What ‘Pokemon Legends: Arceus’ gets right (and wrong) about open world games

There’s a location in the game atop a mountain, with the iconic Snowpoint Temple from the “Diamond/Pearl” games realized in a 3D environment. In front of it is a yawning lake with an island sitting at its center. Off in the distance in another direction looms Mount Coronet, this universe’s stand-in for Japan’s famous Mount Fuji. None of this sounds flat, does it? The issue is that none of these locations are framed with player location in mind. Great open-world games are able to frame various points of a map to offer players glimpses of where they have been and where they could go, while accentuating the scale of the game world, and hopefully, the player’s journey through it. Instead, the player is made to only focus on one object, giving us a lifeless visual made worse by the low-resolution textures and presentation.