Other notable sales milestones for first-party titles include Donkey Kong Bananza selling 4.25 million units; Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition at 3.89 million (12.3 million with the Switch 1 version included); and Kirby Air Riders at 1.76 million.

What’s shocking is that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond isn’t even listed. Granted, it launched in early December, and it very well could have done well on the original Switch. Nevertheless, considering how long ago it was announced and the rebooted development – not to mention this is the illustrious Metroid Prime franchise we’re talking about – it’s somewhat disappointing.

Nevertheless, with 17.37 million Switch 2 consoles sold in less than seven months, Nintendo is clearly just getting started with its first-party rollout. The next big release is Mario Tennis Fever, which is available on February 12th. There’s also Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, out in April for the original Switch, but which could receive higher-resolution support on the Switch 2.

Mario Kart World

The best Mario Kart in the series? Your mileage (pun fully intended) may vary, but it is by far the most feature-packed. Free Roam in an open world with P-Switch challenges and cosmetics to gather; new moves like hopping and wall-riding for a higher skill ceiling; brand new tracks that seamlessly link together; and new modes are just some of the things long-time fans can look forward to, and it all works well.

Kirby Air Riders

21 playable characters and 22 machines, each with unique abilities and stats respectively; brand new tracks and remasters from the first game; the return of Top Ride and City Trial, with the latter turned into a faux battle royale mode of sorts; boss fights; and a full-fledged story mode. But even if you want to hop on for a simple race or two, it’s pure unfiltered fun – just like the original.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A

While there’s plenty of criticism to be had for its visuals, Game Freak’s latest mainline Pokémon title manages to capture that same monster-collecting magic. Lumiose City is full of unique sights, sounds and Pokémon to collect, and new elements like the Z-A Royale and Rogue Mega-Evolved Pokémon, alongside simple delights like traversing the rooftops, make it stand out.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

Catacomb-like levels, progressively unlocking new abilities and backtracking to uncover new areas, that expectation of something incredible around every corner – even after all these years, Retro Studios still knows how to capture that feeling. The new additions in Beyond, like Vi-O-La, also seamlessly slot in, and wouldn’t you know it, even the NPC companions, despite concerns pre-launch, aren’t terrible. More importantly, experiencing it with such fidelity, complete with mouse controls, elevates it to a new whole level.

Super Mario Galaxy + Super Mario Galaxy 2

Technically not a native Switch 2 release, experiencing two of the greatest platformers of all time in 4K is hard to resist. The new Storybook Chapters offer a bit of new content, but really, it’s all about scouring the galaxies once more, reliving the wonder of each planet and the discoveries they hold.

Donkey Kong Bananza

It almost seemed impossible that Jumpman’s worst nightmare would get his own starring role once more, but Bananza delivers on that and then some. Excellent platforming and bombastic visuals were a given – this is from the Super Mario Odyssey team after all – but the destruction elements work so well in tandem, resulting in a 3D platformer that’s more than worthy to stand side by side with Mario’s greatest adventures.

Hades 2

Supergiant follows up one of the best rogue-likes in years with – surprise, surprise – an incredible sequel. Between the sheer amount of stuff to do, whether you’re venturing into the Underworld or ascending into Olympus, the challenging and unique boss fights, or the sheer depth that each new weapon offers, Hades 2 feels like a massive step forward in every single way.

Split Fiction

Hazelight’s latest is one of the best co-op experiences of the year (and many before it), and feels tailor-made for Switch 2. Even if it’s not the most fully-featured port, being able to GameShare with local players or engage in cross-play, alongside the Friend’s Pass (which means not having to buy an extra copy), is still great.

Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road

You wouldn’t believe this took more than nine years and multiple delays to release, but that seems to be a theme for 2025. Regardless, Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road isn’t the most realistic adaptation of football so much as the best adaptation of the anime, complete with MAPPA’s cutscenes and over 5,400 recruitable characters. It’s truly unlike anything else out there and a blast once you get into it.

Hollow Knight: Silksong

Team Cherry’s long-awaited sequel is infuriating, frustrating, and challenging, but it’s also mesmerizing, addictive, and oh-so-good to control. The gameplay loop remains as finely crafted as ever, enhanced all the more with Hornet’s movement abilities, and the sheer attention to detail in areas, from their art to their secrets, will keep you coming back long after. It’s a tough bug to love, but Silksong is a stellar game.

Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition

The prospect of Cyberpunk 2077 running on the original Switch was laughable years ago, and yet, here we are more than five years later, experiencing it on the Switch 2 in all its glory. From the excellent base game to the stellar Phantom Liberty, this is still one of the best RPG experiences, and the addition of touch screen gestures for the UI and gyro aiming makes it feel that much better on the Switch 2. Also, shipping the entire package on an actual cart instead of a Game-Key Card? Chef’s kiss.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition

Truth be told, the new features – like the phone maps and QR codes for sharing Zonai machines – weren’t the most game-changing for Nintendo’s masterpiece. Nevertheless, it’s still a masterpiece, and being able to play it in 1440p/60 FPS with improved fidelity and faster loading is what we’ve always wanted. For that reason alone, it’s worth picking up.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land: Switch 2 Edition + Star Crossed World

For those who didn’t get their fill from Air Riders, the Switch 2 version of Kirby’s acclaimed 2022 adventure is well worth diving into. Star Crossed World offers a brand new storyline with new sections in old stages alongside new abilities, Mouthful modes and enemies to tussle with as you investigate a mysterious meteor. And of course, it’s a significant upgrade over the original’s already gorgeous visuals.

Cronos: The New Dawn

Bloober Team made a big impact with last year’s Silent Hill 2 remake, but its newest title channelled an altogether different survival horror vibe. A post-apocalyptic future with mutating monstrosities, time-traveling, a more enigmatic pace and protagonist, and more kept Cronos from feeling like a Dead Space rip-off. Even in handheld mode on the Switch 2, it’s a tense, terrifying ordeal.

Star Wars Outlaws

Ignored at launch, Massive Entertainment’s Star Wars scoundrel had a quiet but notable redemption this year, aided by its Switch 2 port. How the development team (in collaboration with Red Lynx) managed to deliver such great performance and ray tracing while retaining image quality, even with DLSS, is fascinating to behold. The fact that the game itself still looks so gorgeous while playing better than ever also doesn’t hurt.

And the Best Switch 2 title of 2025 goes to…

Donkey Kong Bananza

Did you really expect anything else, especially when a Donkey Kong game lets you rip chunks out of the environment to toss at enemies or surf on them with utter abandon? Bananza is more than just the Mario Odyssey formula, but with more destruction and a different protagonist. It’s a masterclass in pacing, deftly balancing the collect-a-thon aspects and real-time destruction with superb level design. Donkey Kong controls like a dream; the new Bananza Powers are as ridiculous as they are fun; and there isn’t an ounce of filler or unnecessary padding. For that reason, and many more that we could spend all day listing, it’s our pick for the best Switch 2 game of 2025.

Mega Lucario Z is described as having been categorised as a Mega Evolution rather than a standard one owing to the fact that the evolution was only kicked off due to exposure to a Mega Stone. Along with this, the Pokémon is also described as getting an “increase in power far outshining that of an average Lucario.” It has been dubbed Mega Lucario Z in order to distinguish it from the previously-existing Mega Lucario.

A core difference between Mega Lucario and Mega Lucario Z is how the two Pokémon make use of their auras. While the former can channel it into a destructive force, the newer Mega Evolution can seemingly surround its entire body with its aura to get a massive increase in defense, flexibility and agility. This also allows Mega Lucario Z to use its aura in other ways, like stretching it out into a shield or concentrating it into its attacks.

Along with the unveiling of Mega Lucario Z, this recent reveal also introduces the concept of Z Evolutions to Pokémon Legends: Z-A. As described by the developers, Z Mega Evolutions like Mega Lucario Z need less time to start using their moves when compared to other Mega Evolutions. However, the Z Mega Evolutions also tend to use up their Mega Power at a much quicker pace, which means that they aren’t as useful in longer battles.

Mega Lucario Z follows the reveal of Mega Zeraora as one of the newest additions coming to Pokémon Legends: Z-A as part of its Mega Dimension DLC. The Mega Zeraora was unveiled last month, and has been described as being able to store enough energy in its body to be equivalent to 10 bolts of lightning.

“The electric energy it stores in its body is equivalent to 10 bolts of lightning. Protrusions on its forehead, chest, back, and the backs of its hands are where the electric energy is particularly concentrated. The protrusions steadily emit a pale blue light. If Zeraora stores up lots of energy and then unleashes attacks, those attacks will pack enough power to take down multiple nearby opponents at once,” reads the description for Mega Zeraora.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension is slated for release on December 10 for Nintendo Switch and the Switch 2, and will be priced at $29.99. The DLC will largely revolve around post-story content, and its plot will feature a new mythical Pokémon – Hoopa – along with a strange girl. Over the course of the DLC, players will start discovering spatial distortions throughout Lumiose City, which will ultimately take them to the Hyperspace dimension, which serves as a reflection of Lumiose City, complete with its own stronger wild Pokémon.

For more details about Pokémon Legends: Z-A, check out our review.

Spatial distortions are essentially emerging throughout Lumiose City, and if The Outer Worlds 2 is any indication, that’s probably not a good thing. As the player and Team MZ investigate, they happen upon Ansha, who guides them through the new Hyperspace dimension. As a reflection of Lumiose City, it features wild Pokémon with levels exceeding 100, presenting a strong end-game challenge.

Hoopa can help even the odds, but not for free. You’ll need to discover berries that Ansha will bake into doughnuts for those power-ups, and naturally, some of the best berries reside in Hyperspace.

Other notable additions include Mega Evolution guru Korrina alongside Mega Chimecho and Mega Baxcalibur. The latter requires participating in online Ranked Battles for the necessary Mega Stone, however.

If the DLC isn’t your jam, then good news – starting now, the Mystery Gift feature will provide a Diancite Stone. You can use this to gain access to the “Shine Bright Like a Gemstone” side mission to catch the Legendary Diancie (which can then be Mega Evolved).

The core bug affecting the first Rogue Meta Evolution battle in Pokémon Legends: Z-A only occurs if the player’s Pokémon Boxes become full before the fight. If the boxes had not been at any point before being filled up, subsequent Pokémon capture events “will always fail”. Similarly, a side mission that rewards players with a Pokémon will end up getting completing without the reward.

The other bug is much more difficult to actually execute; in some side missions, if a move hits its target at the exact time when the in-game day switches to night time, the target becomes impossible to hit afterwards. This means that the entire side mission can’t be progressed any further.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A was released on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 earlier this month. Much like its predecessor Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Z-A revolves around players capturing Pokémon and exploring their surroundings. This time around, the game takes place in the Kalos Region, and more specifically in Lumiose City. As players explore the game’s world, capturing and battle Pokémon along the way, they will also have to face off against Rogue Mega Evolutions of Pokémon, which are much tougher challenges than other things that players might face along the way.

The title proved to be an incredible hit right off the bat, with The Pokémon Company announcing through a press release last week that it had sold more than 5.8 million copies of Pokémon Legends: Z-A in the title’s first week alone. While this sales figure might be lower than the last mainline entry in the franchise – Pokémon Scarlet and Violet – it is still an impressive launch regardless.

When it comes to regional performance, Pokémon Legends: Z-A fell short of its predecessor’s sales performance in Europe by around 28 percent. It was still the best-selling game for its launch period in the region, however. Sales figures for the week ending on October 19 also indicated that the latest title sold quite a few more units on the Nintendo Switch 2 than the original Switch.

As for the US, recent sales data has indicated that Pokémon Legends: Z-A has been the biggest physical launch of the game in the country since the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom back in 2023. Reports have indicated that a major part of sales of the game can be attributed to the Nintendo Switch 2 console bundles that were launched alongside the title.

For more details about Pokémon Legends: Z-A, check out our review, where we gave the game a score of 8 out of 10. We praised its detailed depiction of Lumiose City, as well as its real-time action battle system, while criticising the overall weak presentation, especially when it comes to its visual aspects.

Which is no small feat, considering that the latter launched in May 2023 on the Nintendo Switch, which enjoyed a far bigger install base. Even more impressive is the fact that Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s console bundles, which contributed significantly to its strong sales in Europe, aren’t even included in its US sales.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A is available for Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, and sold over 5.8 million units worldwide in its first week (with approximately half of its sales being on the new console). You can check out our review here – we gave it an eight out of ten, praising the real-time combat system, soundtrack, and Lumiose City as a whole.

It’s also no surprise that it’s sold more on Nintendo Switch 2 – even Nintendo confirmed that half of all launch week sales were on the latest platform (despite the Switch 1’s larger install base). However, sales are about 28 percent lower than those of its predecessor, Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Furthermore, in terms of unit sales, it has accrued the least since the Pokémon: Let’s Go titles.

Of course, this doesn’t account for digital sales, and the fact that the title could still unseat Battlefield 6 with physical sales alone is beyond impressive. However, as Dring notes, “Nintendo games sell better at physical retail than via the eShop, in contrast to PlayStation, Xbox and PC.”

For more details about Pokémon Legends: Z-A, check out our review. Other notable elements of the chart include Little Nightmares 3 falling to eighth place, with sales dropping by 72 percent, and Mario Kart World re-entering the top ten thanks to its Switch 2 bundle.

That’s down significantly from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, which launched on November 18th, 2022, and sold ten million units in its first three days. As the follow-up to Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Z-A takes place in Lumiose City five years after the events of Pokémon X and Y. Players partake in the Z-A Royale, working their way up to Rank A to have their wish granted.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A offers real-time combat but with several twists, including the ability to attack hostile trainers first and Mega-Evolve their Pokémon multiple times in battle. For more details, check out our review, where we gave the title an eight out of ten. Mega Dimension, a paid DLC set after the game’s events, is slated to launch on February 28th, 2026.

Game Freak should be given credit for not taking the safe route for following up on Legends Arceus’ success. It would have been all too easy to take that game, put it in a new region, with new maps, new biomes, and different Pokemon to catch, while making the requisite amount of polish and UX improvements.

"The decision to set the game in its entirety in just Lumiose City immediately sets this game apart from its predecessor."

Fans had already responded positively to the premise, why not give them more of that? Instead, however, it seems like Game Freak views the “Legends” subseries as a sandbox to experiment and try new things – because with very few exceptions, almost nothing from Legends Arceus made it into Legends ZA. For good and for bad, this game is entirely its own beast, and the only way it can be defined with respect to Arceus is in all the ways that it’s not like it.

That begins from the most obvious, overarching things, and goes all the way down to the smaller details. Take, for instance, the setting – Legends Arceus was a prequel to the entire rest of the series, but Diamond and Pearl in particular, set hundreds of years in the past, in the wilderness of an untamed Sinnoh region before it had been properly settled, and before Pokemon had been tamed or even understood. Pokemon Legends ZA on the other hand is set after 2013’s Pokemon X and Y, and far from being set in the vast wilderness, they are set instead in the entirety of one city.

The decision to set the game in its entirety in just Lumiose City immediately sets this game apart from its predecessor, and indeed, from any other game in the series. Pokemon from the beginning has been about travelling across the land, searching far and wide. It’s about exploration and adventure and discovery – which runs counter to being set entirely in one bustling urban location, surely?

Truthfully, Legends ZA does a fine job of sidestepping this seeming issue. Lumiose is a fairly large city, and Game Freak leans into the mentality almost of playing and exploring and adventuring in a city as a kid – you get to explore back alleys and under the bridges, you get to go up rooftops and explore the scaffolding. There is a surprising amount to explore and discover in Lumiose – the buildings and rooftops connect to each other in unexpected ways, and often lead to very unexpected discoveries.

"It’s all very delightful – there is a childlike sense of wonder and amusement to it all."

Exploring Lumiose is fun. It’s not fun in the same way as the rest of the series – there is no getting around the repetition inherent to being set in one city only, after all, it’s not like you will come across a volcano biome or a tundra biome in different parts of Lumiose. But there are a lot of hidden nooks and crannies, things that look interesting and then lead you on merry diversions and tangents that see you end up far from where you started. As I said, it really taps into that visceral thrill of exploring your town as a kid – even the most trite and banal things are cool to you when you are doing that, and that’s the exact spirit that ZA channels.

It also leans into the novelty of how Pokemon fit into an urban setting and lifestyle. In back alleys, among the trash cans, you will encounter Trubbish. An ice cream stand might see Vanillice hanging around. Bird Pokemon such as Pidgey, Fletchling, and others can be seen on wires and rooftops. Bugs like Spinarak are hiding up trees.

It’s all very delightful – there is a childlike sense of wonder and amusement to it all. Legends ZA commits to it not just in terms of gameplay either – you can even see it in the set dressing. Machoke are helping with the construction. Scyther can be seen helping hair stylists. This is the exact kind of thing Pokemon fans have been asking for for so long – a true game in the series that fleshes the setting out and shows us how Pokemon and people fit into it. And we get that here, better than the series has ever done it before.

Of course, a single urban environment by definition would not allow for a lot of variety with the kinds of Pokemon you can run across, which wouldn’t work for, well, a Pokemon game. Legends ZA cheats here. Its story premise posits that some unexplained phenomenon seems to be causing a wide scale migration of wild Pokemon into Lumiose – and the city, in an attempt to mitigate the disruption, attempts to set up demarcated “Wild Zones” to contain this influx of wildlife.

"ZA makes for a series first – the first game in the series that completely eschews turn based battles, opting instead for a real time action battle system that is inspired by the Pokemon anime."

From a gameplay perspective, these “Wild Zones” are basically like the open world maps that you ventured into to catch Pokemon in Legends Arceus. They are, of course, a lot smaller, and by definition, a lot more one note than the varied biomes and maps of that game. But these see you sneaking up on wild Pokemon hanging out and doing their thing, and try to catch and battle them, with different wild areas playing host to different species of Pokemon. The core loop here is very similar to that game, and is still sublime. You still see Pokemon, freely aim and throw Pokeballs at them, try to stay unnoticed, and engage in battles as and when necessary.

ZA, in fact, makes improvements to the loop here. These range from minor – such as UI improvements – to the major, such as getting the chance to catch a Pokemon even after it has “fainted”, something that no other mainline game in the series has allowed. This is honestly one of the parts the game is best at – the thrill of being able to hunt and catch Pokemon, expanding your Pokédex, the thrill of finding a new or unexpected creature, or a move you are unfamiliar with. ZA keeps this part as compelling as it was before.

Where things are different are in how Pokemon battles go. ZA makes for a series first – the first game in the series that completely eschews turn based battles, opting instead for a real time action battle system that is inspired by the Pokemon anime. Rather than battles seeing you and your opponent take turns, you can use attacks pretty much whenever you want – except that each attack has a cooldown associated with it that you have to wait out before you can use it again. Managing these cooldowns, along with managing your positioning, makes for a very different style of Pokemon battles than anything before.

It’s a lot quicker and a lot more chaotic than anything before, and allows for a very active style of gameplay loop too. Exploring can be a lot more chaotic when other wild Pokemon nearby can join battles and attack you without notice, and without having to wait for their turns. It definitely gives the game a bite of its own, and allows for a level of challenge that the series has mostly lost in modern times. 

"ZA is named after the ZA Royale, a tournament that takes place in Lumiose City after hours, where trainers start at Rank Z and have to work up to Rank A."

What’s interesting here is how much emphasis has been placed on the new battle system – not only is it central to the core concept of the game (we’ll get to this in a minute), this game also supports multiplayer fights, and in fact, even ranked and competitive battles. Game Freak has never extended multiplayer battling support to any Pokemon game with a battle system that diverges from the core series, but they very much have here.

In my experience, the battle system trades away the nuance and depth of the mainline series without as much to show for it. The fights are chaotic, yes, and there is a thrill to seeing them play out in a game like they did in the anime, but to me at least, they never felt as engaging as they have in the turn based games.

In multiplayer, they felt like pure chaos, and wins didn’t feel earned as much as they felt accidental. Of course, I have literally decades of familiarity with the turn based battle system, so any divergence from that won’t feel as comfortable right away, but at least right now, I am not sure how this battle system can have anywhere near the longevity that the mainline games’ combat does. In fact, in terms of my personal enjoyment, I would even rank this battle system below Legends Arceus’, and I already found that one to be a step down from the core series.

Battles, however, are central to the game’s conceit. ZA is named after the ZA Royale, a tournament that takes place in Lumiose City after hours, where trainers start at Rank Z and have to work up to Rank A. These battles take place in makeshift battle zones, which are swarming with trainers looking to get a leg up on the competition.

Here, again, the real time nature of the battles allows for some really great tweaks to how trainer encounters traditionally play out with dynamic stealth and awareness mechanics interplaying with the series’ famed elemental type matchup system to allow for entirely new approaches to initiating battles. The actual battles are, again, chaotic, fun, and quick – but they are not as involved as I find the turn based ones to be.

The intriguing part here is that I have found battles to be sufficiently engaging and involved when it comes to certain boss encounters, which really involved needing to fully understand my attacks, cooldowns, and positioning to be able to get through. But typically, these encounters are very rare, and limited to very specific and usually telegraphed boss fights that necessarily involved utilizing every mechanic and system in the game. For regular old fights, however, I have found the new battle system to be a step down.

"On an artistic and purely aesthetic front, I would argue the visuals here are worse because the poor urban environments actively detracted from my immersion in the setting in a way that they did not in Arceus."

There is also the elephant in the room – like most new releases in the series in the last decade or so, Pokemon Legends ZA has drawn sharp criticism for its poor graphics and production. That criticism is well earned. Legends ZA is not a good looking game at all. From both, an artistic perspective as well as a technical one, I find it to be a mess, and plainly ugly. Buildings in Lumiose, for example, are giant walls with 2D PNGs of windows and balconies plastered on to them. Architecture and geometry is typically simplistic straight lines and right angles, and the mish mash between parts of the environment that are properly modelled and those that are not leads to an unsettlingly uncanny effect that can be quite disruptive to immersion a lot of the times.

It almost makes you wonder why Game Freak made the decision to set an entire game in one singular urban environment, when they very obviously lack the knowhow to make convincing urban environments in 3D to begin with. It’s especially frustrating because, as I said, the actual single city setting here is well realized and compelling – but the poor graphics are constantly letting it down.

Poor visuals were a criticism I also had for Legends Arceus and Scarlet and Violet, and here is how Legends ZA compares to those games on this front. With Legends Arceus, I criticized the game’s performance, as well as its shockingly low quality assets, rendering, and poor art style. Legends ZA is decidedly better at rendering and performance – on both Switch and Switch 2, the performance is steady, and on Switch 2, in fact, the game runs at a locked 60fps and 4K resolution. That 4K60 rendering and performance is for some really ugly visuals – but it’s nice to play a Pokemon game that performs well and has a clean image.

On an artistic and purely aesthetic front, I would argue the visuals here are worse because the poor urban environments actively detracted from my immersion in the setting in a way that they did not in Arceus. See, Arceus was basically set in wide open expanses of the wilderness – those are a lot easier to abstract, even with lower quality visuals, than urban environments can be. We all have very specific and defined ideas of what cities and streets and such are supposed to look like – and any divergence from that feels far more jarring than for more stylized natural environments.

Bafflingly, there are improvements to the graphics elsewhere too, but they all happen to be in areas that this game does not focus on. For example, the interior environments in this game look good! In fact, they are legitimately the best looking interiors the series has ever had. But of course, most of the game takes place outside, so that doesn’t quite matter. Character models are also great, with a shocking amount of artistic flair and polygonal detail poured into each human and Pokemon model (thankfully without the performance penalty that this series has traditionally accrued for things such as these).

So compared to Arceus, the visuals are a mixed bag. Compared to Scarlet and Violet, I would call them an all around improvement. That game looked legitimately unfinished – I don’t just mean that in terms of how poor the image quality was, or how awful the performance could be, but also in terms of the quality of assets and tech used, which legitimately looked like pre-alpha assets pushed into the final retail product at times. Literally none of that is an issue here. As I said, it looks and runs well, and while the graphics are ugly, I think there is at the very least a unified and consistent aesthetic here, which does come together in several places, and allows this game to occasionally look fairly okay. 

"Legends ZA is not as good as Arceus was. It is, however, still a very good outing for the series."

On the other hand, there is one area where this series has steadfastly refused to make a very necessary improvement, and that ends up being a big issue in this game. I am talking about the series’ baffling insistence on refusing to have any sort of voice acting whatsoever. Not only is that something that would work very well with the franchise’s focus on younger audiences (not all of whom can read), but it would also work with the anime, movies, and other trans media properties.

The games seem to continue to emphasize increasingly more cinematic cutscenes for their storytelling aspirations, and that’s great – but it stands out as really weird when those cinematic cutscenes, complete with lip flap animations, lack any voice acting. The cutscenes are obviously directed with the experience ration of voice acting, but there’s nothing there. Even having grunts and yelps, like so many other Nintendo games do, would be better than nothing. But nothing is exactly what we have now, and it’s just… weird. It doesn’t work well, and it feels actively detrimental to the storytelling segments when they happen.

It’s a shame too, because the actual writing and storytelling is interesting! Legends ZA, like Arceus, is divorced from the structural expectations of the rest of the series, and is able to explore some interesting themes and developments that the main series shies away from. The writing is legitimately clever too, and there’s some unexpectedly sharp and witty dialog – if only the storytelling didn’t feel so hollow because of the lack of voice acting.

The soundtrack, on the other hand, is great without any qualifiers necessary. The music is great, the renderings are catchy and upbeat, and it all flows into and from each other very well. The areas where it has issues mostly come down to repetition, which is down to the structure of the game more than any failing of the music itself. 

Game Freak deserves credit here. It would have been extremely easy for them to simply do more of what had worked well in the past. Certainly it would have been safer in terms of keeping their fanbase happy. But they chose to do something completely different, and completely new and challenging. A lot of what they tried here doesn’t work as well for me as their previous experiments have, but the value of continually trying new things itself cannot be overstated.

Then, too, the core gameplay loop remains incredibly compelling and fun, and the playground of Lumiose City is incredibly fun to explore, and a surprisingly fleshed out setting. There are things that work here, and things that don’t, which unfortunately means that the game is, by definition not as great as its predecessor was, which hit it out of the park on most things.

But there are gambles here that really pay off – the single setting allows for Game Freak to have the most realized setting they have had in any of their games yet, the writing is sharp, the exploration remains incredibly compelling, the core loop is as addictive and delightful as ever. Even the battle system, though it didn’t click for me as much, will probably be thrilling for a lot of people who have been waiting for a real time Pokemon game.

This game was reviewed on the Nintendo Switch 2.

According to Chris Dring of The Game Business, the Switch 2 version made up 51 percent of sales. While it’s the second biggest launch on the platform this year (behind only Mario Kart World), physical sales are down 40 percent from Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Bundles are figured into the sales, though that doesn’t include the Nintendo Store.

And while this total doesn’t account for digital sales, Dring estimates that it wouldn’t make a huge difference. Since it’s selling for $10 higher, Nintendo could make up the difference that way. Being available on two platforms instead of one also wouldn’t hurt.

Time will tell, so stay tuned for more updates. With regards to its critical reception, Pokémon Legends: Z-A has an 80 Metascore based on 61 reviews.