Pokémon Legends: Arceus Gameplay Trailer Shows Off Boss Battles, Customization, and Pocket Monster Hunting
I haven’t seen any commercials for it, so I’m not gonna blame you if you forgot – but Pokémon Legends: Arceus arrives in just about two weeks, and you should be getting excited.
Why? Have a look at this gameplay trailer, and you tell me.
Honestly, I haven’t been doing too much digging into Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Not because I’m not interested (I very much am), but more so because this game is clearly SUCH a massive departure from the classic Pokémon formula that I want to be as surprised as possible when the game releases on the 28th.
From this trailer alone, we get to see the explorative aspects of the game, and it appears that we’re finally getting a quest log of sorts to keep track of odd jobs and tasks from the people you’ll meet all over the Hisui region. There also seems to be a good amount of customization in the game, which I was curious about as Nintendo hasn’t shown it off at all aside from right now.
The biggest surprise for me in this trailer was the game’s “boss battles”, which are clashes with “Noble Pokémon”. While the player will need to be strategic with how they approach regular wild Pokémon by analyzing their behaviors, preferences, and patterns – the game’s Noble Pokémon encounters look to be much more cinematic and challenging. For the first time ever (by my count), the trainer and Pokémon need to work together to subdue the massive and powerful boss Pokémon, and just watching the battle play out in the trailer above gave me flashbacks to watching Ash and Pikachu team up to conquer insurmountable odds in the classic TV show as a kid.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus isn’t just different, it’s “we locked up every senior executive and manager at GameFreak in a broom closet for two years and didn’t tell them what we were working on” different. For a studio that barely ever changes up their formula on an incremental basis, let alone a monumental one like this, Legends seems like their most ambitious title yet… And I absolutely cannot wait to play it.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus arrives on Nintendo Switch on Friday, January 28th.
