Pokémon has always been a jet-setting series, with its head in the clouds and its feet planted firmly in the real world. The first four generations of Pokémon games took us on a whirlwind tour of Japan. Red and Blue were set in a fictionalised version of Greater Tokyo, with dense cities and urban sprawl. Gold and Silver whisked us down to Kansai, with gorgeous temples and leafy towns. Ruby and Sapphire looked south to subtropical Kyūshū, all seaside cities and swathes of blue ocean. Diamond and Pearl donned their winter coats and flew to the chilly northern island of Hokkaidō, with its craggy peaks and snowfields.
After that, Pokémon went global. Black and White visited New York; X and Y strolled through Paris; Sun and Moon vacationed in Hawaii; and Sword and Shield showed us a mirror-world United Kingdom, where people like Pokémon battles more than football. The Pokemon Legends series even returned to some of these locations with updated graphics and new mechanics. Pokemon Legends: Arceus took us back to Hokkaidō and now, with Pokémon Legends: Z-A, we’re heading to France once more. These regions each have their own made-up names, but their connection to real places is deliberate and palpable.
It’s a brilliant conceit, and the designers have tremendous fun riffing on local creatures and customs. The poké-UK has roly-poly spherical sheep and haunted teapots. The streets of poké-Paris have bouffant poké-poodles. The outskirts of poké-NYC are filled with herds of sentient trash bags. But Pokémon Legends: Arceus, in particular, was different – and as its successor releases into the wild, this is worth revisiting. That’s because, as anyone who played it knows, Legends: Arceus didn’t just transport us through space; it quite literally took us on a journey through time.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is set in ‘Hisui’, a reimagining of the northern Japanese island Hokkaido in the late-ish 1800s. You end up there after being mysteriously sucked into a space-time vortex. And this rendering of historical Japan is, mostly, a total charmathon. In Hisui, pokéballs are hand-carved, and loaded with tiny fireworks that crackle and fizz. The battle menus evoke calligraphic brushwork, the skyboxes look like woodblock prints, and the new ‘strong’ and ‘agile’ attack styles are accompanied by the clap of hyōshigi sticks.