Pokémon, Saints Row and the beauty of small open worlds

I’ve been thinking a lot about Pokémon Legends ZA recently. If I’m honest, I’ve been doing more thinking about it than playing it. After all, I’ve finished the game, including the DLC, with mostly some extra quests and Pokedex slots to fill out but my time with the game feels like it has mostly come to an end as I look toward Pokemon Winds and Waves. But I did play a lot of it for a pretty long stretch of time, and honestly, I had a blast with it.

It isn’t perfect. For me personally it’s a step back from Legends Arceus, with the catching being severely deemphasised and made less fun, but I understand why – they wanted to make battles the star of the show and the new battles system is fun. I still don’t think I am in love with it, but I just think that’s a personal taste thing because I’m not really into these kinds of games anyway. But I was never into turn based RPGs either and I love regular Pokémon games. The gameplay is fun enough, the story is excellent and I really enjoy the ZA Royale and kinda wish we had been genuinely going all the way from Z to A.

And then there’s the elephant in the room. The very big elephant in the room, or, possibly more accurately, the very small elephant in the room – the world. Legends ZA’s world is certainly open, but it’s also tiny and this is one of the biggest things that I’ve seen criticised about the game. Well, other than the DLC and the NSO specific mega stones, but I’ve already commented on that in some of my videos so I won’t go into it here. Regardless, that open world is something I wanted to focus on because I fell in love with it very quickly and I didn’t really understand why.

You expect that something like this would be off-putting simply because it’s so small. What’s the point of an open world when you can circumnavigate it in 7 minutes? And yeah, that’s a fair point. We’ve been blessed in the modern age with open world maps of enormous proportion. I haven’t played many to be honest, but it’s hard to deny that Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, which I have played, are a masterclass, and games like GTA V, Skyrim, Elden Ring and Red Dead Redemption are considered all time classics for many reasons, but their massive, packed open worlds are one of the main ones. As I said, I haven’t actually played any of these, other than a little bit of GTA V, but I can acknowledge that the worlds they create are extraordinary.

Pokémon Legends ZA seems to fly in the face of that, but particularly in terms of its size. As I mentioned, someone managed to travel the outer rim of the city in a mere 7 minutes, which makes this among the smaller open world games out there. And yet something about it feels so… right. A lot of people lament that we aren’t getting this game with the entire Kalos region, imagine this kind of open world but with all of Kalos! And that sounds great, but it also feels like it would miss the point, and not just because the game is specifically meant to be based on a city. Something about the smaller open world works for me. But what exactly is that?

I started thinking about the open world games I’ve played in the past and enjoyed and, as I said, I really haven’t played many, but the one that I think has to be brought up for me personally is Saints Row 2. Man, I played this game so much as a kid, I always preferred it to GTA, although granted I think part of that was that my main point of comparison at the time was San Andreas and just the fact that Saints Row had ragdoll physics for its characters made it infinitely more fun. I also loved the cheat codes. Infinite health, low gravity and evil cars was my go to combination. The reason I bring that game up is because Stillwater is, by modern standards, a pretty small open world. It’s certainly not on the level of Legends ZA, don’t get me wrong, but thanks to the existence of cars, getting from one point to another will only take a matter of minutes. That’s probably true of most open world games that have vehicles, but the point is Stillwater isn’t especially big. And yet it doesn’t really feel like that affects my enjoyment. Yeah, it’s small, but I still have a blast driving around, hacking at people with katanas or spraying them with a septic truck.

A part of this is just that there’s a lot to do in Saints Row 2 and the activities are incredibly fun, but I would spend most of my time in the game just messing around in the open world. That never got old, and I find it interesting that when I did try out GTA V for the first time it didn’t hook me in the same way Saints Row 2 did. I actually think size had something to do with this, because I know that GTA V is massive, but that feels somewhat intimidating, and impersonal. It would take me a long time to really get to know the city, and I probably could put that time in, but with so many other games out there to play, why should I? And my experience with a large open world game doesn’t necessarily make it feel easy to know the world – I never really felt like I knew Breath of the Wild’s world that well and I put an ungodly amount of time into it. It’s to the point that I was convinced that Tears of the Kingdom had a much larger overhaul than it did because I was just not remembering most of these areas. Breath of the Wild’s world is excellent, but I wouldn’t say I know it inside and out, not by any stretch. I know the broad strokes, but the details are fuzzy. This means that every time I play it I’ll be able to discover something new, which is a great thing, I’m not trying to say that larger open world games are worse than smaller ones. It’s just that in Saints Row 2, at the height of my time playing it, I really DID feel like I knew it. This wasn’t a far-off land that I could have a grand adventure in; it was a city I knew well. It was MY city in a way. It became homely.

Legends ZA gives me that very same feeling. It’s small, but that means that I got to know it very well very quickly. You see a lot of the same areas quite often, and your journey through the game has you going all over the map. To make the comparison once again to Breath of the Wild, you can go pretty much anywhere at any time, but the reality is that you’re venturing to new areas where you can complete a questline that mainly takes place in that area, and then doing that with other areas as you explore more. It will take you hours upon hours to see the entire world, while in Legends ZA or Saints Row 2 you could see it within the first few. They are very different types of open world that lead to very different experiences.

This all makes Lumiose feel homely. You start to get used to these places – walking by Quasartico Inc, strolling through Bleu plaza, always returning to your home base in Hotel Z. You come to recognise these places as if it really was your own city. And that isn’t to say there aren’t things still left to discover – there are so many little alleyways, nooks and crannies hidden away that you never went down because you never had a reason to, as well as plenty of rooftop routes to dive into. But in large part you start to know exactly where you are at all times and I actually kinda like that.

Because just like Stillwater, this does become your city and, just like Stillwater, this is kinda crucial to the actual plot of the game. In Saints Row 2 you’re the boss of the third street saints and you have to fight to take your city back from the new gangs that popped up to take it from you while you were in a coma. Being able to really know the city, understand it, feel a sense of belonging there, helps you to connect with that goal and want to achieve it. You know that the streets you walk can belong to you and so you try to work towards that. Legends ZA has a, uh, slightly different story, where you’re trying to save Lumiose city from the threats that are popping up, particularly rogue mega evolution, and help it be a place where people and Pokémon can coexist. And once again, the fact that you can get to know this city so well, and can feel like you belong to it, helps connect you to that goal. And because you see it change as you play, there is a tangible reward to the investment you’re putting into it, you can see the changes happening.

Once again, I will make that comparison to Breath of the Wild because the goal is similar – save Hyrule from Calamity Ganon and his demonic army. And yet I feel far less connected to Hyrule in that game, and its sequel, than I do Stillwater or Lumiose City. It’s a wonderful world to explore, but I don’t feel like I have personal stakes in it. It’s massive but I rarely stay in a place for too long and I don’t tend to revisit areas either. And so, most of the land feels like somewhere I’ve been rather than somewhere I belong.

Now, am I saying that this makes Breath of the Wild’s open world bad? Heck no, and nor do I really think it holds the game back. Of the three games I’ve talked about primarily in this post, Breath of the Wild is my favourite, and I love Tears of the Kingdom even more. I also don’t mean to come across as saying that Legends ZA and its world are on a par with Saints Row 2, because again, I love that game more than ZA. Legends ZA does some things I love, but there are also things that I also find a little more off-putting on a personal level and we can all see that it’s imperfect in many ways. But I did want to make the case that when it comes to open worlds, bigger doesn’t have to mean better. It just means… different.

The more I think about it, there are other extraordinary games with very small open worlds. Shadow of the Colossus isn’t a game that you would typically think of as open world, seeing as its world is handled very differently to most, but technically it is one and it certainly isn’t big. But it never needed to be big; it just needed to give you that sense of freedom in a world where you have an express focus and build an impeccable atmosphere. I think of Lego City Undercover, basically Lego’s answer to Grand Theft Auto, a dense city that has so much to discover. And then there’s Bowser’s Fury, which may feel like cheating both because it isn’t a standalone game and because it may as well just be a very large Odyssey level, but shut up, it counts, and it’s my favourite open world game of all time… if you count it I guess. It may be a relatively small world but it has a very strong central focus and a world that changes the more you interact with it and I fell in love with it.

When it comes to open worlds, most people will insist that it has to be massive and also packed with stuff in order to be worth a damn, and I think that style of open world can certainly be excellent, but I think small open worlds are almost a lost art. The ability to give a player a smaller open space and make that small size meaningful feels like it can be more meaningful. I don’t think a small open world has to be a bad open world, I think it can give a greater focus to a game and I think Legends ZA nails that focus. So would a fully explorable Kalos have been great? Yeah, maybe. But I also think what we got is worth that trade off. Even as someone who already loved Kalos, I never expected to fall in love with Lumiose City like I have here. I think they’ve done something kinda special here, and I really hope other developer take note and make these small open world style games. I would be interested to see what can be achieved in that kind of medium.