Yeah, I got Legends Arceus (along with everyone else in the Pokémon community). I actually waffled back and forth between getting it and not getting it, because I already had Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and at first glance they looked to be pretty similar. I will admit that I had a bit of a grudge against the game because Game Freak shunted production of the Diamond/Pearl remakes towards ILCA, who had never made a whole game before, in order to work on this game. However, I saw a bunch of my friends enjoying it, and I eventually caved when I saw someone said that it gave them more enjoyment than they’d had playing a game since childhood. I’ve been pretty obsessed with this game, to the point of where most of my free time is going towards it (I’ve been trying to manage this so that I spend less time on it, though).
FUN RATING: 4/5. I’ve been enjoying this game so much. I think there are some parts are just fine, but there’s nothing I hate. I’ve seen some people rag on the graphics as PS2 level graphics, but I think that they’re fine. It’s not a PC or PS4/5 game, the graphics aren’t going to be fantastic. I really appreciate them introducing the quest mechanic in this game, and I’ve been doing all the side quests and sort of ignoring the main quest. While there’s not a huge range of things like the pokémon contests in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum, there’s so much ground to cover as this is sort of an open-world game. The introduction of alphas (larger, stronger pokémon) and outbreaks (I assume outbreaks are related to swarms in games later in the Pokémon timeline) is also a nice set of mechanics to play around with. When your team all faints, you don’t black out, either- although I wish you could just fight a pokémon with your bare hands, as some of us were led to think in the Legends Arceus trailers, you CAN ride around on pokémon mounts and catch things in pokéballs without a usable team.
EASE RATING: 3/5. Not particularly difficult until you get to the boss fights of Noble pokémon and the postgame fight (while I have not done this one, apparently it is notoriously hard). I don’t want to spoil the postgame fight too much (unfortunately I did get it spoiled for me, but that’s what happens when you go on Twitter), but it’s supposedly similar in difficulty to the Cynthia fight, and it’s normal to lose at least once. However, aside from those particular fights, I think the game is not too difficult. At the beginning of the game, you should definitely avoid alpha pokémon you see (they are large and have glowing red eyes) because they will mess you up, and badly. Most alpha pokémon in the first area, Obsidian Fieldlands, are around level 40. Once you hit around that mark or are in the 30s with super-effective moves, then it’s safe to challenge them.
REPLAYABILITY RATING: 2/5. A lot of the quest objectives and doing things to fill out the pokédex are pretty long and complicated. I don’t know how much I’d want to try to complete the pokédex multiple times, to be honest, not to mention actually perfectly filling it all out. There are also 108 wisps to find among all of the maps available, which is a difficult undertaking without guides. While you can go run around in all of the areas and keep catching pokémon for as long as you want, eventually I think you’d run out of things to do in the game- however, it’d take a long while before you got to that point.
OVERALL: This game has a couple shortcomings, but it’s really interesting and a fun new take on the Pokémon series games- it’s even made it into the mainline series. You can tell that Game Freak put a lot of care and work into this game with all of the features and quests that you can do. You can put all your pokémon out, and they even have idle animations (sleeping Crobat is elite, it’s insanely cute). Shiny hunting has also been made easier with outbreaks, and people have been finding so many shinies with the visuals becoming available in the overworld (makes me wonder how many shinies I passed without knowing it in Sword and Shield). There’s some player customization options that weren’t really available in BDSP (the Diamond/Pearl remakes that came out a few months prior), which is always nice to have. Although there’s low replayability, I think I would recommend this to players just because it’s so expansive. It’s fun, can hold your attention, and has a wide variety of things to do that is sure to keep you occupied for a long while.
