to feel the absolute lack luster design and feel of the city. The whole game takes place in one city which makes me feel like I’m trapped in a cave in one of the levels of Zelda ocarina of time for the Nintendo 64. With all the open space in the city I can’t help but feel like it’s huge and empty with no real engagement to my environment. All this open space but no Pokémon wandering around! The textures from windows to the buildings themself feels like they have just copy and pasted everything just for the sake of putting more into the game. The story is not great and some of the new designs for mega Pokémon evolutions are both under and overwhelming. There is no sense of danger or trouble within the story and the difficulty level is just about as easy as it gets, there is no real challenge. While this game is mainly targeted for kids it is such a disappointment that Gamefreak, Pokémon company & Nintendo have forgotten the kids who are now adults and have followed and supported them since the beginning have seem to phase the older generation of Pokémon fans out. The fact that this games budget was 13 million shows to me that a company that makes billions of dollars just simply did not care to put to much effort or creative imagination into this game and gives off a hint of just being a cash grab because at the end of the day Pokémon fans will buy anything Pokémon puts out. That being said with the fact that this games budget feels like it could have had more done to it it is not worth the 70 dollars but instead should of been a 40 dollar game with the DLC being 30 dollars making it a 70 dollar game. This game, for me gets 3 stars just cause the battling system. Which could also use some more tweaking. Everything else just feels like a big old dirty Sludge Bomb.