Big Baddies Breakdown: Kleavor (Pokemon Legends: Arceus)

In Big Baddies Breakdown, Wolfman Jew analyzes all sorts of boss fights across the games industry. The catch: one boss per game. Many of these are brilliant, some of them poor. Several show technical polish, while others tell stories through their fights. But all are worthy of discussion.

Thanks to Hamada and Cart Boy for edits.

When it was released in late January, Pokémon Legends: Arceus had a mission: to move away from a formula as violently as possible. The formula in particular was a structure—a pair of games, a stritch path, a standard plot—that has been set in stone since 1996, when the original Pokémon Red & Blue came out. It’s a good system, and every sequel in the massive Pokémon franchise has found pleasing ways to iterate on it, but it’s stale. Responding to it forms Legends’ identity, and it’s led to it being exploratory in ways these games rarely are.

Its chosen responses are numerous and dynamic. Setting the story a century before every other entry, in a predecessor to the Sinnoh region from Pokémon Diamond & Pearl that straddles the line between Japan’s Edo and Meiji Eras. A goal that involves cataloging wild Pocket Monsters, with barely any human rivals about. Moving the action from thin routes to sandboxes ripe for survey. Removing mainstays like Abilities and Effort Values. But the greatest change of all is how the two spaces of most Japanese RPGs, the “overworld” and the “battle screen,” are seamlessly integrated. Touching or seeing a Pocket Monster doesn’t send you to an abstract, ethereal world; you send out your teammate to start the battle then and there. If you want to run away, you can literally run away. It’s incredibly dynamic and allows subsequent cool ideas, from letting players sneak up on Pokémon from afar to letting those Pokémon physically attack the players in kind. It’s a fresh departure.

Official art, and one of the earliest promotional material for the game. Sells a kind of game that is totally unknown for this franchise: a game of exploration.

The game needs bosses that are just as fresh—and, more specifically, iterate on that departure. It’s a role filled by Noble Pokémon, who exist alongside more traditional series boss fights as the game’s standout battles. Within the Hisui region, ten otherwise “normal” Pocket Monsters act as local religious deities; they protect their section of land for minor tribute. Five of them (Ride Pokémon) can be ridden to explore the world, but the other five (Noble Pokémon) have become violently crazed due to a mysterious energy. And your job is to quell them, by feeding them their favorite food until they calm down. That’s in real time, to be clear. Throwing away two decades of tradition, the player and Pokémon fight directly, with the former pelting bags of food at the latter as a light third-person shooter. While many side games, spin-offs, and crossovers provide tactile Pokémon combat, this is unlike anything the franchise has done in its mainline games, the turn-based JRPGs that define the brand.

The first of these Noble Pokémon is Kleavor. It’s a new and nifty evolution of Scyther, one of the original Pocket Monsters of Red & Blue, and this one watches the forest of the Obsidian Fieldlands. By being the first fight of this nature, the praying mantis effectively sets the standard and shows you the process. Which is to say he chases you around an arena while you dodge (and with quite the excellent dodge roll, I might add), retaliate, and blindside him with impromptu Pokémon attacks. That’s an important feature; after staggering a Noble, you can confront them in a traditional battle. It doesn’t end the fight, and it’s not even required, but it helps you whittle down their health. When you win, you get Kleavor’s favor and the next stage of the plot.

Of course, you can get a Kleavor of your own, and fairly early. Axe’On Cage here—I named my main teammates after Bruce Springsteen songs—was one of my first steady party members. Her Stone Axe was especially great.

As the first Noble you face in battle, Kleavor has the secondary job of selling this fairly dramatic shift. While it’s not a particularly unique fight by the standards of action games—he’s the stimulus, you’re the response—it is odd for this series. Pokémon has been aggressively focused on being easy and calm, especially in its mainline entries. Battles are turn-based, mechanical mastery isn’t important, the only real time aspect is a 24-hour cycle based on an internal clock, and there is always, always a harsh gulf between fighting and running. The overworld and battle world of these games are separate, as they are in most traditional turn-based JRPGs, and because of that they are safe. But in Pokémon Legends, those worlds are one—and, because of that, unsafe and threatening. And nowhere is that more true than a closed arena you can’t escape populated by a creature that won’t give you an inch.

This is true in all five fights. Despite their moral goodness and higher calling, these frenzied Noble Pokémon are symbolic of how violent and scary Hisui is compared to the pleasant, accommodating world of modern Sinnoh. In Kleavor’s case, he comes after an array of assaultive Pokémon—Shinx, Zubat, and Paras—but he also surpasses them in threat and aggression. Those ones will adhere to the standards of a Pokémon battle if you formally challenge them, they’ll let you alone if you run away far enough, but he won’t. You have to force him into a position where he’ll take part in one. Fighting Kleavor is reminiscent of classic Pokémon fan-fiction imagining the terror of living in a world of Pocket Monsters, though he thankfully doesn’t kill you. If you lose, you can just restart the battle without losing a few of your items, the typical punishment the game doles out every time you black out.

That feature is largely representative of the game’s concern that the scariness not go too far. He’s a fairly simple boss, all things considered; aiming is easy, you’ve got unlimited ammo, and Kleavor telegraphs his attacks generously. The strategies you employ are fairly limited, as well. The fight isn’t meant to pound players into the ground—after all, it’s a Pokémon game, with young players and fans unfamiliar with these mechanics to consider. But it still pushes and limits you, which is intimidating after you’ve spent hours getting used to more openness than the franchise has ever given you. That’s a classic Nintendo move: provide options, develop mechanics, and then take them away just when you’ve gotten used to the rhythm.

Not every mechanic, though. The food is the most important part, as the general act of throwing items—your primary way of interacting with the world—is Legends’ main mechanic. It bridges the overworld (in which you encounter Pokémon) and the battlefield (in which your Pokémon and other Pokémon fight). In the field, you can freely toss food as bait, items to trick wild monsters, empty Poké Balls to catch them, or ones that are already home to one of your Pokémon. You can send your partners out to farm materials or relax on the ground. Naturally, throwing is your main recourse when being attacked; you can’t physically fight other Pokémon yourself, but you can distract them with smoke bombs or battle them with your partners. It’s an immediate, fun process, and one that’s absolutely transformative for this series. So of course it has to form the backbone of these Noble fights. It also makes the battles more manageable, since you’re encouraged to keep at a distance and not close in. You don’t have hatchets for hands.

Though it’s a bit silly in its bluntness, the idea of throwing balms made of food to nurture a rampaging, mythological beast is also great on a narrative level. It taps into a broader cultural exploration than Pokémon is used to doing, and it allows you as a player to be part of it. You’re interacting with powerful, intelligent creatures with ties to the land and the indiginous people who’ve lived on it for centuries. By helping them and leaving them be (instead of capturing them, like you do for pretty much every other wild Pokémon you see), it allows the game to have wild Pokémon who stay wild. Mainline Pokémon games have explored this before, but never with game mechanics. By combining them, the Noble battles become a sort of odd, slightly ungainly, but extremely cool mixture of Legends’ approach to gameplay and story.

It’s not unlikely that players who fight Kleavor for the first time will have already met the younger Scyther in the wild. They’re violent and aggressive, as befitting their presentation since the very beginning, but there’s a jump from reading about them in the Pokédex to running away as they swipe blades of air at you. It’s a melding of the disconnect this series has always had between its wild and exciting world and gameplay that keeps that at a slight distance. The Nobles are both a celebration of that melding and an attempt to take it further. Their battles put these immediate, accessible systems to use, just as their Ride Pokémon fellows provide you with new methods of exploring the land.

But the Lord of the Forest carries another flavor, one that may be unintentional but still caught me by surprise. While he’s hardly what the franchise calls “human-shape,” with his Bug/Rock-typing and insect body, he’s “only” a fair bit larger and more monstrous than you. He’s got four limbs. His weapons of choice, two huge axes for hands, are human weapons. His stone carapace is armor. He’s very different from a giant eagle or whale or god-dragon; he carries more humanoid airs. In that sense—and permit me to bring up a potential cliché—fighting him reminded me more than anything else of the duels with dark knights in Dark Souls.

It’s hard for me to describe exactly how, but he moves, operates, and carries a feel akin to a very specific kind of boss, one from a specific type of action game from the past decade. He’s the FromSoftware human (or humanoid) boss, the person who’s just a bit bigger than you but hits so much harder. Ornstein & Smough, Artorias the Abysswalker, the Looking Glass Knight, Father Gascoigne, Pontiff Sulyvahn, Slave Knight Gael, the Crucible Knights; they’ve got this exact same aura. It’s the cadence and rhythm of the fight, that tough brown armor he’s got, the rushing attacks. I can’t point to one specific thing, and I doubt the Kleavor species was itself designed with that influence in mind (it’s most likely based on the “mantis’s axe,” a Japanese idiom for the kind of heroically doomed resistance that was ever-present in the region that inspired Hisui), but as a boss he carries this unmistakable scent.

Suspecting that the fight itself is a deliberate Souls reference might seem trite (though it hit me hard when I first fought Kleavor), but if I’m right, it’s only indicative of the way Pokémon Legends: Arceus takes influence from many games—something that’s blatantly true with the Noble battles. While the second fight follows this pattern, the third and fourth ones are totally unlike it; instead, they operate like 3D platformer bosses whose movement patterns make sections of the arena unsafe. The fifth twists the shooter mechanic into a wild shooting gallery where you attack the boss from afar. One non-Noble Legendary Pokémon also gets in on this with a bullet hell attack right out of NieR: Automata.

And that’s just the bosses. You’ve got Minecraft-style scrounging for items to craft. The structure—sending players into large sandboxes with vague, scored goals—is right out of Monster Hunter. The art style and some of the soundtrack aggressively follows Breath of the Wild. Some quests, particularly a great one in which you track down all twenty-eight kinds of Unown, are those wonderful open world environmental puzzles that don’t put markers on the map. And there’s another Souls element at play: you drop some of your stuff when you die—which online players can recover for you, not unlike the cooperative multiplayer of games like Death Stranding. Some of these elements are industry standards, and some are more specific, but for the first time in most of its history making these games, Pokémon creator Game Freak appears to have been aggressively looking at other people’s work. And, arguably, it’s been a long time coming.

Also a long time coming is the ability to now change a Pokémon’s moves on the fly. It’s one of several additions that answer or respond to longtime criticisms of the series, another way in which Game Freak is more willing to look outward.

When Pokémon Red & Blue first came out, Scyther in tow, it didn’t feel quite like anything else. It had connections to EarthBound and other Japanese RPGs, and the “monster catching” genre existed, but mostly it felt new. But twenty-six years later, Kleavor debuted in a series that has become anything but, as mainline Pokémon has only iterated on itself. That’s led to some very good games, the core gameplay has only gotten better, and the light innovations of each new entry are typically very additive. But they aren’t “new,” a quality that can be both overrated and deeply valuable. I doubt the classic formula will ever go away, nor would I want it to do so, but these games desperately needed Legends or an entry like it to be proudly different.

And while it might seem odd for a game to feel new and unique by appropriating ideas from other games, it can help. Especially since Legends is picky about what it takes; it doesn’t, say, force your throwing arm into an upgrade tree or combo system. It focuses on things that fit its setup, and things that fit the broader world of Pokémon. Crafting Poké Balls at a workbench has been part of the series since Gold & Silver. The untamed overworld has always been on the outskirts of this world. The constant capturing is a natural extension of the series’ focus on research. And the quick transitions between fight and flight fulfill a longtime fan dream to explore a world less beholden to the strict RPG dichotomy. None of the additions or changes ever feel forced, just natural.

And that includes, especially, a frenzied Pokémon willing to kill you and not waiting for your turn. Much of the time, Pokémon presents its setting as a world that’s modern, safe, evolved from social ills, and just on the edge of the wilderness. That’s where those notoriously scary Pokédex stories take place, tales of Driftloon abducting children (a tale whose origin is even shown in Legends), Bewear joyfully crushing people’s spines, or Gyarados rending cities asunder. And that’s where Legends is fully set, with humans constantly mentioning the death and destruction they’ve seen from Pocket Monsters. As mechanically new as Kleavor is as a boss, he’s only presenting a very famous part of the Pokémon world—and, arguably, doing it better than the other Nobles. After all, that was something his predecessor Scyther was famous for, being the murderous mantis with the razor sharp arms. Out of all ten, his blades and armor posit him as the most immediately threatening.

Naturally, that threatening aura has already been captured in assorted Pokémon paraphernalia.

That fight with Kleavor in Grandtree Arena isn’t the first time Pokémon Legends: Arceus sells this mixture of ideas and setting. There’s the low key introduction, your first mission outside the walls of Galaxy Camp, the times when the always-omnipresent Geodude and Zubat chase you far more directly than ever before; those are all hard pitches. But it’s most aggressive and most distinct with him. You’re stuck in a fight that’s both nothing like the games of Pokémon and everything like the world of Pokémon. It’s great, both on its own and as a stepping off point.