Pokémon Legends: Z-A - PAX AUS 2025 Hands On Preview
Recently, Nintendo provided us with the wonderful opportunity to venture over to HQ and check out the hotly anticipated Pokémon Legends: Z-A, and Alayna’s comprehensive coverage tackled many incredible aspects of the experience, one that will be in the hands of fans in a matter of days. PAX AUS 2025 provided us with some other builds of Pokémon Legends: Z-A to check out, and as someone who has become a bit more of a casual fan of Pokémon in the last decade than the hardcore one that I once was, I was extremely impressed.
Nintendo had set up two stations per player, with two different builds for each, and you would move from one, to the other before exiting. The first one dropped me in as a Z-rank trainer into a sequence where I needed to navigate a pathway, and best a selection of trainers and their party of Pokémon. This was early game content, and so the going wasn’t overly tough, the three trainers taking little more than a minute each to thwart. My predetermined party, which included a nice blend of Pokémon with grass, electric, normal, and fighting attacks, provided me with a diverse set of techniques that allowed me to utilize type advantages to secure comfortable victories.
I was feeling quite good about myself, tackling the challenges with ease, until suddenly, upon beating the third and final challenger, my Nintendo PR rep, sent me on a small journey through the roads of Lumiose City, to an encounter with a final trainer, this one, with a leveled-up Pigeotto in their possession. My type advantages suddenly meant very little as the Pigeotto one-shot the best I had to throw at it, before I found out that only 3 people in more than 2000 players of the demo had actually beaten the Pokémon. I’m not sure what luck they had on their side, or some sneaky additional demo minutes that they might have had, because this seemed completely insurmountable in the conditions of the demo. What was great to see though, was that the challenge existed, and with some extra time to grind, even those more extreme jumps can be overcome.
The demo’s second vertical slice was an opportunity to see Mega Evolutions in action. After a cutscene where a Lucario bounds over to fight the good fight with you, the player will tackle a Mega-Evolved Absol. Going toe-to-toe with such a suped-up Pokémon is no small feat, and my Lucario was needing to Mega Evolve to match it. Straddling around the volatile Absol and launching attacks at it, collecting the shards that explode from it with each attack that then fuel your own ability to Mega Evolve your own Lucario. When that bar maxes out, and you can unleash your own flurry of Mega Evolved moves, your time with this boosted power is limited, and despite throwing some of my heaviest attacks at it, my Mega-Evolved moments expired and the loop to refuel begun once again before a final assault finished the job.
Though at its core, the combat remained the same as the standard encounters, and tightly in-line with what players experienced through the original 2022 release, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, the scale of these megasized encounters feel fantastically refreshing for a formula which hasn’t aged poorly in the last 3 years to begin with.
I’m extremely excited to see how the ascent from Z-rank, hopefully, all the way through to A will play out. These two tiny slices of the experience whet my appetite for a fascinating launch in just a matter of days from now, and as a huge fan of Pokémon X & Y, the return to Lumiose City is painfully close. I’m thrilled with what I played, and I’m stoked to get more soon.
Time Until Launch (October 16, 2025)
