Pokemon Legends Z-A Really Stretches the Definition of…

Pokemon Legends: Arceus isn't a particularly long game, but it did offer a lot of ways to keep players busy, thanks to its dozens of Requests. Pokemon Legends: Z-A aims to do the same; once players meet Emma at the Looker Bureau, they can start taking up tasks around town, this time called Side Missions. Each completed story beat typically serves the player with another handful of Side Missions, each of which offers generous rewards when completed. However, I think this is an area where Pokemon Legends: Z-A largely fails, because it seems to have chosen a quantity over quality approach in its Side Mission design.

Tons of Pokemon Legends: Z-A Side Missions can be sorted into one of two boxes: a battle with a trainer who favors a certain gimmick, or a battle with a wild Pokemon in an odd situation. As a result, most of these quests are only brief diversions. Pokemon Legends: Arceus Requests had plenty of simple entries too, but Z-A's side quests pale in comparison to the best that Arceus had to offer.

Spoilers ahead for Side Missions and some story beats in Pokemon Legends: Z-A.

Many Pokemon Legends: Z-A Side Missions are Hardly Missions At All

Over and over again, Pokemon Legends: Z-A asks players to complete side missions that simply boil down to battling trainers who use one specific strategy. Examples include:

A debate over whether paralysis or poison is the better status condition
A trainer who fixates on trap moves like Spikes and Sand Tomb
Two trainers who love to use buffs and debuffs respectively
A trainer who loves the move Detect
A devoted fan of the Pidgeot evolution line

All in all, each of these missions generally amount to a short conversation, a fairly easy Pokemon battle, and final thoughts on the trainers' strategy of choice. The intention here is arguably good: this is Game Freak's way of highlighting obscure or uncommon battle mechanics that players might not know or generally overlook. This has repercussions for the entire Side Mission system, however. When each of these quests can be opened and shut in the span of a minute, they're not quests at all, since they ask next to nothing of the player that differs from a normal battle. These Side Missions might as well just be old-school trainer battles found when following a Pokemon Route.

Missions about Pokemon exhibiting unusual behavior are a little more interesting, but not by much. To name a few, players might:

Battle a feisty Chespin three times in a row
Battle a group of Binacles all at once
Have a rematch with a Hawlucha who previously experienced Rogue Mega Evolution

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These Side Missions have a little more character in that they're snapshots of a core theme in Pokemon Legends: Z-A: the complications that come from humans and wild Pokemon trying to live together. Still, they tend to be just as brief as the trainer battles, so it's hard to really think of them as "missions".

Why Pokemon Legends: Z-A's Side Missions Are Such a Letdown

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There's two main reasons I feel so strongly about these types of Side Missions. Firstly, Pokemon Legends: Z-A initially frames these quests as jobs that the player takes on to help out the detective Emma. These kinds of quests utterly fail to live up to that pitch, since they're pretty trivial and don't involve any of the sleuthing or complicated problem-solving that require a detective's attention, and by extension, would make for more engaging quests.

Secondly, Pokemon Legends: Z-A already had a lot of better quest blueprints to steal from Pokemon Legends: Arceus. This isn't to say every PLA Request was groundbreaking — plenty of them just boiled down to "battle me" or "show me a Pokemon" — but many others broke the mold. Players might:

Go in search of a missing person
Play a balloon-popping minigame
Resolve a Pokemon's disruptive behavior in the village without battling it
Work on specific entries in Pokemon Legends: Arceus' unique Pokedex
Perhaps most memorably, collect 107 mysterious wisps to unlock a Spiritomb

Requests like these made an effort to break the usual gameplay loop at least a little, and felt more like real missions by demanding some critical thinking or thorough exploration by the player. They stand in stark contrast to all the Side Missions that boil down to a one-and-done battle that's functionally no different from an encounter in one of Pokemon Legends: Z-A's Wild Zones or Battle Zones. They're just more profitable.

Z-A dropped Arceus' Pokedex task mechanic, instead opting to reward players for studying Pokemon through Mable's Research, which is much simpler overall.

Pokemon Legends: Z-A Side Missions Don't Have to Set the Standard

mega hawlucha pokemon legends z-a screenshot

Z-A's Side Missions aren't a total loss. I've been charmed by quests that ask me to relocate a group of Trubbish near a restaurant, or find medicine for a sickly Fennekin (who became a core member of my team). Unfortunately, these modest breaks in format still tend to be very easy and very short, so they fail to make up for all the repetitive battle missions. I'd rather have had half as many Side Missions in Pokemon Legends: Z-A if it meant they could be something more.

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