Z-A Leak Confirms Missing Linking Cord

As is usually the case with Nintendo games, copies of Pokemon Legends Z-A have hit the wild before its release date, allowing for the potential of early spoilers. The Nintendo Switch title joins Donkey Kong Bananza as recent titles to be in the hands of players well before they should.

If spoilers aren’t your thing, you’re probably better off staying away from the Internet until October 16, when the game “officially” drops. That said, if you’re cool with finding out things beforehand, then it’s been discovered that the Linking Cord will not be present when Legends Z-A drops.

As first spotted on social media by Centro Leaks, along with a smattering of other people in the Pokemon community, the Linking Cord won’t be back in Legends Z-A despite having been present in the first Legends game, Legends Arceus.

Further breakdown of the Day One patch, plus in-game code searches confirm as much, meaning you’ll likely need to partner up to evolve certain Pokemon rather than rely on the item to help make things easier.

“People really liked how PLA was a self-contained, single-player story… so we decided to go with the exact opposite approach for the sequel,” one user sarcastically replied on a Reddit thread of the discovery.

Surprisingly, this isn’t even the first pre-release related controversy for Legends Z-A, as the Kalos starter’s Mega Evolutions will be locked behind online ranked play. If that wasn’t enough of an early gut-punch, then it was similarly also revealed that if you transfer a Pokemon into this Gen, you can’t transfer it backwards, thus locking the creature to Z-A.

Oh, and lest we forget the whole debacle of announcing paid DLC before the game even made its way into the hands of fans. All that is to say, Legends Z-A has a lot of heavy early baggage to overcome.