The players of Pokemon Legends: Arceus are very excited about the scale accuracy of the Pokémon models in the game. Arceus is the new game in the Pokémon franchise, scheduled for release on January 28 this week. The game is set in the Sinnoh region before it was covered in cities and modernized, an old version of the region known as Hisui. Arceus offers players the chance to chase down a Legendary Pokémon as they explore this familiar region in an older time and catch new Pokémon in their Hisuian form that are exclusive to the game’s region and time period.
Most Pokémon games, especially the older ones, made very little distinction between Pokémon sizes when building their in-game models. In most cases, they were rendered similar in 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 bit when an amazing Legendary Pokémon was introduced, only to be caught and shrunk to illogically tiny proportions. This problem has gotten better over time thanks to more recent Pokémon games, and Pokemon Legends: Arceus seems to have eliminated the problem completely.
One of the first players Pokemon Legends: Arceus, leob0505, shared an image on reddit, where his character is surrounded by his team of Pokémon of various sizes, with a huge Machoke at the bottom of the group that hangs over the rest. Golduck also dwarfs the player model in height and width, but is still considerably less imposing than the massive Machoke.
Although officially Machoke Only five feet tall, the image of the mighty fighting guy looming over the model is apt, albeit unsettling. On the other hand, Golduck is canonically five feet tall, but in-game he is depicted as shorter than Machoke, a change one could disagree with, but which seems appropriate in-game. Typhlosion’s leaked form in Pokémon Legends: Arceus is also shown in the shared image, and is only as tall as the player’s avatar. It is also possible that these Pokémon were of different sizes in the time period when Sinnoh was known as Hisui.
The imposing size of Machoke in these images leads us to wonder what the largest Pokémon in the game could look like and, above all, how impressive the model of Arceus in the game. When faced with images of Pokémon as huge as these, it immediately becomes clear that the protagonists of Pokémon games are often children.