Do you want to play a game where you explore well designed areas densely packed with interesting creatures that interact with their surroundings and require thought as to how you approach and capture them, balanced with a thrilling investigation into the mysteries of the society you suddenly find yourself in? That sounds great, right? Well, I just described Bugsnax, the game that Pokemon Legends Arceus wishes it was, and I recommend that you play it. Arceus isn't a bad game, but I definitely have to count myself baffled by the volume of praise and hype it has received over the past 9 months because I don't think it's particularly good either.
I'm leaving my playthrough of Arceus feeling like I played an early access or rough beta, rather than a polished up and completed retail product. Look, I've played some ugly games and loved them - Fire Emblem Three Houses at times feels like it's missing important sequences (Blue Lions Dedue return for example, no cutscene or build, he's just... suddenly back with no explanation) and its texture work is extremely rough looking, but not only does it make up for that with the quality of the rest of the package I also don't think those failings are anywhere near as major or glaring as equivalent issues in Arceus. Almost every texture in Arceus is extremely ugly - if the world were well designed and interesting it could make up for it, but in practice it's a roughshod paint job on a ramshackle void bereft of anything to see or do in it. It constantly reuses cutscenes (ah yeah lemme watch the Potato Mochi meal cutscene 10 times with identical animations and barely different dialogue each time) or, rather than even pretending to have a cutscene we can just fade to black for 10 seconds while a sound effect plays to avoid even having to try to show something happening. There is nothing appealing in its presentation aside from the Pokemon themselves, and I do think that the new ones are all hits (with the exception of Sneasler, who I loathe). Even the music is iffy, I hate the Jubilife music and the music that plays when you talk to the Professor and they play so frequently that they grate on your ears if they don't land with you. The music for the various regions is actually pretty great... but unfortunately it either decides to simply not play or instead it'll just constantly be interrupted by the lackluster wild encounter theme, so it might as well not even be there.
The battle system doesn't make any sense. Every trainer battle seems to start with the enemy attacking you before you can even see a menu, often with an unexpected super-effective move not in their usual learnset, instantly sucker punching your pokemon as you send it out and often killing it. It's frustrating to not have a chance to react and to immediately lose your lead... but then I have 5 other pokemon and I retaliate by instantly nuking their ONE pokemon and win the battle. The combat forecast for moves often doesn't tell me correct information - the amount of times it showed me moving first or multiple times, or the enemy moving only once, and then suddenly something entirely different happened (in the final trainer battle against that bandit girl, her Gengar moved 5 times? I looked up the datamined stats and it barely had a higher speed stat than my pokemon, launching 5 moves at me absolutely did not track there) is just absurd. It's an unfair system, and yet the battles were so imbalanced and easy that it didn't even matter because I never lost a single trainer battle and nearly every pokemon on either side was dead in one or two hits. All it amounted to was somehow Gamefreak managed to make Pokemon Battles not fun for me, which is bizarre because I enjoyed them even in Pokemon Sword, my least favorite Pokemon game with my least favorite battling gimmick in Dynamax. You can walk around in them for some reason - I don't know what purpose this serves but it's a feature.
The story, and in particular the writing, is bad. I suppose this is to be expected because writing in Pokemon games is far more miss than hit, with really only Gens 5 and 7 being anything worthwhile. But even so, the writing just felt even more insipid and uninspired than it usually does... it's truly disappointing that Pokemon seems to lean into the defense it gets for its writing, "it's for kids" (as if writing for kids cannot be good, or as if kids somehow deserve bad writing). I feel especially shortchanged by the fact that the bulk of the game is helping the various Noble pokemon... and that's it, that's the last you see of them. Wouldn't it make sense for them to show up at the end and do a whole power of friendship thing to support you before you fight Origin Form Dialga/Palkia? That would make sense and show your impact on the world and that what you've been doing has mattered, and it's so obvious... and it does not happen, because the Nobles do not even remotely matter after their respective story quest ends. The only characters I really remember having any investment in are the woman who took care of Growlithe/Arcanine and the Battle Subway guy whose mere presence in this game is completely inexplicable - the rest are either forgettable or downright annoying (Melli, the Braviary girl, and the bandit trio come to mind, they were the goddamn worst). Otherwise, the game feels like it ran out of ideas when you quelled all the Nobles (Avalugg wasn't even rampaging yet, doesn't get hit by lightning, and then just IS rampaging when you fight it) and rushes to figure out how to include a banishment subplot, the lake trio, and Dialga/Palkia in to wrap it all up. It just didn't feel finished, and I know that it isn't in part because it has a post-game quest with Volo/Giratina and Arceus, but the main game story isn't satisfying. Ah yeah, we need the origin ore, thank god it's two feet away from the spot where we decided to invent the fact that it exists, glad we had that annoying detour.
What's unfortunate is that part of me likes the live capturing mechanics, and I don't really know why I do. Capturing literal dozens of the same pokemon is undeniably repetitive busywork and I really gotta question the fact that they focused on it as the main gameplay loop, but it did somehow get its hooks in me for the first few areas. It feels nice to throw the pokeball and catch the pokemon, even if there's realistically no reason I'd ever need or want 25 Bidoof. The problem is, the system for capturing is not deep at all. There's all this talk about stealth and throwing berries... you don't need to do any of that. Half of the pokemon you can just walk up to and crack a pokeball into the back of their skull to instantly catch, the other half all you need to do is either snipe them with a feather/wing ball or simply throw a spoiled nut or dirt ball in their face to temporarily de-aggro them and then hit them in the back of the skull with a pokeball. It was genuinely more effective for me than slowly creeping through the bushes or trying to figure out which berry would interest the pokemon, so I stopped bothering to experiment with that - after all, they only have three types of behavior. They're all either docile, aggressive, or docile until you do something that makes them aggressive like running or being seen capturing a nearby pokemon. They all wander around in circles, doing whichever of those three behaviors, and don't stray from their little zone. They don't do any particular animations or anything special, they don't interact with each other or the environment, they're just replaceable figures standing around in empty boring zones that have nothing to do or see in them. There's no puzzle to get them and getting them stopped feeling like an accomplishment when I realized I can just speedrun through an area and casually toss pokeballs and catch the vast majority of them. If the world could have at least had things worth exploring and discovering, that would've been great! But the world really is just nonsensically designed and has nothing other than hidden Spiritomb orbs and Unown. And the Noble fights are just clunky - they're easy affairs that tend to drag on, and I guess you can actually battle the pokemon but I didn't feel like seeing what bullshit they were going to pull vis-a-vis the unpredictable nonsense of the battle system so I just kept tossing balms, which completely works as a way to win and probably took just as long as the battle would have.
My biggest problem with this game is that I could see it being the groundwork for something good in the future... but I don't really have any faith in Gamefreak to deliver on that. With a more capable studio I could see this evolving into something interesting, but as it stands Gamefreak is just kinda marginal. I wouldn't call it a bad game, but I don't think it's a good game - it's about as middle of the road as can be. I don't think it really excels at anything but I've played much MUCH worse, and I feel that this was still more compelling than Gen 8 despite the many flaws I think it has. Props to anyone who loved this - I sure didn't see it, and I don't understand it, but if this is what you wanted then I'm glad you got to have it. I just wanna have a Pokemon game that catches me again, and as the entries keep coming out and missing with me I feel I'm getting less and less likely to get that... At least I got Basculegion and Overqwil.
I'm leaving my playthrough of Arceus feeling like I played an early access or rough beta, rather than a polished up and completed retail product. Look, I've played some ugly games and loved them - Fire Emblem Three Houses at times feels like it's missing important sequences (Blue Lions Dedue return for example, no cutscene or build, he's just... suddenly back with no explanation) and its texture work is extremely rough looking, but not only does it make up for that with the quality of the rest of the package I also don't think those failings are anywhere near as major or glaring as equivalent issues in Arceus. Almost every texture in Arceus is extremely ugly - if the world were well designed and interesting it could make up for it, but in practice it's a roughshod paint job on a ramshackle void bereft of anything to see or do in it. It constantly reuses cutscenes (ah yeah lemme watch the Potato Mochi meal cutscene 10 times with identical animations and barely different dialogue each time) or, rather than even pretending to have a cutscene we can just fade to black for 10 seconds while a sound effect plays to avoid even having to try to show something happening. There is nothing appealing in its presentation aside from the Pokemon themselves, and I do think that the new ones are all hits (with the exception of Sneasler, who I loathe). Even the music is iffy, I hate the Jubilife music and the music that plays when you talk to the Professor and they play so frequently that they grate on your ears if they don't land with you. The music for the various regions is actually pretty great... but unfortunately it either decides to simply not play or instead it'll just constantly be interrupted by the lackluster wild encounter theme, so it might as well not even be there.
The battle system doesn't make any sense. Every trainer battle seems to start with the enemy attacking you before you can even see a menu, often with an unexpected super-effective move not in their usual learnset, instantly sucker punching your pokemon as you send it out and often killing it. It's frustrating to not have a chance to react and to immediately lose your lead... but then I have 5 other pokemon and I retaliate by instantly nuking their ONE pokemon and win the battle. The combat forecast for moves often doesn't tell me correct information - the amount of times it showed me moving first or multiple times, or the enemy moving only once, and then suddenly something entirely different happened (in the final trainer battle against that bandit girl, her Gengar moved 5 times? I looked up the datamined stats and it barely had a higher speed stat than my pokemon, launching 5 moves at me absolutely did not track there) is just absurd. It's an unfair system, and yet the battles were so imbalanced and easy that it didn't even matter because I never lost a single trainer battle and nearly every pokemon on either side was dead in one or two hits. All it amounted to was somehow Gamefreak managed to make Pokemon Battles not fun for me, which is bizarre because I enjoyed them even in Pokemon Sword, my least favorite Pokemon game with my least favorite battling gimmick in Dynamax. You can walk around in them for some reason - I don't know what purpose this serves but it's a feature.
The story, and in particular the writing, is bad. I suppose this is to be expected because writing in Pokemon games is far more miss than hit, with really only Gens 5 and 7 being anything worthwhile. But even so, the writing just felt even more insipid and uninspired than it usually does... it's truly disappointing that Pokemon seems to lean into the defense it gets for its writing, "it's for kids" (as if writing for kids cannot be good, or as if kids somehow deserve bad writing). I feel especially shortchanged by the fact that the bulk of the game is helping the various Noble pokemon... and that's it, that's the last you see of them. Wouldn't it make sense for them to show up at the end and do a whole power of friendship thing to support you before you fight Origin Form Dialga/Palkia? That would make sense and show your impact on the world and that what you've been doing has mattered, and it's so obvious... and it does not happen, because the Nobles do not even remotely matter after their respective story quest ends. The only characters I really remember having any investment in are the woman who took care of Growlithe/Arcanine and the Battle Subway guy whose mere presence in this game is completely inexplicable - the rest are either forgettable or downright annoying (Melli, the Braviary girl, and the bandit trio come to mind, they were the goddamn worst). Otherwise, the game feels like it ran out of ideas when you quelled all the Nobles (Avalugg wasn't even rampaging yet, doesn't get hit by lightning, and then just IS rampaging when you fight it) and rushes to figure out how to include a banishment subplot, the lake trio, and Dialga/Palkia in to wrap it all up. It just didn't feel finished, and I know that it isn't in part because it has a post-game quest with Volo/Giratina and Arceus, but the main game story isn't satisfying. Ah yeah, we need the origin ore, thank god it's two feet away from the spot where we decided to invent the fact that it exists, glad we had that annoying detour.
What's unfortunate is that part of me likes the live capturing mechanics, and I don't really know why I do. Capturing literal dozens of the same pokemon is undeniably repetitive busywork and I really gotta question the fact that they focused on it as the main gameplay loop, but it did somehow get its hooks in me for the first few areas. It feels nice to throw the pokeball and catch the pokemon, even if there's realistically no reason I'd ever need or want 25 Bidoof. The problem is, the system for capturing is not deep at all. There's all this talk about stealth and throwing berries... you don't need to do any of that. Half of the pokemon you can just walk up to and crack a pokeball into the back of their skull to instantly catch, the other half all you need to do is either snipe them with a feather/wing ball or simply throw a spoiled nut or dirt ball in their face to temporarily de-aggro them and then hit them in the back of the skull with a pokeball. It was genuinely more effective for me than slowly creeping through the bushes or trying to figure out which berry would interest the pokemon, so I stopped bothering to experiment with that - after all, they only have three types of behavior. They're all either docile, aggressive, or docile until you do something that makes them aggressive like running or being seen capturing a nearby pokemon. They all wander around in circles, doing whichever of those three behaviors, and don't stray from their little zone. They don't do any particular animations or anything special, they don't interact with each other or the environment, they're just replaceable figures standing around in empty boring zones that have nothing to do or see in them. There's no puzzle to get them and getting them stopped feeling like an accomplishment when I realized I can just speedrun through an area and casually toss pokeballs and catch the vast majority of them. If the world could have at least had things worth exploring and discovering, that would've been great! But the world really is just nonsensically designed and has nothing other than hidden Spiritomb orbs and Unown. And the Noble fights are just clunky - they're easy affairs that tend to drag on, and I guess you can actually battle the pokemon but I didn't feel like seeing what bullshit they were going to pull vis-a-vis the unpredictable nonsense of the battle system so I just kept tossing balms, which completely works as a way to win and probably took just as long as the battle would have.
My biggest problem with this game is that I could see it being the groundwork for something good in the future... but I don't really have any faith in Gamefreak to deliver on that. With a more capable studio I could see this evolving into something interesting, but as it stands Gamefreak is just kinda marginal. I wouldn't call it a bad game, but I don't think it's a good game - it's about as middle of the road as can be. I don't think it really excels at anything but I've played much MUCH worse, and I feel that this was still more compelling than Gen 8 despite the many flaws I think it has. Props to anyone who loved this - I sure didn't see it, and I don't understand it, but if this is what you wanted then I'm glad you got to have it. I just wanna have a Pokemon game that catches me again, and as the entries keep coming out and missing with me I feel I'm getting less and less likely to get that... At least I got Basculegion and Overqwil.