5 New Features Pokemon Legends: Arceus Needs to Evolve the Series

The next era in the Pokemon franchise was announced last week. Pokemon Legends: Arceus looks like the promising next step in the series, but there’s a lot that we don’t know about it just yet.

Despite the lack of info, fans of the franchise hope and expect for this title to be an ambitious and innovative step forward. Here are some of the things that players want to see the most with Pokemon Legends: Arceus. 

Completely Open-Worlds With Lots To Do

Although the Pokemon Company didn’t use the exact words “open-world,” it certainly seems like that’s what we’re getting with this new game. The series already took the first step with this concept in Pokemon Sword and Shield with the introduction of Wild Area.

In Pokemon Legends: Arceus, the game should expand on this idea even more. Ideally, the entirety of ancient Sinnoh should be accessible from the start, allowing players to explore far from the first village. Let us encounter rare, high-level Pokemon early in the game if we’re brave enough to venture deep into the wild territory.

This would give everyone who plays the game a unique experience. Instead of taking a linear path from route to route like in most Pokemon games, we’d be able to explore at our own pace and discover new things in a different order than our friends might.

Throw in some abandoned human settlements with artifacts to find, side quests and minigames, and mysteries to uncover, and this would break up any monotony of roaming around and finding Pokemon in a barren world.

New Travel Mechanics

If we’re exploring a vast world in Pokemon Legends: Arceus, new travel mechanics are vital.

In the past, we’ve had a few travel options. Running shoes, bicycles, and rollerblades were the most common. Most recently, we’ve had the ability to ride on Pokemon.

If options like these return, it could be a great way to travel across ancient Sinnoh quickly. It would be even better, though, if new mechanics for traveling quickly tied to the setting are introduced.

It’s hard to not look at visually similar games such as Breath of the Wild and take ideas from that. Imagine seeing a mountain in the distance and climbing the side until you get up to some icy cliffs. What if you got to the top and swiftly paraglided to the bottom?

Since these are the early days of Pokemon, it’s possible that HM moves like Surf and Dive for navigating the waters don’t exist yet. It would be fun to see water travel such as swimming, diving, or manning a boat in their place.

Innovative Battling

From what we saw in the trailer, battling in Pokemon Legends: Arceus will work pretty similarly to previous mainline games, but we noticed a few differences and hope that there are some creative changes based on this.

It looks like battling takes place right out in the open area of the world, so the transition into a battle is seamless instead of loading into a separate screen. This adds a sense of realism to the fights that many players have been asking for.

We can see it still appears to be turn-based with four selectable moves like we’re used to, but there is room for innovation with the battling, such as an active time system or a similar idea that would heighten the realism.

One important thing we noticed in the trailer is that it appears the wild Pokemon does not have its level or stats shown even though the trainer’s Pokemon does. It’s possible that wild Pokemon levels are always unknown to us in this game, and we must approach battles using a different strategy.

We wonder how important battling even is in Pokemon Legends: Arceus; it seems Pokemon can be caught in the overworld without battling, and we don’t see any rival trainer battles. It’s possible the battling system will be reworked to account for this.

Crafting System

Okay, hear me out. No, not every open-world game needs a crafting system. But Pokemon Legends: Arceus could do a lot of creative things with this idea.

Since this story takes place in the past, inventions such as Pokeballs are in their infancy.

They look very basic on a technological level, so perhaps instead of buying them in stores, we’ll have to craft them ourselves with materials we find around the world. This would make sense if there aren’t many trainers in the world for us to battle and earn spending money from.

There could be other things to craft too, such as bait to draw wild Pokemon in. If items like HMs don’t exist yet, it could be a fun idea to craft an ax to chop down bushes that stand in our way or collect materials to build a bridge to cross a river.

A More Hands-On Story

So far, the only details of the story we know are that it surrounds the mythical Pokemon, Arceus, who is said to have created the entire region and all Pokemon who inhabit it. This has the potential to be one of the most meaningful stories of the series.

While every other mainline Pokemon game has you set off on an adventure to collect gym badges and challenge the Pokemon League, this story is different. We’re not collecting gym badges; we’re creating the Pokedex for the very first time and uncovering the mysteries of Arceus.

Since the story is so different here, we’re hoping to see Game Freak dig a little deeper than usual past the surface level. Encountering Arceus is equivalent to encountering a god, so there should be some significance to the role we play. Why are we involved in this mystery?

Beyond the story of Arceus, players may also want to know how Sinnoh evolved from what it is in this game to what it was in the Gen 4 games. Could we be the ones who establish the Pokemon League, since it doesn’t seem to exist yet? What if we got to nominate top trainers and form a team for them to become their own gym?

In any case, fans have been wanting a deeper story in Pokemon for years. It’s time for Game Freak to dig a little deeper with this one to give us something hands-on that will be interesting and engaging past the point of “collecting them all.”