I’ve only spent a few nights in Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s multiplayer mode, and while I’m not usually a competitive player, I had a pretty fun time during those early days post-launch, before everyone had figured out what the meta was going to be. It’s chaotic, makes the most out of the game’s real-time battle system, and hitting several enemies with one giant Surf tsunami is always satisfying. Even using my non-optimized team of favorites was a blast. But it was only like this for a few nights. Now, you can’t boot up the game without folks running the same three Pokémon and essentially turning competitive battles into a game of rock-paper-scissors.
It’s not uncommon for a Pokémon meta to form that prioritizes a handful of monsters, but Legends: Z-A’s multiplayer format has incentivized players to find what are essentially three of the strongest, most versatile Pokémon in the game’s roster and swap between them ad nauseam. This time, Metagross, Xerneas, and Garchomp have become the go-to team.
Legends: Z-A’s multiplayer mode pits four players against each other, each with a team of three monsters, competing to rack up the most knock-outs in a limited time. These three Pokémon are not only powerful on their own, but they also have some of the most robust defensive capabilities in the game. Their Steel/Psychic, Fairy, and Dragon/Ground typings make them resistant to several incoming elements, and they each have versatile movesets. Basically, these three Pokémon cover most situations between them, and they are also excellent counters to one another. Metagross’ steel attacks can take down Xerneas, whose fairy-type moves are effective against Garchomp, who can knock Metagross over with a well-positioned Earthquake.
These three Pokémon are so dominant in competitive play now that everyone else is just trying to get a few good hits in before some variation of this team pops up on the battlefield. When I started writing this up, I hopped into one match to see what teams I would come across, and while I didn’t face this exact composition, all three of my opponents had at least two of them on their team. I’m not the only person who’s noticed this, either.
© The Pokémon Company / Kotaku
“I know Metas are inevitable, but Legends Z-A online battles went from actually quite fun at release to the most monotonous and miserable thing ever over such a short time,” Reddit user TheFierceDiety writes.
“Adding in the legendaries this early in ranked was a crazy move,” D00MPhd wrote in response. “Xerneas being playable in ranked homogenized the format in the worst way. If they waited until there were more legendary options to choose from, like in older games, we would still see a degree of diversity among team building.”
This kind of homogeneous teambuilding is the reason official Pokémon competitive play has tiers that sort different monsters into different groups. Right now, Legends: Z-A has no such designation that lets you battle against teams of comparable power. If the game implements something like that, players who want to use different teams might have somewhere to play without having to deal with the impenetrable wall that is Metagross, Xerneas, and Garchomp.
Maybe things will change when the Mega Dimension DLC launches on December 10 and adds several new monsters to the roster, but for the moment, this is what players are dealing with when they hop onto ranked battles. It’s made worse by the fact that you have to play ranked battles to unlock certain Mega Stones, so even people who don’t want to deal with these teams have to in order to get every Mega Evolution. It’s bad enough that there’s a growing cheater problem infecting the mode; now we have to deal with the same few monsters every battle. At least Game Freak made it easier to get high enough rank for those rewards by essentially making it impossible to lose rank. Now you can just go get beaten up for a few rounds and still get what you want. You’ll be fine.
