Pokemon Legends: Z-A Hides a Major Character Reference in…

Summary

Pokemon Legends: Z-A brings a fresh focus on Kalos Region's lore, with AZ potentially playing a major role in the game's story.
The unexpected reveal opens up new possibilities for the series' future, breathing life into a region that felt incomplete.
Fans can expect to dive deeper into AZ's mysterious background and his connection to the Ultimate Weapon in Pokemon Legends: Z-A.

The excitement of Pokemon Day's announcement of Pokemon Legends: Z-A has sent the online community into full speculation mode as this unexpected reveal opens the door for tons of possibilities about the series' future. While many fans were predicting a new Pokemon Legends game to be revealed during this Pokemon Presents, few would have predicted Pokemon Legends: Z-A, a game set in the Kalos Region's Lumiose City, to be the star of the show. While there is still a lot left unrevealed about the game, its title suggests a major character from the Gen 6 games will play a key role in its plot.

A lot of the speculation ahead of the Pokemon Presents showcase included theories about a potential Pokemon Legends game set in the Johto Region or the Unova Region. However, both of those regions have already received a lot of attention through past remakes and sequels. Comparatively, the Kalos Region has always felt like it was missing some pieces of lore, given Pokemon X and Y never got a third version or sequel, but now Pokemon Legends: Z-A can finally do the region the justice it deserves and give a mysterious character like AZ a more complete story.

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By Drew Swanson

Pokemon Legends: Z-A's Title Suggests AZ Could Play a Major Role in the Game

Coming off the heels of the massive popularity of Pokemon Legends: Arceus, Pokemon Legends: Z-A takes the same Pokemon Legends concept and translates it to a region that was in desperate need of a new game. What seems to set this new game apart from its predecessor, aside from the urban setting within Lumiose City, is the odd and somewhat confusing choice for its name. Rather than subtitling the game after a Mythical Pokemon like Arceus, the decision to give the game the subtitle of "Z-A" might imply that the character AZ will be the focal point of the game's story.

AZ is a very enigmatic character that players might recall from Gen 6's Pokemon X and Y, where he appears on several occasions to offer cryptic dialogue about the Ultimate Weapon. It's later revealed that AZ is an ancient king of Kalos who participated in a great war that saw the loss of his beloved Floette, causing him to create the Ultimate Weapon to end the conflict. At the end of Pokemon X and Y, AZ challenges the player to a battle, and having had his heart liberated by the player's care for their Pokemon, AZ's Floette finally returns to him.

AZ Lore that Pokemon Legends: Z-A Needs to Address

While it might seem like AZ's story arc is mostly complete following the ending of Pokemon X and Y, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the character that Pokemon Legends: Z-A will hopefully address. An obvious mystery this game should address is how a 3,000-year-old king is still alive in the modern day. Given the Pokemon Legends games' tendency to involve time travel, there could be some sort of plot device involving AZ traveling in time between the modern era and his original time, similar to Ingo in Pokemon Legends: Arceus, which could explain how he came to exist in the modern story of Pokemon X and Y.

Aside from his apparent age, another strange aspect of AZ's design is his enormous height, as he is the tallest known person in the mainline Pokemon series. The explanation for his massive height and extreme age has been associated with his exposure to the Ultimate Weapon, but the games never really go into how or why this exposure resulted in these physical changes. Perhaps a major plot point of Pokemon Legends: Z-A will be discovering the secret of the energy used in powering the Ultimate Weapon that resulted in AZ's physical changes and how it connects to the physical changes Pokemon undergo when they Mega Evolve.

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