Pokémon Legends: Arceus Machoke’s Model is Massive In the Game

Pokémon Legends: Arceus players are excited by the game’s accurate scaling of Pokémon’s models. Pokemon Legends: Arceus is the newest game in the Pokémon franchise, slated to be released later this week on the 28th of January. The game is set in Sinnoh before it was covered in cities and modernized, an ancient version of the region known as Hisui. Pokemon: Legends Arceus offers players a chance to pursue a legendary Pokémon while exploring this familiar region in an older time and catching new Hisuian form Pokémon unique to the region and time period of the game.

Most Pokémon games, especially older ones, made very little distinction between the sizes of Pokémon when building their models in-game. For the most part, they would be represented as a similar size to the player’s model without much deviation, regardless of whether the Pokémon in question was a Caterpie or a Charizard. This could dampen the mood a little when presented with an incredible legendary Pokémon from an older game, only to catch it and have it reduced down to illogically tiny proportions. This problem has improved over time with the release of more recent Pokémon games and Pokémon Legends: Arceus seems to have done away with the problem entirely.

[WARNING: Media linked below contains possible spoilers for Pokémon Legends: Arceus]

An early player of Pokémon Legends: Arceus, leob0505, shared an image to the PokeLeaks subreddit two days ago of their avatar surrounded by a team of Pokémon of various sizes, with a massive Machoke at the back of the group looming over the rest. Golduck also dwarfs the player’s model in height and breadth but is still significantly less imposing than the enormous Machoke. Other early players, like Twitter user Mootmonday provided alternative angles of the massive Machoke to let players see the size and scale of the fighting Pokémon.

Although officially Machoke is only about five feet in height, the image of the powerfully-built fighting type looming over your model feels fitting, despite that it is more than a little unsettling. Golduck on the other hand is canonically about five and a half feet tall but in the game is depicted as significantly less towering than Machoke, a change that could be disagreed with but looks appropriate in the game. Typhlosion’s leaked form in Pokémon Legends: Arceus is also shown in the image shared to Reddit, and it is only about as tall as the player avatar, again a change from the Pokédex that could have umbrage taken with it but does not look bad as depicted in the game. It is also possible that these Pokémon simply came in different sizes in the time period when Sinnoh was known as Hisui.

The imposing size of Machoke in these images begs the question of what much larger Pokémon might look like in the game, and most of all, how impressive the in-game model of Arceus must look. When faced with images of Pokémon as massive as these it is immediately cast into sharp relief that the protagonists of Pokémon games are usually tween-aged children. Seeing players’ avatars so thoroughly dwarfed by Pokémon in their party makes the yet unseen Pokémon in Pokémon Legends: Arceus that much more exciting.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus will be available on the Nintendo Switch on January 28, 2022.

Sources: Leob0505/Reddit, Moot /ムート/Twitter