Sometimes mapping every real-world struggle onto whatever the current pop culture hotness is can feel exhaustingly cynical. Often this tendency manifests in statements and gestures that are, at their best, a bumper sticker tagline about how Republicans are a bunch of Dementors from Harry Potter, or at worst, literal fascist propaganda dressed in Halo’s imagery. Even just yesterday, as we headed into election night, the official social media accounts of the Democratic party were using my favorite song from KPop Demon Hunters to paint President Donald Trump as an agent of the evil, soul-eating demon Gwi-ma, and it gave me the ick. So when something like Pokémon Legends: Z-A actually seems to understand the moment in a deeper, more authentic way, it’s not only a welcome surprise, but it can be an incredibly poignant reminder that not all these stories are empty posturing.
In my Pokémon Legends: Z-A review, I mentioned a moment that made me put my controller down and just stare at the ceiling, speechless and overcome with emotion. It was, admittedly, an inopportune time for me to have to take a break, as Lumiose City, the Paris-inspired metropolis that is the setting for the entire game’s adventure, was facing an apocalyptic threat in the form of a sentient rogue machine called Ange embedded in the city’s central tower. But I just needed a moment. I’m a sentimental person, and pretty much no other series activates all those flowery feelings in me like Pokémon does. Legends: Z-A is especially well-equipped to invoke them, and its finale had its sights set on me like a Gigantamaxed Intellion aiming down its scope.
Legends: Z-A’s singular setting has been a point of contention for some Pokémon fans. The series is typically defined by its regional pilgrimages that take the player through different cities and biomes in search of its many magical monsters, so putting an entire 30+ hour campaign in one city was already a big change. This isn’t helped by the fact that the map is kind of small and lacks the distinct districts that usually characterize a city. So, looking at it strictly as a video game setting, Lumiose City leaves a lot to be desired. However, what it does manage to capture better than probably any other game in the franchise is that a city is not just a place, it’s a people. Landmarks and attractions can lure anyone to a place like Lumiose for a visit, but it’s the citizens who make a city what it is.
Because Legends: Z-A is set in one place, it’s better at cultivating a cast of characters than most Pokémon games get to be. Typically, you meet other trainers and gym leaders for a battle or two before you head out on your way to your next destination, but Legends: Z-A’s not-gym-leaders round out a team of absolute weirdos who would likely not interact at all in another Pokémon game. They come from different industries, backgrounds, and cultures, and you could imagine each of them as a figurehead of separate towns with their own eclectic visual motifs. Maybe Canari, the star streamer of Lumiose, and Jacinthe, the battle-obsessed socialite, could have passed by each other at a Kalos gala, but broadly, I can’t imagine most of these guys even being friends if it weren’t for their proximity, both geographically and to you, the player. You serve as the social glue linking a dozen or so disparate trainers that make a full-blown community by the time the game is over.
Living in a dense city is pretty much living on top of people whom you might have otherwise never met. From the outside looking in, a place like Lumiose can seem like a chaotic rat race of people too distracted by their own bullshit to care about the person they see every morning on their commute. In Legends: Z-A, however, you see just how untrue that city stereotype is through characters like Corbeau, the leader of the Rust Syndicate, which is essentially Pokémon’s version of a French mob. He leads as an intimidating force who is seemingly extorting people like the player’s friend Taunie/Urbain, though as your team works off your debt, you’re not getting involved in heinous crimes, but instead in what is essentially forced public service, like helping the locals deal with problems in their homes or chasing off public menaces who are bothering local kids. When he finally “forgives” your debt, he does so in a roundabout way by staying at your team’s hotel base of operations and leaving a “tip” of the remaining amount. Despite his scary demeanor, the guy’s a household name in Lumiose for wanting to do right by the people.
These kinds of on-the-ground institutions rise over the years as corporate interests creep into a city and threaten to overtake it. Legends: Z-A grapples with the impact of this kind of corporate involvement throughout its main story, as the city’s new urban redevelopment plan to bring Pokémon and people together via new Wild Zones that house untamed monsters is orchestrated by a corporation called Quasartico Inc. The company enters the city ostensibly with good intentions, but the people of Lumiose don’t seem satisfied with this arrangement, and the ongoing destabilization of the city as new Wild Zones open begins to interfere with the people’s daily lives. By the time Legends: Z-A wraps up its main campaign, no one’s really sure if the city is going in the right direction, and there’s something really fascinating about watching the Pokémon universe grapple with the world it’s made, even if it doesn’t come to a definitive conclusion by the end of the story.
Even within the language of an all-ages franchise, the seedier side of city living lingers over Lumiose. Legends: Z-A has anti-homeless benches scattered around its city, includes a few questlines that criticize the overbearing local police force, and as the urban redevelopment plan unfolds, the citizens are either complaining about it or straight-up protesting it. The people are watching their city be gentrified, and they feel like they’re being pushed out by a corporation’s supposedly well-meaning changes. This is put on display by two characters, Grisham and Griselle, who were previously unnamed grunts for Team Flare in Pokémon X and Y, but have stayed in the city and evaded capture, despite their actions in the 3DS games. Nowadays, they run a cafe in the city, but they secretly consider themselves members of “Team Flare Nouveau,” a new iteration of the team that wants to make Lumiose better for the people in it, and they think they’re far more equipped to do so than the suits of Quasartico because they talk to the average citizen every day when they bring them one of their specialty coffees.
One of the most effective segments in Legends: Z-A occurs when these two take you to the old remnants of their base from X and Y, lamenting that they’ve been ostracized from the community of Lumiose, but also have nowhere else to go because this is their home. Rather than simply rehashing the Team Flare story in Legends: Z-A, Game Freak chose to turn a remnant of one of its more forgettable villainous teams into a sad, moving echo of ordinary people being swayed by big promises their leaders make and fail to deliver on, typically in pursuit of their own selfish goals. Grisham and Griselle were sold a vision of a world that would help the Kalos region, and instead, all they got was a madman at its helm. So what are they to do? Make the most of it for the city they love.
Most of the people you team up with in Legends: Z-A’s final hours shouldn’t be friends. In a lot of places in the Pokémon world, they likely would have never even met. So when the going gets tough and they band together, it shows that the heart of a city is the people who helped build it brick by brick. When it all goes to hell, these unlikely allies all gather around a giant piece of rubble to bicker and strategize how to defend their home. Everyone has something to contribute. Tarragon and his construction crew build a massive path with scaffolding to help you reach your objective, Jacinthe blocks the Rogue Pokemon attacking the city with her barrier tech, and Corbeau uses the might of the Rust Syndicate to…create a human ladder for you to climb (it’s actually a hilarious moment). Lastly, the leaders of Team Flare Nouveau defend you as you try to reach Zygarde, knowing that even if the people of Lumiose can’t forgive them for what they did all those years ago, they’ll protect the city or die trying.
The only way that the people of Lumiose City can overcome this gargantuan threat is together, and god, it hits. It’s why I had to take a breather to just reflect. I moved to New York City to write for Kotaku almost three years ago, and as a queer man who grew up in the Bible Belt, there’s something disorienting about notions of community to me. I came from a place where most of the citizens would only rally around you if you checked specific boxes, and if you accepted that help under certain pretenses. Mutual aid often felt like it was conditional, and it often came with strings attached. I know if I asked a lot of the predominantly white, conservative people in that small town, they would say that wasn’t their experience. But many of them were so embedded in their insular circles that they didn’t recognize their hands weren’t extended equally if you were even slightly outside of their bounds.
Last night, I attended my first election watch party since moving to the city, and after throwing my support behind new NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, I had been grinding my teeth all day in anticipation of the results. The event was full of so many people from different walks of life, with histories different but perhaps not too dissimilar from mine. Everyone was united in a common cause: to try and make the city more affordable for working-class people after years of escalating expenses pricing people out. In my 33 years, it was the first time I sat in a room waiting for an election result surrounded by people who all wanted the same things I did, and who did more than simply tolerate each other. When Mamdani’s victory was called, he gave an incredible speech that not only promised a future worth fighting for, but asserted that anyone who sought to disrupt that future, even Donald Trump’s fascist administration, would have to go through everyone in New York City. I was standing with my friends, many of whom had only come into my life after I’d uprooted it to be in this city, as we hooped, hollered, and cried, knowing that maybe, just maybe, things might be different tomorrow than they felt today.
I know that Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s depiction of people who love their city coming together for the common good is possible because I’ve seen it. For a lot of my life, I’d felt like stories of disparate people coming together were purely idyllic or naive. But these days, I know better, because those stories are all around me.
