Pokémon Legends: Arceus

The Pokémon Legends: Arceus game honors past Pokémon games’ core gameplay while infusing new action and RPG elements. You’ll need to catch, survey, and research wild Pokémon in a long-gone era of the Sinnoh…

85 28 January 2022

Adventure Role-playing (RPG) Turn-based strategy (TBS) Action Fantasy Open world

Pokémon Legends: Arceus is an adventure developed by Game Freak, released 28 January 2022 on Nintendo Switch. The main story takes about 29 hrs to finish.

Verified 10 Oct 2026 Sources: IGDB , Wikipedia

What Pokémon Legends: Arceus is

Pokémon Legends: Arceus is an adventure game developed by Game Freak and released in 2022. It was published by Nintendo. It is available on Nintendo Switch only.

The premise, in the publisher's words

The story starts with the main character getting sent back in time by Arceus to the Hisui region, the Sinnoh region of ancient times, with one task in hand—to seek out all Pokemon. From the same day onward, strange lightning from the rift starts striking the Noble Pokemon, causing them to enter a frenzied state.

Description from the publisher · source

How it plays

It is played from a third person perspective. Its themes are action, fantasy and open world. It is a single-player game with no multiplayer component.

Where it sits in the Pokémon series

Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the 271st of 306 entries we hold in the Pokémon series. The next entry was Pokémon Trading Card Game Live in 2022. Its critic score of 85 is 11 points above the series average of 74. The highest-rated entry is Super Smash Bros. Melee at 100.

See all 306 Pokémon games in release order →

How it was received

Pokémon Legends: Arceus holds a critic score of 85 out of 100. That places it above 82% of the 7,525 rated adventure games in our database, which average 72. Games released in 2022 averaged 74, so it scored 11 points above the year average. Player ratings track closely with critics at 81, across 226 votes.

How long it takes, and what that costs

The main story runs about 29 hrs.

What it launched against

Pokémon Legends: Arceus launched on 28 January 2022, within three weeks of Horizon Forbidden West, Dying Light 2: Stay Human, Vampire Survivors and Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection. It reviewed better than 1 of the 4. It arrived 5 years into the Nintendo Switch's life, so it was built for hardware developers already knew well.

Released around the same time: Horizon Forbidden West, Dying Light 2: Stay Human, Vampire Survivors, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection.

Cheats and codes

We have not confirmed any working cheat codes for Pokémon Legends: Arceus yet. Rather than reprint a list we have not tested, this section stays empty until one is verified.

Know one? Send it in and we will test it →