Not 100% all side content, but essentially everything. I did not battle 1k times.
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Unpopular Opinions: Legends Z-A Edition
- Thread starter bdt2002
- Start date
Not 100% all side content, but essentially everything. I did not battle 1k times.
I think I got like...50-ish hours out of the base game after doing the side quests, screw collection and finishing the post-game story. I wish I had kept better notes. A chunk of that was probably doing the grind for Eternal Floette, so I can see it being around 40+ hours to doing everything other than that. I didn't do the 1000 (or even the 500) battles challenge.
With the DLC that ballooned to about 100 hours, with I'd say 25~30 hours taken to beat Rayquaza & finish all the new sidequests. I have spent...way too long...getting the special scans. I finished the 1000 battle challenge and still need the last one.
Which is all to say that I'e probably put about as much time into the base game as a normal Pokemon game or even a normal RPG, and excluding the Special Scan hell, a fairly normal amount of time out of the DLC.
With the DLC that ballooned to about 100 hours, with I'd say 25~30 hours taken to beat Rayquaza & finish all the new sidequests. I have spent...way too long...getting the special scans. I finished the 1000 battle challenge and still need the last one.
Which is all to say that I'e probably put about as much time into the base game as a normal Pokemon game or even a normal RPG, and excluding the Special Scan hell, a fairly normal amount of time out of the DLC.
Ok maybe pokemon. Tbh. I'm more comparing it to a game I adore in digimon story cyber sleuth:hackers memory. I mean that's kinda two games in fairness, but looking at either half o sink easily.over 100 hours and that's before any attempt at the crazy post game. Not sure how pokemon is way more of a franchise in states than other mon game, just looking at those. I wouldn't really say quality suffers for the more play, though I do have some misgivings. But to me it's important how much unique material is presented, in terms of how long it takes to beat. This game explained a complaint someone made to me Abt how pokemon is now releasing unfinished games, at the time was like wth. And this isn't just a length of game issue compared to relatively recent games, x y themselves take way longer to beat well iirc, or at least there's a real world not just one city. I did like za, but for like 5 minutes it felt like.
I like both Legends games, but for me personally I prefer Z-A by quite a lot. On the counts that you mentioned:
Story: I think Arceus and Z-A are quite similar in terms of story structure, and while it has been a while since I played Arceus (so I might not recall all the details), I feel like Z-A does more with that structure overall. For example, the Cobalt Coastlands section of Arceus’s story focuses primarily on Irida, Palina, and Iscan, with an appearance by the Miss Fortunes, and interrogates the opposition between the Diamond and Pearl Clans by looking at a pair of characters who found love for each other despite belonging to different clans. Meanwhile, in Z-A, for the Rank E section of the game, you spend most of your time with Naveen as you try to pin down Canari’s location. In the process of doing this, you meet and learn about both Tarragon and Mani, and also get an early cameo from Gwynn to establish her relationship with Canari (which comes into play in the next Rank’s story).
I feel like, to speak somewhat broadly, Arceus’s story is much more sparse and isolated, whereas Z-A’s is much more bustling and interconnected. Quite a lot like the respective locations of Hisui and Lumiose themselves. Another way that this manifests is that for each chapter in Z-A, you work with a close ally; usually a member of Team MZ, which helps you get to know them better. Whereas in Arceus, although you do have allies (Rei/Akari and Laventon), you spend most of the time conducting surveys and investigating the story on your own, while Rei/Akari are off-screen and Laventon is staying at the base camp.
I don’t think one approach is necessarily better than the other as a whole, but I do think Z-A’s allows it to flesh out more characters more fully, which personally, I prefer. I feel like I know Taunie, Naveen, and Lida far better than I knew Akari.
The games’s respective macro-plots (frenzied nobles and your place in the Jubilife community vs. Rogue Megas and the Z-A Royale) are both solid and do interesting things. I don’t think I really lean more toward one or the other. As a someone who has been a big Lysandre fan for the longest time, Z-A obviously has a very special appeal to me, but I think the culmination of Arceus, in which Kamado banishes you from the village you’ve spent the whole game becoming a part of is a very bold swing that Z-A doesn’t really have.*
* Though I wonder if Flare Nouveau revealing that kindly old AZ built a mass-murder machine and killed a nation’s worth of people and Pokémon to revive Floette hits harder if you haven’t already played X & Y.
Fights: I’m gonna be a bit more mean to Arceus here because, uh… what fights? Trainer battles are so sparse in the game that I feel like there’s hardly anything to sink your teeth into, and wild battles can be a slog if you get ganged up on by multiple Pokémon, as you wait for each one to make a move. The turn-based mechanics are a weakness in that regard as you can spend several turns sitting there doing nothing (and neither are your opponents, half the time).
Both games lack Abilities, which is unfortunate, but Z-A at least brings back held items to deepen your options, and has plenty of Trainers and battling challenges to test those options against.
I think Rogue Mega Battles supersede the boss nobles of Arceus very easily — not only are there far more of them, with far more diverse challenges, but the battles against Rogue Megas are much more seamless by virtue of integrating your Pokémon for the entire fight instead of transitioning back and forth from the “pelt them with balms” phase to the “send out a Pokémon for turn-based battling” phase.
I’d also contend that major battles in Z-A are treated with a lot more gravitas than the majority of the battles in Z-A, as a consequence of Trainers being such a nascent concept in Arceus’s time period. Trainers like Corbeau and Canari, each with their own battle themes and signature Mega Evolutions, feel a lot more high-profile than, uh, Melli, or one of the Miss Fortunes. I feel like Kamado and Volo are the only really solid Trainer battles in Arceus.
Lore: I feel pretty neutral on this part. I think both games have a lot of interesting lore, they just approach it in different ways. Arceus is oftentimes a lot more implicit, and has more intriguing implications by virtue of being a distant prequel giving us a look at a time in the Pokémon world that we’ve never seen. Z-A on the other hand is more about presenting a vision for the future and is laser-focused on expanding on the biggest central conflict of X & Y’s lore.
In terms of deeper themes, I think both games also have a lot of interesting things to say. This thread is mainly about the themes of Z-A, but also talks brief about some of the ideas that Arceus is most concerned with. Personally I think both games do quite well for themselves in this regard.
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There is no justifiable reason that this game doesn't have abilities in it. That's my unpopular opinion.
That is unpopular how exactly? Has to be one of the most common opinions around...
True lol. But everyone I talk to seems keen on the idea that abilities aren't in this game somehow.