Pokémon Legends: Arceus is great—when it shuts up and lets you catch some damn Pokémon

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories. But of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?

---

It says something, when the opening sequence of Pokémon Legends: Arceus—in which your teenage player character is first raptured by Dinosaur Jesus, then gifted a new magical iPhone and deposited several hundred years in the past—is not the most bizarre thing about Game Freak’s latest expansion of its massively successful pocket monsters franchise.

No, the truly wild thing about Arceus is how much crap it puts in between you and just trying to catch some dang Pokémon.

This is not a new Pokémon problem, to be fair: Pretty much every new game in the franchise post- the original Red and Blue has added a host of new Things That Aren’t Catching Pokémon And Then Making Them Fight Each Other to its roster of events—these increasingly elaborate distractions from the core gameplay loop of stuffing adorable gods into balls and then carrying them around in a bag full of potions and berries and other garbage you’ve hoovered up off the street.

But it’s especially galling in Legends: Arceus, because this is, wait for it: the first bona fide Pokémon action game! At least, kind of. Sure, you’re still stuck giving your various murder birds and lightning rats turn-based commands when they’re fighting other monsters, and any “action game” bits are abstracted into you pelting rampaging beasties with their favorite foods while dodge-rolling away from attacks. But at least you get to throw Poké Balls in real time to catch your new “friends”!

(If I’m going to get nitpicky here, it’s worth noting that Arceus’ action elements feel doled out in half-measures, and kind of confused. A game where you could actually control all 240-some individual Pokémon on display here and use their moves in action-y fights might very well be beyond the scope of a game that already feels like it’s pushing Nintendo’s Switch to its limits. But it doesn’t change the fact that pausing every few minutes for a traditional “you take your turn, then I’ll take my turn” fight is one of several things that makes Arceus’ hybrid nature feel like a failure to fully evolve.)

And the insidious thing about throwing Poké Balls and catching Pokémon in Arceus is that it’s actually really damn fun. Fun to sneak up on a wild Lickitung and get a good sneak attack on it. Fun to nail the angle when you’re pelting a Carnivine. Fun to see your Pokédex slowly fill out as you work your way through an individual creature’s checklist of research task. (An excellent way to get the more compulsive-minded among us to keep hurling our Great or Feather Balls well after we’ve assembled a killer team.) Fun to roam a new region on Wyrdeer-back and see new monsters pop out of the swamps and seas and fields.

Legends: Arceus is, in many ways, the advancement of Pokémon that many fans have been hoping for for years, a move away from tradition that grants collectors a big, open set of areas where the Bunearys roam and the Stantlers play, all for you to master in something approaching real-time. And all of that is extremely fun, when the game shuts up and lets you get to it.

I don’t want to make some big, sweeping statement here, like “No human being has ever played a Pokémon game for the plot,” because god knows I’ll be inundated with hate tweets from people who cried at the end of Sun or Sword or whatever. But still: No human being has ever played a Pokémon game for the plot. And hoo boy, but does Legends: Arceus want to tell you about its plot.

Said narrative, in brief: Dinosaur Jesus sends you back in time to an era where people still live in fear of Pokémon, which we all know is silly and superstitious (even though they’re wild animals and some of them can literally kill you by thinking about it). Our hero gets picked up by a crew of explorers who have recently arrived in the area and then promptly barged into a religious schism between two groups of natives that only our trusty Future Kid can sort out, mostly by doing chores. It’s all pretty colonialist and savior-y. (Although the willingness of the “heroes” to tell you they’ll let you starve if you don’t work day and night for them is the closest a Pokémon plot has ever come to objective capitalist critique.) There is also just far too much of it.

And not just talking: Legends: Arceus is full of little frustrations that get in the way of The Good Bits. Text speed is a tad too slow. Your stamina when running around the central village runs out too fast. Want to carry more than a handful of items? Better start shelling money out to the local guard who’s apparently running a multi-level marketing scheme to bilk children out of thousands of dollars in exchange for small upgrades for inventory space. And get ready to harvest everything if you want to keep yourself in enough crafting materials to stay fully stocked on Poké Balls. All small friction points individually, all adding up to a series of annoyances that are irritating, unnecessary—and endless.

Let’s be real: If you’ve ever had the thought, “I would love to run around the world of Pokémon, see these incredible creatures hanging out in their natural environments, and then bonk them on the head with balls to make them into my personal friends/servants,” then Legends: Arceus is exactly the game you’ve been waiting for. If you’ve ever followed that thought with, “And I’d like it to not be kind of an annoying, overly talk-y mess while doing so,” well… maybe keep wishing.