Pokemon Legends: Z-A Has One Feature That Reminds Me So Much of Red & Blue

Like many longtime fans, my earliest Pokemon memories center on playing Pokemon Blue and Pokemon Crystal. While I’ve remained a dedicated Pokemon fan since those early days, nothing quite hits like playing on a Game Boy in the backseat of a car on a long road trip. With each new Pokemon game, I’m always eager to see new features and improvements. But I’m also secretly chasing that childhood joy of digging into a game for hours. Although Pokemon Legends: Z-A is pretty different from true main series games in many ways, it did bring me back to Pokemon Blue in an unexpected way.

Legends: Z-A doesn’t quite have the same “catch ’em all” impetus as earlier games. Yes, there are Pokemon in the Wild Zones, but the Pokedex is pretty small. We also aren’t battling gym leaders or traveling far and wide. So, it feels quite different to playing even recent games like Scarlet & Violet. And yet, once I reached Lysandre Labs, I couldn’t help but feel a bit like I was playing an older Pokemon game. This is, of course, because of the short yet sweet feeling of an old-fashioned Pokemon team hideout dungeon crawl.

The Team Rocket Hideout Was the Bane of My Childhood Existence, But I Kind of Miss It

As a young gamer, some of my core memories center on game mechanics that left me stumped. And as someone with pretty poor spatial reasoning, the Team Rocket Hideout and Silph Co. in Pokemon Blue are chief among them. Exploring these mini-dungeons took you through a maze of arrow panels and warp tiles that required careful planning to navigate. One wrong move, and you’d be back where you started, or spin yourself right into a Team Rocket Grunt eager for a battle. Naturally, I was very bad at it, and spent a lot of time frustrated and tempted to throw my Game Boy across the room. And yet, I’ve missed it in more recent Pokemon games.

More recent main series games have kind of moved away from the tried-and-true you vs. some evil team with a name like Team Rocket, Team Flare, etc. And that means entries like Pokemon Sword and Shield and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet haven’t really given us those same maze-like dungeons. With the holo tech throughout Lumiose City, Pokemon Legends: Z-A already kind of felt like exploring a Team Rocket hideout. All I was missing were warp panels and arrows that sent you spinning out of control.

Because the Team Flare Nouveou reveal comes relatively late in the story of Pokemon Legends: Z-A, I didn’t expect a Silph Co. style lab to still be lurking beneath the city. Or at the very least, I didn’t think I’d get to go there. So, it felt a bit like coming home to my early Pokemon days to realize I’d have to find an elevator key to make my way down through Lysandre Labs once again. It didn’t have quite the same level of intricacy or the arrow panels I loved to hate in prior games, but it had just enough nostalgic flair to leave me delighted.

Pokemon Legends: Z-A Makes the Dungeon Crawl Too Easy, But It Is Still Nostalgic

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In Legends: Z-A, Lysandre Labs has done away with its arrow floor panels. This strips away a good bit of the frustration, but it also takes away some of the charm. Similarly, we don’t have grunts to fight. Given that Team Flare has officially disbanded, Team Flare Nouveu seems to consist of exactly two people. That means the maze we explore isn’t filled with grunts to battle, but a few wild Pokemon will take you by surprise if you’re not careful.

When I first stepped back into Lysandre Labs, I expected to get lost wandering the maze. That was especially true once I saw that, though the arrows are gone, the warp pad mechanic very much is not. But either my spatial reasoning has improved in later life (doubtful), or this maze is much less intricate than those of older Pokemon games. I found my way to the Elevator Key and back without too many missteps at all, let alone spinning my way into a random grunt to battle with.

I did miss the challenge, but not the frustration. Stepping onto warp panels to explore an old-fashioned Pokemon Team Hideout felt incredibly nostalgic, even if it was over a bit too soon. I’m hoping this kind of callback to earlier games can return in Gen 10, alongside the solid storytelling and compelling characters. And while I may regret saying this, I’d like to see the arrow panels and the misdirection step it up a notch again, too. Here’s to getting lost in a team hideout on our way to save the world again in Pokemon games.

What did you think of the return to Lysandre Labs in Pokemon Legends: Z-A? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!