While the Pokémon franchise has remained dominant for the duration of its two-decade-long existence, Pokémon Legends: Arceus has produced an easy solution to the series' biggest problem. The vast majority of the main Pokémon releases have been split into two separate versions featuring arbitrary differences and forcing players to trade between the two if they wanted to gain access to every Pokémon. While this premise was initially a great idea in 1996, it has long overstayed its welcome, and Pokémon Legends: Arceus has proved that it's time for the franchise to transition into single-game releases moving forward.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus represents a potentially massive change in structure for the future of the series. While many comparisons have been made to The Legends of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the game actually follows the formula used by Monster Hunter, featuring a hub world and separated explorable areas that the player can travel to in order to catch wild Pokémon and complete various tasks. Although the series remains as popular as ever, the traditional formula of Pokémon has begun to grow stale for players and drastic changes have been in demand for years. It's still unclear how many of the new ideas introduced in Pokémon Legends: Arceus will be retained in future titles, but there is one element of the game that should permanently change the entire approach of the franchise.
In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, the entire objective is to complete the using Pokémon HOME transfers to by the task entirely.
Legends: Arceus Abandons Exclusive Pokemon & Trade Evolutions
When trade evolutions were initially introduced in Pokémon Red and Blue, they were a brilliant concept. When the franchise erupted in popularity, kids were bringing their Game Boys everywhere and were incentivized to do so because of the way the games were designed. If someone playing Pokémon Red wanted to evolve their Haunter or Kadabra, they needed to get together with another player who had the game and trade with them through a link cable. It was a really interesting model that worked in the early years of the franchise, but it has since become wildly outdated with the introduction of Wi-Fi. And the same thing can be said for Pokémon that are exclusives available in separate games, as requiring players to trade between the two versions has become nothing more than an arbitrary nuisance.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus has introduced the Linking Cord to the series, an item that fittingly represents the original Game Boy link cable that players used in order to trade and battle with each other. While players can still trade Pokémon like Machoke and Graveler in order to evolve them, they can also use this new Linking Cord item much like an Evolution Stone to evolve these Pokémon. And this same function has been added to other evolutionary items like the Metal Coat or Electrizer.
With this massive quality of life change, players are no longer impeded by an annoying trade mechanic in order to acquire popular Pokémon like Gengar and Scizor. So with these long-requested changes to trade evolutions in place and a complete lack of exclusives split between multiple versions, Pokémon Legends: Arceus finally allows players to obtain every Pokémon in a single copy of the game and that's how it should be.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus Isn't Split Into Two Versions
The split version model has been a core staple of the Pokémon franchise since it began and is the foundation for the themes of the games. Gold and Silver, Black and White, Sword and Shield - they're all built around this idea of dueling themes, offering a clean divide between two different versions of the same game featuring a handful of different Pokémon. While it's an interesting concept and it's worked for Pokémon for a long time, it's time for the split version model to come to an end. Arguably the greatest thing about Pokémon Legends: Arceus is that it is a self-contained title and it's going to be difficult for players to accept a return to the split version model in the future.
The story of Pokémon Legends: Arceus is exactly like the ones in any other game in the series, except instead of arbitrarily altering the featured Legendary Pokémon in the story, it simply changes based on a decision made by the player during the course of the game. There's no need to divide the story between two different titles when it can be streamlined within one, especially when eliminating the entire concept of exclusive Pokémon and requiring trade evolutions. And it goes without saying that selling a single new Pokémon game is much more consumer-friendly than splitting it into two fully-priced versions of what is effectively the same game, especially now that the series has made the transition to full console games.
More often than not, the "definitive" versions of new generations of Pokémon are close to this idea, combining elements from the split versions into one game and refining the experience. If nothing else, Pokémon Legends: Arceus has proved that this should be the standard model for the franchise moving forward. By making every Pokémon available within a single copy of the game, it incentivizes the player to actually follow through with the series' motto of catching them all and it doesn't force players to choose between arbitrary differences in the experiences. Pokémon Legends: Arceus has provided an extremely obvious solution to a problem that has existed within the franchise for two decades and there's no reason it should continue into the series' ninth generation.