The Next Open World Pokémon Game - 5 Things It NEEDS
222Pokemon Legends Arceus is out, and much to the surprise of a lot of people who had all but given up on the franchise after a decade of disappointing entries, it is actually really good.
Not flawless, mind you – there are obvious points of improvement to be made here with the game. But without question, this is an incredibly fun playing game that is incredibly well designed and makes several long overdue steps to bring Pokemon games to parity with many other modern titles, and rekindle a lot of the magic that has been lost over the last few entries.
It’s an incredibly thorough and comprehensive overhaul of the series formula – almost nothing about the games hasn’t been touched and rethought of in some radical way here. From core tenets such as catching Pokemon, battling Pokemon, and evolving Pokemon, to how stats work, how traversal works, how items and resources work, how your inventory works, how the story progression and map layout work, how the Pokedex works, how moves, status conditions, Pokemon stats and builds, all work, everything has been torn down and built back up in a fresh new context here. T
he result is a gamed that feels like such a dramatic modernization of the long running and beloved property, that after Arceus, it will actually feel extremely difficult to go back to the traditional style of Pokemon games – these open world kinds of games need to be the future of the franchise moving forward.