Forum - View topicGAME: Pokémon Legends: Z-A Game Review
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Yune Amagiri
 Posts: 1322 Location: France |
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I agree with almost everything; the game in its entirety, or rather its current version, is better than I was expecting. If there is one aspect that might become someone's pet peeve, it's clearly the gameplay. I have mixed feelings in this regard. I really like being able to beat meta 600+ base total EV Mega Pokémon online with a ridiculous 400-500-ish EV one with good timing and mobility. However, it's true that we often get stuck in the offline Z-A battle zone, especially with Alpha Pokémon. Sometimes it's frustrating, but other times it allows for some lucky advantages. After more than a month and hundreds of hours of playtime, I still don't intend to leave anytime soon, so I would call it a success, and I have great expectations for the coming DLC. For those who might refrain from playing because of the usual grind, many things in this game can be automated with a macroable turbo controller (R.I.P. Yukari, who has been auto-farmed more than a thousand times by now).
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FireChick
 Subscriber Posts: 2764 Location: United States |
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I'm mainly pissed that the game doesn't give you the option to disable auto-save and the method to accessing the manual save is needlessly tedious.
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BrazillianCara
Posts: 88 |
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I agree about about the permanent auto-save, but pausing the game and pressing a single button (plus confirmation) is just trivial. |
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Yune Amagiri
Posts: 1322 Location: France |
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I'd love to be able to disable the permanent auto-save too; it would allow us to farm certain shiny Alphas like Chespin much more easily after overloading.
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2559 Location: Online Terminal |
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Not that I care one way or the other, but I think I'm a little contrarian on the need for VA's in Pokemon. I made a big bulleted list, but tl;dr Nintendo has a lot of iconic 1st party properties that survive on little-to-no native-language voice acting, and despite being an adventure RPG, Pokemon doesn't have a lot of the RPG tricks that would allow for immersive dialog. Plus, can you imagine how gamers are going to react to a Pokemon voice cast?
The only real way Z-A in particular benefits from voice acting is to see how they handle Canari. 
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Connor Dino
Posts: 427 Location: Anywhere. Because "hacked." |
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I mean, I would expect gamers to react to a voice cast the same way they do to...every voice cast? Also, with the anime havibg a voice cast, why do you think this would be a big deal?
Ultimately, I don't get your argument. Are you saying the pokemon video games have found (and continue to find) success financially without a voice cast? If so...doesn't that kinda prove that people's number 1 complaint with Pokemon is correct? That it often rests on it laurals and refuses to innovate significantly because it will sell a billion copies? |
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BrazillianCara
Posts: 88 |
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I'm just going to say that if the games selling so much meant there was no incentive to try to improve and innovate, Scarlet/Violet would have been exactly like Sword/Shield (or more relevantly, Legends Z-A would have been just Legends Arceus in Kalos). |
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Joe Mello
Posts: 2559 Location: Online Terminal |
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Because an anime is not the same as a video game (something The Pokemon Company is reinforcing with the S/V anime) and the video game-consuming internet can be positively rancid when anyone announces anything. Within 48 hours of actors excitedly posting on their social media accounts that they are becoming part of something that has a special place in their life, the space will be flooded with garbage takes from garbage people then add in that kids are going to see all this (because that's still the target demo for Pokemon). I don't think the firestorm of negativity would be worth dealing with, just so there are voices in the game. Also, since the convo is steering towards the conscious choices Nintendo is or isn't making, if the big issue with the current gen was about it not running well, do you really think it's a good idea to add more features. |
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Dr. Wily
Posts: 864 |
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You seem way too concerned with how social media/the community will react to any sort of change more than how it will actually affect the game's quality.
Honestly, I would have agreed with you several games ago that voice acting is unnecessary, but as the series goes on and on, it's clear that Game Freak/The Pokemon Company wants to have bigger stories. They had an excuse for decades by being limited to handheld, but that's gone now. As the review notes, the game and its story often play like they should have acting, characters have mouths that move now instead of just static expressions, but they seemingly don't want to commit to giving characters voices because.... reasons? (the reason is money, they don't want to spend money on a voice cast, and they especially don't want to hire casts for multiple languages). I think it's silly because it's not like they would have to give literally every NPC fully voiced lines either. Personally I'd do it like the Persona games where the more major characters get voiced lines but then just have generic "hey" noises if you keep talking at them, and there's a bunch of "hey"s for the unimportant randos you interact with |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 7197 |
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You’re not wrong but at the same time I recall people whining about Pikachu talking in one of the movies which was and still remains a rather dumb bit of criticism. Basically people are going to complain about voice acting regardless of the medium. Just because people will complain isn’t really a good excuse for not having voice acting. As I’ve pointed out on other occasions this shit is funny when you remember the criticism Super Mario Sunshine got back in it’s time for having voice acting to now seeing many of those same people complain some of the voice cast for Super Mario movies. It’s like can you guys make up your minds. |
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Nionel
 Posts: 632 Location: Nebraska |
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I'm not defending Nintendo for the lack of voice acting, but I feel that the reason they don't do it is because of the tremendous cost of localization.
Pokemon is a global franchise and unlike something like Final Fantasy, where Square will record audio in a couple languages while translating the script into many more, Pokemon's names and characters have names that vary wildly between different languages. That means Nintendo would need to record an audio track for every language the game is localized in, including redoing a vast majority of the Pokemon cries in each version. If localization had been streamlined in the early days of the franchise this wouldn't be an issue, but now it would be almost impossible to unify localization without making a huge number of changes to every localization in the franchise. |
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Stelman257
Posts: 370 |
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Saying the music in this game doesn't hold a candle to Sword and Shield of all games is a WILD take that I definitely don't agree with lmao, but to each their own. I absolutely adored Legends Z-A, music, characters, gameplay and all. I think it's probably one of my favourite modern Pokemon games they've ever made, and absolutely the one that's the most cohesive and has had the most love and care put into every inch of it. And it was also amazing getting to play a Pokemon game that just ran like a real video game again after Scarlet and Violets launch fiasco. Gives me faith for the future that they really did learn the right lessons from those games' failings.
I'm also the same here honestly, and I really do love my voice acting but Pokemon games don't need it. I get that some of the cinematic cutscenes have a line or two of dialogue in them that maybe looks a little weird with no VO, but 99% of Pokemon and first party Nintendo games in general are very unashamedly videogame-y in their dialogue and story presentation, and I just don't think we need to be hiring voice actors to read out goofy video gamey dialogue teaching you what the A and B buttons do. The whole "there's no voice acting!" thing rearing its head for this game just feels so odd to me when I felt Pokemon has always benefitted BECAUSE it's never had voice acting. |
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MelodyShaper
Posts: 25 |
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Pokemon fans have zero issue doing the same with using their game to attack and criticize other games. I think the real issue is people are just upset people are criticizing Pokemon. As far as the voice acting thing goes, the argument against it never held water because it essentially boiled down to "But we're Pokemon, it's different when it comes to us". Every other video game has voice acting either in one single language (JP only with text translated) or multi-language, including Nintendo staples like Legend of Zelda which added voice acting and we hear Zelda talking complete sentences. I'd rather they just say they don't want to do it than make flimsy excuses like "Well the thing with voice acting is you have to translate it into other languages and like there's a lot of dialog which means there'd be a lot of voice acting" which only makes sense if you've never played another video game in your life if you think those are unique problems specifically to Pokemon. The existence of the anime from day 1 also made it harder to believe excuses like they don't want to attribute a voice to a character and ruin people's voice in their head or something like some games try to use to say why something isn't voiced. It made more sense in the Gameboy and DS era but with being console games now the lack of VAing when they try to do complicated or dramatic scenes really shows; especially that one scene people like to post of one of the Sword and Shield gym leaders singing and rocking out and there's... complete silence. |
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FireChick
Subscriber Posts: 2764 Location: United States |
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I'm referring to the fact that you can only access the manual save by pressing three buttons simultaneously while on the title screen, and you can only do it while you're in a Pokemon Center. |
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BrazillianCara
Posts: 88 |
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I've tried looking it up, and I genuinely have no idea what you're talking about regarding the title screen.
Going to a thread about a game review to state subjective opinions as if they were facts to bash the game and developer based on short-sighted assumptions and bad faith is what I would call "trying to stir up trouble". Last edited by BrazillianCara on Tue Nov 25, 2025 8:18 am; edited 1 time in total |
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