This post contains heavy unmarked spoilers for Legends Z-A, including the post-game epilogue.
I am using Taunie to refer to the Z-A rival: that’s the version I played with, I don’t know if dialogue/animation choices vary with Urbain, and besides, it flows better than saying “the rival” over and over.
The Legends series is one of my favourite new additions to the Pokemon canon. Performing a “remake” by way of making a completely different style of game is a very refreshing way to revisit old territory, without doing the 1:1 recreation of BDSP or the ultra-HD remastering of AAA games.
One of the major themes of Arceus was nostalgia. Ironically achieved by sending the main character into the past, the whole game is about trying to recapture a place, a time, a feeling you once loved but no longer recognize and is perhaps even now hostile to you. I’ve written about this in terms of its soundtrack, but the entire game evokes a deep sadness about missing what once was.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Arceus released just as the children who grew up on Gen 4 were entering the workforce and probably aging out of their childhood obsession, as the Pokemon franchise itself was facing increased scrutiny following the SWSH release cycle. My first argument, and a lot of this essay is precipiced on this axiom, is that the Legends series is also meant as metacommentary. In the case of Arceus, the resolution is not that the player returns to the present, but that they continue to live and make Hisui their home. You can’t go back to how things were – you can’t go back to the 2000s and 2D graphics and hiding your DS under the sheets – but you can build something beautiful in the here and now.
(If you question that Game Freak would put these types of themes in their games for kids, I'd argue that even if unintentional, the reading is still perfectly valid. These ideas do not materialize out of thin air, absent from any context.)
Z-A also has important meta-context to it. XY was a transition to 3D that many found off-putting, and arguably started the critical slide of the franchise as a whole. The games have notorious amounts of unreleased and cut content: most Mega Stones are locked to post-game, Zygarde completely lacks any lore, Eternal Floette and its Light of Ruin were never made available to catch. It was almost as if there was a third version, a Pokemon Z that would provide closure to these elements…and then there never was, until over a decade later. Now, Z-A looks back at XY and the problems it left behind, and asks: how do I answer for what my parents did?
This is the theme of Z-A: debt. Specifically, someone else’s debt, debt passed on from generation to generation. While XY examines cycles of life and death, Z-A examines how one cycle can burden the next, and the resolve to leave behind something better.
On a textual level, this motif is repeatedly brought up. In the most literal sense, the core conflict of the game is about a group of young people being tasked with stopping a cataclysm started long ago by a 3000-year-old man who is no longer capable of facing it himself. It is quite literally their problem now. They didn’t ask for this, they weren’t responsible for it, but now they have to address it. While this very much feels like a climate change allegory first and foremost, on a broader level climate change is the new generation facing the consequences of what the previous generations sowed.
This is not the only example. A major subplot of Z-A involves the protagonist trying to resolve a massive debt unknowingly racked up by Taunie – while not a cross-generational debt, it feels like a primer for the theme as a whole. And Taunie quite literally carries something of her parents’ at all times: her deceased mother’s jacket, literally weighing on her shoulders.
Grisham and Griselle are survivors, people born into Team Flare’s aristocratic death cult and groomed to be their foot soldiers. They had no choice in the matter, and yet when Team Flare fell they were ostracized from society all the same. But at least they are doing better in their revival of Flare, no longer wanting to commit omnicide.
Canari’s parents are seemingly not in the picture at all: instead, her grandfather Tarragon is her caretaker. There is an interesting inversion of the theme here where Tarragon takes on the burden of live performances for Canari. What will she do when Tarragon passes on, and she inherits his business – and has to actually do public appearances herself? She didn’t ask to be the granddaughter of a construction empire’s boss, but she’ll have to take the good with the bad.
Corbeau and the Rust Syndicate are debt collectors, although (amusingly) altruistic ones. Lebanne lost once to Jacinthe and is now obliged to work for her in a maid outfit. NPCs worry about paying rent, a particularly interesting concern in the context of the anti-homeless benches littering the city and Wild Zones encroaching on people's living spaces. Everybody owes someone something in Lumiose.
Even the gameplay elements are attempts to address things that went “wrong” with XY. The blatantly overpowered gift Lucario is (hilariously) bait-and-switched with an Absol that, while strong, can’t solo carry you through the whole game. Zygarde gains an entire arc instead of hiding in a cave, and thank goodness you don’t need to collect 99 cells. Fan-favourite Mega Evolution is at the forefront more than ever, and the player has massive freedom to build their team with their favourite Megas. The friend group feels like an earnestly nice team that was already friends with each other (and can actually battle), instead of XY’s infamously underpowered and underexplored group. And you even get Floette-Eternal eventually!
All of this leads back to the finale, stopping the aforementioned crisis brought by an old man. The final cutscene has some birth symbolism that is honestly pretty on-the-nose for a Nintendo game: Zygarde deploys a massive phallic cannon, and uses it to attack a gigantic flower. In the aftermath of that explosion of light, Taunie emerges from the rubble. She’s cradling Floette like a newborn baby (user Esserise has noted that Mega Floette’s connection to its flower resembles an umbilical cord) and shares an emotional fist-bump with the protagonist. The cycle of life continues.
Soon after, so too does the cycle of death continue. AZ dies peacefully, able to rest at last, and two people inherit his legacy. Lysandre becomes what he once was: an alphabetically named loner doomed to a 3000-year life of regret. But this time, to our knowledge, there is no second weapon waiting to doom the next generation. He sees the beauty of the world and is set to use his eternity to bring about peace. (And it is worth noting that his post-game fight is legitimately difficult in comparison to AZ’s underwhelming post-credits battle, with a beautiful, optimistic reprise of his theme.)
Taunie inherits what AZ wanted to be his legacy: a growing hotel, his beloved Floette, and his wish to expand the Z-A Royale. It is the second of Taunie’s elder figures to have left her a close personal possession. In the epilogue, we find out that Taunie’s mother was responsible for developing the hologram technology taking over the city, a conflicted legacy considering the positive and negative consequences of that invention. After failing to respond to the Ange threat, Jett resigns, and leaves Quasartico to Taunie - her granddaughter. The legacy of two generations now rests on her shoulders. They trust her with it.
Z-A closes its main story with the knowledge that we can never be completely free from what those before us did. The shadow of legacy is inescapable, the good and the bad alike. It’s pretty obvious that there are regrets about XY, and Z-A spends much of its playtime atoning for them. But it also argues that we have a say in what we leave behind for those that come after us. Maybe, just maybe, this generation can leave behind something better.
I am using Taunie to refer to the Z-A rival: that’s the version I played with, I don’t know if dialogue/animation choices vary with Urbain, and besides, it flows better than saying “the rival” over and over.
The Legends series is one of my favourite new additions to the Pokemon canon. Performing a “remake” by way of making a completely different style of game is a very refreshing way to revisit old territory, without doing the 1:1 recreation of BDSP or the ultra-HD remastering of AAA games.
One of the major themes of Arceus was nostalgia. Ironically achieved by sending the main character into the past, the whole game is about trying to recapture a place, a time, a feeling you once loved but no longer recognize and is perhaps even now hostile to you. I’ve written about this in terms of its soundtrack, but the entire game evokes a deep sadness about missing what once was.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Arceus released just as the children who grew up on Gen 4 were entering the workforce and probably aging out of their childhood obsession, as the Pokemon franchise itself was facing increased scrutiny following the SWSH release cycle. My first argument, and a lot of this essay is precipiced on this axiom, is that the Legends series is also meant as metacommentary. In the case of Arceus, the resolution is not that the player returns to the present, but that they continue to live and make Hisui their home. You can’t go back to how things were – you can’t go back to the 2000s and 2D graphics and hiding your DS under the sheets – but you can build something beautiful in the here and now.
(If you question that Game Freak would put these types of themes in their games for kids, I'd argue that even if unintentional, the reading is still perfectly valid. These ideas do not materialize out of thin air, absent from any context.)
Z-A also has important meta-context to it. XY was a transition to 3D that many found off-putting, and arguably started the critical slide of the franchise as a whole. The games have notorious amounts of unreleased and cut content: most Mega Stones are locked to post-game, Zygarde completely lacks any lore, Eternal Floette and its Light of Ruin were never made available to catch. It was almost as if there was a third version, a Pokemon Z that would provide closure to these elements…and then there never was, until over a decade later. Now, Z-A looks back at XY and the problems it left behind, and asks: how do I answer for what my parents did?
This is the theme of Z-A: debt. Specifically, someone else’s debt, debt passed on from generation to generation. While XY examines cycles of life and death, Z-A examines how one cycle can burden the next, and the resolve to leave behind something better.
On a textual level, this motif is repeatedly brought up. In the most literal sense, the core conflict of the game is about a group of young people being tasked with stopping a cataclysm started long ago by a 3000-year-old man who is no longer capable of facing it himself. It is quite literally their problem now. They didn’t ask for this, they weren’t responsible for it, but now they have to address it. While this very much feels like a climate change allegory first and foremost, on a broader level climate change is the new generation facing the consequences of what the previous generations sowed.
This is not the only example. A major subplot of Z-A involves the protagonist trying to resolve a massive debt unknowingly racked up by Taunie – while not a cross-generational debt, it feels like a primer for the theme as a whole. And Taunie quite literally carries something of her parents’ at all times: her deceased mother’s jacket, literally weighing on her shoulders.
Grisham and Griselle are survivors, people born into Team Flare’s aristocratic death cult and groomed to be their foot soldiers. They had no choice in the matter, and yet when Team Flare fell they were ostracized from society all the same. But at least they are doing better in their revival of Flare, no longer wanting to commit omnicide.
Canari’s parents are seemingly not in the picture at all: instead, her grandfather Tarragon is her caretaker. There is an interesting inversion of the theme here where Tarragon takes on the burden of live performances for Canari. What will she do when Tarragon passes on, and she inherits his business – and has to actually do public appearances herself? She didn’t ask to be the granddaughter of a construction empire’s boss, but she’ll have to take the good with the bad.
Corbeau and the Rust Syndicate are debt collectors, although (amusingly) altruistic ones. Lebanne lost once to Jacinthe and is now obliged to work for her in a maid outfit. NPCs worry about paying rent, a particularly interesting concern in the context of the anti-homeless benches littering the city and Wild Zones encroaching on people's living spaces. Everybody owes someone something in Lumiose.
Even the gameplay elements are attempts to address things that went “wrong” with XY. The blatantly overpowered gift Lucario is (hilariously) bait-and-switched with an Absol that, while strong, can’t solo carry you through the whole game. Zygarde gains an entire arc instead of hiding in a cave, and thank goodness you don’t need to collect 99 cells. Fan-favourite Mega Evolution is at the forefront more than ever, and the player has massive freedom to build their team with their favourite Megas. The friend group feels like an earnestly nice team that was already friends with each other (and can actually battle), instead of XY’s infamously underpowered and underexplored group. And you even get Floette-Eternal eventually!
All of this leads back to the finale, stopping the aforementioned crisis brought by an old man. The final cutscene has some birth symbolism that is honestly pretty on-the-nose for a Nintendo game: Zygarde deploys a massive phallic cannon, and uses it to attack a gigantic flower. In the aftermath of that explosion of light, Taunie emerges from the rubble. She’s cradling Floette like a newborn baby (user Esserise has noted that Mega Floette’s connection to its flower resembles an umbilical cord) and shares an emotional fist-bump with the protagonist. The cycle of life continues.
Soon after, so too does the cycle of death continue. AZ dies peacefully, able to rest at last, and two people inherit his legacy. Lysandre becomes what he once was: an alphabetically named loner doomed to a 3000-year life of regret. But this time, to our knowledge, there is no second weapon waiting to doom the next generation. He sees the beauty of the world and is set to use his eternity to bring about peace. (And it is worth noting that his post-game fight is legitimately difficult in comparison to AZ’s underwhelming post-credits battle, with a beautiful, optimistic reprise of his theme.)
Taunie inherits what AZ wanted to be his legacy: a growing hotel, his beloved Floette, and his wish to expand the Z-A Royale. It is the second of Taunie’s elder figures to have left her a close personal possession. In the epilogue, we find out that Taunie’s mother was responsible for developing the hologram technology taking over the city, a conflicted legacy considering the positive and negative consequences of that invention. After failing to respond to the Ange threat, Jett resigns, and leaves Quasartico to Taunie - her granddaughter. The legacy of two generations now rests on her shoulders. They trust her with it.
Z-A closes its main story with the knowledge that we can never be completely free from what those before us did. The shadow of legacy is inescapable, the good and the bad alike. It’s pretty obvious that there are regrets about XY, and Z-A spends much of its playtime atoning for them. But it also argues that we have a say in what we leave behind for those that come after us. Maybe, just maybe, this generation can leave behind something better.
