10 Best Video Game Prequels

For years a portion of the Pokémon fanbase pined for the series to take some risks, with the most vocal demand being an open-world game. Even the most diehard fan could recognise the series had been spinning wheels for a long time, at least from a gameplay perspective.

Being a spin-off, 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus allowed Game Freak to try some new things that largely pay off. At best it can be described as a pseudo-open world, but Legends breaks several tenets of the franchise; allowing players to battle wherever they stand, and be attacked by agitated wild Pokémon themselves if they’re not paying enough attention.

Pokémon Legends takes place an undetermined amount of time before every other game in the series, stylised on Japanese history. In the Hisui region, which will eventually become the Sinnoh region, the Survey Corps are doing their best to study wild Pokémon to catalogue them.

This is aeons before the technology of the Pokédex exists and players are tasked with filling out a book with their findings. Similarly, Pokéballs as we know them aren’t around and so players must gather and craft apricorn fruits into pre-tech equivalents.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus is a cute and charming look at the never-before-seen past of a world familiar to so many gamers.