Got a free copy from 4chan. Might as well play it to see if it's as bad as everyone says it is.
"Pokemon Legends: Z-A" First Impressions:
After a few hours, I can say that the claims are quite accurate, even if they are exaggerated for dramatic effect. This game is sadly closer in quality to Scarlet & Violet than I'd like. It's definitely better than SV but that's not saying much when I did not enjoy playing SV at all. Despite the extra year in development it doesn't feel like all that time was allocated to anything substantial. I weep for the suckers that get this game for $70.
Gameplay: For context, "Pokemon Legends: Arceus" for me was the best Pokemon game yet, and I was unironically excited for this game. I should've known better since exploring a city is way lamer than exploring a vast, untamed wilderness. The open world is an improvement over Scarlet & Violet's version yet both that game and Z-A have still effectively learned nothing from what made Legends Arceus so fun to play. No reason to make a open world game when there's fuck all to do in it.
You are extremely limited to where you can go and what you can do in Lumiose City. The city itself is crafted well enough for you to get lost in yet all of the gameplay minutia is oddly segregated. The Wild Zones are these pithy little kid's playgrounds where you catch a tiny handful of Pokemon. Shops are nothing more than strip malls with a anemic assortment of fashionware. The rooftops of said shops have more Pokemon for you to catch but they're basically another wild zone in all but name. There are these dumb obstacle courses to jankily 3-D platform your way around for meager rewards. All of this does not mesh well and the game becomes lesser than the sum of it's parts.
PokeCombat: I did not have faith that GameFreak could do real-time combat justice and sad to say the combat is not all it's cracked up to be. The pokecombat is very button-mashy, very MMORPG in design. Day-to-day combat is very flat, both in design and in execution. You can't jump in this game, nor is there any verticality to the combat areas. It feels like there's no reason to dodge roll or move around since it's much more effective to stand still and spam attack commands. Even if you tried running around with your Pokemon out, it all feels pointless, because they never keep up with you or somehow get stuck in geometry. I can't even say if this is an improvement over the turn-based combat since they're both god-awfully executed for different reasons.
Story: I only care about a Pokemon story based on how much it wastes my time. Z-A's tutorial is about as long as SV's, so as first impressions go it's not good. It does not help the story missions have railroaded me much harder than Scarlet or Violet ever could. Once you get to the part where side-missions are available, the game finally opens up and stops suffocating you with the intro. The side missions are a god-send for the fact that most of them are simple enough not to force me into drawn out cutscenes, and let me keep playing how I want to play. People are saying the story is short, so I take that as a positive since the less rudimentary cutscenes I see, the better.
Performance: It runs well enough @30fps on the good ol' Switch emulators. Not a high bar of course but with GameFreak you have to expect the worst these days. Mercifully, the worst did not happen this time so I was able to play through without any incidents. It'll probably run better natively on the Switch/Switch 2, but that's not a compliment for a game this tragically banal.
Conclusion: Better than Scarlet & Violet, worse than Pokemon Legends: Arceus. I'm sure that I'll keep playing for what there is, just not sure if I'll beat it or drop it like I did with SV.
EDIT: I Just put a few more hours in. Holy fuck that intro does not do this game any favors. It genuinely got better the more I played it. My overall critiques still apply but thankfully it's not as bad as I originally thought
Here's a picture of Mareep and my Trainer (Rocket Pop Banana Fudge, Banana Fudge for short)
