The next Pokémon Legends title is in development and the Pokémon community is already fiending for more information about the game. Before you go around asking for another trailer, however, there are some things you might have missed during Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s reveal.
Like with most of its initial teasers, the Feb. 27 reveal of Pokémon Legends: Z-A features minimal content in its trailer and scattered info from other official sources. We won’t have a concrete lock on what Game Freak is cooking up with this game until we get closer to the Pokémon Legends: Z-A release date, but there is plenty to pick apart while we wait.
Three things you missed about the Pokémon Legends: Z-A reveal
The game is set in one location… probably
Depending on where you are looking, some post-announcement information states that Legends: Z-A will be set entirely within Lumiose City. This is the most obvious thing you may have missed when watching the Legends: Z-A trailer because The Pokémon Company didn’t include the information in the reveal itself.
The “entirely” wording comes from Nintendo of America social media accounts. The official TPC press release wording, meanwhile, simply notes: “A new adventure awaits within Lumiose City, where an urban redevelopment plan is underway to shape the city into a place that belongs to both people and Pokémon.” The difference in wording could be a simple misunderstanding that has not been corrected, but if it holds true, the gameplay loop for Legends: Z-A could look drastically different from Legends: Arceus.
If we had to guess, Lumiose City in Legends: Z-A will be a much bigger hub and play a more central role than Jubilifie Village in Legends: Arceus. If you are worrying about not getting to go out and explore areas of Kalos, however, it is unlikely every moment of the game will spent in Lumiose, even if it should be vastly scaled up from its 3Ds appearance.
Hints at the time period
While Legends: Arceus likely had fans thinking every game in this subseries would be set in the past and tell stories building upon the lore of modern Pokémon titles, Legends: Z-A is almost blatantly proving that wrong—at a glance.
The trailer starts off showing off a set of documents for the “Urban Redevelopment Plan” of what later learn is Lumiose City, meaning the city already exists. The drawn, blueprint style of the intro transitions into a 3D, techno grid-style flyby of a city that looks at least somewhat like the Lumiose we know from X and Y. This likely means we are seeing what the characters want to build the city up to, though there is no concrete evidence yet.
Historical fans are pointing out that Legends: Z-A could pull from something like Haussmann’s renovation of Paris from the mid-1800s as a means to grow Lumiose into a sprawling metropolis, and ended about a decade before the Eiffel Tower was built between 1887 and 1889. This could put it post-Legends: Arceus and pre-X and Y, but again, real-world inspirations do not necessarily point to when a Pokémon game will take place within its own universe.
The plot of this legend
To piggyback off the time period information, there are two elements of X and Y we will definitely see more of and are also teased in Legends: Z-A’s title—Zygarde and AZ.
If you look at the Legends: Z-A logo, you will see a reference to the Legendary Zygarde in the Z with those scales. This points to the fact we should finally get a game dedicated to arguably the most overlooked major Legendary in the franchise when it comes to plot relevance. If the plot is about expanding Lumiose to build a place of “coexistence between people and Pokémon,” as the trailer suggests, Zygarde might not take kindly to that. This is considering the effects that growth and other plot elements might have on the region’s ecosystem, based on the Legendary’s Pokédex entry: “It’s hypothesized that it’s monitoring those who destroy the ecosystem from deep in the cave where it lives.”
But we shouldn’t overlook the importance of the A in the name either. This could be pushing things, but the base and color scheme of that A, if it is an A at all, looks oddly similar to that of the Ultimate Weapon used by AZ to cause a calamity during a war in Kalos. We could very well learn more about that conflict, AZ’s unnamed brother, and the concept of Infinity Energy, which played a pivotal role in X and Y—along with getting its actual name in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire’s Delta Episode.
All of this speculation is based solely on the information shared by The Pokémon Company at the time of Legends: Z-A’s reveal. Now we just have to wait for more information on things like the return of Mega Evolution and what Starters will be featured.
