♫It’s Mega Dimension— Bad DLC— An Unmitigated Travesty!♫
Pokémon Legends: Z-A – Mega Dimension Review
Platform: Nintendo Switch 2(Reviewed), Nintendo Switch
Developer: Game Freak and their many support studios
Publisher: Nintendo
Well, I’m coming to this party fashionably late. What can I say? 30 boxes is nowhere near enough to store all the Pokémon you get in a modern Pokémon title, and I had other projects I wanted to tackle. I could muse about that, but I have a full-game sized DLC expansion to cover and far too many things to say about it.
Part 1: Downloadable Content; Diabolical Concepts
Pokémon Legends Z-A (2025) was a positive step forward for the series, offering the strongest cast of characters, best overall story presentation, and a brand-new real time combat system that mostly worked. I had my grievances and misgivings about the game, but I still ultimately liked it and was left optimistic about where the series could be. However, before the game was even released, Nintendo announced a $30 downloadable expansion for the game dubbed Mega Dimension.
As an expansion, Mega Dimension is effectively a postgame secondary campaign, grafted onto the existing postgame of PLZA. Functionally, it is a way to inject 100+ Pokémon into the title, introduce new Mega Evolutions, and add an epilogue for the core cast of a dozen or so secondary characters. Combined with returning characters, new characters, and a new area to explore, this sounds like a good way to give the game more life and general stuff to do. …And considering it came out less than two months after the base game, this was absolutely functionally complete prior to launch, but that’s the way game development has worked for 20 years.
The structure, production pipeline, and planning of DLC like this has been refined and normalized. It may suck, but it generally leads to a fuller, more complete, experience. DLC expansions like this run the gamut in quality like everything else, but they are one of the areas where Game Freak has succeeded. Sword and Shield’s Expansion Pass was a pretty good time, and I enjoyed going through it when I did. Scarlet and Violet’s DLC is even better from what I heard— I refuse to buy it after how much I disliked Pokémon Violated. And as a postgame expansion, what Mega Dimension needs to do is pretty simple. Add some new main quests, some new side quests, a new area to explore, and maybe some postgame farmables.
None of this is hard… but whoever was leading this project has just the worst priorities, and they made the game materially worse through this addition. As in, I went from loving PLZA enough to write a haphazard 30k word fanfic about it, based on discussions with a friend, to never wanting to replay this game. For a series so built on replayablity as Pokémon, that sounds pretty bad, because it is. This is genuinely some of the worst DLC I have ever had the misfortune of playing.
Back during the Xbox 360 days, it was routinely common for a B-team to be farmed out to ship a 1 to 3 hour asset recycling kitbash of existing and cut content that doesn’t really say or do anything special that wasn’t done before. It’s new, sometimes a mini campaign of sorts, but rarely says or does anything noteworthy. I’m reminded of the Prince of Persia (2008) Epilogue DLC, the Fable II (2008) DLC that undermined the original ending and vaguely teased the next one. For less story-driven games, they were often branded as mission packs or the like, extra levels, or something of the sort. While games such as Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) famously carved out a chunk 70% through the game to resell it later for a couple bucks.
Some excellent DLC was released during this era— I still stand by the claim that Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den (2010) is the best Bioshock game, period. Yet, limitations put a cap on what DLC realistically could be, meaning it was mostly short. There was no real need to deliver a high dollar per hour ratio with these things, and if that was the goal, it would rightfully lead the game to be criticized for unneeded padding. Now, a 3 hour experience can still be padded with recycled bosses, environments and enemies, but that’s nothing next to, say, 30 hours, or hell, 40 hours. If you are going to make someone play something for that long, you better be prioritizing something interesting.
Now for my load-bearing pillar for the rest of the review: Mega Dimension has enough ideas and content for a 10 to 15 hour expansion, but spreads it over 30 to 40 hours. It achieves this feat of fluff in myriad manners, none of which are distinct or captivating, and all of which apply artificial barriers before the player is capable of doing anything. It is a game with a foundation based in bad ideas, miserly tendencies, and a blatant disregard of good taste. While never atrocious, it is lavishly mediocre effort in every sense.
Part 2: Pokémon Legends Z-A: The Endless Epilogue
Pokémon Legends: Z-A has one of the strongest endings of the entire series, gives its characters a proper send-off through some postgame activities, and feels like it did just about everything it both needed to with this cast. The setting of Lumiose City was left forever changed, and the mythos of the series were given a pleasant capstone on decade-old mysteries. So, how the hell do you write a sequel to this that happens a matter of days later? Well, you chip away at the finality of the original ending, introduce new characters, and a new threat that is both greater and flimsier than that seen in the main campaign.
After Team MZ saved the city with the help of Mega Zygarde, Lumiose Tower was destroyed, and AZ passed away, a new plot thread is introduced with the introduction of Ansha. Ansha is the daughter of Kalos champion Diantha, a small girl with a penchant for making donuts and a Hoopa for a best friend. Why this child, who has to be younger than 10, is able to go venturing around with a Pokémon capable of traveling to alternate dimensions is never explained, but that’s arguably on-brand for the series.
Shortly after meeting Ansha, the gang inadvertently discover Hyperspace Lumiose, an alternate dimension that’s just the existing Lumiose City, but with a white filter over everything. Technically, it’s called Hyperspace Lumiose, but that name is far too cool for such a bland environment. There is nothing hyper about it. Personally, I like to call it Liminal Lumiose, as it is an eerie empty place populated only by assorted trinkets and wild Pokémon. And professionally, I think the fact that the setting of Mega Dimension is not called Mega Dimension is a mega misstep.
Naturally, the discovery of this new dimensions breeds problems. The Rogue Mega Evolutions from the base game return, now affecting new species, and the entirety of Lumiose is in danger as portals to Liminal Lumiose open up all over the place, threatening to consume the city and everyone in it. Somehow. The mechanics of Liminal Lumiose don’t make that much sense in isolation, and the explanation you are given makes even less sense. Regardless, with the aid of Korrina from Pokémon X and Y— the rollerblade gym leader with a Lucario— Team MZ and their friends try to save Lumiose, again.
This is not an awful idea, but it truly does not feel like a natural extension of a story that was firmly over and done with. Despite everything, Lumiose is plagued by problems, and the entire game’s story centers around doing things for and around a hyper-competent child who just-so-happened to uncover a lingering lump of unfinished business. It’s a continuation for the sake of it, and the only real draw here is seeing more of the existing characters. What’s there is sufficiently enjoyable, giving them more room to stretch their personalities, now crystallized from the events of the finale. As someone who enjoyed them the first time around, it was nice seeing more moments with this gaggle of weirdos. Not necessary, but nice.
However, the main character here is arguably just Ansha, who the game both narratively and mechanically depends upon, and as a character she’s… fine, I guess. In a story so centered around young adults, this wise-beyond-her-years child does not feel like an appropriate inclusion. Her connecting to Diantha works, but she doesn’t have a particularly interesting arc or compelling personality. She’s just a proper kid who is better than anyone at her one fixation, and lacks so much as a guardian, as she does not need one. I feel her role could have been fulfilled by anyone, and a donut machine would have sufficed.
On that note, it’s time to talk about the worst yet central part of Mega Dimension, those damned donuts.
Part 3: The Infinite Liminal Donut Loop
The core gameplay loop of Mega Dimension is built around visiting Liminal Lumiose, but this realm is not just a straight alternate version of Lumiose you can explore. Oh, no. Instead, you can only access this other dimension via randomized locations across Lumiose, where the player can feed Hoopa a donut in order to open up an instanced world and explore it. Not all donuts are equal, and the donut you give to Hoopa will determine both the buffs you have in Liminal Lumiose and how long you can stay in this instance.
How do you get donuts? Well, you give berries to Ansha the donut machine. The better the berries, the better the donuts, the longer you can stay there and the greater your buffs will be. You can use regular berries, which you can buy and find on the streets (gross), but those berries will not allow you to create good enough donuts to tackle anything more than low level instances. To take on high level instances, you will need to find “hyper berries” in Liminal Lumiose, which are just gaudy recolors of existing berries. I would compare this to the like of Pokéblocks, Poffin, and the item combiners from prior Pokémon expansion packs, but there’s no minigame and these are not required for extras that less than 10% of players bother with. These are required for progression.
This makes sense as a gameplay loop. Get more resources from weaker areas in order to take on stronger areas. In practice… this just kind of sucks.
Why? Well, for one, the game expects you to engage with this loop dozens of times, and does not have much for you to really do in Liminal Lumiose. Mechanically, there are four types of instances you can enter into.
- Special instances where you battle trainers, legendary/mythical Pokémon, or engage in some miscellaneous side quest.
- Rogue Mega Evolution battle instances, which I guess now take place exclusively in Liminal Lumiose. Didn’t think they needed timers, but I’m not a real game designer!
- Wild Zone with a randomized assortment of Pokémon, ranging from 3 to 6 species— emphasis on species, not evolutionary lines, delineated by type.
- Battle Zones where you fight against a barrage of trainers. …Just like in regular Lumiose, but with a shorter timer and less type variety!
In the liminal Wild Zones and Battle Zones, you have a series of three tasks to complete within the donut-designated time limit, and they are not particularly interesting. Catch X Pokémon, collect Y floating Poké Balls or glowy ground gems, destroy Z boulders or brambles in the environment for Wild Zones. And… perform battle tasks properly in Battle Zones.
Almost immediately, there’s an obvious problem with these tasks. Any player who can access Mega Dimension… has already done this before, for dozens of hours. Except now, you need to haul ass through a semi-randomized environment, keep an eye out for semi-randomized giant Poké Balls containing hyper berries, and complete predefined tasks that, in turn, summon a golden Poké Ball somewhere on the map.
Now, that might not sound too bad. Just check your mini map to figure out where these things are. Oh, you supple babe swaddled in the rich cashmere of ignorance! There is no mini map in Liminal Lumiose! Your mini map is replaced with a ticking clock for how many donut calories you have left and pressing the plus button doesn’t reveal anything I would call a map. You have no compass, and no ability to track where specific Pokémon or floating Poké Balls are supposed to be. You are expected to just memorize the potential spawn locations, go there, and do that again, and again, and again.
This is all harder than it sounds because, well, have you SEEN the screenshots I’ve included with this section? Everything in Liminal Lumiose is WHITE, searingly white, annoyingly white, and by lacking color, it is very hard to distinguish one area from another or, at a glance, determine where you are supposed to be.
Oh, and I should also talk about the levels. Because the level curve of the main campaign is so high— you catch Zygarde at level 84 and find wild Pokémon in the mid-60s during the endgame— Mega Dimension did not have a great way to make encounters challenging. Everything could just be level 100, and that would work, but instead someone decided that, for the first time in series history, they should raise the level cap to 200! …While in Liminal Lumiose. This is one of the donut buffs I mentioned earlier. The more and rarer berries you put into a donut, the closer you get to reaching the +100 level mark. Meaning you do not get levels, you just buff levels.
So… why do this? Well, two reasons. One, it sounds cool to have Pokémon exceed level 100, and a level 200 Pokémon plays into a rule of cool factor. Two, it makes the game artificially harder as, at level 105, even common first stage evolutions can be a nuisance if you are only rocking a level 115 pseudo legendary. Levels mean less as they go up, and there’s a reason why competitive play uses level 50 as a standard instead of level 100.
This also creates a strange situation where, in order to participate in Mega Dimension, you really want to make your Pokémon level 100, making EXP irrelevant. Now, bringing a Pokémon to level 100 is not particularly difficult thanks to the prevalence of EXP candies, letting you immediately bring any Pokémon up to level 100. Similarly, the EV buffing held items, letting you EV train a team in just a couple minutes. …My problem with this is that, in order to have Pokémon reach level 200, they have effectively trivialized EXP as a mechanic. Hell, you don’t even gain EXP while in Liminal Lumiose. You can battle trainers, catch Pokémon, but they all give zero EXP. …How do you even do that in a series this bound by tradition without getting chewed out by someone?
I need to pause to emphasize that, in order to progress with the story, and get the deluge of legendary/mythical Pokémon held out at the end, you need to play through a LOT of these instances. Venturing into them and completing tasks earns you research points, something like 1,500 to 5,000 per dive, with the game frequently throwing out 25,000, 50,000, or even 100,000 point requirements depending on where you are in the story. Getting on with the plot is gated behind these points, and it does not even stop there. This cycle continues infinitely until you are done with the game, only sorta stopping once you complete your Pokédex, which is an ass of a task.
If you want to find the 112 new regular Pokémon added in Mega Dimension, you simply need to wait for an instance containing the Pokémon you’re missing to spawn, which would take one day/night cycle or twenty. You cannot just go to the area where this Pokémon can be found, learn how to approach it, or farm out encounters. Though, I guess you could just sit on a bench, day-in, day-out, waiting for the spawn to appear. Because that’s fun!
However, there are also 20 legendary/mythical Pokémon with their own bespoke requirements. Some are locked behind story quests and require you to catch them— Heatran, Darkrai, and the Hoenn trio. You can get Volcanion through a three-minute-long side quest that takes place in a black room. Meltan and Melmeltan are just handed to you, more or less. Yet many of them require grinding before they show up— going through this cycle again, and again, hoping that they show up— while you are unable to easily manipulate WHEN they appear due to the game’s mandatory auto-saves.
Does this actually sound fun?
Does collecting resources, spending them on another run, using better resources to fund another run, and then eventually getting better Pokémon sound like the best, most engaging, way to make a game? …The answer, objectively, is no. You know how prior Pokémon games handled special, legendary, or mythical Pokémon? They had a small little quest to trigger them, maybe a side area, you go there, fight the Pokémon, catch them, and then you use them. It’s direct, it’s sensible, it has a sense of grandeur, and it’s how EVERY legendary in the base game was distributed! This can be tricky, it requires some effort, but the process is rarely obnoxiously indirect.
What the do these donuts add? Do they make the process more fun? Well, no, they encourage optimal play above all else, but not in a strategic sense. You are not making calm and calculated moves based on a series of rented Pokémon in order to complete a puzzle. You are, as I said, hauling ass through a randomly arranged recycled environment with randomized walls, randomized objectives, and the uniform goal of consuming or smashing crap as quickly as possible. Otherwise, you blew it, you played wrong, lost resources, took a hit to your grade, and now need to burn more time, more resources, to try again. Way to go, bozo.
These challenges, in isolation, are not a bad thing, but they are when there is a cost associated with them. Every run requires you to use items, combine them into a donut, and then spend that donut with the goal of accumulating more berries and points to accumulate better donuts to perpetuate a cycle of consumption and growth, for hours upon hours. If Mega Dimension instead introduced bespoke time trials or other objectives to complete in a time limit, sure, just keep the costs of participation limited, preferably free.
Even in the best case scenario, you would need to contend with the fact that PLZA’s movement and action mechanics are not great. The player character has unlimited stamina, can roll, cannot climb anything but a ladder, and can do their awkward drop jump to get over gaps. It works, it functions, and in the context of the main campaign, in exploring Lumiose, it is a limitation, but not a major one. Pokémon sometimes get stuck on terrain, behind potted plants, and can struggle to hit targets, when their function is to execute player commands. Yet because of the nature of the main campaign, with its low cost of failure, this is rarely an issue in regular play.
You’d think that projectiles would work better, but you’d be wrong!
Movement and traversal are satisfactory, not exemplary, not particularly refined, making them a terrible choice for any sort of timed, high-precision, high-tension environment. A little quirk ceases to be a quirk under this level of pressure. It becomes a failure of the game to perform, and by extension, a failure you need to eat and accommodate.
Everything about Liminal Lumiose… is bad conceptually, bad by design, and bad due to a desire to add content without caring if it’s good content.
Part 4: Don’t Worry, It Gets Worse!
The core reason I dislike Mega Dimension— why I am confident in calling it bad with no qualifiers— is because it takes something that used to be free and applies a cost to it. You don’t get to explore, you get to complete tasks, and hope beyond hope that you get the privilege to obtain the resources needed to perpetuate this cycle. It’s too demanding to be anything but stressful. It’s too unpredictable to ever feel like you know exactly what you’re doing. Even after spending a dozen hours just running through the same collection of maps, I could never memorize where everything is or could be. So I spent who knows how many extra hours save scumming so that I could find things before the time ran out.
Those Battle Zones are just wastes. They require more work and effort than the Wild Zones and do not give you enough rewards to make it feel worthwhile. At least you can get new and shiny Pokémon in the Wild Zones— I found six shinies, and that was neato. However, there’s nothing you can really do with these new Pokemon.
New Pokémon come in at low levels, ranging from level 12 to 66, when EVERYTHING should just be level 60 or higher. It worked for Sword and Shield, and it would work even better in a game like this. If you are playing Mega Dimension, you should have a team in the 90s at a minimum, and any new member would need to be raised up to this standard. This adds a surprisingly high investment cost for any new team member, and even if you get a level 100 Annihilape, there is nothing to do other than go through more Liminal Lumiose instances. Everything outside of it is trivially weak by comparison!
There’s nothing to do in other than perpetuate the loop and get Pokémon that, for practical purposes, can ONLY be obtained through the Mega Dimension DLC. You want Meloetta, Genesect, Hoopa, Marshadow, Magearna, and Zeraora, you NEED to do this crap and continue the cycle
They could have just GIVEN things to you. They could have adapted something like Mable’s research quests instead of adding these run-based tasks, eliminating this infinite grind for research points. They could have ditched the donuts entirely and just let you enter Hyperspace whenever you felt like it. Hell, instead of using these tiny instances with no mini map, they could have just adapted ALL of Lumiose into Hyperspace and made it a mirror world. Lots of games would have done that, and I highly doubt that would have taken much additional work. They could have given the player a new world with new Pokémon to explore at their leisure, at their pace, with the added novelty of being one big untamed Wild Zone.
But noooooo!
They just HAD to bar you from having a good time with these arbitrary limitations, this endless cycle of grinding for expendable resources, and the establishment of labor for the sake of labor. Games aren’t supposed to be jobs. Stop making them jobs or start paying me.
On that note, the side quests. PLZA already suffered from a fair amount of side quest bloat. These were odd adventures that did not have much to say, much to show, and were often just a way to highlight a unique move or mechanic. Many were cute. Some were genuinely great activities that had you engage with the world in an engaging way. Yet with a total of 119 side quests, they frequently felt like obligations over things you wanted to do.
…Mega Dimension introduces 81 more side quests, and they didn’t have enough good ideas to fill up half of them. The ones asking for a specific Pokémon and for you to raise them up are not interesting because you don’t have control over when you can catch these Pokémon. You are not going out to find this creature, you are waiting for the game to allow you to find this creature. Some exist to explain mechanics are coming in WAY too late for be relevant to the game. Specific gimmick battles lack their luster when you probably have EV trained perfect IV level 100 juggernauts at your disposal. Others are just gimmicks that… do not resonate when you are this deep into a game and its world. They would be great side quests for hour 20, but not hour 100 in my case.
Oh, but the worst are the rematches with the secondary characters. There are 10 of these side quests, and they all have the same set of sloppy problems. They take place in Liminal Lumiose. Side quests in Liminal Lumiose do not tell you what to expect before you venture into their instance, so you risk being unprepared, overprepared, or just using the wrong donut for the encounter. The game normally gives you clear information on what each instance will feature, but for side quests? You get no hints beyond the location and star (meaning level) rating.
When you actually get into the battles, they are double battles. These are a fairly rare feature from PLZA, being pretty janky, chaotic, and unwieldy, but often fast enough that you wouldn’t care too much. If you have a good Pokémon for a match up, you can just Mega Evolve and spam your good attacks and should be fine at this point in the game. The actual gameplay here only lasts 45 seconds or less, making these kind of a waste, but the game artificially extends this with THREE cutscenes of characters mega evolving their ace Pokémon. Your opponents both do it, your partner does it, and whenever a cutscene is triggered, it nullifies the effects of all attacks.
This is normally not a problem in one-on-one fights. Hell, this is a core mechanic in clearing the aggressively tricky Korrina Lucario versus Lucario side quest (which is dirty, but a novel callback to X and Y). However, the short duration, high enemy level, and cutscene interruptions make these fights all lame as hell. They could have been cool final battles against all of these trainers again, but they aren’t. All they are is a source of money, which you barely need at this point in the game, five costumes with two colors each, and another skit with these characters. Oh, and Mega Shards which… oh Mega Shards.
So, one of the best things that came with this DLC was actually a post-launch update where the secondary currency, Mega Shards, can now exceed their 999 cap. This is good, as Mega Shards are directly converted into TMs, EXP candies, EV training items, and Mega Stones— and they were everywhere in Lumiose. In Liminal Lumiose, they are a nuisance, and you are CONSTANTLY getting them, as they are always in your way.
I simultaneously do not care about Mega Shards, as the opportunity cost of smashing them is often too high to bother, but the game also balances the economy around that. Mega Shards can buy EXP candies, which are useful when leveling up Pokémon, obviously. However, the game also throws in dozens of overpriced irrelevant TMs that can only be bought from some random dude in an alley. Why not put them right next to the place you go to exchange Mega Shards in the base game? I know this is a petty point, but you are ALWAYS seeing these crystals. They are the only speck of color in Liminal Lumiose and you are constantly pressured to smash them to get something.
In fact, I think I really need to emphasize that the main setting of this game looks like nothing. Lumiose was already a bit too samey as a city, lacking many defined districts like the best open world/city games. Still, you at least had colors, a horizon, and landmarks to consume to help you navigate things. …And also, you know, a map. With the liminal world being effectively black and white, everything just blends together into a series of shapes, not a place, not a location. Nobody lives here, nobody wants to be here, this is just a damn obstacle course that doesn’t look like one because that would be more work.
Nothing looks defined, and nothing about being in this setting is pleasant. Hell, even the music is wildly inappropriate for butt-based hauling of any sort. It is a great theme, eerie and dreamlike, but it does not fit. Even when this expansion does something well, it does it in the wrong way.
Conclusion: A Mega Mistake
I want to end this review by bringing up the post-postgame of Mega Dimension. When you are done with every main story, you are to spend the rest of your time with this game conducting Special Scans. You venture to Hyperspace, complete tasks, get 25,000 points, and then trigger a new special rift you can enter. Normally, this rift is just a high power Wild Zone or Battle Zone. But if you are lucky, it will contain one of seven legendary Pokémon.
I did this, wanting to understand this mechanic, and see how these legendary Pokémon were presented, and unlocked an instance where I could catch a Terrakion. That’s not an uncommon legendary, but I’m game. The problem was that it dropped me into an expansive liminal space with no map and no idea of where this rocky dog would be. There were oodles of wild Pokémon all about, layers of scaffolding that led to nothing but crushed hopes, and aggro waiting to be triggered on every corner. I had 4.5 minutes to find them, so where the hell are they? This is stressful, this is annoying, and if I fail, I would have wasted this Special Scan.
This is a terrible tension, an awful stress— the kind of thing designed to make you hate video games.
So I said, screw this, screw you, let me just look up where Terrakion is on Game8, head left, dodge the Scrafty hoard, climb up the latter, go left, and then throw a Quick Ball with a near 100% catch chance. Bam. Got ’em. No combat necessary. No effort exerted beyond playing Find That Pokémon in an environment where everything wants you dead.
…And then I got started on this review, because I had seen everything I needed to say to call this the worst expansion I have ever had the misfortune of dredging through. It is a scar on a game I love, and I detest the choices the developers made. Maybe The Pokémon Company mandated that they make it garbage. It would not surprise me. But that does not change the fact that Mega Dimension is the rare breed of DLC that bogs down the base game it’s attached to.
If I thought PLZA was an 8.5/10, I now think the true complete package is a 6.5/10. And not even an interestingly flawed 6.5/10. It’s an 8.5/10 that devolves into a 3.5/10 during its latter third. Yes, Mega Dimension is that big, and yes, it is that bad.
In fact, I can confidently say that I would rather play through the main campaign of any other mainline Pokémon game than dredge through the dreck that is Mega Dimension. The fact that it was released in this state will forever confuse me, because you don’t design something this obviously bad on accident.