Geek Errant Reviews: Pokemon Sun & Moon

As the year of events marking the 20th anniversary of Pokemon comes to a close, it only seems logical to look to the future of the franchise. If Pokemon Sun & Moon are the future, then this series is heading in a very positive direction. Maybe you haven’t played a Pokemon game other than Go for a long time, these are the games for you. Even if you were already a fan, then these are the mechanically and narratively the best the series has had to offer in a while.

Nintendo and Game Freak’s venerated series has always technically come under the title of a role playing game.

It’s a very specific role though. You’re playing a kid, partnered with a Pokemon, and told to go beat 8 gyms, collect 8 badges,become the Pokemon league champion, catch the legendary Pokemon of that game and as a side note, stop the nefarious plot of whatever evil team has turned up this time.

That’s how it has been through six generations of main series games. It’s no bad thing. A consistent base quality is a hard thing for a series to manage, especially running over twenty years.

What the newest generation provide though? Something a little bit different.

No gyms. The Pokemon league is only being set up in this region as the game goes on. Your villainous team, Skull? They’re a bunch of tryhard doofuses more interested in annoying people than world domination.

Instead, what Pokemon Sun & Moon has is a more traditional RPG structure. You’re on an actual adventure where every aspect of the story continues the plot. You join a team of characters who actually have reasonable character arcs. It feels natural. Hell, the world feels natural, not just a series of routes and encounters between the next badge fight.  The map design helps, with four main islands in the region, and each having very distinct areas to explore. What’s neat is that the small areas allow for circuitous route and dense environments. Really good use of camera angles allows for a sense of dynamic movement that also helps show off the full 3D environments that showcase the great design choices.

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This is actually just what the Alola region looks like all the time.

This comes down to the very naturalistic way that the game handles the setting. The Alola region is heavily based off Hawaii, and other pacific islands, so the development team have gone out of their way to have the cast be filled with native kahunas, tourists, immigrant settlers and tonnes of imagery and tropes that suit that style. And oh god those people. The previous generations have had much better writing in their endgames than the main story,  but here it is fantastic all the way through. There are terrible puns. There are actually pretty funny jokes like the pre-schooler who calls you “Kneecaps”. They even go some way to representing actual pacific islanders by having your rival constantly talk about “Chicken Skin”. Which is Hawaiian Pidgin English for goosebumps. It feels appropriate, and helps build the world thematically.

Every compliment I gave goes double for the animation and expression work. Your rival and companions constantly emote in an endearing fashion.
Oh and the villain of the story? Ooh. between their dialogue and expressions at the end, there’s something really unsettling in a way I’ve very rarely expected from a Nintendo game. In fact, even compared to villains like X/Y’s Lysandre, I’d give Pokemon Sun & Moon’s Villain the award for most awful person.

Speaking of “Villains”, back to Team Skull.

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Precious Cinnamon Rolls

They are the most precious, wonderful losers. A bunch of literal whiny teenagers causing trouble and acting up. they constantly try to big themselves up in front the Player.

They fail every time. I didn’t hate that they kept turning up like previous villain teams.  I was cheering because it meant I got to see more of their dialogue and stupid animations and posing. One particular sequence in an abandoned pokemon centre where they started rapping made me set my 3DS down because I was laughing so hard. It is perfect.

In Pokemon Sun & Moon and Alola, people and pokemon don’t just coexist, they have codependent lives, with this being most prevalent in the way that HMs have been changed. Instead of surf, fly, strength and others needing a Pokemon on the team to use, in Alola, they have Ride Pokemon. The last few games have made pushes towards developing these with X/Y’s Rhyhorn racing and ORAS and the ability to call Latios/Latias to fly. Here, the player pushes a button and instantly summons a Pokémon to surf on, break rocks, fly to routes or push blocks. These even replace items like the bicycle or the dowsing rod. I cannot stress enough how much better it is riding around on a giant dog pokemon to find items than waving a stick. Or being carried like a baby by a Machamp as it uses strength.

This is part of the wider trend of simplified systems within be game, but the manner in which it has been implemented should be given credit. The mechanic has been paired with the narrative, which makes the whole system feel much more acceptable and intuitive. Even to long time players.

These simplified systems are present throughout the game. Like scanning QR codes from friends and outside the game so you can identify pokemon and add them to the pokedex. This then allows you to find them in the game world.  There’s things like the fact that your companions constantly heal your pokemon for you in between major battle sequences, so you don’t have to constantly break the story by flying back to pokemon centres. Or the fact that when you catch a pokemon you can just add it to your party and send an existing member to the PC.

There are dozens of little revisions and convenience features that make the actual gameplay incredibly smooth to play.

I need to talk about the trials when I talk about revisions. The island trials are a reimagining of gyms, with two or three battles preceding fighting a trial captain or a totem pokemon (Effective Gym Leader). But they feel fresh. They feel clever. There’s one where a character causes the lights to go out, which causes your screen to go black. So you have to answer quiz questions based on audio cues to get the lights back on. Then there’s the one where you have to use a camera to find ghost pokemon to get a picture. So you have a haunted house to wander through, fighting ghost types and investigating spooky objects.
The thing about it is, it’s just a minor change to the formula. The functional stuff is the same. The dressing makes it feel Excellent to play through.

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Now there are problems. For some people anyway. The tutorial is extended over the course of the first hour or two, running you through everything. Caveats though include the fact that the game is thirty hours long without even including the postgame content, so it’s not that long comparatively.

I do understand the idea that this is Gen7 so we need a way to skip the “catch a pokemon tutorial”. But there’s a quote I heard about the WWE that applies, and that justifies the design decision for me.

“Every show is someone’s first”.

The game is still aimed mostly at kids. I’d rather they didn’t get frustrated and quit because they didn’t quite get base mechanics.

Anyway, you veteran players have nothing to complain about. There are constant references to the old games for you, even including some for Johto fans. (Who I feel are consistently overlooked)

The last issue I can see people having is in the selection of new pokemon. There’s actually a surprisingly large amount. And in keeping with the themes of the game. they mostly have a natural design. For me, I love that. A real animal with strange features is practically my definition of pokemon. But for some people, I know that nothing will be good enough, especially with Alolan Forms ruining their precious GenWun Pokemon like Vulpix and Meowth. (The designs are cute and the moment you finally encounter an Alolan Exeggutor is about as perfect a moment as Pokemon gets.)

Pokemon Sun And moon Dugtrio
How can you hate this? They just want to wake up in the morning and look outside.

Performance has problems. The original 3DS struggles with big animations and double battles, including when pokemon call for help. It’s only a few seconds each time, but it does create a noticeable lag that builds up over a thirty+ hour game. It’s not a terrible downside, but it’s something to keep in mind if you really can’t tolerate little things like that.

I could gush further, but it seems unnecessary. It is fun. It’s fresh. No other Pokemon game feels this wonderful to play, and the story is by far the best of the series. Like I said at the top, If you haven’t played a pokemon game in a while, this is for you. If you like the series, this is a must play.