All the new status effects, weathers in Pokemon Legends: Arceus

By Steven Rondina

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Jan 27, 2022

Reading time: 4 min

Pokemon Legends: Arceus overhauls the Pokemon experience, and that comes with an overhaul of status conditions and weather effects.

The environment of Pokemon Legends: Arceus plays a much greater role in the game. This can work for the trainer or against them, and that is seeing a slew of new status effects and battle conditions being added to the game.

Some familiar ones like paralysis and poison are set to return, but other status conditions are being replaced entirely in Pokemon Legends: Arceus. Alongside this, new weather conditions are also set to mix up how battles play out. Here are all the new weather conditions and status effects in Pokemon Legends: Arceus.

What is the drowsy status effect in Pokemon?

In Pokemon: Legends Arceus, being drowsy reduces a Pokemon’s increases incoming damage when attacked and has a chance for Pokemon to miss their turn in a way similar to paralysis.

Drowsy in Pokemon Legends: Arceus isn’t a Pokemon. It’s not that frustrating turn after an opponent uses Yawn, either. It’s now a full-fledged status effect that is doubly troublesome for Pokemon that are afflicted.

What does frostbitten do?

In Pokemon Legends: Arceus, the frostbitten status effect deals damage and lowers the damage it deals with moves that scale on the special attack stat.

Frostbitten isn’t anything close to the frozen status effect that has been around since the start of the Pokemon series. Instead, frostbitten functions similar to burn, with the extra effect of reducing the special attack stat instead of the attack stat. This is a status effect that should seriously shake things up in Pokemon games in the future if it ends up becoming the standard.

What does fixated mean in Pokemon Legends: Arceus?

Fixated is a condition in Pokemon Legends: Arceus that increases damage dealt by a Pokemon when it uses the same move in consecutive turns. However, it also increases the damage the Pokemon receives from opponents.

Something similar to the mechanic has been seen in past Pokemon games with moves such Fury Cutter. Unlike past iterations of attacks like Rollout which dealt increasing damage each turn, the Pokemon can stop using the attack at will.

What does obscured mean in Pokemon Legends: Arceus?

Obscured is a new status condition in Pokemon Legends: Arceus that increases evasion.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus does away with many of the stat-altering moves and that has Game Freak looking for different ways to let players add some finesse to battles. This means that there are two status effects that offer outright buffs to affected Pokemon.

Instead of using Double Team or Minimize, players can use the obscured status effect. The idea is that Pokemon are camouflaged or hidden in their environments and it’s interesting to see how this might be used in the series moving forward.

What does it mean when a Pokemon is primed in Legends Arceus?

Primed Pokemon have increased damage.

As stated, many moves that alter a Pokemon’s stats have been removed from Legends: Arceus, heavily overhauled, or replaced with status effects. The “primed” status to Pokemon serves to replace some of those missing moves.

Given how much of an impact stat boosts from Dynamax and Gigantamax moves had in Sword and Shield, this should translate to a radically different approach to all forms of battling.

What does snow do in Pokemon Legends: Arceus?

Snow increases susceptibility to the drowsy and frostbitten status effects while boosting the speed of ice-type Pokemon. 

While hail has been around since the start of weather effects in Pokemon, snow has never gotten its due. That’s changing with Pokemon Legends: Arceus.

Hisuian Zorua in the snow in Pokemon Legends: Arceus

The new weather effect is primarily designed to be used in unison with status effects, but that’s not all it does. Weather effects are set to be associated with stat boosts, adding new ways to utilize them.

What is strong sunlight?

Strong sunlight in Pokemon Legends: Arceus boosts the speed of grass-type Pokemon.

It is technically an upgraded version of harsh sunlight from the mainline Pokemon games. Alongside the speed boost, it has various effects associated with specific moves.

What does fog do in Pokemon Legends: Arceus?

When fog is in effect, it lowers the accuracy of both Pokemon in a battle.

Fog has technically existed in Pokemon games since the original Diamond and Pearl, but it hasn’t been used very much since then. This is for a variety of reasons, most notably the addition of terrain effects in Pokemon Sun and Moon. From there, foggy areas were instead associated with the Misty Terrain move.

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