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Pokémon Legends Z-A Impressions, Nintendo's GOTY Odds, and More

Round up Pokémon Legends Z-A impressions ahead of Gamescom.

Author

Kat Bailey
August 15, 2025

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The Pokémon World Championships are currently taking place in Anaheim, bringing with it the first impressions of Pokémon Legends Z-A.

I previously talked about how I think that it will be this fall’s big tentpole release for Switch 2, and the previews are indeed very positive. You can find the roundup below. Elsewhere, I’m back after my latest sojourn, and with Gamescom just around the corner, I’m ready to get back to covering all the biggest Nintendo news. Here we go!

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Preview Round-Up: Experts weigh in on Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s new battle system and more

There’s more at stake with Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s release than you might suppose. While the franchise is as strong as ever, the prestige of the actual video games has taken a hit recently, as evidenced by the somewhat muted enthusiasm for the Legends: Arceus follow-up on Switch 2. To be blunt, the quality has been quite lackluster of late, particularly in the technical aspects of the series. Legends still enjoys a fairly good reputation with fans and critics, though, and that momentum looks to continue with Z-A based on some of the early impressions.

The main thing to know is that Pokémon Legends: Z-A will feature a very different battle system than before. Where Legends: Arceus featured a souped-up version of the series’ traditional turn-based combat, Legends: Z-A has you giving commands to your monsters in real-time. IGN’s Casey DeFreitas explains it thus:

To attack, you essentially use Z-Targeting by holding the ZL button and then pressing the face buttons to instruct your Pokémon which move to use. This is the same whether you’re in battle, initiating a battle, or instructing your Pokémon to attack an obstacle–like some rocks I saw at the beginning of the mission that none of my Pokémon were strong enough to break.

As expected, each Pokémon can know four moves at a time, and those are the moves you have access to on the four face buttons. Surprisingly, the moves don’t seem to have PP (Power Points), meaning that they can be used an unlimited number of times, with consideration to their cooldown, a new mechanic for Pokémon commonly used for skill-based action games. Different moves have different cooldown times, but the moves I had access to this early in the game all had relatively short cooldowns (around six or seven seconds) and short “casting” times as well that aren’t communicated in any menus.

I’ll admit, I prefer the more tactical approach favored by the turn-based combat, but I do like to see the Pokémon team stretching out and experimenting. If nothing else, it’s a change of place after close (guh) 30 years of turn-based Pokémon games. Here’s what else critics are saying after trying out Legends: Z-A for themselves.

GameSpot

While both segments left me excited to see and play more of Pokemon Legends: Z-A, the experience was very brief. It's impossible to say how these new mechanics hold up after a few hours and how they develop beyond what I've seen. However, it seems like a solid foundation that will give players a new way to experience Pokemon battles that have become so familiar. If anything, I hope that developer Game Freak continues to use the Pokemon Legends series to experiment with the formula and try out different things that may or may not work in the mainline series.

IGN

Overall, Legends: Z-A didn’t feel like a full action game to me, but kind of more like an MMO, with its casting times, cooldowns, and behind-the-scenes math happening. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I do hope Legends: Z-A gets challenging enough to make me more intentionally dish out commands and think about switching Pokémon at just the right moment. I can see the potential, but with just twenty minutes of experiencing the early game, it’s much too soon to tell if this real-time battle system will scratch the strategy-itch Pokémon games usually do for me.

VGC

It will take much more time with the new battle system to get to grips with the new way of taking down Trainers, but we’re thoroughly sold on Rogue Mega Pokémon battles already.

Serebii

While playing, the game ran super smooth and it looked great. In the segment before Rogue Mega Absol, I got a look around the city and it looked great and how I imagined Lumiose City being while playing Pokémon X & Y back in 2013. It was such a fun play and it really has me wanting to play more. It's still early and hard to say how well the new systems will work in an overall game but what I played here seems like it's a cool new evolution of the Pokémon Legends formula. It has me wanting to go back and that's always a good sign; it's new and fresh but still quintessentially Pokémon.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A will be out on Switch and Switch 2 on October 16, 2025.

More Nintendo Reading: Nintendo’s GOTY odds, Chibi Robo, and the Disco Elysium mess

  • Your essential viewing this week is the latest documentary from People Make Games (above), which once again delves into the very complicated and messy dispute surrounding Disco Elysium and its creators.

  • Microsoft has a “binding 10-year legal agreement” to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo platforms, but Call of Duty 7 currently appears to be skipping Switch 2 based on recent leaks. A loss for Nintendo, but perhaps a bigger loss for Activision-Blizzard, which would surely like to tap into the Switch 2’s rapidly growing userbase.

  • Chibi-Robo is heading to Switch 2’s GameCube lineup on August 21. As this article explains, it’s one of the platforms rarest and most underrated games, and a welcome addition.

  • Finally, I raised an eyebrow when I saw the headline for this Polygon article from Oli Welsh — one of my favorite writers — asking whether Nintendo can still win a Game of the Year.

The people who give out awards — in The Game Awards’ case, a jury of media outlets like Polygon — like to tell interesting stories with their selections, and “excellent game-maker makes excellent game” doesn’t qualify. “Nintendo completely reinvents Zelda” does. Donkey Kong Bananza has a lot in common with Breath of the Wild, but has nowhere near its level of shock value, and it doesn’t tell a story as enticing as “team of 20 French people outdoes Final Fantasy at its own game.”

My own feeling: Maybe we put a little too much emphasis on the “Game of the Year?” I’m more interested in a critic’s Top 10 list, which tends to include a robust list of games that would never find their way into the Geoff Keighley Extravaganza. I’m sure Donkey Kong Bananza will find its way on to plenty of those lists.

Mailbag: Has the Switch 2 changed where I play games?

One of the perks of being a premium subscriber is that you get to submit questions to the weekly mailbag via the comment section in each issue. This week’s question is from JJ Mahoney, who asks:

I've been kind of obsessed with my Switch 2 since release, so Nintenkats is perfectly timed (and I'm all caught up!). Nintendo hits all my nostalgia buttons, so I've been systematically moving a bunch of my "retro" type games and pre-orders to the Switch 2 since I have no concerns about performance. There's just something about having all the GBA/DS Castlevania collections on Switch (with the cool retro Konami box art), so I've been on a bit of a spending spree. And games I had queued up on PS5 I've bought on Switch/Switch 2 to play there instead. Games like the Suikoden remaster, the Lunar collection, and Star Ocean: The Second Story R. Since I cut my RPG teeth on Final Fantasy 6 on the SNES, it just feels right to my 50 year old brain to play these kinds of RPGs on the Switch 2. That said, I know you played the Switch a lot, but has the Switch 2 changed where you play some games?

This might be its own post somewhere, but for all the negativity around various aspects of the Switch 2, I’ve been quite enjoying my time with it so far. Over the past month I’ve taken it on several road trips and elements like the battery have held up surprisingly well. Donkey Kong Bananza is also a great roadtrip game — very fun, very easy to pickup and play, and a big improvement on the original Switch.

The biggest change, I guess, is that I’ve migrated back to the Switch after a period where I mainly picked up games for the Steam Deck. Otherwise, I’ve always preferred to play my games in bed, on the porch, on the train… anywhere other than my TV, really. The Switch 1 filled that role masterfully, and the Switch 2 is more of the same, but better. In that sense, the Switch 2 is pretty much what I wanted from Nintendo, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

One game I might be picking up on Switch 2 this fall: EA Sports FC 2026. Yes, really. It’s been a minute since I’ve had a soccer sim in my life, and I’d love to delve back in franchise mode on Switch 2. So there’s my answer — I want to play portable sports games. It’s the only place I can think of where West Ham has a chance to have a good season.

Thanks for reading another issue of Nintenkats! We’ll be back with more Nintendo news, opinions, and mailbag questions next week!

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