Welcome back to Save State, where my favorite Pokemon game in years received DLC content. Pokemon Legends Z-A, which I recently reviewed for GiN, received its Mega Dimension DLC around two months after the title’s launch, and it’s packed to the brim with brand new Mega Evolutions, old favorites, and a story that can be finished in around six to eight hours. The strangest thing about the Mega Dimension DLC is that I greatly enjoyed the time I spent with it until I finished it because it’s not until after everything is said and done that the gnarled, desiccated fingers of RNG will wrap themselves around your play time and choke all of the fun out of the experience.

Pokemon Legends Z-A Mega Dimension brings to you the story of hyperspace warp holes appearing all across Lumiose, threatening the way of life of everyone who lives in the city. Pokemon not native to Lumiose City appear there regularly, and many can hear a disembodied cry for help. Seeing as how you and your rival were able to quell the rogue Mega Evolution fiasco that took place at the end of Legends Z-A, your team is once again tasked with exploring Hyperspace Lumiose with the help of Ansha and her Hoopa.

Mega Dimension introduces helpful bakery chef Ansha, and it brings back Korrina from Pokemon X and Y to help you along in your research tasks. There are nearly 20 new Mega Evolutions, including ones for Staraptor, Golisopod, and two forms for Raichu, and they even introduced Z Mega Evolutions who can use moves faster but run out of Mega Power more quickly in exchange. Over 100 Pokemon from previous games have been added for players to collect in Hyperspace, there are more side missions to do, and more TMs to collect as well.

The story of the Mega Dimension DLC has you facing legendary and mythical Pokemon, new rogue Mega Evolutions, and even doing 2v2 battles against the cast of characters from Pokemon Legends Z-A to collect their outfits. So, if you wanted to make your character dress like Jacinthe or Corbeau, now is your chance. They didn’t make all NPC styles possible to obtain, however, only five of them, which seems to be a little odd.

Mega Dimension has its own story, but how do you progress it? Well, basically, you take berries you’ve found during the main game and have Ansha turn them into donuts to feed her Hoopa, and you can use those donuts to enter Hyperspace distortions that have appeared all over Lumiose City. These distortions lead you to randomized remixes of areas around Lumiose, and the length of time you can spend in Hyperspace as well as the special abilities you get while there are determined by the berries you used for your donut plus a good bit of RNG.

While in Hyperspace, you’ll find special berries that exist primarily for crafting new donuts, so as you progress throughout Mega Dimension’s story you’ll gain more and more time you can spend in Hyperspace – the time you get at the start is pretty short. But that won’t last forever.

While in Hyperspace, you’ll be assigned three random tasks to complete, usually things like catch X species of Pokemon, catch a shiny (if you get this task, it means a shiny spawned nearby), catch an alpha, break X floating Pokeballs, and things of that nature. Each of these tasks has its own research points value and upon obtaining enough points to fill up the gauge, you’ll be told to go back to either Hotel Z or the Rust Syndicate building to get your next story beat. This basically repeats without changes for the entire length of the DLC.

The repetition in obtaining story progress didn’t exactly bother me while playing through the plot since there were always Hyperspace distortions with new Pokemon for me to collect or to shiny hunt. Mega Dimension is basically a shiny hunter’s dream DLC. With a turbo controller (or one that can use macros, like several of the 8bitdo and Gulikit controllers I’ve reviewed in the past), you can easily use warp panels or fly resetting to collect tons of shiny alpha Pokemon. It may not surprise you to discover that I have over 20 boxes of shiny Pokemon, 15 of those boxes being alphas alone. Combine the ease of resetting Pokemon spawns with the fact that donuts can have special properties like Sparkling Power that increases shiny spawn rates, and you’ll have loads of shinies ready for trade with friends and family.

The berries you find in Hyperspace all have specific flavor profiles, and you can use those flavor profiles to acquire specific boons for hunting or battling while venturing through dimensions, though what you ultimately get is determined by RNG. You can use the exact same berries to get a donut that yields Sparkling Power 3 and Alpha Power 3, but then your very next donut using the same ingredients will give you Catching Power and Teensy Power, which makes small Pokemon spawn more often and makes catching them easier. Getting the right Hyperspace zone with the Pokemon you want is based on RNG, and getting the correct donut to have the powers you want on it is also based on RNG. You can do some save shenanigans to ensure you aren’t wasting your rarest berries on bad donuts, but that’s a symptom of a flawed system and it still wastes the most precious resource of all: Your time.

Ultimately, Mega Dimension winds up being a fairly repetitive DLC where you do a lot of the same tasks repeatedly, but I still had fun while I was gallavanting about and collecting new Pokemon at a regular pace. The problems didn’t arise until I finished the story of this little expansion and discovered that I only had around two-thirds of the available Pokemon, with several of them not appearing even after resetting all of the Hyperspace distortions across Lumiose over several hours– which is boring as hell, by the way. It involves sitting on a bench to skip time forward then checking all non-battle hyperspaces for new mons: it’s incredibly unengaging for completionists.

Special scans, a function that’s unlocked after beating the main story, requires you grind up 25,000 research points to get a special Hyperspace zone, but that zone is also RNG, and no amount of save resetting will save you if you get your seventh battle zone in a row when you just want to find Rotom. I still haven’t been able to find Rotom, and I’m up to 45 or 50 special scans total (over half of which have been battle zones that don’t let you catch Pokemon). It would be nice if there was some in-game way to spend resources to limit the RNG for completionists, but apparently that’s too much to ask for.

All in all, I enjoyed most of my time with the Mega Dimension DLC for Pokemon Legends Z-A. I have a strong feeling that were I not a completionist who was taught to “Catch ‘em all,” I would have enjoyed the post-game of this a lot more. But that’s fine. The $30 price tag is a bit much for what Mega Dimension offers, especially considering $35 got you both DLCs for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet just a few years ago, and both of those had considerably more content in terms of story, environments, and Pokemon to catch. If you really enjoyed Legends Z-A, Mega Dimension may be a safe bet for several more dozens of hours of entertainment, but if you’re a completionist or don’t like multiple layers of randomness dictating your game play experience, time limits, or things of that nature, Mega Dimension is probably a fair skip.

That being said, I think it’s time to bring this chapter of Save State to a close. Remember, if you gained weight during the holidays, you didn’t get fatter – you just Mega Evolved! Until next time.