Summary
The latest trailer forPokemon Legends: Z-Agave fans a look at how trainer battles will work in the upcoming title, but an easily-missed detail seems to confirm the official names of the game’s two protagonists. There’s been a fair amount of speculation among the community regardingPokemon Legends: Z-A’s duo of playable characters, but the reveal of the protagonists' names seems to put at least one popular fan theory to rest.
Most players typically create a custom name for their characters when starting a new game in anyPokemontitle, with many others simply using their real name. Many fans new to the series might not realize thatevery protagonist in thePokemonfranchiseactually has an official name, though, with this tradition dating back to Gen 1. Originally, playable characters and rivals would share names with their respective games, hence the Gen 1 games featuring Red as the protagonist and Blue as the player’s rival. This naming convention continued with minimal change in thePokemon Adventuresmanga series, though was changed in the core-series games from Gen 2 onward.
While playable characters' names haven’t been directly adapted from the titles of their respective games since then, each protagonist in thePokemonseries still has an official name. Thenew trailer forPokemon Legends: Z-Ashown during the most recent Nintendo Direct features a few frames that appear to reveal the official names of the game’s protagonists, withPaxton apparently being the male characterandHarmony being the name of the female protagonist. Some discussion around this detail was sparked in a post shared by aaa1e2r3 in thePokemoncommunity on Reddit, where some fans pointed out that both of these names are themed around concepts of peace, balance, and coexistence.
What The Names of Pokemon Legends: Z-A’s New Protagonists Mean
This makes a lot of sense considering what’s known about thesetting ofPokemon Legends: Z-A, with Lumiose City apparently being redeveloped to make the city more comfortable for both people and Pokemon to live alongside one another. The themes of these names are also consistent with those of Calem and Serena, the protagonists of the original Gen 6 games, whose names convey the themes of calmness and serenity. Another detail included in the upcoming protagonists' names is the likely intentional inclusion of the letters X and Y, an obvious reference to the games that first introduced the Kalos region and Lumiose City.
In thelatestPokemon Legends: Z-Atrailers, the names of these protagonists can be seen during the section of footage which shows off the game’s Z-A royale mechanic, where players will get to battle NPC trainers throughout the city and raise their battle rank. Though these names remain pre-release content at the moment and may be due to change, this does seem to confirm that these are completely new characters rather than older versions of the Gen 2 protagonists, Ethan and Lyra, as some fans had speculated based on their appearances.
