Pokemon Legends Z-A.

They did it. They found the one thing that nearly all Pokemon fans can universally agree was the legitimate best announcement they could possibly have made on Pokemon Day (and if you disagree, I respect that, different strokes for different folks). I honestly did not expect to get out of last month's Pokemon Day literally screaming in excitement, especially given the franchise's rapidly dwindling goodwill due to a string of objectively terrible decisions (such as Scarlet/Violet's condition at launch, releasing DLC for said games despite them still to this day never being properly patched, and whatever the hecc Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl was supposed to be), and yet I let out a yell of joy when that great big letter Z appeared on the screen.

Pokemaniacs, this is our Metroid Dread moment.

Thus far, the only things we actually know about this game is that it's another action RPG like the previous Legends game and it's set entirely in Lumiose City. We don't know if it takes place in the past, present, or future, and while some have theorized that time travel will be somehow involved (often citing a scene in the trailer that appears to some to be a Talonflame 'devolving' into a Fletchinder and then a Fletchling), I'm personally skeptical. The most likely scenario seems to be that Z-A is set in the late 1800s, when the real-world city of Paris was itself rebuilt, but as I've said before, we don't know for sure. And as for time travel, they got away with that in Legends Arceus because the entire game literally centered around a space-time rift hovering over Mt. Coronet, and then we got time travel in ScVi even if I felt they could've done more with the concept by letting us travel to the past and/or future ourselves to see where the Paradox Pokemon really came from, but that's two games in a row featuring time travel, so I don't think we're gonna get a third. Besides, where are we gonna find a time traveling Pokemon in Lumiose City? (Although I do have a drawing of Celebi holding the Eternal Flower hanging up in my room. I won it ages ago in a Twitter giveaway.)

Originally I wanted to write a list of ten things I wanted-slash-expected in Z-A, but given that there's countless takes on that very subject that have already listed the bulk of my expectations-slash-wishes, and I'm kind of late to the party on that front, that take was axed for appearing too derivative. But there is one potential take I want to see in Legends Z-A that I don't see a lot of people talking about, but that fits quite well with the city-rebuilding theme: cozy game elements.

Hear me out, okay? I know 'cozy game elements' doesn't exactly mesh completely well with 'action RPG,' but let me cook. Ever since Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity (which was my first PMD game and while it's generally considered the worst one by the fanbase, it makes a good entry-level game for casuals like myself who couldn't beat Primal Dialga if their lives depended on it), I've wanted to see a Pokemon game that leans a bit more into what made Gates' 'Paradise' gimmick such a great hook. The core PMD gameplay of exploring dungeons and completing missions was still there, but at the end of each mission you got a few bits of building material that you could invest into a new attraction in Paradise, which could be a shop, a piece of farmland, or even a minigame. These attractions provided ways to obtain new items outside of dungeons and gave Gates its own identity outside of the previous PMD games, and you could even have Pokemon you'd recruited from dungeons work at these attractions, which was pretty cool.

I want something like that for Z-A. A game that centers specifically on rebuilding a city should actually give you a chance to, well, rebuild the city.

You might not realize it if you jumped into the series from Sun and Moon onward, but cozy game elements aren't entirely alien to the Pokemon series. Gen 2 had decor you could place in your room. Gens 3 and 4 had secret bases you could decorate, with the Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire remake being in my mind the pinnacle of Game Freak coziness. Gen 5 used to have the Dream World, and Gen 6 even had a feature of Pokemon Amie where you could decorate the inside of your Pokemon's Poke Ball with little bits of furniture (why doesn't anyone talk about that, and why don't we get that anymore? It was really cool!) Even The Indigo Disk has an option to change the decor in a club room, although I haven't played the Scarlet/Violet DLC for myself and don't really regret that decision.

But the most interesting and underrated 'cozy game' element of the Pokemon series that I'd like to point out is in HeartGold/SoulSilver's Safari Zone, where you can place certain objects within the various areas to attract different Pokemon that you could catch. If Z-A really does allow us to place objects within the city, I want whatever choices we make to matter. The pitch of Z-A's storyline is remaking the city for the sake of humans and Pokemon living together; I want to be able to attract new Pokemon with my cosmetic options.

And I want to be able to craft these cosmetic items from materials I gather in the overworld, however it is we obtain them. Some have suggested that Lumiose City will have natural biomes that the player will explore; others have brought up Paris's underground catacombs and the possibility that we may explore something very similar to the Grand Underground in Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl. Maybe we'll even get a resurgence of the mining minigame from the Sinnoh games, which would fit quite well in a catacombs-based area. Wherever we may trek, I want the chance to gather resources, craft them into items, and place those items in the overworld to attract more Pokemon to the city.

Will it actually happen? I'm on the fence. Certainly Game Freak has been breaking trends left and right recently (the fact that by all appearances they skipped Unova and went straight to Kalos instead is evidence enough), but I don't really have the confidence to say that this is even probably where they're going with this. But it'd be pretty cool to leave your own mark on Lumiose City, wouldn't it?

(Also I'm totally planning a concept for a new Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game with more cozy game elements, and I'm torn between calling it Pokemon Ultra Mystery Dungeon or Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rifts of Creation. But that could be its own article somewhere down the line.)