Pokémon Legends: Arceus review – budget bare-minimum, or the series' purest form?

It’s a strange kind of punishment, being a long-term player of Game Freak’s collective Pokémon works. To have played all these games as they came out is to be forever tormented by the series high of Pokémon’s early gems. For many these are all-time video game highs: deep, vast, iconic giants, games that launched and subsequently bottled the lightning of a generational craze. Continuing on beyond them means suffering a kind of constant haunting by the hypothetical, the what-if world where the studio is given the time and budget and technical talent it so obviously needs – and that the Pokémon Company, owner of the highest-grossing media franchise , can so obviously afford.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus reviewDeveloper: Game FreakPublisher: Nintendo, The Pokémon CompanyPlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Out 28th January on Nintendo Switch

But it’s also to be dragged along still by the series’ superlative, enchanting, uber-compelling core: battle, trade, collect. Yes, there’s a lingering sense of austerity and belt-tightening, of a kind of savage, self-inflicted economisation and distillation of Pokémon games into the absolute barest necessities for existence. Of a publisher with a fondness for ever-tougher rounds of development-budget limbo. But this is just what it means to enjoy Pokémon, now. You want more, you feel you really want more, but by some twist of dark magic you’re left feeling grateful for what you’ve got.

It’s never been as evident as it is in Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Part-remake, part-prequel, Legends: Arceus traces a sketch across the events of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, the fourth generation of main series games that only last November had a closer, similarly penny-pinched remake of their own in Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. Legends: Arceus is set a long, long time before them in a kind of feudal-Japan version of the Sinnoh region, here called Hisui and scattered with great, unspoiled basins of land where gen four’s cities would be, plus a single settlement of Jubilife Village and a few, weirdly Olympian ruins here and there.