The Pokemon anime has always made the act of battling out to be an exhausting affair. Ash and Pikachu can spend several episodes duking it out with rivals, but they’ll come out battered, bruised and in dire need of an appointment with Nurse Joy. But this hardship doesn’t matter when they are now one step closer to their ultimate goal. In the games, trainers seem to just stand around doing nothing. That is, until now.
By virtue of its Game Boy origins, the original Pokemon Red and Blue couldn’t exactly show us larger than life battles where trainers and their obedient pocket monsters ran around huge arenas trying to stay alive. It wasn’t possible, so they instead settled for static images and an array of sound effects to translate the feeling of duking it out with other trainers. Game Freak likely never intended this to be the case, but over the years this idea that trainers are nothing but static observers as their Pokemon do all the hard work has become the norm for those with no interest in watching the show.
Pokemon Trainers Work Harder Than We Think They Do
Even the 3D titles like Stadium and Colosseum didn’t change this for the better, still having trainers stand by the sidelines as their allies performed one move after another in an incredibly predictable fashion, rooted in place and never moving from their initial position.
I understand these console spin-offs wanted to remain faithful to the handheld games, but this could have been a chance for the games to capitalise on the high-octane action we’d been seeing in the anime for years.
Games like Sun & Moon, Sword & Shield, and Scarlet & Violet would increase the presence of trainers in battle with exuberant animations and a sense of agency that made it obvious to us they were more than sprites that throw balls into a field and hide until the dust clears.
It was a character we’d made to reflect ourselves with a personality and appearance we had wanted to see not only in the narrative, but getting down and dirty in each battle. For so long this hasn’t been the case, but Legends: Arceus began to move things in the right direction. Its battle system and catching mechanics that saw you move freely across the environment. You were still limited in places, but this limited movement alone was liberating.
And Legends: Z-A Is Getting Ready To Prove It
Legend: Z-A appears to be building on this further, with battles now taking place in large and instanced areas in which Pokemon and trainers are free to move around however they want while performing all the actions we’re used to. The player is still going to be pulling off the necessary moves, using items to keep their Pokemon alive and kicking, and potentially reacting to the environments where battles take place in a variety of different ways.
Before this, it was hard to believe Pokemon battles could ever be tiring for trainers when looking at how Game Freak decides to portray them, but here, it makes perfect sense. Dirty street battles outside of stadiums or skirmishes in random fields you are pulled into should feel gritty and real.
While we befriend them and keep them in balls, you have to assume that Pokemon are still pretty dangerous, especially in battles where many of them can breathe fire and summon a lightning storm to devastate their opponents. Trainers are in the line of fire, so, naturally, the need to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge in order to stay alive is part of the deal. But this has rarely been effectively presented in the games until now.
Even if Pokemon Z-A doesn’t go beyond allowing trainers to move lazily about each battle arena, it’s still a big step in the right direction for Pokemon. I want it to feel alive, doubly so when the visuals do very little to pull you into the experience. Letting us move around as battles unfold would go a bit of the way toward making that feeling a reality.
