Pokémon Legends: Arceus is a breath of fresh air for a stale franchise

Enlarge / Pokemon Legends: Arceus is as close as we've ever gotten to an open-world Pokemon game. (credit: Nintendo)

Last year's by-the-numbers Pokemon Diamond and Pearl remakes did even less than most Pokemon games to spruce up and modernize the series' decades-old formula. That's understandable for a remake of a 2006 Nintendo DS game, but the games were still disappointing follow-ups to the more adventurous Sword and Shield.

The good news is that if you've been waiting for Game Freak to really shake up Pokemon's gameplay without totally burning it to the ground and starting from scratch, Pokemon Legends: Arceus is the game you've been waiting for. Part Pokemon and part Breath of the Wild, Legends takes the free-roaming "Wild Area" concept from Sword and Shield and updates the series' catching and battling mechanics to match.

That's not to say it's a perfect fusion of those disparate elements. Its mission-based structure gets pretty fetch quest-y, it leans heavily on an over-familiar roster of existing Pokemon, and the aging Switch hardware sometimes struggles to make it look good, especially when docked. But despite those problems, the whole package works together surprisingly well, and it makes the Pokemon feel fresher than it has in quite a while.

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