According to a recent leak ahead of its official release on October 16th, Pokémon Legends Z-A will have autosave enabled, with no way to manually disable it. This change may upset some players, especially those who rely on repeatedly resetting saves to catch specific Shiny Pokémon.

Autosave is a common feature in role-playing games and has been widely used in many Nintendo titles, such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In Pokémon Sword and Shield, autosave is introduced to the series for the first time and is enabled by default, but players can still choose to disable it and use manual saves. The subsequent Pokémon Scarlet and Violet also feature an autosave mechanism, automatically saving progress when connecting to a network, trading Pokémon, or participating in Taijing Raid Battles.

However, according to a leak by the Pokémon intelligence account Centro on the social platform X, Pokémon Legends Z-A will no longer have the option to disable autosave. Players will only be able to adjust the settings for text display speed, minimap rotation, and controller vibration. While the game's autosave frequency is currently unknown, the design has sparked controversy on social media. Some players point out that this will significantly impact Shiny Pokémon hunting and make it more difficult to achieve the desired starting Pokémon stats through "soft resets," as players may have to repeatedly create new save files.

The leak stems from players who obtained physical copies of the game before release. Furthermore, since digital pre-orders were already available on the Nintendo eShop, data mining has already begun. The Nintendo Switch 2 version of "Pokémon Legends Z-A" reportedly requires at least 7.7GB of storage space.

In addition to the autosave mechanism, changes to the power-up and power-down system in "Pokémon Legends Z-A" have also sparked some controversy. It's unclear whether the development team will allow players to re-enable autosave in future updates.