Legends Arceus has quickly become not only my favorite Pokemon game on the Switch, but also one of my top 5 games on the Switch period. I was a big fan of Gale of Darkness back in the good old days and I always wanted another 3D Pokemon game like that and then Game Freak went and delivered.

SOUND: 9/10

I have to start off talking about the sound be ause it's by far my favorite aspect of the game and when it comes to the music, it's my favorite Pokemon soundtrack in a decade. Sure there are a few songs that are remasters of Diamond and Pearl music or heavily inspired by them, but there's a lot of original music that's good too. Within just a couple days of playing, I fell in love with the trainer battle theme and Volos theme.

But when I compare that to gen 6 through 8, it took me weeks or even months to start liking the songs because there just weren't any that I really liked. But they did a great job with the music here. They did a great job with the regular sounds too, especially considering that sound plays such a huge role in open world games.

GRAPHICS: 8/10

For an open world Pokemon game, Legends Arceus looks great. For starters, you have the standard such as the Pokemon and people models as well as their animations, which look good. Then you have the world, which looks amazing, especially when you play it for the first time. There's a ton of detail and color. The only downside is that textures don't look to good when you're up close to them, but when you're looking at everything all at once, the world looks great.

ADDICTIVENESS: 10/10

If this was a standard Pokemon game, it would be super addicting with all the normal things you'd be doing and all the added features. But Legends Arceus is such a fresh take on the series that it's so easy to end up doing more and investing way more time into the game. There's a lot of the usual Pokemon stuff like catching, battling, training, and shiny hunting but then you add things like crafting, the pretty big world to explore, the Pokedex mechanic, and the actual crafting mechanic and it becomes very difficult to get bored.

Even if these were all standard features, they'd be lots of fun, but right now they're still new enough to be mind blowing to some players.

DEPTH: 10/10

Let's talk a little bit more about some of these individual features, shall we? To me, the two biggest aspects of depth are the Pokedex mechanic and the world. First of all, the Pokedex mechanic is insane because you have to see, catch, or battle the Same Pokemon over and over again. It's definitely a grind but in the end it's worth it and you're going to end up spending hours just hunting one Pokemon and that's not even counting shiny hunting which will require even more encounters with a single Pokemon.

Then you have the world, which is pretty big. The game isn't truly open world and there's only a few locations to visit, but each location is big enough to allow you to spend hours exploring. It's also a lot easier to get through battles in Legends Arceus, they're very fluid and way faster, especially with the lack of opening and closing transitions. In the time it would take to battle 3 wild Pokemon in a regular game, you could have battles 5 or 6 here. This is great because it opens the door for you to do more. Grinding becomes more enticing and there's much more gameplay in a shorter amount of time.

You'll still easily invest 100+ hours if you really work on the Pokedex and shiny hunting

STORY: 8/10

I still don't really want to talk to much about the story because even though the game has already been out for a few months, there are big spoilers and it's very hard to talk about the plot without talking about the story. But for the most part, the game is a good blend between your standard Pokemon plot of completing the Pokedex and catching Pokemon, and a good, unique story.

DIFFICULTY: 6

The game can definitely feel tougher to some people because now you have to worry about crafting, the massive Pokedex mechanic, and the fact that Pokemon fight back. But once you put some time into understanding the new mechanics, the game becomes simple and straightforward and much easier. The only things you really need to focus on is the grinding and what you want out of the game specifically, whether it's the strongest team, the shinies, the perfect Pokedex, or whatever.

OVERALL: 9/10

Overall, Pokemon Legends Arceus is a fresh take on the franchise that works on so many levels. In truth, the only issues with the game are ones that people who are big fans of the series won't really care about. There's lots to do in the game, and it looks and sounds great. You can easily get 100 hours out of it and it's worth the $60 for sure, even more than some other Pokemon games.

While I think Legends Arceus is an amazing game I don't think it's the best Pokemon game for the simple fact that I don't think it's got much in terms of replay value because of it's super slow start but I can understand why that did it that way too though.

Something I don't understand at all is how you think the game is anything like XD Gale of Darkness though gale of darkness isn't open like Legends so I don't understand the comparison.