Pokémon Legends Z-A, the newest entry in the long-running Nintendo RPG franchise, is officially out today on Switch and Switch 2. And while many are excited to hop in and start catching pocket monsters, many fans aren’t happy with Z-A‘s small and boring map, which lacks the environmental variety found in past Pokémon games.
While Pokémon Legends Z-A technically didn’t launch until today, October 16, fans have been playing leaked versions of the game for a few weeks now and have begun sharing their thoughts online about the game’s map, which is the entirety of Lumiose City, located in the Kalos region. This location first appeared in 2013’s Pokémon X and Y. In those games, Lumiose City was just one of many locations included in the large open world. However, in Z-A, Lumiose City is essentially the entire playspace, and that’s proving to be a disappointing fact for some players.
Over on the Pokémon subreddit, a popular post with over 3,000 upvotes claims that you can walk around the entire city in less than seven minutes. Eurogamer tested this out and confirmed that, yes, if you sprint around and avoid battles, you can run around the whole circular city in just about six minutes and 20 seconds. Now, a smaller map isn’t entirely a bad thing. Some open worlds don’t need much space to be wonderful. Grand Theft Auto 3 feels pretty dang small when you go back to it in 2025, but it packs a lot in its limited sandbox. However, Z-A’s map isn’t just small, it also lacks visual variety. This is demonstrated perfectly in this short video from YouTuber 101Leafy.
On Reddit and YouTube, you can find comments from players lamenting the small map’s lack of visual variety. For a franchise that used to be about discovering new cities, towns, biomes, and environments, Z-A‘s focus on one city, filled with reused buildings and props, is disappointing to many. And while some of the complaints are clearly from fans who have long been done with the series but can’t stop torturing themselves, the more you look at screenshots and videos of Z-A, the more it becomes clear that, yeah, there ain’t much here.
At least if you buy the game on Switch, it mostly looks the same as the Switch 2 version. Don’t worry, everyone gets to enjoy the same copy-pasted buildings regardless of their platform of choice. That’s nice.
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