I Hope Pokemon Legends Arceus Isn’t Held Back By The Switch
The Nintendo Switch is holding games back and an upgrade isn’t on the way just yet.
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Nintendo Switch has some beautiful games. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, New Pokemon Snap, and Super Mario Odyssey are all gorgeous, using their stellar art design to supersede the technical obstacles that surface with the limited hardware they call home.
Others haven’t fared so well, with Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Apex Legends, and Pokemon Sword & Shield failing to maintain solid performance and visual quality on a platform that clearly has a low ceiling with no way of smashing through it. Otherwise wonderful experiences are being held back by hardware that was already reaching its limits several years ago, and with no Switch Pro in sight, those limitations are set to continue.
This has me worried about Pokemon: Legends Arceus. In its first few trailers, the ambitious adventure looked rough. Environments were bland, the performance was choppy, and the artistic intent of its period-era world simply wasn’t shining through. Things have improved, and I’m somewhat more optimistic now I’ve learned that it won’t be a traditional open-world affair, instead adopting wide open zones in a similar manner to Sword & Shield’s Wild Areas, which themselves were more than a little underwhelming. I understand we have a strong sense of nostalgia for Pokemon, but perhaps I’m detached enough to remove my goggles and be a little cynical. Sorry, this job wears you down.
People are looking at Legends Arceus and hoping for a bold evolution of the series’ formula, for Game Freak to take the tried-and-true template it has been using for several decades and finally shake things up. I’m still unsure what will happen, even if the act of catching Pokemon and engaging in battle are being updated to reflect modern mechanical innovation. Exploration will once again involve journeying across a vast world, being given time to explore wide open areas with the freedom to catch and do battle with Pokemon to our heart’s content. But we could do that before, and I’m not sure I’ll be compelled to spend hours combing the world if the framerate happens to tank and the graphics are a blurry, inconsistent mess. Perhaps I’m being harsh, but Game Freak is yet to reassure me and so many others that this won’t be the case.
Pokemon’s most memorable locations are its charismatic cities and sprawling dungeons, all places that are curated with love and care that a conventional open world won’t be able to grant, especially on a platform like the Switch, without compromise. Game Freak isn’t a massive team – it’s a hugely talented one, but a developer that is often forced to work within its means to produce each new epic. Sword & Shield was representative of that struggle, bearing a number of teething issues that came with moving to a home console for the first time. To be clear, I’m not dragging Pokemon for no reason – I’m just being realistic. The fact that Legends Arceus isn’t an open world filled with things to do is a reassurance, showing me that Game Freak is perhaps aware that it needs to scale back and work on the things it does well instead of venturing into unfamiliar territory and landing flat on its face.
This hope doesn’t remedy the technical issues that could surface in the full release. Who knows, it could run great and look incredible, but it’s far more likely to suffer from the same visual oddities and performance hiccups as Sword & Shield, and that’s no good thing. The Switch OLED is an excellent console, and the new display is a game changer when it comes to exemplifying the colours across new and existing games, but it runs on the same internal hardware, and thus encounters all of the same obstacles. Breath of the Wild still drops frames, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 still looks like Trubbish, and Arceus could suffer from similar fumbles. I hope it doesn’t, or wish Nintendo had upgraded the console in a meaningful way to circumvent such inevitable shortcomings.
Pokemon games are brilliant, but Sword & Shield and Legends Arceus are beginning to show a pattern that the main series is struggling to settle into a new life on home consoles. Its handheld origins are still evident in its design, while visuals are striving to catch up to a standard that so many players are expecting. These blemishes will be overlooked as the game goes on to sell millions of copies like all those before it, but I hope this ingrained popularity doesn’t lead Game Freak into a malaise of complacency. I want Pokemon to be the best it’s ever been, like no game has even been before, but I’m not sure that’s possible on the Nintendo Switch.
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