Nintendo always has a big presence at PAX West, but since I usually know what to expect with their games, I don’t always make checking their booth a priority. This year, they had two sections of the floor: one showcasing upcoming third-party titles on the Switch 2, and the other demoing Kirby Air Riders and Pokémon Legends Z-A.
There was a massive line for the third-party section all weekend, so I didn’t get to go hands-on with Elden Ring, Borderlands 4, or Final Fantasy VII Remake Integrade. From a distance, they all looked like I’d expect: functional, but worse than on any other platform.
I did manage to make an appointment through the My Nintendo program for the first-party booth, and I found myself surprised by both titles in wildly different ways.
Pokémon Legends Z-A
Every generation, I pick up the new Pokémon game hoping it will be the one to pull me back in, but I don’t think I've loved one of them since the Game Boy Advance. Legends Arceus really intrigued me with its fresh mechanics, but even that one didn’t quite hook me. Honestly, I've been so unmoved by them that I hadn’t really been following Legends Z-A, so I wasn’t really sure what I was in for when I got to demo it on the floor at PAX West.
After fifteen minutes playing the game, I’m optimistic again.
The demo we played for Pokémon Legends Z-A was split into two segments. First, we got to explore an evening battle zone full of trainers, and then we skipped to a boss battle.
Exploring the battle zone felt like making your way down any route in the classic games, with trainers waiting around each corner. Like usual, you can battle with an active Pokémon, swap them out for another, and need to keep type advantages and weaknesses in mind to fight as efficiently as possible.
The fun twist on combat in this game is that everything happens in real time. Holding down a trigger turns your face buttons into each of your active Pokémon’s abilities, and each of them runs on its own separate timer. When you tell them to tackle, your Pokémon runs towards their enemy, makes the hit, and then runs back to you until you tell them what to do next.
Balancing cool downs and being able to move around mid-fight made this feel almost more like an ARPG or even an MMO than the standard turn-based fare.
The boss fight really highlighted the strategic layers to this system. For reasons that I didn’t process at all, the Pokémon we were battling got real big and real mad. That meant that they used attacks that spread way across the arena, and suddenly my position became super important.
In this system, you have to make sure that your human avatar avoids splash damage from the battle, and you’ve also got to think about whether the path back to you is going to be safe after your pet uses tail whip on an elder god.
I'm still not certain if this game is going to be the one to pull me back into Pokémon, but the combat in Pokémon Legends A-Z feels fast and fresh enough that I'm looking forward to giving it a go.
Kirby Air Riders
I was late to the 2003 GameCube classic Kirby Air Ride. I picked the game up at some point when I was working at GameStop, because I picked up a lot of games when I worked at GameStop, but I didn't play it until I was living at a house with some friends in college around 2010. And then we played it a lot.
Like… an unhealthy amount.
Kirby Air Ride is a sort of simplified racing game. There’s no “go” button in this game; your vehicle just shoots forward automatically at all times, until you hit the A button to slow down. This helps with maneuvering around corners, and can also build up a boost. As a racing game, it does nothing for me.
Instead, the real draw to Kirby Air Ride is City Trial, a sort of mini-open world game where you have a certain amount of time to collect vehicle upgrades before jumping into a randomly selected competition, that could be anything from a straightforward race to a combat free-for-all, or a gliding competition to a drag race.
Sitting around our basement and playing City Trials became what we did every night. Hours and hours and hours were lost just cruising around in the city with the longest timer possible, building up a vehicle that we hoped would be perfectly matched for the short competition that ended the game. And then we'd do it again.
For all the hundreds of hours spent playing Kirby in that basement, I've barely touched the game since. It's just too hard to get a group of people all together in one place, and the homebrew methods for playing the original game online are beyond me.
That had me super excited for the Switch 2 sequel, Kirby Air Riders, but the demo ended up making me a lot more hesitant than I was before.
Don’t get me wrong, the game feels great to play. If you know the first game, jumping into this feels incredible. There are tweaks to the controls, there are new items and events, and the city follows the same original map but is way bigger than before. Every aspect of cruising around the city felt absolutely perfect.
When the timer ran out, things fell apart. Instead of jumping into a randomly selected competition to cap things off, we were given four different competitions to choose from. I figured this was like voting on tracks in Mario Kart, where we each put in our pick and then the game would use that to randomize what we'd been playing.
Nope, we just each played our own game.
Instead of facing off against each other in one of those four minigames, all four of them happened simultaneously and separately. Instead of facing off against the other four players I was grouped with, I played in a game mode with just CPU players, because none of the other players chose the same mode as me.
Kirby Air Ride was a game where I would happily play thirty minutes to get to a 15-second competition and basically not care at all who actually won by the time the next round started. Kirby Air Riders feels like it's said, “You don't care about the competition? Cool, I'll just take it out.”
And I think I hate that.
I'm sure I'll still get this game, because there's no way my kiddo will not want to play it, but I really hope that in the final release, everyone playing City Trial together also ends up competing with each other.
Conclusion
It was fun to get to play some first-party Nintendo games early, but I walked away feeling so weird. On the one hand, the amount that I was excited about these titles flopped pretty powerfully based on the time I got to demo them. On the other hand, these were games I was already going to check out, and the time I spent with them really didn’t change that reality at all.
Ultimately, it is cool to see big titles at shows like PAX West, but the time it takes to get hands-on with them doesn’t always feel worthwhile. There were games I just walked up to and played that I had a way better time with, from teams where the impact of shows like this actually matters.
So keep an eye out for thoughts on some of those games on Geek to Geek Media soon!