Pokémon Legends: Arceus breathes new life into Pokémon

theverge.com:

For years there has been a paradox at the heart of the Pokémon series. Each game is a story about discovery, where players venture into a strange new world in search of monsters to uncover and collect. At the same time, the franchise has evolved slower than a low-level Magikarp, introducing features so gradually that long-time players generally already know what to expect when the next release comes out. There will be a fresh location, a few new features, and a bigger pokédex, but the structure has remained largely identical from the original Game Boy games all the way up to Sword and Shield on the Nintendo Switch.

Which is what makes Pokémon Legends: Arceus so refreshing: it’s genuinely surprising. It does this by shifting the timeline back to long before the modern games in the series, during a period when pokémon were still barely understood. Instead of a world where humans and pokémon live in harmony, and anyone can buy an electronic device full of information on hundreds of species, players are thrust into a wild, untamed region where people are just doing their best to survive while surrounded by largely unknown and seemingly dangerous creatures.

This shift in perspective — coupled with a more holistic design approach and a much larger, more open world to explore — makes for the biggest overhaul to the Pokémon formula since the series debuted.

Long-time fans of the series will notice the changes immediately. Instead of being a young would-be pokémon trainer out to become a champion, you’re instead a teenager in the Hisui region, an older version of the location from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl — which, not coincidentally, were just re-made for the Switch — where pokéballs have just been invented, and humans mostly