'Pokémon Legends: Z-A' on Switch 2 is the turbo-charged 'Pokémon' combat of my dreams

The Nintendo Switch 2 may be new to the scene and still waiting for its first must-play exclusive RPG — but that wait might soon be over. That's because Pokémon Legends: Z-A launches on Oct. 16.

Yes, the game is technically coming to both the Switch 2 and its predecessor. But based on the hour I spent with it at a recent preview event, this could be the step forward the series has desperately needed. Longtime Pokémon developer Game Freak has made some admirable leaps in recent years, such as the open world-ification of Scarlet and Violet, but one thing remained stubbornly stuck in 1996: the combat.

The demo I played of Legends: Z-A included more than just combat, of course, but what stood out most were the changes to how fights work. As someone who has been begging for Game Freak to pick up the pace for years, the changes made to Legends: Z-A are exciting. Let's dig in.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A hands-on preview: A seismic shake-up

There are plenty of things that distinguish Pokémon Legends: Z-A from other games in the immensely popular franchise. This is a spin-off, not the next big generational jump, which is likely coming next year. That gives Game Freak room to experiment — and based on my brief time with it so far, that seems to have paid off.

Like its predecessor, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, this is an open-world game where wild Pokémon not only attack your Pokémon, but they can also attack you. If you're not careful, they'll take you out, prompting a respawn at a previous checkpoint. Sneaking around and finding the right time to advantageously sic your Pokémon on wild ones is a big part of the game, but that's not necessarily new here.

What is new is how fights work. Combat in Arceus was still a take on the classic turn-based fights that go all the way back to the Game Boy. In Z-A, battles play out in real-time. If you just sit there and do nothing, you will lose because the opponent will just unleash all of its moves on you while you wait. Rather than choosing moves from a menu, you instead map four moves to the face buttons, and they operate on cooldowns, so you can use them as often as they're available.

Don't do it... Credit: Nintendo

This is a fundamental shift that has immediate effects on how you play the game compared to previous Pokémon titles. For instance, moves like Protect or Double Team that offer defensive or statistical benefits without doing any damage are now significantly more useful than they would be in a system where using one takes up an entire turn. Protect is especially interesting, as it essentially acts as a timed guard move; there were multiple fights where my opponent would use it right as I unleashed a powerful move, negating my attack entirely. That felt bad, sure, but it also lit up my eyes with the realization that I could pull that kind of BS on my enemies, too.

Positioning also becomes paramount in this new system. If you don't give it any commands, your Pokémon will follow you around during fights, and this is actually super important for dodging enemy attacks. Many moves now have areas of effect, with Flame Wheel bursting ahead in a straight line and Whirlpool leaving behind a destructive circle wherever you used it.

Ah, crap. Credit: Nintendo

It's a manifestly altered experience from something like Scarlet and Violet. Battles here play out incredibly quickly, so much so that it can be hard to keep track of everything that's going on, but I suspect that's part of the fun. There's a rolling log of combat updates on the right side of the UI (older games would make you manually button through an unskippable text box every time anyone did anything) that's genuinely kind of hard to follow, but in a cool way. As someone who has been yearning for a sped-up Pokémon experience for a long, long time, I got what I wanted here.

Probably the coolest example I can give of all these systems working together in harmony was in a boss fight against Mega Victreebel, a new, gigantic, and grotesque take on one of the original 151 Pokémon. During this fight, Victreebel would occasionally leave out circular pools of poison that I'd have to navigate around to avoid damage. One of the more fascinating bits of tactical nuance in this game is that, in situations like that, it actually pays off to withdraw your active Pokémon for a few seconds so they don't get hurt. That fight also gave me the ability to Mega Evolve a few of my guys, and while the mega meter steadily decreases during Mega Evolution, you can actually stall that by defensively pulling your Pokémon back into its ball and living to fight another day.

Sprinting and dodging while also juggling classic Pokémon mechanics like type advantages and stat boosts is a lot to process, and I only just started to get a handle on it by the end of my demo. We'll see how the combat meshes with everything else going on in Legends: Z-A when the game launches on Oct. 16, but for now, all I can do is applaud Game Freak for doing something truly new, even if it'll make some players uncomfortable.