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Unpopular Opinions: Legends Z-A Edition

Coronis said:
Its ok because S/V outstrips them both.



Is this 24 hours including all the side content? Or just the main storyline?


Watch them give it Huge Power instead, to spite you. Starmie too goofy to be pure.
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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.
 
R_N said:
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.
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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.
 
Antihaxxer said:
What ? Arceus is the best Pokemon game on Switch ! Some functionalities are done better on Z-A but otherwise, the story, the fight, the lore are excellent. What is the lore in Z-A ? I've just finished playing Arceus for the 3rd time (doing DLC quests right now), I don't know if I want to replay again Z-A !

PS : I like Z-A but Arceus is better.
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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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This is both an unpopular (Z-A) opinion and a little thing that annoys me personally, but it's been over 3 months out and I still think the marketing campaign for Mega Malamar makes very little sense to me especially after Z-A has released, so earlier today I wrote a spirited post in another thread about the most EVIL characters in fiction that I may as well crosspost over here for a more relevant target audience. I was considering editing this around to adjust tone or add in other mentions of things like Emma's role in the story, (also I know that there's alternate Octolock dialogue for Malamar in one DLC mission), but I feel like I should wait until I eventually personally complete Z-A to give my overall thoughts there, so this is just some raw all-fresh natural slander without touchups. No offense to any non-brainwashed fans of (Mega) Malamar if you just think it's cool.

(The OP of such thread has been edited since, but for context this post was mostly playing on the original wording and its second rule, and also the concept of "evilscaling" in general but that's laid out in the first sentence.)

salakdefirst said:
Top 10 MOST Evil Villains/Characters In Fiction

When mentioning characters, you must follow these rules:

-All characters mentioned would require justification for answer.

-Character had to have done that action because they felt like it-no other motive. Just that they woke up today and chose murder or something.
EX: Thanos cannot be mentioned as he did these actions to combat against over population---which he witnessed first hand on his home planet.
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doipy hooves said:
In my personal opinion, powerscaling intelligence/evilness is completely subjective and also OP didn't even list a top 10 to debate over, but trying to think of an example specifically under the OP's rules, I have to say that Mega Malamar (specifically from Pokemon: Legends Z-A's prerelease marketing campaign) is one of the more evil fictional characters in recent memory with no actual stated motive in its story to date, at least in terms of actual impact it had on the world and also how it annoys me personally. I mostly say this because Mega Malamar had a very notable real world impact based on a shaky premise that I heavily disagreed with (you could argue Three Houses can also rank up there but those characters at least have intended motives enough for people to side with/argue over to no end and also I am not really invested in the non-gameplay discourse).

In September 2025 (just a month from Z-A's release), the Pokemon Company cooked up a marketing campaign called "My Friend Malamar" (detailed on Bulbapedia here), which somehow took the internet by storm, seeming to actually influence the online masses and forced them (in-character) into thinking that (base) Malamar was their friend, leading up to a set of videos in the format of in-universe news footage revealing that Mega Malamar was rewriting peoples' personalities in Lumiose City to become artificial followers who can only think about Malamar at any given moment, paralleling the real life Malamar marketing campaign. Again, there is no explained motive, but the Legends Z-A website entries claim that Mega Malamar is intelligent, haughty, and notably difficult to interact with, viewing all others as pawns in its world and even hypnotizing its own trainer if it disagrees with an order. This evokes a lot of supervillain behaviour, but for all its boasting it doesn't really display any feats of intelligence to me, more just brute force and overconfidence while literally dismissing the feelings of others.

By all means, the ZA Marketing Malamar is made out to be the pure essence of power-hungry evil in the Pokemon world with nothing from its perspective to sympathize with, and yet people gladly join in its fun and games because I suppose being evil and mind controlled to have no personality is simple enough to play along with, and/or perhaps just to follow along and fit in while everyone else you know seems to be involved in the latest online trend, preying on the fear of missing out. Of all the contentious additions in ZA, Mega Malamar represents the lowest of the low of industry plants to me purely because of all of this unwarranted attention.

At the time I was a major detractor of Mega Malamar on the forums even before the game's release, pointing out that mega evolution had really nothing to do with the plot which could have been performed by base Malamar (and which the real-world marketing highlighted with the fact that everyone was playing along with a trait that base Malamar already had), in contrast to the previous in-universe mega campaigns (Mega Victreebel, Hawlucha) highlighting the bond between trainer and Pokemon to reach new heights or make up for established shortcomings of the base form like showing off in battle. Meanwhile, the concept of Mega Malamar itself requires you to suspend your disbelief and assume that base Malamar, described as having the most hypnotic powers of all Pokemon, is incapable of "rewriting personalities" like Mega Malamar does, but also simultaneously believe that these powers do exist in the world and Mega Malamar is just more capable of them. Conversely if you can believe that Mega Malamar is capable of pulling off the actions in the Z-A marketing campaign in-universe, there's no reason not to believe that base Malamar is incapable of the same thing.

Building on an analogy I made at the time, it's like if they made a marketing campaign all about Machamp having 4 arms and why having 4 arms is so cool, and then they reveal Mega Machamp still having 4 arms but also being vaguely "smarter" and also being able to punch 1000 times in 2 seconds (which is a fact already in base Machamp's pokedex entries so you have to believe that's still impressive or that base Machamp is less capable). And then in the actual games, Machamp having 4 arms doesn't really affect its battle gameplay at all, which is already true but at least you have to respect its beefy Attack stat and unique Dynamic Punches. Unfortunately the gameplay-story inconsistencies just get even worse for Mega Malamar after all the artificial buildup.

When Legends Z-A released, it would turn out that Mega Malamar had notably bad stat allocation which didn't particularly benefit from Z-A's gameplay mechanics, in which it had no ability to take advantage of its former gimmicks, and wasn't represented in a rogue boss battle with unique enemy attack patterns. Even Hypnosis is still just a status move and in Z-A it doesn't even put you to sleep, just makes you drowsy. In fact, Mega Malamar has much less relevance to the plot of Legends Z-A than you would expect (a major character uses one in battle just to reference XY and is not mentioned otherwise), not even being the intended star of any side missions (contrary to the marketing campaign's proposed plot of being a villain causing chaos in the city), and the player can't even look forward to using it in the base game campaign because it has one of the worst availabilities of the newly introduced megas, with its mega stone only obtainable at the very tail end of the main story (and not even given to you for a dramatic story reason like the other endgame mega stones, it's just added to the optional shop with no fanfare in the middle of the endgame story).

To conclude, imagine little Timmy getting Legends Z-A for Halloween or Christmas, maybe with a fresh Switch 2 to boot, hearing about Malamar being such a popular mon online for a few weeks and building up anticipation throughout the entire story and suite of boss battles, only to end up disappointed that Mega Malamar is actually barely in the game. Now I'd say that's a pretty evil thing to do to a kid for no real reason or gain.

tl;dr: Mega Malamar ends up as a fraud in both story and gameplay, especially after its whole successful marketing campaign doubling down on it being a pure evil villain, and yet it actually seemed to influence real life people into believing its contrarian lore with no substance. There may be more terrible characters within fiction, but the uniquely real-life combination of being an industry plant featuring in false advertising (relative to its role in the actual Z-A game) is one of the more evil things a fictional character can successfully cause (while also being relatively in-character and as part of officially promoted media), in my opinion.
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Hyper Cutter said:
I'm really disappointed the game didn't add any new Pokemon, the way PLA did. I know they wanted to focus on Mega Evolution (not a big fan of that either), but would a few Kalosian forms, new evolutions, or actual new Pokemon have killed them?
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Given the number of new Mega Evolutions (around 20, double it comes the DLC), it might, given their tight deadlines and rumors of actually two years of development per game… though the Mega Gauge helped with turning the “one Mega per team” into “one Mega per team at a time”, something that I don’t mind seeing in the upcoming Champions game.

At least we know GF clearly want to stay true with “Mega Evolution going beyond an evolution can do”, this time with not every Pokémon forcedly Mega Evolving into a Rogue Mega by the excessive Mega Energy because they do not have a Mega form at all, at the very least. The Mega Dimension, Hyperspace Lumiose, might have a different kind of Mega Energy which is why we don’t have Mega Raichu X and Y in the base game but in the titular DLC instead.

One of the reasons you see Dedenne as a guard over, say, any Pokémon capable of Mega Evolving, is exactly that; it cannot Mega Evolve, thus no risk of becoming a Rogue Mega Pokémon, not even in Hyperspace Lumiose. If the “electronic sacs not fully developed” in the SV PokéDex is not expanded here, then there’s a non-zero chance it will receive a new regular evolution or a supermechanic form similar to Mega Evolution in a future game.
 
Megas absolutely did take the design space usually reserved for new Pokemon; you can see similar aspects with megas, regionals and so on over the past several generations

It's the return of Mega Evolution so I don't blame them for going all-in on it, rather than a L:A styled mix of primarily regionals + a few new ones, since they likely won't get another injection for a while.
 
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