A brand new trailer for Pokémon Legends: Arceus has been released and it offers what might be our best look yet at the game’s historical Hisui region.
Posted to YouTube by the official Japanese Pokémon account, the 360 degree video allows you to take control of the camera angle and enjoy a first-person view of the game world. For just over two minutes you are transported across land, water and sky with the help of three Hisuian evolutionary forms: Wyrdeer, Braviary and Basculegion.
While it’s not possible to control the actual direction of those Pokémon, looking around is a simple matter of clicking and dragging. You can try it for yourself below.
This feels like one of those trailers that excited fans will be able to spend a while exploring. As you turn the camera, you’ll catch glimpses of some of the wild Pokémon that you can expect to be able to encounter in the Hisui region (shout out to that pretty angry-looking Snorlax).
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We get the impression the trailer is only showing one section of Hisui, which the Pokémon Company has previously explained isn't a fully open world, but instead split into “various open areas” into which players can venture from the main base of Jubilife village.
As the game’s website explains, Mount Coronet, which we see in the trailer, “rises from the center of the Hisui region” and it’s “surrounded on all sides by areas with distinct environments. Each area is rich in its own natural features and plays host to different Pokémon ecosystems”. What's shown in the trailer is visually pretty uniform so there's more to see when the game launches.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is set to release on January 28 exclusively for Nintendo Switch.
Analysis: Best look yet? Well...
With its greater lean into the Wild Area concept introduced in Pokémon Sword and Shield and its seeming focus on expeditions and discovery, Pokémon Legends: Arceus feels like it’s doing something new with the Pokémon series. This interactive trailer strikes us as a pretty effective means of conveying that sense of discovery.
That said, while we wrote this is probably our best look at the Hisui region yet, that’s maybe not strictly true if you’ve caught sight of some of the recent leaks around the game.
It might only be a week until the release of Pokémon Legends: Arceus but it looks like copies of the game have arrived with fans early and, as a result, screenshots, gameplay footage, and other information about it has started cropping up here and there online.
If you want this trailer to be the extent of what you see of Hisui before you get to visit for yourself, we suggest being wary of spoilers for the next few days.
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