I’ve put dozens of hours into Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s Mega Dimension DLC, and for a while, I thought the issue I was encountering on occasion in which my Pokémon, when fighting in the new Hyperspace maps, would go in the opposite direction of their target and attack air, was just a minor, occasional oddity not worth much attention, and so I opted to just navigate around it as best I could. But after putting way more time into grinding the game as I try to find Latias in a randomly generated portal, I went looking to see if anyone else had experienced this odd, battle-breaking bug. Turns out, I am not alone.
Though this glitch isn’t exclusive to one of the randomly selected Hyperspace maps, this odd attack pathing does seem to occur most frequently on the one that has a mostly open field with one or two large scaffolding structures on the edges of the area. These maps are made up of the “dreams” of Lumiose City citizens, so they manifest as distorted images of the actual metropolis, mashing together different areas with no rhyme or reason. So while this area doesn’t have buildings, it does have scaffolding of the sort you often find near buildings in the real Lumiose, and if you use a close-range attack, Pokémon will often race toward the structure and get caught in it long enough that the attack will time out and they’ll automatically use the move, often striking the air instead of a wild monster.
I managed to capture this footage of my Mega Raichu flying away from an Alpha Pidgeot that’s about to whoop my ass when I told him to use Thunder Punch. This move should be a quick close-range jab, but instead Raichu decides to take the scenic route and gets caught on the scaffolding.
For the moment, in the absence of an official fix, players are finding ways around it. Attacks like Psychic and Thunderbolt don’t miss, so even if your Pokémon takes an odd detour in Hyperspace, you can at least know you won’t be wasting your limited time in these rifts with an attack that won’t land. But it would be nice to not have to do that, so we’ve reached out to The Pokémon Company for comment on the situation.
While many fans have reported weird attack pathing with close-range attacks and Pokémon taking odd routes to strike an opponent, the oddest example of this for me involved one of my Pokémon barely moving at all when using mid-range ones like Flamethrower. My Houndoom, who is my go to fire-type attack user, is typically able to breathe fire on an enemy and take them out in one hit. However, when positioning for this attack in Hyperspace, the hellhound almost always stops short of getting its target within the attack’s actual range, leaving my opponents with a strange hot flash rather than anything that actually makes contact. If my trainer character wasn’t in range himself, Houndoom would never get close enough to land the hit.
In Legends: Z-A, you’re often challenged to initiate battles without being detected, and if you can get in range to lock onto a foe, your Pokémon will move in to close the distance, but with mid-range attacks like Flamethrower, the pathing seems wonky in Mega Dimension.
I really didn’t notice it much during my initial playthrough, but the more grinding I’ve done, the more I see this is a really strange and frequent problem, especially for types that typically battle at close range like fighting and normal. Hopefully this can get patched soon and Mega Raichu can keep flying up to fools and knocking them out Superman-style.