After a marathon of shiny hunting in Pokémon Legends: Z-A — camping out in Wild Area 16 and leaning on the bench method — my ears began playing tricks on me. The transition from day to night isn’t just visual; the soundtrack subtly shifts, and the evening theme in particular felt warm, rhythmic, and oddly familiar. Before long I realized why: large swathes of Pokémon Legends: Z-A’s score could easily be mistaken for the kind of background music heard on classic Black sitcoms.
I stepped away for a day to clear my head, but when I returned the feeling only intensified. Tunes triggered flashes of scenes from Family Matters and The Cosby Show — the tense, soulful sting that announces a Battle Zone felt like the exact cue you’d hear right before a commercial break on Family Matters, and the nighttime theme for Lumiose City — velvety, jazzy, with a French nuance — matched the tone of those elegant brownstone establishing shots on The Cosby Show. Explaining this to someone felt absurd, so I did the sensible thing: I made a video that stitches the two moods together.
The battle zone activation theme carries the sort of insinuating, gossip-like sting that signals a scene’s tension just before a cut to commercials. Meanwhile, the Lumiose City night theme feels like an invitation into one of the Huxtable rooms — suave, slightly jazzy, and poised for a moral lesson or a comic beat.
The ’90s were saturated with a hybrid of hip-hop and jazz — a groove-forward, urbane sound that turned up in family sitcoms like Family Matters and The Cosby Show, in cartoons such as Hey Arnold!, and even in offbeat comedies. Pokémon Legends: Z-A leans into that same sonic vocabulary: cinematic jazz colors, rhythmic swagger, and occasional rap-tinged tracks that echo the era when the anime first gained traction. The game’s sprawling cities, eccentric NPCs, and freeform exploration conjure a similar energy to those early episodes, and the soundtrack helps lock in that nostalgic atmosphere.
And honestly, picturing Carl Winslow lecturing while you catch a Magikarp is as delightful as it is absurd.
Source: Polygon
