We can all agree that Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s city looks like total crap

Whether you’re a blind fanboy who refuses to admit that Game Freak doesn’t care about making good games or you are a Pokémon Legends: Z-A hater who is angered by its blatant sloppiness, we can all come together to agree that it looks like total sh*t.

The Pokémon community has been grinding Z-A all weekend long, and there’s been one undeniable thing that every creator has been forced to admit: the game is lifeless.

Lumiose City is hideous and depressing

I was already skeptical when Pokémon Legends: Z-A was said to take place in just a single city. That seemed like a huge step down from previous games where you could travel to a wide range of locations. But I guess Game Freak decided it was done making 234908 soulless, lazy locations and just wanted to make one big one.

While some fans had hope that Lumiose City would be vibrant and full of secret catacombs or something, it’s literally just a bland, depressing grid. You can’t even go into almost any of the buildings and the windows are all blue so developers didn’t have to put any detail on that aspect.

Speaking of detail, all of the city’s details are just decals slapped onto walls. Players have been having a good – or torturous – time showing off just how depressingly cheap and lazy Lumiose City is. Pillars, windows, and other details are completely 2D, sort of like stickers on the side of buildings.

The streets are lifeless. There are almost no NPCs or anything at all walking around. Jump on the rooftops and you are just in some blank area with no other living thing to speak of. Not even a Pidgey flying through the sky.

If I grinded this game for a few hours, I’d almost feel I was trapped in an empty insane asylum and would likely feel completely claustraphobic and like I’m going crazy.

If you happen to finally come across humans, they are completely unhinged. Probably driven to insanity from living in blank, featureless city they can’t escape. (No, you cannot take the train anywhere.)

Leave it to Pokémon fans to find the positive in even the most dreadful and sad of situations. Trainers have been entertained by the strange – and sometimes perverted – things that the NPCs say when you approach them. And I’d find it funny too if the rest of the world was equally clever and had any sort of personality to speak of.

But alas, you are just in a dystopian, empty city where all the citizens are mentally ill from staring at fake windows all day and having no stores to go into as they wander the vacant, hollow streets.

Guess we shouldn’t be shocked after seeing in a leak that the entire city is a single model and the game cost only $13 million to make. We can tell.

You can try to justify Z-A all you want, but the game looks cheap. And it’s not just the city itself. The game just feel mechanical and lifeless, flat and sterile. There’s no details, no personality, no fluidity. It’s a stiff, boring game that gets by because people love the Pokemon. That’s it.

I never thought I’d say this, but you should probably buy Digimon instead.