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Do you prefer Legends Arceus or Legends Z-A?

Which pokemon game do you prefer?

  • Total voters
    22
Definitley Z-A for me. It felt a lot more comfortably familiar and accessible to me, progression being fit to the Royale was definitley more accessible for me conpared to filling out the dex (something I've almost never done in my 10+ of playing the games), and the atmosphere was just way more my speed. Like it's the sequel to my favorite gen and region, with love for Kalos and it's story, mon and characters lovingly filled throughout with the new additions being pretty great and complimentary too (Well the new megas thus far are admittedly hit or miss irt execution)! SV might be the better game irt the overall package but like, this might be the Switch era game I've vibed with the most in terms of aesthetic and personal attachment and such, and I'm already very stoked for the Mega Dimension DLC.

That's not to say Arceus doesn't have anything over Z-A though. I do think Arceus had better expansive exploration irt the wild areas, ride Pokémon actually being a thing here is definitely more than can be said for Z-A lmao, and I think it's new mon selection being regionals + new evos feels stronger than just straight megas. At the end of the day though, a couple of base inconveniences hold it back for me and make it harder to come back to compared to SV and Z-A (I think i mentioned the things a couple times on the site, so I won't repeat myself in fears of sounding obnoxious about it). And like unlike gen 6, I'm already not really strong on gen 4 or Sinnoh, so it's definitely not as personal to me in that regard.

Ultimately I at least adequately enjoyed Arceus, but Z-A definitely felt more my speed in terms of what it carried over and left, what it brought new, and just being so tied to my favorite gen and region. I'm already at 50+ hours in Z-A compared to the 25 total I spent in Arceus (and that's before the DLC is likely gonna take it further)

I'd definitely understand people going the other way around on this though. Given how much they changed irt to gameplay and structure, if you adored Arceus, I feel like you're a lot less likely to get into Z-A. Definitely a weird followup as a Legends game in that regard.
 
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i think im split down the middle on this one, like the overall story and new pokemon of PLA a lot more however i like ZA's characters and gameplay more. I think they are both some of my favorite games in the entire franchise and picking one over the other is genuinely difficult.
 
I think this question will depend on if you prefer vast exploration to battle mechanics. Personally, I've always been more fond of battling then catching Pokemon so Z-A's gameplay loop does more for me by a longshot then the deeper exploration that Arceus presents.

That said, I really think both games are great!! I love the deep dives into the canon/lore soI'm definitely looking forward to more Legends games in the future.
 
Going to go with Arceus. I enjoy Z-A for its battling, polish, and speed but its missing something that makes me want to go to a part of the map, sit down, and take in the environment with Hisui. With Arceus, there is something appealing about going to an area and taking the time to fly to my favorite spot to chill and sort of meditating to the ambient sounds and music while the skies transition from day to night or vice versa (which look amazing). I cannot do that with Z-A, mostly because of the transition cutscenes and the idea that I feel the need to exit out of places solely because they might turn into a battle zone.
 
I'm only about 13 hours into Z-A, so should probably wait until I've finished it before giving my final verdict, but so far I'm not enjoying it nearly as much as Arceus.

In real life, I'm much more of a nature person than a city person, and one of my favourite things to do in Pokémon games is to explore the natural environments of each region. Arceus isn't my favourite game in the series, but it is perhaps the one that scratched my exploration itch the most, as it let me fully immerse myself in the natural world, far, far away from civilization.

Z-A, by contrast, feels claustrophobic, and I'm finding it impossible to memorize the layout of the city, so I have to keep checking the map to figure out where I'm going, which gets exhausting. Lumiose looks beautiful in this game, and I am enjoying discovering all of its nooks and crannies, but just like cities in real life, I'd rather go there on a day trip than live there.

Climbing up onto the rooftops offers a welcome change of pace, but then I'm reminded of the Kalosian countryside (one of my favourite aspects of X and Y) that lies beyond the city walls, so near yet so far away.

I'm also really disappointed that you can't complete the Pokédex without trading in Z-A. This, along with the DLC and limited-time events, stops Z-A from being a self-contained experience, something that I was hoping would become a staple of the Legends series.

I will give Z-A credit, though, for fixing my main annoyance with Arceus - needing to fill the Pokédex to progress. Also, so far it seems like it's no longer necessary to upgrade your satchel's storage, which is a huge improvement if true.
 
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Arceus will be my beloved for years. Exploration is great when you have all Poke-Rides, the world is fun and I've always been more of a battler than a catcher. It has more content overall with the Pokedex quests, the facility Ingo ran and outbreaks. Z-A has fun parts but feels much smaller in comparison not only in the world but also in features. I really hope future entries in the Legends series feel closer to Arceus.
 
Hydrogen Bomb vs. Coughing Baby

It's Z-A by far for me. I did not enjoy my time with Arceus beyond the first casual playthrough. anything more and the game feels like a slog to me. I really hope that future Legends games will take a page out of Z-A's book and stay as far as possible from Arceus.
 
Arceus and it's not even close. If you'd ask me to rank Arceus among all Pokemon games that I've played, it would be near the bottom, but by comparison to Z-A it's miles ahead. I loved Hisui as a region and the characters too even if I disliked some of the actual game mechanics in Arceus, and I can still replay it and have fun, whereas I don't think I'll replay Z-A once I'm finished with it.
 
They're both some of my least my favourite games in the franchise (though pokemon games for me are like pizza in that even a bad one is still pretty enjoyable). I definitely prefer ZA to PLA though.

I play pokemon for the postgame stuff - the shiny hunting, minigames, battling, etc. - and the Legends games are overwhelmingly story-focused, so they're just not my thing at all. PLA is offensively bad to look at (my bar for graphics is pretty low but PLA is SO bad), and the "gameplay" outside of mashing through dialogue consisting of repetitive chores to fill out the dex wore thin very quickly. It also suffers from the open-world problem of having a bunch of empty fields that I'm supposed to prefer to loading screens because BotW sold a bazillion copies. The story was nowhere near good enough to hold a candle to any other story-focused game I've played, and I despise the changes to battling. Pokemon battling as implemented in the mainline games is a phenomenal system; I can't see why they'd want to change that, and the changes they made definitely don't present a convincing case for it.

ZA has a lot of the same problems as PLA (the battling is even worse!), but also makes some big strides forward. The map is more focused and better filled out with content (though still pretty ugly and it's lame so many buildings are copy-pasted and can't be entered) and while the overall story is still no masterclass in writing, the NPC dialogue - particularly on non-main characters - is reminiscent of the random nonsense NPCs spouted in the older games. I found ZA genuinely funny at a lot of points. I'm also extremely glad they went back to the "plastic-y" pokemon models after the weird experiment in texturing they tried in SV. And most crucially, the game isn't as intent on wasting your time as PLA was. There's no point where you're locked out of story progression until you've completed X nonsense busywork tasks that are just there to pad out runtime.

TL;DR: the legends series so far has some overarching elements that are fundamentally just not my thing but ZA really feels like the beginning of GF finding their footing with the direction they've been taking since PLA and if they take the right lessons from it and keep iterating as they have been, I'm cautiously optimistic for gen 10.
 
While the naturalistic environments, exploration, and sense of danger is better in Legends Arceus, Legends Z-A has better music. Most of Legends: Arceus's atmospheric music is forgettable and pointless (e.g., Obsidian Fieldlands' music). This might be due to the use of the oboe and other traditional instruments, as I don't like the oboe. (Yes, the Lumiose City theme also has an oboe, but it works; it might be the music isn't so stretched-out or empty.)

As I played the game early on, Z-A reminded me of Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, in the sense it had small maps with no routes and a particular musical style. I liked it better than Scarlet's meandering, generic "camping"-themed music, and with every zone and wild battle having a remix of the same overall theme (as of the time I quit the game), it got tiresome.

The problem with Legends: Arceus and Scarlet both was the lack of people and Trainers in the wild. Apparently, that's the secret ingredient to a good Pokémon game. Pokémon Z-A, on the other hand, had plenty of people and Trainers. It made the world feel lived-in, rather than empty, and even minor Trainers (outside of the plot) sometimes felt like an actual threat (e.g., being ambushed by higher-level Trainers in the Battle Zones).

EDIT: To elaborate on "sense of danger": the protagonist of Legends: Arcuescan actually get knocked out from fall damage (though it's easy to avoid with a last-second call of a Noble Pokémon), and also get knocked out by wild Pokémon. A sad jingle plays, and there's a penalty for it (however small later on in the game, when one has vast resources). In contrast, whenever aggressive wild Pokémon or Mega Pokémon knocked out the protagonist in Legends: Z-A, there's no stakes, no penalty, and not even a mildly upsetting black screen where the protagonist is said to "scurry back to the nearest Pokémon Center to protect your Pokémon from further harm", as in FRLG. For the Mega battles, the protagonist simply frowns briefly and tries again immediately. It's not even acknowledged that it took multiple tries to take them down.
 
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i suppose you can count me in the "i'm a battler, not an explorer" camp, which means ZA over Arceus.

i think my problem with exploration in pokemon games is that it will always be finite; my wonder will only take me as far as the limits of the map will allow. so once i've seen it all, then what? what else is there to explore? and, other than pretty screenshots that i may look back on from time to time, what would be the practical point for me? i understand the bigger point is to take in nature and the environment around oneself, but it doesn't scratch an itch for me. i can certainly appreciate pretty environments when i see it and i think Arceus has that in leaps and bounds, but again, after a degree, it bores me. i've seen it once, twice, three times, etc when trying to shiny hunt and doing missions and catching pokemon here and there. so what else is there for me to do?

i think this is why ZA wins out for me. the gameplay loop of essentially battle battle battle is fantastic! it's something that i can continuously engage in and not tire of. i can jump in on ZA battle royale online and have a blast amid the chaos of it all! the dlc adds on top of that by adding in pokemon i was already a fan of back in, so that gave me more motivation to train and battle with them. not only that, i think hyperspace lumiose is interesting in that there's reasons to continuously visit there; that is to say, i would need to make frequent trips should i want more rare pokemon, and especially to shiny hunt them!

my whole thing with pokemon games is that i want to be stuck on them as long as possible. i think a pokemon game does its job for me if i rack up hundreds of hours on it. but if the moment i beat a pokemon game, i've put it down, and have no interest in the post-game, then it falls short for me. this is also kind of why i've loved emerald, platinum, hgss, pokemon colosseum/XD because there are things to do outside of the story that can keep you stuck on the game for hours and hours. heck, even b2w2's pokemon world tournament did a fantastic job with bringing back past champions as a reason to keep perpetually battling and it kept me pretty hooked!

so... without prattling on further, ZA really outdid itself far more than Arceus did.
 
Arceus but only because I like the fact that is "historical". Honestly I'm not a huge fan of Legends series...
 
falinksedin said:
There's no point where you're locked out of story progression until you've completed X nonsense busywork tasks that are just there to pad out runtime.
Click to expand...
I'm playing the DLC now and I can't believe
they went and did the exact thing I was praising them for not doing

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LA because I really loved the exploration in that one, and Hisui as an older Sinnoh is automatically my favorite region lol. Z-A doesn't do it for me in wanting to explore an urban setting with the wild zones, and everything in it feels too much like a chore and just sluggish imo; it's at a point that I've put it off too long that I don't even know when, or if, I'll go back to playing it to actually finish anytime soon. Z-A does have way more characters that I like, though, and some of the new Megas are pretty cool as well, to give a positive opinion about it.
 
Both, but because I haven't completed either of them (gigantic backlog of games), my final decision has yet to be made.
 
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