When Pokémon Legends: ZA was first revealed, we all immediately started speculating when it would take place in the Pokémon timeline. No matter where, we knew it: the action takes place entirely in Lumiose City from the Kalos region of Pokémon X and Y. However, considering that Legends: Arceus was a time-travel story stretching back hundreds of years into Sinnoh’s past, based on the trailers, we had every expectation that ZA would be many, many years in Lumiose City’s future.
We were wrong! We now know exactly when this will happen, and it’s not as large of a leap as you might think.
We played Pokémon Legends: ZA for review and the embargo was lifted. We can therefore confirm from our own experiences, from conversations with many of the characters (most of whom unfortunately we cannot directly cite or show due to ongoing embargo restrictions), that ZA takes place just five years after the events of X and Y. This is not a time travel narrative, it is a direct sequel that offers a continuation of many of the characters and situations presented in X and Y.
For example, we already know that you can date AZ, a 3,000-year-old man who plays a key role in X and Y. We also know that Mable, a former member of Team Flare, takes on the role of a Pokémon professor in this game and sends you out to catch Pokémon with various challenges. Other characters you remember from X and Y also appear, some of them have changed radically, but we cannot and will not reveal them yet.
Pokémon Legends: ZA, being a direct sequel, is actually a large deal. Over the years, the Pokémon universe has varied greatly in terms of connections between different games and regions. While there were several direct sequels before (Gold and Silver after Red and Blue, Black and White 2 after Black and White, etc.), later games introduced time travel (Legends: Arceus), alternate universes (Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire), and basically every game implied that the locations and monsters of all the other games existed in the same world, but the events taking place in these games may or may not be canon, depending on which one you play. The Pokémon timeline, if drawn, probably looks a lot more absurd than Zelda’s at this point.
However, if you were wondering what happened to most of the main cast of X and Y five years after the events of the game, here you go: it’s just a straight sequel! In hindsight, we should have seen this coming when they named it “ZA” for X and Y.
My review of Pokémon Legends: ZA is already underway if you want to check out my impressions of the first 24 hours, and the full review will be up next week. I also wrote about the fact that Sister Joy’s work is now open to people who, after 27 years of working at ZA, do not look identical to the original Sister Joy.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Her posts can be found on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Have a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
