Paras Syndrome: Weirdos Thriving in Pokemon Legends: Z-A's Four Player Brawls

By TheMantyke. Released: 2025/12/13.
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PLZA Brawls Art

Art by a blue banana.

Pokemon as a Super Smash Bros. free-for-all is a wild thing for Game Freak to drop in our laps. I can't put it down.

Pokemon Legends: Z-A's revamp of the old RPG battle system to a live-action multiplayer smackdown has turned the series's typical player-versus-player affairs into fast-paced, three-minute games of nonsense. These cartridge-exclusive battles are like a fusion of Capcom's Power Stone mixed with Magic: The Gathering's Commander format. They're live-action arena brawls with extra room to prepare your own game pieces and express yourself through your unique elemental animal tactics.

Make no mistake, it all comes out still very Pokemon. All our old Pokemon systems are here and among the most accessible they've ever been: Natures; EVs; base stats; and even IVs showed up, as much as IVs don't deserve it. It's all familiar, but with a fresh distortion to make it all look half-right. Sure, Garchomp's there, kicking butt as mandated. Skarmory is... Slamming into things with Swords Dance-boosted Brave Bird, okay, I've seen that before. God, don't look at Aegislash. No one deserves to see a loved one in this state. It's like an American looking at the Cyrillic alphabet: some of the characters are familiar, others look completely foreign, and one can only ponder what the jolly backwards R is doing not in the center of the Toys "R" Us logo.

It's a wonderful new experience that's seen a whole gaggle of Pokemon completely reframed. Before we dive into that though, let's catch up with some of the main landmarks on how this bizarro world works:

We've already seen some absolute nonsense. This smattering of alternative mechanics has resulted in some really weird faces not only showing viability but rising to the top. Today, we'll be covering a whole host of unexpected faces seen online, both metagame staples and wild cards executing gimmicks you can only see here, in the chaos of a Pokemon battle royale.

Quick aside: if you somehow haven't figured this out by now, this article is NOT about the Pokemon Showdown! PLZA OU community mod. This is for the four-player smackdowns you can only play on your cartridge. Please do not embarrass yourself using these in a simulator in a metagame where they climb trees as well as fish. You will not receive any high-level tips on Pokemon strategy to top a ladder here. You will only feel your blood pumping when commanding your little jerks to join the enormous death dogpile.

LARGE AND IN CHARGE

In my nearly 20 years of playing competitive Pokemon, I never thought I'd say that "Charge is a serious driving force behind metagame viability." I forced that Charge Zapdos Dynamax stuff from Gen 8 out of my head; something deep inside me had to reject that bad Nasty Plot could be good. Yet, here we are, where Charge is a big contributor to what does and does not see play. An entire type has unlocked a new play style: sneaking around like a little bandit with a dollar sign sack making little tip-toe piano noises until you see the opportunity for a complete and utter robbery.

Let's look at the thickest thieves, with the thickest first:

Ampharos

My god, is it nice to have Ampharos dominate a metagame. Finally we get a quality Pokemon leading the charge instead of some ugly genie deformed into a flying cat. Ampharos hits different if you're like a 30-year-old who imprinted hard enough on GSC that you're still reading about Pokemon on the internet today. It's a nice blink back to the days of Generation 2 when your powerhouse thunder sheep was the envy of Crystal players and when you whispered to your schoolyard about the keys to the ultimate weapon: that Typhlosion could learn Thunder Punch.

Ampharos is one of the biggest benefactors of PLZA's mechanics. Speed as a stat is almost completely irrelevant, only slightly reducing cooldown times between your attacks. Thunderbolt translated to real-time battles majestically, turning into a long-ranged homing attack your opponent's Pokemon can't dodge without sources of invincibility. Lastly, Charge is an absolutely ridiculous move when the typical bounds of Pokemon battling are removed. No, you're not wasting a turn doubling Ampharos's power for one attack while your opponent gets carte blanche options. You're charging up an attack while everyone's ignoring you for more plausible targets because your sheep with dual screens up can eat a whole damn Golden Corral.

Boosting effects are hard to find in this game, and Charge's double-power boost cracks things open to damage levels more akin to what we would expect in the RPG combat system. You don't need to engage with your opponents' Pokemon immediately, no. Lock on to one of them and make Ampharos set up a screen or two and a Charge. Then, waddle through the arena with your chunky idiot sheep until someone dares to let their Pokemon drop below 60% HP or have a Water-type out. Strike out of nowhere as disrespectfully as a Sydney Sleeper Sniper for your knockout, and then do it all again. Against anything but Ground-types, Ampharos is a point-stealing machine: unstoppable, unphasable, unshearable.

Stunfisk

One of the funniest new important traits for real-time battles is your Pokemon's size. Like, not its weight for stuff like Low Kick or Heavy Slam, but how actually physically large it is meandering around the battlefield. Your Pokemon's hitbox matters. You know, like a real video game.

Stunfisk doesn't need evasion to dodge things. It can physically duck under them. I cannot describe to you how robbed I felt watching my alpha Dragonite get its Aerial Ace low-profiled by a Stunfisk. That's this thing's niche. It's a sniping Electric-type that's a pain to hit if your Pokemon has got the wrong moves. Hell, Earth Power itself is a great sniping move too, with similar homing properties that can be hard to see happening until it's too late. Thank God Dig homes in on targets and Earthquake has a big area-of-effect hitbox; otherwise we might be having serious debates on the best way to smack this awful little flounder.

Stunfisk also comes with the excellent upside of actually being physically hard to see. Stunfisk is so flat, you genuinely can't view it easily at a quick scan of the battlefield. Moving through grass is a legitimate tactic so people don't know where the hell your Pokemon even is while you make it snipe things. What a runaway flavor win for the Trap Pokemon. It's like I'm really jogging on an active minefield.

Pikachu

Yes, I am dead serious. If your opponents do not respect Pikachu, their Pokemon are going to get obliterated. With maximum investment Pikachu has an effective Attack stat of 234. That's only 10 points less than max attack Mega Garchomp, and Pikachu gets a 120-Base Power move with a wide-AoE tackle animation that can double in power. If an opponent lets this thing set up a Charge and doesn't switch into a Ground-type, the most marketable Pokemon alive will turn something into a pavement skid.

Do not bother with coverage except for Play Rough for the omnipresent Garchomp. Iron Tail is impossible to hit versus a Xerneas moving the slightest amount. Pikachu should be one-tapping the deer with Volt Tackle instead. Just use Thunderbolt in addition so that it can hit with double damage off a lethal 204 Special Attack. Protect is an underexplored option in PLZA PvP; it's very good when it's good, but it's choked out of a lot of movesets due to coverage desires, as well as frustrating latency issues. Pikachu really wants the move though, both because it's made of wet paper and because every Ground-type move has a big long windup that lets Pikachu dodge.

I haven't even mentioned I'm giving you the very basic max / max EV spread to get you started. If you're completely lost in the sauce, you can even fiddle around with HP and Special Defense to let Pikachu survive Xerneas's +1 Moonblast while maintaining a maxed-out attacking stat. The damage formula changes have been very kind to Pikachu, cushioning its normally hard life while allowing it to still blow things back. Thank God. It's almost been a whole 50 minutes since Pikachu was a key selling point of a Pokemon product.

BEAM MACHINES

Now that attacks are actual physical things that occupy three-dimensional space, we have a new genre of powerful attacks: beams. These attacks not only pack their traditional RPG power but also come hurtling out of your Pokemon's face in a big long hitbox that occupies a giant chunk of the stage. If Charge Electric-types are snipers, these beam machines are tossing live grenades into piles of Pokemon squabbling it out, writing fresh obituaries one energy blast at a time.

Glaceon

Glaceon's prowess in PLZA's multiplayer by now has been heard far and wide. It turns out the long-mocked genre of slow, frail Ice-types are pretty good in an environment where Speed doesn't matter and they can just physically haul ass away from the stuff trying to down them.

Let Glaceon spam the most powerful Ice Beam in the game like it's Dr. Eggman in a Snapcube dub. Not only does Freeze-Dry have its coveted Water-type demolishing property, but it's also an area-of-effect attack that lets Glaceon walk into a pile of brawling idiots and pick up a KO or three. Shadow Ball helps it deal with Metagross and Chandelure. That said, if Shadow Ball's hitting with its lackluster speed in real-time combat, Glaceon's probably about to get smacked hard. That's why you should consider throwing away its Steel-type matchup altogether and be the coolest kid in the 4th grade by clicking one of the biggest, baddest Hyper Beams around. The first moment you see Glaceon fire one of these bad boys into a crowd and see your KOs tick up two or three times hits like a drug.

Pyroar

Yes. YES! Finally, Game Freak corrected its greatest wrong. The coolest move in the game, Hyper Beam, is finally restored to its rightful place as a non-embarrassing multiplayer attack. Yes, I know about Normalium Z and Max Strike, shut up. Those are good moves and boring moves. They're not Hyper Beam. I don't want to see my 50-foot-tall Porygon-Z use some weirdo strike attack. I want to see my flaming lion sum up all its strength and wreck my ears with that Game Boy noise and use goddamn HYPER BEAM!

That all said, Pyroar is still Pyroar, a being synonymous with disappointment, but it does have its ticket punched to one of the strongest STAB Hyper Beams in the game. The game plan is simple: bring it out while the Steel-types are harassing Xerneas, maybe set up a Work Up, and then let its enormous attacks get a KO before the Garchomp comes out. Heat Wave came out the other end of real-time battles as a beautiful giant death cloud of fire. The Plus Move version is especially huge and very hard for most Pokemon to escape. Flamethrower and Fire Blast had no such luck, as they're slow, awkward, easy-to-dodge attacks; don't bother with them.

Make no mistake: this is a viable Pokemon, but not a good Pokemon. You're better off using Chandelure or Delphox most of the time, as both offer the same Xerneas-proofing and Steel-type slaughter without being Pyroar. This one is just a shoutout to all my Hyper Beam junkies. Lance would be proud.

SCOPE DOPES

The generation 6 revamps of critical hit mechanics, taking a +3 boost from both Focus Energy and Scope Lens to a full 100% crit rate, have long excited Trainers' whirling minds as they tinker with ways to make bad sets. PLZA finally rewards these devotees by compressing every stat boost to only ever be a single stage. There's no more boosting your Pokemon's stats up six stages and going insane. Your Pokemon get one quick boost on a timer. Focus Energy + Scope Lens gives a Pokemon a way around that with a second boost and even lets it bypass dual screens while doing so. Enjoy the most embarrassing Double Dance the world's ever seen; you'll still be rewarded with things falling over. Your opponent will be stuck contemplating their life decisions, waiting to respawn and seeing that their Xerneas was KOed by some Route 3 garbage.

Kangaskhan

Just as in our world, kangaroos adore beating the absolute Christ out of unsuspecting deer. When a brawl breaks out and everyone's distracted, let Kangaskhan snag a Work Up, sneak in a Focus Energy, and get ready to fire off its nuclear Giga Impact. If Kangaskhan makes contact with a non-Steel-type, congrats, it probably evaporated. Even a Xerneas behind dual screens is done for. Fire Punch or Earthquake gives coverage for the myriad Steel-types occupying Kangaskhan's niche of deer hunting. Fire Punch hits Skarmory, and Earthquake lets it hit other Steel-types and that one Diancie you'll see online like once every thirty games. Honestly though, probably just rock with Double-Edge to get the most out of your Kangaskhan. I'd rather be walled standing than live kneeling.

Camerupt

Camerupt isn't Double Dancing, but it's the only real source of Focus Energy-boosted ranged attacks in this game with a respectable Special Attack stat, aside from Emboar, which doesn't actually resist Fairy. Thus, the classic tradition of out-damaging your own Mega lives on through our Bactrian buddy.

Camerupt loves the uptick of Steel-types and its Fairy resistance so much in the world of Xerneas. Heat Wave is phenomenal in PLZA, a big AoE whirlwind that can checkmate slower Pokemon from across the map. Boosting that power and making it lethal is even better. Don't forget to occasionally enhance it as a Plus Move to amp up the range and damage of Camerupt's mortar shots even further. Earth Power is helpful coverage that lets Camerupt bully the other Fire-types, and Overheat's low cast time and high damage can make anything that approaches it while boosted at risk of suddenly exploding. Overheat-style attacks with a Scope Lens and Focus Energy... It's almost like Kingdra is still alive.

Just like, probably pack an Ampharos both to give you the leeway of dual screens and an easy answer to cocky Water-types. Please smoke people with your camel responsibly.

Ariados

"O-Ohh it has Sticky Web a-and Toxic Spikes. Maybe if I-I give it a F-Focus Sash I can lead a-and-" No. Stop right now. Unlearn everything you know. We do not hazard lead here. We do not desperately eek out feeble niches. We do not strategize. We simply ball.

Do as your kangaroos have done before and make Ariados set up its Double Dance. Then, let it rip and teach the people. Show them that even if Ariados's base stats might be bad by Violet City, its typing is a dime a dozen, and its inclusion in this game came from all of the negative two Ariados fans, it can still dunk on 'em. Let it charge ahead with Megahorn and fly like a bird, like the world's worst Mega Skarmory. Teach the deer god its folly and obliterate it with a quick-cast time Poison Jab. Who cares if the next light breeze slaughters Ariados after? You earned that Bug-Type User title to stick on your Trainer card. In a sea of Trainers with profile pictures of them kissing Gwynn or just a shot of Emma's ass, you stand alone as a Bug-type master.

I guess you can also have the Bug-type user title as well as a profile picture of kissing Gwynn. I can't stop you. I have no dominion over yuri.

Watchog

Watchog is worse than Kangaskhan in almost every possible way. Plus Move Giga Impact with a critical hit is a slim roll to OHKO Xerneas. There is nothing so absolutely infuriating as landing your Exodia combo only to see a sliver of health left while Watchog's holding extra long reload timers. You might as well give up the Scope Lens and go for a Silk Scarf or Normal Gem and just go whole hog on the coin flip chance to crit for the OHKO.

With all that said, if Watchog lands the OHKO on Xerneas, it's over. The result of the match doesn't matter. You stole your opponent's soul IRL forever. There are few greater joys. When the word "pwned" was invented 20 years ago, it foretold on sacred whispers of this fabled event, of a meerkat staring into the face of life incarnate and clicking Giga Impact. You've got to try it. You've got to live. When the hell else are you going to use this thing? Go full HogChamp.

SEASONS PAST AND FUTURE

This article was written during Season 2 of Ranked Battles, and much to my personal frustration updating this article with relevant information, Gamefreak keeps trampling over themselves adding stuff to the game mode. Season 3 added Zygarde to a yawn, Mewtwo a week later to a legitimate impact, and now all the DLC moves before everything's uprooted on the 18th with the whole ass DLC.

Looking towards the future, as DLC looms nearer, not all of these Pokemon will survive, especially not the ones named Watchog. Still, their stories are so delightful, it would be a crime to let them pass without a moment of preservation. Know that whatever happens next, Pikachu and Ariados had their day, and I smiled when the mightiest Pokemon in the game fell to them.

I'd like to take some time to talk to the sort of person I think might really like playing PLZA's multiplayer instead of just reading about it. I know there are a few of you out there who enjoy observing competitive Pokemon but don't actually play it all that much. The collector diehards, the shiny hunters, and our gamers with just good old-fashion competitive anxiety. I know we have this crop of folks who collect a lot of cool Pokemon but don't seem to use them very often. Some people, myself included, just have that brain type where you feel like your opponent was bad and made obvious mistakes when you win and feel like you're totally outclassed when you lose. I can't say how you specifically will enjoy these things, but as someone burdened with these scenarios in the past, I've really come to love this mode and its more laid-back nature. Gaining piles of in-game rewards also helps for my Apricorn-poisoned brain.

If you just want some fun or if you want a big experience where nothing serious matters and winning is a pleasant surprise against three other players, but your decisions before and during the game contributed to your win, give this mode a try. It's a great way to put all those shinies you've accumulated sitting on a bench for days on end to the test. Come check out Orange Island's Pokemon Legends: Z-A section and join the conversation. Just check your sightline before coming over so you don't get sniped by a sheep.

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