Pokemon Legends: Arceus is a decent game that could be a great game. I've played around 90% of it and really got hooked after about 2 hours of play.
It has some great game play elements including:
- Catching Pokemon, the process of approaching a Pokemon and figuring out the best technique to catch it is extremely fun and rewarding, I really enjoyed the Pokemon I was able to sneak up on and catch
- Battling Pokemon, the whole battling engine was far more fluid than any Pokemon game I'd played, battles started quickly and battle menu felt more modern, it was also nice that you were still in control of the trainer whilst moves were made, it made the battle more immersive
- The semi open world, whilst it would be better to be fully open world (like Breath of the Wild) the environments Pokemon resided in were well made, I really liked the Cobalt Coastlands
But it also had some big negatives including:
- The story, there's so many cut scenes with big long slabs of text that are hard to read and not interesting to me, they should have added some voice acting
- The boss battles, throwing balms at the noble Pokemon is a different approach which I respect but to me it wasn't really that engaging
And some things were just kind of meh:
- The graphics, they could be much better, something on the level of Breath of the Wild is now what people expect when it comes to these huge Nintendo franchises
- Player movement, until you had all the traversal Pokemon moving in certain areas felt pretty stagnant, especially if you got stuck climbing up a ledge that was slightly too steep
- The Pokedex, I found it a little too confusing with all the different things you needed to achieve, I liked the idea of it but it could be executed in a simpler way for better user experience
I have high hopes for the Pokemon Scarlet and Violet scheduled to be released end of this year. If they reuse the good elements out of this game and tidy up the bad stuff it could make for an epic experience.
