Pokemon Legends: Z-A's shift to fully real-time battles with timed cooldowns allows for unconventional tactics

Pokemon games have been quite on a rollercoaster ride lately. The Switch 2 revived interest in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet thanks to the staggering performance bump it provided, while Pokemon TCG Pocket has found a tremendous audience addicted to opening packs. I don't know how well the light daily puzzler Pokemon Friends has been doing, but I had fun with it for a few days. Meanwhile, the upcoming Pokemon Champions is being positioned to be the primary vessel for the future of competitive Pokemon.

I’ve largely fallen off the Pokemon train for the most part, though I did appreciate that Pokemon Legends: Arceus tried something unique. Pokemon Legends: Z-A seems to be another intriguing shake-up for the long-running RPG series. At PAX West 2025, I got the chance to go hands-on with it, and I was pleasantly surprised.

The demo opened up with a brief tutorial on how battles with other Trainers primarily took place at night in Lumiose City, the singular location where the entirety of Z-A seems to be built upon. This particular section took part in the southeastern part of the city and that certain segments of the city will be designated as Battle Zones when night falls. These blocks are easily distinguishable through a red field that you deliberately enter as its own instance.

My roster consisted of Chikorita, Mareep, Fletchling, and Weedle. Although I’ve braced myself for it in prior trailers of Z-A, I was still caught off-guard that battles… are no longer turn-based; combat is entirely in real-time. Pokemon will do basic attacks on their own, while skill commands are dictated through face buttons when locked onto a foe’s Pokemon.

There is no numerical limit to how often a Pokemon can use each of their abilities like prior entries. Each of a Pokemon’s abilities is now tied to a timed cooldown. Instead of worrying about consecutive turns like in other Pokemon installments, there’s now an emphasis on the timing of when a certain skill is executed, and a Pokemon’s position relative to the opponent. Of course, elemental and type weakness continue to be an important factor, as well.

I wondered how snappy this would be in action. Could I simply summon a Pokemon, do one rotation of its abilities, immediately swap them out for another, and do the same thing as fast as possible? Did this switch to real-time battles with timed cooldowns change the fundamental flow of how Pokemon battles were fought?

While there is an inherent shift in the flow of battles, simply trying to do this yielded poor results on my end. There is a deliberate cadence in how often Pokemon auto-attack, and a delay between sending out a command to perform a certain skill. Trying to continually spam commands the second they’re off cooldown, especially non-damage moves, throws off the damage race. Swapping to another Pokemon is seamless when inputting it on a controller, but the actual animation of the action to perform it allows the already on-field Pokemon to immediately start attacking as the next one is still in the animation of getting onto the battlefield.

Paying attention to a Pokemon’s HP takes on a more major role too, since I couldn’t rely on taking my time on a turn to consider my next action. I had to be a lot quicker with my decision making, as my Pokemon’s HP decreased - and Z-A wouldn’t let me take a breather. Aside from normal consumables that my character could personally use, I could also equip my Pokemon with one item each; some of these items would automatically heal that Pokemon when they reached a certain HP threshold.

If an enemy Trainer and their Pokemon weren’t looking directly at me, I did have the option to sneak up on them and attack first to gain initiative. This would leave both foes stunned briefly, so there’s a few moments to get in damage immediately without any retaliation. There was a manual crouch button to make sneaking up on them easier.

The real-time nature of Z-A does open the door to several unconventional tactics that prior mainline Pokemon games didn’t support. For instance, a tougher fight against a higher-leveled Pidgeotto was a major threat to my low-level party. Several of them did have moves that could poison it, though. One tactic to consider is simply poisoning the Pidgeotto and kiting it around as its health gradually goes down on its own; reapply poison whenever it wears off, and continue to run around dodging its assault. It left me thinking how much Z-A would allow for these kinds of strategies, and how effective they would end up in the long run.

There was one final part to the PAX West 2025 demo I played. After following a dog form Zygarde, I was led to a rooftop with an Absol on the brink of mega evolving. I was lent a Lucario by returning Pokemon X and Y character AZ, and got to play out a boss fight against a Rogue Mega Absol.

This type of fight was a little bit different than the other fights I experienced. My main character was also a target that could be attacked along with Lucario. I had to actively dodge incoming attacks, and land hits with Lucario’s abilities that had a chance to spawn orbs. Collecting those would gradually fill up a meter for Lucario to mega evolve; normally, Lucario’s attacks would deal only a tiny amount of damage, but Mega Lucario did respectable amounts of damage.

Its mega evolution was on a timer though. Once it ran out, I had to do the song and dance of having the normal-sized Lucario spawn orbs again. Eventually, Mega Absol started to fire off a skill that created a red pool around it. I wasn’t feeling particularly curious to see what’d happen if my character touched it. The boss fight eventually ended, and I don’t recall my character getting hit more than… twice maybe. Lucario was tanky, so their survivability wasn’t an issue.

Of course, all of this were only tiny segments of Pokemon Legends: Z-A. I’m glad I got to try it out for myself, It ran at a stable 60fps on the Switch 2 I was playing it on, and it felt pretty responsive. I don’t know if the switch to real-time will be everyone’s cup of tea, but I enjoyed it. I’m interested to see how high-level endgame battles will look like in Z-A. There’s a certain enigmatic aura to Z-A that I can’t place my finger on, though that mystery is shaping up to be one of the reasons I’m tempted to pick it up. Pokemon Legends: Z-A is releasing on October 16 for the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.