Way back in 2021, just a few months into my time at TheGamer, I wrote about Lumiose. Pokemon’s City of Lights, the Parisian centrepiece to the French-coded Kalos, is one of Pokemon’s best slices of world building. It’s rare that a town post-Gen 3 captures the personality of those before it, whether it be the highs of Goldenrod or the lows of Cianwood, but Lumiose, built around the Prism Tower, managed it. Now, people might finally realise that.
There was no particular reason for me to be writing about Lumiose back in 2021. I just liked writing about Pokemon – still do – so when I didn’t have anything all that timely in front of me, my attention often turned to Pikachu and company. But now, there is a reason to celebrate Lumiose again. It will be the setting for the upcoming Pokemon Legends: Z-A, and the latest trailer gave us a deep dive into what we can expect.
Pokemon Legends: Z-A Seems Nothing Like Legends: Arceus
Z-A is going in a very different direction to Pokemon Legends: Arceus. The original Legends game took us back in time, to a feudal era of Pokemon where the Pokedex was still being invented, and was written by hand. Poke Balls were carved out of wood, and catching Pokemon was an exercise in cataloguing a species we still knew little about. With this, the lands were open and free to roam. Cities and townscapes had not been built, letting us wander freely across wild terrain.
I had feared, from the original Z-A trailer, that we’d get something similar. It offered us a Tron-style cybernetic look at Lumiose, and I wondered if we’d be part of some cosmic building process where we’d see the foundations of what would become an iconic metropolis. But in the latest trailer, we see Lumiose as we know it in the modern day, with bustling streets, busy roads, sky-high buildings, and a cosmopolitan buzz of activity.
On the one hand, this raises the question as to what a Legends game really is. It seemed as though it had an identity as an anthology of the past series, and the sequel is moving away from that. Part of me is worried about what purpose Legends serves in that case. On the other, I’m very excited to go back to Lumiose again, and that’s all I care about.
Lumiose Is The Star Of Pokemon Legends: Z-A
Legends: Z-A gives us Lumiose as I remember it, but with a much needed glow up. The latest trailer shows off parks, shopping centres, and hotels, and it’s a city that feels lived in. So many Pokemon towns are just there for you to pass through, and so they only have a few narratively or thematically important buildings, some quite nonsensical houses, and a lot of space to roam. Because Lumiose is much grander, it can still offer lots to interact with, but seems designed for the people who spend their lives there as much as the trainers who are passing through.
Legends: Z-A tries to keep the themes of Arceus as we see the city is undergoing a “hi-tech redevelopment plan”. It’s not quite the frontier spirit we got in Hisui, but if we generously call Z-A the future, we can still see a theme. Maybe in the full game that will have a larger bearing on things. We see solar panels on buildings and cybernetic holograms walking around, which does leave me apprehensive. Lumiose is beautiful because of its architecture, and futurising it just to look cool takes away its appeal.
Hopefully this links to the Wild Zones, clearly playing off the Wild Area of Sword & Shield, which is where you can catch and interact with Pokemon despite remaining in the city. It feels like a clever way to divide the city from the wilderness in a place that is all city, and hopefully means focus stays on Lumiose and the grandeur it can offer. Staying in one place will mean it needs to be denser, a far cry from the emptiness of Scarlet & Violet, and could finally see Pokemon get the open-world stuff right. If it does, it would be fitting for it to happen in Lumiose, a place that has always deserved more respect from the Pokemon fandom.
- Publisher(s)
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Nintendo, The Pokemon Company