Pokémon Legends: Z-A Confirmed to Take Place Just Five Years After Pokémon X and Y
The highly anticipated Pokémon Legends: Z-A will directly follow the events of Pokémon X and Y, taking place in Lumiose City only five years later, developers confirmed today.
Initial speculation suggested a significant time jump, given the time-traveling narrative of Pokémon Legends: Arceus. However, firsthand experience with the game reveals a direct continuation of the Kalos region storyline. Characters central to Pokémon X and Y, including AZ and Mable, will return, with Mable now serving as a Pokémon professor who tasks players with new challenges. Some returning characters will appear dramatically changed, though details remain embargoed.
This direct sequel is a notable shift for the Pokémon franchise, which has often employed ambiguous timelines and alternate universes. While previous games like Gold and Silver followed Red and Blue, later installments introduced complexities like time travel and parallel worlds, making a cohesive timeline difficult to establish. Understanding the established canon is crucial for dedicated fans who have followed the series for decades; you can explore the history of the franchise on the official Pokémon website.
The naming convention of “Z-A” after “X and Y” now appears to be a deliberate signal of this direct continuation. A review-in-progress is currently available, and a full review is expected next week. The game also introduces changes to established roles within the Pokémon world, such as allowing individuals beyond those with a specific appearance to become Nurse Joy, as detailed in recent coverage.
Developers have indicated further details regarding the story and character arcs will be revealed as the game’s November release date approaches.
When Pokémon Legends: Z-A was first revealed, we all immediately got to work speculating on when it would take place in the Pokémon timeline. Not where, we knew that: it takes place entirely in Lumiose City from Pokémon X and Y’s Kalos region. But given that Legends: Arceus was a time-traveling narrative going back hundreds of years into Sinnoh’s past, we had every expectation based on trailers that Z-A would be many, many years in Lumiose City’s future.
We were incorrect! We now know exactly when it takes place, and it’s not nearly as big a leap as you’d think.
We’ve been playing Pokémon Legends: Z-A for review and the embargo has now lifted. So we can confirm, from first-hand experience talking to multiple characters (most of which we unfortunately can’t directly cite or show due to the ongoing embargo restrictions), that Z-A takes place just five years after the events of X and Y. It’s not a time traveling narrative, it’s a direct sequel that offers a follow-up to many of the characters and situations introduced in X and Y.
For instance, we already know that you get to hang out with AZ, a 3,000-year-old man who plays a pivotal role in X and Y. We also know that Mable, a former member of Team Flare, takes on the role of Pokémon professor in this game and sends you out to catch Pokémon with various challenges. Other characters you’ll remember from X and Y show up as well, some of them dramatically changed, but we can’t and won’t spoil them just yet.
Pokémon Legends: Z-A being a direct sequel is actually a pretty big deal. The Pokémon universe has been real hand-wavey with how the different games and regions relate to one another over the years. While there have been some direct sequels before (Gold and Silver after Red and Blue, Black and White 2 after Black and White, etc), later games have introduced time travel (Legends: Arceus), alternative universes (Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire), and basically every game has implied that all the other games’ locations and monsters exist in the same world, but events taking place in those games may or may not be canon depending on which one you’re playing. The Pokémon timeline, if drawn out, probably looks far more ridiculous than the Zelda one at this point.
But if you were wondering what happened to most of the main cast of X and Y five years after the events of the game, here you go: this is just a straightforward sequel! In hindsight, we should have seen this coming when they named it “Z-A” after X and Y.
My review-in-progress of Pokémon Legends: Z-A is now live, if you want to check out my impressions of the first 24 hours, with a full review coming next week. I’ve also been writing about how the Nurse Joy job is now open to people who don’t look exactly identical to the original Nurse Joy after 27 years in Z-A.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
