by Andrew Auclair ’29 on October 23, 2025

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Arts & Entertainment

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Early Impressions

The Pokémon Company took the world by storm this past week with the highly anticipated release of their newest title: Pokémon Legends: Z-A. Reviews came pouring in the days leading up to its release, with many credible sources such as Screen Rant, The New York Times, and GamesRadar all showering the game with praise. The question now is: do these reviews suitably reflect the game as a whole?

Before I can properly give my own review of Pokémon Legends: Z-A, I have to mention the problems that persist with the Pokémon Company and big gaming industries as a whole. Recently, video game prices have been at an all-time high, with the standard for a brand new video game for any system being $70. This in itself isn’t a crime, as inflation is inevitable and the recent tariffs on Japanese imports absolutely play a part. The problem occurs when these video game companies prioritize fans purchasing their yearly releases over pleasing their audience. 

Circling back to Pokémon, the recent games have been widely criticized for their shoddy performance on the hardware they were built for. Pokémon Legends: Arceus was ugly and barren of detail, while Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet were messy and borderline unbearable, only able to run decently on the Nintendo Switch 2, years after the game’s initial release. The bottom line is that if fans are now being forced to pay $10 more for every video game they buy, then they expect the quality to at least match that of the recent installments.

So, after all of the controversy stirred up by the gaming scene recently, does Pokémon Legends: Z-A really live up to the hype? Within the 10 hours I have played this game so far, I can say with certainty that this is one of the most creative Pokémon installments in the franchise’s history. In Legends: Z-A, you find yourself traveling to Lumiose City, a futuristic urban society based on real-life Paris, France. In this game, battles take place in real time for the first time in Pokémon history. No more turn-based RPG-style gameplay—you’re now expected to dodge and manage your Pokémon’s move cooldowns during every battle encounter. This style of gameplay is very engaging and is certainly a breath of fresh air for Pokémon fans who may be getting tired of the same formula year after year. Although sometimes it can feel like mindless button mashing, some of the later-game battles ask more of the player and were personally pretty challenging. Pokémon Legends: Z-A also presents fans with the long-awaited return of Mega Evolutions, one of the most beloved gimmicks the series ever had. Furthermore, the game introduces over 25 new Mega Evolutions for Pokémon that had previously never had one—not even counting the new ones that are going to be in the DLC releasing this February.

In terms of how the game looks and runs, I have not noticed the game running any slower than a consistent 60 frames per second. It runs very smoothly and the loading times between zones are impressively fast. With all this being said, Lumiose City makes up the entirety of the game’s explorable area, thus not as many assets have to be loaded in at once, as compared to Scarlet and Violet, where the entire region of Paldea was condensed in one singular loading zone. Graphically, the game isn’t exactly perfect in any sense of the word. All of the models look pretty, and the characters are surprisingly well animated, but the landscapes and buildings lack the detail most modern video game titles offer. For example, the texturing on the side of almost every building is a completely flat, unexpressive PNG representing the would-be fancy windows and balconies of the advanced city.

In all honesty, don’t let the minor graphical issues keep you away from giving Pokémon Legends: Z-A a try. It is an exciting new take and is sure to be a fun time, even for someone who may not be familiar with the series at all. As a Pokémon fan myself, I think this game is an extremely entertaining  reimagining of the typical Pokémon formula with a brand new story and lots ofnew Mega Evolutions to discover. Ultimately, the early acclaim feels justified; Pokémon Legends: Z-A manages to rise above the franchise’s recent missteps and offers an experience worthy of the praise it’s received.

by Patrick Smith '26 on February 21, 2023
A&E Staff

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Arts & Entertainment

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Magic: The Gathering holds the title of the original trading card game and has remained a consistent background staple of pop-culture since the early 90s. I’ve always enjoyed board and card games, and the Pokémon trading card game was my jam when I was growing up. 95 percent of Zoomers probably did not know the rules as kids, but Magic was always there. It allured players with its zany fantasy art, but always seemed overly complicated to me as a child and lacked the cuddliness of the Pokémon (your average Magic card depicts a giant, biomechanical zombie worm rather than, say, a large, yellow rodent). It wasn’t until middle school that I really got into the game, establishing a miniature, impromptu game in my local CCD class of all places. Then I just fell out of the game for several years, and it wasn’t until this year’s winter break that I was pulled back in. I’m so glad I started playing the game, however, as this is a great time for Magic, especially for new players.

Deck-building has always been a little bit of a hassle in Magic compared to something like Pokémon. In Pokémon you take some creatures with a vaguely similar aesthetic and you’re pretty much good after that. Magic uses a similar system of color-based card types, but there are endless strategies within strategies. Every color operates differently, there are multiple, deeply involved strategies in each color (milling, token spam, and artifact heavy to name just a few), and experienced players are going to crush you with the deck they’ve been carefully building for the last two to thirty years. It’s a lot, so when I found the recent Jumpstart ecosystem, a format where you combine two packs of cards into one larger semi-randomly generated deck, I was hooked back in. It combined a lot of the random fun of opening card packs with the knowledge that whatever you inadvertently create will be at least somewhat competitive. This was a great time, and I quickly drew my friends from my hometown into the bottomless abyss of card games alongside me. We played games with these packs for hours upon hours. Ultimately I found a combination of a pack titled “wolves” and a pack titled “gross” to be my personal winner after I won at least five times in a row with it and had it deemed “busted” by my comrades.

With this newfound excitement for Magic, I had a desire to play in a public setting. Typically, comic book shops or hobby stores will have a set of tables or a spare room for this purpose, likely with a guy who is shouting about three times louder than necessary. I went twice over the break to my local shop, but the second time was nuts. Dozens of people crammed into a room smaller than a Feinstein classroom. This was the launch of the first new set of cards for 2023, and people were excited. This brings me to Draft. By far the favorite format I tried on this foray back into Magic was Draft, in which players draft their decks from a rotating pool of cards and then play in a tournament format. Generally, you open a pack, take a card, and then pass it along and take a card from the pack of the person next to you. There’s a lot I like about Draft. It maintains a lot of strategy and choice while also feeling relatively straightforward and balanced as everyone’s picking cards from the same pool. In the extremely popular Dominaria: Remastered draft, I was able to finish fourth overall with a black and white deck I hastily assembled around a card depicting a giant, floating eyeball with a silly name. I take that as a win. 2023 is the 30th anniversary of Magic: The Gathering, and there’s no better time to get back into it if you’re like myself or try it for the first time. This upcoming February sees the release of the much-anticipated Phyrexia: All Will be One, which seems to have a very cool and creepy biomechanical visual aesthetic. If you’re a student or faculty member who happens to have an interest in playing some Magic or starting a tabletop-gaming club, feel free to send me a message at psmith13@friars.providence.edu.

by Patrick Smith '26 on December 4, 2022
A&E Staff

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Arts & Entertainment

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Pokémon is probably one of those few universal phenomena to be deeply ingrained in the gestalt consciousness of everyone born between 1990 and 2005. There’s something inherently appealing in collecting and battling weird little monsters. If you’re a Zoomer, you likely have some kind of buried nostalgia for Bulbasaur (Bulbasaur is the best of the classic trio and you’re lying to yourself if you think otherwise). Thus, it pleases me to announce that Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is a fine addition to the rich tapestry of the pocket monster dynasty. I realize Scarlet and Violet are legally two separate games, but as the sole meaningful variation between them is the color of the reptilian creature on the box, I will refer to them as a singular entity.

The most immediately striking feature of Scarlet and Violet is the new format and transition to a full-open world. Past series entries have dabbled with this idea, but it comes into force in Scarlet and Violet. The entire game map is now sprawling and seamless, allowing players to traverse the most fully realized depiction of a Pokémon flavored environment to date. The gameplay itself is no longer the linear trail of battles that the series has long been plagued by, but is now instead a set of distinct objectives players can complete at their own personal leisure. It’s a fantastic change in form, reminiscent of what Elden Ring did for the Dark Souls format. It’s incredibly charming to see Pokémon roaming around little virtual ecosystems and the seamless nature of the world and gameplay’s relationship adds an extra level of immersion.

Despite whatever new features the game brings, there is only one thing people truly care about when one of these new drops happens, and that is the design quality of the monsters. Scarlet and Violet’s critters are excellent and a breath of fresh air after a couple years of mediocrity. The three starter Pokémon, Sprigatito, Quaxly, and Fuecoco, are adorable and manage to feel distinct yet cohesive. The rest of the Pokémon feel a little all over the place, but in a good way. I get the vibe of “here are a bunch of good ideas we had that we had never tried before,” rather than trying to theme them around the region. The best example of this is Finizen, an adorable little dolphin monster that fulfills the somehow unfulfilled niche throughout the eight previous Pokémon iterations of a dolphin themed creature. A key difference between every set of twin Pokémon games is its legendary poster-boys, but Scarlet and Violet makes these twins a key gameplay component in addition to just a fun layer of theatrics. Miraidon and Koraidon are two odd but interesting looking reptiles with vague elements of a motorcycle jammed into their biology. They’re both obtained early-on in a non-combat form and act as an impromptu vehicle. This works nicely with the new open world, and the bizarre lizard Harley Davidson will develop new abilities as players progress like gliding and climbing sheer cliff faces because of course they can.

With everything excellent on display here, there is still sadly an elephant in the room, and that is the game’s performance. The Switch is by no means a powerful piece of hardware. It’s around six years old and was underpowered when it first came out in comparison to its competition. Nintendo and its partners have smartly worked around this by largely producing stylized games or incredibly polished and optimized products that are generally unaffected by this limitation. Scarlet and Violet ignore this methodology and are a little janky and rough around the edges. Low frame rates, pop-in, and generalized bugginess are consistent issues without a real solution. I’d expect some of this to be fixed over time, but this will likely remain an unpolished game. I have seen people throw this game completely under the bus for these kinds of issues, but I don’t share that sentiment. Its flaws are persistent and a little annoying, but Scarlet and Violet ultimately remain a fun game despite them. The framework is solid and the game is filled to the brim with good ideas; the execution was just a little rushed.

In conclusion, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet is an excellent addition to the classic franchise that provides a much-needed retranslation of the classic format while maintaining its signature style. Its additions to the ongoing catalog of pocket monsters are worthwhile and charming in every way. It had technical issues as a result of the Switch’s aging hardware and its own poor optimization but shines through these faults to remain a fun experience. I really enjoyed Scarlet and Violet, and I’m extremely excited to see where the series goes from here.