Pokémon Sun & Moon Review

Title: Pokémon Sun and Moon
Developer: Game Freak
Publisher: Nintendo
Release Date: November 18, 2016
Reviewed on: 3DS

Nintendo kicked off its Pokémon 20th anniversary celebration earlier this year by announcing the latest iteration of its ever popular creature collecting JRPG series.

Cut to 9 months later and Pokémon Sun and Moon has launched to critical acclaim, being cited as a breath of fresh air for the franchise.

It seems that Game Freak has really tried to listen to what the fans have been asking for and tried to streamline and improve the overall mechanics and story of the game. As a long time fan of the series, I’ve been really looking forward to seeing what’s changed and if, unlike the previous generation, Sun and Moon can hold my attention for more than a few weeks.

Probably one of the biggest changes to Sun and Moon is with the overall plot and pacing of the single player story.

The game takes place in the Alola region, a cluster of 4 islands that take inspiration from real world tropic locations such as Hawaii and the Galapagos Islands.

Your Character: random 11 year old kid, has just moved to one of the islands from the Kanto region (that’s were Red and Blue take place). After meeting the local Pokémon professor named Kukui and making a few friends, you decide to take the island challenge.

Alola is pretty cut off from the rest of the world and as such, the region doesn’t have their own Pokémon league. Instead, kids travel around the 4 islands taking various trials. after all the trials on an island are completed, you can fight the island’s Kahuna, the best trainer on that island.

To be honest, trials aren’t that different from gyms.

Generally a trial has you going through an area fighting wild Pokémon until you reach the boss called a totem Pokémon which is a stat buffed Pokémon that can call in allies to battle with them. Like gyms, Trials and Kahuna battles are themed by Pokémon type and beating one nets you that type’s z-crystal (we’ll get to those in a bit).

There’s a much larger focus on story and characters this time around.

Cut scenes and plot points are littered everywhere throughout the main story and you’ll be constantly be running into the various main cast.

I really like this. You’d think it’d really slow down the game but it really does a great job to flesh out the story and world around you.

The cast in my opinion is way better than X and Y.

Your rival/buddy character are still a bunch of goofy archetypes, but they have actual personalities this time around. I hated the buddy characters in X and Y, they didn’t do anything. You could remove them from the plot and It wouldn’t make any difference. They existed completely to have a group of npc’s that gave you a shitty nickname (stop calling me T-dawg you assholes). Characters like Hau and Lillie work as supporting characters because they themselves are also involved in the plot and are affected by what happens in it, that’s how good storytelling works.

If I had to pick my favorite characters from the game, it would absolutely have to be Team Scull.

These guys are the best.

There’s no grand agenda or master “take over the world” plan, Team Scull’s just a bunch of losers causing trouble because they’re bored. No one else really takes them seriously and they’re really over the top in how they act and hold themselves. There’s another set of villains that the plot seems to eventually revolve around more in the later game.

Pokémon hasn’t really been all that subtle with their antagonists like… ever and this one would have been a bit of a surprise, if it wasn’t kinda spoiled 5 minutes into starting up the game.

Ok, so I’ve gone on for about 5 paragraphs or so and I haven’t talked about the actual Pokémon themselves yet.

So might as well get to that.

I feel the new Pokémon for this generation is a bit of a mixed bag. There’s around 80–90 new Pokémon for the seventh generation of games and I’d say I like probably 2/3’s of them.

There’s a lot of good variation and keeps the island theme well. one of my favorites is Palossand, a giant haunted sand castle. There’s also a large handful of generation 1 Pokémon that have adapted to the Alolan region and are quite different from their previous versions. For example, Alolan Sandshrew lives in a snowy mountainous region and has adapted into an ice/steel type instead of it’s usual ground type.

It’s really cool to see different versions of the same Pokémon and I hope this becomes a standard change going forward in the franchise.

Mechanics wise, the overall game play has remained the same but there have been some tweaks for an overall better experience.

It ranges from minor things like being able to monitor stat changes during battle to completely overhauling the HM system. HM’s were special moves that Pokémon could use outside of battle on the overworld to add a puzzle like element to the games. They ranged from opening up blocked paths to traversing over water to fast traveling between towns.

The problem was you needed specific Pokémon in your party that could use said moves to make use of them. most people had to keep 1 junk Pokémon in their party which coined the term “HM slave”.

Now we have the “Ride Pokémon” system which allows you to call over a sort of Pokémon service animal. They mostly act in the same way as using an HM move would.

Tauros can break rock blocking your path, Lapras can carry you on water, Machamp pushes huge boulders for you, etc. This is probably my favorite change. The way HM’s worked was an interesting idea for the first few games, but after 20 years, it’s become archaic and cumbersome.

One of the big additions for Sun and Moon is Z-crystals. They act very similar to X and Y’s Mega Stones but I find they’re a bit more balanced. Like I said, you collect Z-crystals throughout the story of the game by beating trials, Kahuna’s or other bosses and a few are found in various locations. There’s a Z-crystal for each type as well as a small handful that work with a specific Pokémon only.

You can equip a regular Z-crystal to any Pokémon as long as it knows a move of that Z-crystal’s type. Like Mega Stones, once per battle, you can activate one of you’re equipped Z-crystals to let your Pokémon use a Z-move. There are 2 kinds of Z-moves. Any attack based move of that type becomes a extremely powerful move exclusive to that Z-crystal and any non attack based move becomes a more potent version.

Because most of them aren’t Pokémon specific, Z-crystals tend to be more flexible in game than Mega Stones. Mega Stones do come back into the game after you clear the main story though and they’ll be helpful for the endgame content.

One of my other big complaints with X and Y was the lack of things to do after the story.

The games seemed to put a larger emphasis on breeding and competitive play and if you’re really into that then you’re golden. I wasn’t, so I mostly found myself fighting the Pokémon League over and over again until I stopped playing all together.

Sun and Moon still seems lacking in that department but it’s a step in the right direction. There’s some additional content tying up some unfinished points in the main story dealing with a group of odd looking extra-dimensional Pokémon known as UB’s or Ultra Beasts. You can also go to the Battle Tree and fight a gauntlet of tough trainers including some of the more famous trainers from previous games like Cynthya from Diamond/Pearl and Red and Blue (from their games of the same name).

There’s still a large push for online competitive play as there are placement tournament happening now. The other major online component is the Festival Plaza, an area where people you pass by via street pass or while online can come and check out your festival stalls.

Everyone has their own area with a group of stalls that you can customize from a central area. There are multiple types of stalls such as a lottery, a stat training room, a fortune teller, a place you can dye your clothes and more, each with different ratings, higher ones giving you more options.

People who show up at your plaza can be registered to a VIP list and can take part in mini games you can set up. Battles and trades are also set up here either online with randoms or you can call on anyone on your VIP list. Doing most anything at the festival plaza earns you points that can be turned in for items or the various functions of your stalls.

The old friends list is one of the few things I think X and Y did better. The new system isn’t that bad, but having to interrupt game-play to access online features seems like a step backwards. Most of the new features for the Festival Plaza are interesting at first however, you need to spend way too much time grinding menial tasks to see any benefit from them.

A common statement you hear from the general populace is that Pokémon (and to some degree all of Nintendo’s main franchises) have been the same game since the beginning.

I disagree.

Every new generation of games has been gradually improving on a system considered one of the most iconic JRPGs of all time.

Sun and Moon is a prime example of the developer understanding what older fans have wanted in the game while still keeping it inviting to new players.

There are still many changes I’d like to see in the games such as story updates and a better online system, but I’m pretty happy with the direction the series has been going. If Game Freak and Nintendo continue to improve Pokémon as they have, I see the franchise sticking around for at least another 20 years.