{"id":311631,"date":"2025-11-24T22:41:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T22:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/311631\/"},"modified":"2025-11-24T22:41:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-24T22:41:11","slug":"z-as-go-to-team-has-made-multiplayer-boring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/311631\/","title":{"rendered":"Z-A\u2019s Go-To Team Has Made Multiplayer Boring"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve only spent a few nights in Pok\u00e9mon Legends: Z-A\u2019s<\/a> multiplayer mode, and while I\u2019m not usually a competitive player, I had a pretty fun time during those early days post-launch, before everyone had figured out what the meta was going to be. It\u2019s chaotic, makes the most out of the game\u2019s real-time battle system, and hitting several enemies with one giant Surf tsunami is always satisfying. Even using my non-optimized team of favorites was a blast. But it was only like this for a few nights. Now, you can\u2019t boot up the game without folks running the same three Pok\u00e9mon and essentially turning competitive battles into a game of rock-paper-scissors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not uncommon for a Pok\u00e9mon meta to form that prioritizes a handful of monsters, but Legends: Z-A\u2019s multiplayer format has incentivized players to find what are essentially three of the strongest, most versatile Pok\u00e9mon in the game\u2019s roster and swap between them ad nauseam. This time, Metagross, Xerneas, and Garchomp have become the go-to team.<\/p>\n

Legends: Z-A\u2019s multiplayer mode pits four players against each other, each with a team of three monsters, competing to rack up the most knock-outs in a limited time. These three Pok\u00e9mon are not only powerful on their own, but they also have some of the most robust defensive capabilities in the game. Their Steel\/Psychic, Fairy, and Dragon\/Ground typings make them resistant to several incoming elements, and they each have versatile movesets. Basically, these three Pok\u00e9mon cover most situations between them, and they are also excellent counters to one another. Metagross\u2019 steel attacks can take down Xerneas, whose fairy-type moves are effective against Garchomp, who can knock Metagross over with a well-positioned Earthquake.<\/p>\n

These three Pok\u00e9mon are so dominant in competitive play now that everyone else is just trying to get a few good hits in before some variation of this team pops up on the battlefield. When I started writing this up, I hopped into one match to see what teams I would come across, and while I didn\u2019t face this exact composition, all three of my opponents had at least two of them on their team. I\u2019m not the only person who\u2019s noticed this, either.<\/p>\n

\"Img\u00a9 The Pok\u00e9mon Company \/ Kotaku <\/p>\n

\u201cI know Metas are inevitable, but Legends Z-A online battles went from actually quite fun at release to the most monotonous and miserable thing ever over such a short time,\u201d Reddit user TheFierceDiety writes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAdding in the legendaries this early in ranked was a crazy move,\u201d D00MPhd wrote in response. \u201cXerneas being playable in ranked homogenized the format in the worst way. If they waited until there were more legendary options to choose from, like in older games, we would still see a degree of diversity among team building.\u201d<\/p>\n

This kind of homogeneous teambuilding is the reason official Pok\u00e9mon competitive play has tiers that sort different monsters into different groups. Right now, Legends: Z-A has no such designation that lets you battle against teams of comparable power. If the game implements something like that, players who want to use different teams might have somewhere to play without having to deal with the impenetrable wall that is Metagross, Xerneas, and Garchomp.<\/p>\n

Maybe things will change when the Mega Dimension DLC<\/a> launches on December 10 and adds several new monsters to the roster, but for the moment, this is what players are dealing with when they hop onto ranked battles. It\u2019s made worse by the fact that you have to play ranked battles to unlock certain Mega Stones<\/a>, so even people who don\u2019t want to deal with these teams have to in order to get every Mega Evolution. It\u2019s bad enough that there\u2019s a growing cheater problem infecting the mode; now we have to deal with the same few monsters every battle. At least Game Freak made it easier to get high enough rank for those rewards by essentially making it impossible to lose rank. Now you can just go get beaten up for a few rounds and still get what you want. You\u2019ll be fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve only spent a few nights in Pok\u00e9mon Legends: Z-A\u2019s multiplayer mode, and while I\u2019m not usually a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[60390,74],"class_list":["post-311631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-pokemon-legends-z-a","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}