HOME | DD

Description
If I had to give you my initial thoughts coming into Pokemon Sun and Moon as the game was released, I would actually have to tell you that I wasn't looking forward to it. I'm not sure if there will ever be a day where I actually give up Pokemon for good, or if there will ever be a day where Pokemon just won't be fun for me, but I was very worried as to the path that Sun and Moon were taking us. The trailers for the new Alola forms had me in mixed reactions. The lack of a proper gym system had me worried. Team Skull was silly and fun, so they had that going for them, but the Aether Foundation felt over-hyped at best and clearly evil beyond what Pokemon was advertising. As a result, I didn't want to pick up this game on release day like I did for X and Y or ORAS. It might have just been the cynicism that I had developed through the 6th generation of Pokemon, but I thought Pokemon was setting itself up for failure.

However, this was certainly the game of the winter if I was going to buy one, and with Persona 5's delay... again, there wasn't really anything holding me back from joining in on the fun of the battle with all my friends around campus. So, as a group, we walked down to the local Gaming Generations and picked up one of their last copies of Sun to start the journey.

Now that I've finished the game, I think it's ripe time to look into the mechanical changes Pokemon made between XY/ORAS and Sun and Moon. I've decided not to go out of my way to list off what I believe to be the positive aspects of 7th gen or what the negative aspects are, but rather to just talk about the significant changes that have been made to the franchise, and how that affects the game moving forward.

~~~

Back when I started playing X and Y, I thought that 3-D was the coolest thing, and the little Fletchling flying into our house and waking up the protag of the Kalos region was one of the coolest innovations of the time. There is no doubt that this new style of animation was far beyond anything we as Pokemon fans could have expected, but there comes a question of what actually changed? Sure, the game was in 3D now, so there was a sense that the world was becoming more real, and the game was expanding beyond the simple grid layout RPG we've all come to know and love. Aspects like the Roller Skates, Bicycle, and general free movement gave us a better perspective of that motif, and it was all meant to have its crux be focused around Lumiose City, this grand creation of the Pokemon Company as a shining beacon of how far the game has come, and how we can begin to explore the world in a completely different way. However, this isn't really the case. The game is still entirely constricted to a grid, whether the game liked it or not. The player had the option to free-run, and they had the option to move diagonal through areas, but that didn't stop the entire game's layout from being stuck on a grid, and the use of the d-pad from being a primary source of movement. Even in the grand Lumiose City, one could simply input a single direction from the d-pad, and walk in a circle around the city's perimeter, though the 3-D would make you believe you would run straight into a wall. It's no different from when Castelia City in 5th gen tried playing with perspective to make the city seem larger and more free than what it actually was. It was a spectacle difference, but the actual content, the actual ability of the player wasn't much different from before.

With Sun and Moon, we finally see the full break from the grid style system. No matter how hard the player tries, they can't lock into the grid system with the d-pad, nor can they stop themselves from only traversing through free-walk mode. As far as a shift in the game's overall tone goes, this is what 3-D truly means. What XY/ORAS provided was a graphics update to an old means of movement. In Sun and Moon, the entire game has to revolve around this free movement instead of the grid, which allows for significantly improved exploring spaces in the game. Now that the game isn't deadlocked into squares, the formations of paths, the patterns of grass, and the general layout of the routes feel more natural than ever before. Yes, they are still constricted to contain the player, most notably by sea, but that's simply to keep from having a sandbox over having a true RPG. This allows for the player to feel more immersed in the game, and furthermore for the game to feel more open. Discovering new territory in this land is all the more exciting. The player may subconsciously register that the game is still a game, and everything is laid out in its own right, but the freedom provided in movement gives the player an innate sense of wonder, as to where they will take themselves. Having been locked into the rigid movement of the game beforehand didn't allow as much curiosity to flourish. No matter how tall you build your skyscrapers or how grand you make your cities, they will feel rigid if your movement is built to be rigid. With the introduction of free movement, as allowed by 3-D, we finally get that understanding in a Pokemon game, and ultimately it allows for the game to be more interesting as a whole. You aren't stuck on the game's railroad anymore, or at least not as much. Now, you're experiencing the game.

As for the game you are experiencing, it's most notable to cover how the game handles its challenges as the story progresses. Instead of the stereotypical eight gyms in each region with a challenge at the end with the elite four and the champion of the Pokemon League, Sun and Moon vie for a different route. In the Alola region, aspiring trainers must undergo a series of trials throughout the four major islands, and then battle an island kahuna at the end of it all. The trials vary in their goal and challenge along the way to the player, but they always consist of providing Pokemon to the player to fight as a way of preparing the player for the boss of the trial. Each boss is labeled a Totem Pokemon. These totem Pokemon gain a stat bonus in a field varying on what the trial is, and have the ability to summon Pokemon to help them in the battle. Defeating the totem Pokemon results in a clearing of the Trial, and the reception of a Z-Crystal, an item that allows Pokemon to use a super-powerful move once a fight. For those familiar with mega evolution from 6th gen, this is essentially the same concept. Just like how you can only have one mega evolution per fight, you may only use one Z-move per fight, and the Pokemon you want to use that powerful move/ability with must carry a stone that correlates with that move/ability. For Z-moves, the power varies on the move you are using as a base. For example, using Ghostium Z's signature Never-Ending Nightmare on Shadow Sneak will increase the power from 40 to 100 base. However, if you wanted to use it on Shadow Claw, the base power increases from 70 to 140.

My feelings towards this change in format are still mixed, but mostly positive. The challenges preceding the ultimate trial challenge with the totem Pokemon are around the same amount of challenge as the gyms in the sixth generation, if not less challenging. To top it off, there are generally less Pokemon to fight than there were with trainers, so the buildup to the trial Pokemon isn't as difficult, and, as a result, isn't as fun. However, the tasks themselves are interesting enough to carry the player along until the true challenge. However, where the trials truly shine are with the Totem Pokemon and the reward for beating the challenge. The totem Pokemon are significantly stronger than those sprinkled throughout the trial, and give more of a challenge than most trainers can. I'm not sure how much of this can be attributed to the buff in stats that the Totem Pokemon get, or if it's simply that the Pokemon were designed to be tougher, but I digress. One of the best examples of this was the Lurantis at the end of Mallow's Trial on the second island. Lurantis's totem buff results in a +2 to speed, and the sun is out. For people who chose Litten as their starter, this match isn't really that much of an issue. The sun boosts fire-type moves, and Lurantis, being pure grass, is weak to fire. However, against the other starters, Lurantis is a menace. Lurantis knows Solar Beam, which, in sun, has no charge-up time, and is an all-around powerful move. Alongside the SOS call having a chance of finding Castform, who's Weather Ball knocks out bug types, ultimately makes the round much harder than what most people have experienced in the game up until that point. I will make the concession that the game is knowingly trying to get the player to pick up a water and a fire type Pokemon during each of the trials through the incentive of the Z-moves, and that fire type would have greatly helped in the process of fighting off against Lurantis, but the prominent fire type in the previous trial area was Salandit, of which only 1/8th of the population can evolve due to quirky evolution standards only allowing the females to evolve into Salazzle.

Oh, and speaking of the Z-Crystals, I open this advancement in the rewards for the challenges with open arms! With the gyms, beating the leader always gave the player a badge for beating the gym and a Technical Machine (TM) for the victory. If you're anything like me, the TMs mattered less to you by comparison to the allowed HM's ability to be used outside of battle, usually allowed after ect. amount of gyms beaten. To me, this meant progress in the game. The moves that my Pokemon learned naturally were usually enough to carry me throughout the game, so the TMs didn't mean much overall. Some of that stigma was taken away in 5th gen with the concept of unbreakable TMs, but it didn't stop the HMs, or hidden moves, from completely overriding the reward of the TM. This is to top off the already completely meaningless nature of the badges in the original games. What the badges held were largely symbolic value, a totem to which you have accomplished a feat and beaten a challenge. Though the designs were fun to look at, what did the badges actually do for the player? It did allow for them to use traded Pokemon at a certain level or lower, sure, but that was a balancing tool against game-breaking strategies with other games at the origin. If someone had a level 100 Arceus traded to little Timmy who had just only beaten Roark, that would defeat any challenge even proposed in the main story line and ultimately make the game a chore rather than an experience. The badges themselves weren't a reward of gaining anything, but of removing limits. I believe Egoraptor had a very similar idea with puzzles in Zelda games in his review of Ocarina of Time. When you complete a challenge in the games prior to Sun and Moon, you think, "Ugh, finally, the badge." The challenge itself may have been fun, but the reward for that challenge is trivial at best. In Sun and Moon, however, that entire stigma is reversed. Instead of removing limits on the player's behavior with increase of skill, the player is given more tools to achieve greater things! Z-moves are these wickedly strong attacks with a cool dance and giant wooshy-woo animations that explode the screen until you kill your opponent, and it even goes through Protect! That's awesome! Sign me the fuck up! This gives the player true motivation to complete the trial. The reward at the end of the trial gives the player something that makes them even stronger, and allows them to fight even harder against whatever adversity is flying in their face at that time. This is the sign of a true reward, and should be praised infinitely more than what the badges and TMs could ever provide.

Something that may have also put more emphasis on the importance of the Z-Moves and how badass of a reward it was came from the complete removal of HM's. So, for those of you who haven't touched a Pokemon game since Gen 1, Pokemon has drastically reduced how much they utilized HM's. By Gen 6, Cut was only a move the player needed if they wanted rare collectibles. Rock Smash was made into a TM. The only really mandatory HM's a person needed to have on their team were Surf and Strength, TMs that most people were ok with having in the first place, given how strong of a move it was in the first place. HMs were on a complete downfall, being used less and less for puzzles and obstacles restricting advancement in the game. It was obscenely clear that the HMs were tools to keep the player from advancing in the earlier generations, but as the games progressed, the obstacles usually were laid out on story instances, or just the need to complete the Pokemon League Challenge.

So, what happened in Alola? Well, HMs were taken away completely and replaced with these random-summon Pokemon to assist with any issues with terrain or obstacles. Tauros became Rock Smash (and the new Bicycle), Stoutland acted as your item finder, Mudsdale galloped over rocky terrain (think Rhyhorn in XY), Machamp used strength, Lapras was your regular surf while Sharpedo was the Super-surf (you could break breakable rocks in water) and Charizard was used for Fly. Each was earned as the game progressed to tackle new scenarios as they appeared. You could also travel back to previous parts of the game and unlock some special items that weren't accessible before, but that's par for the course in a game like this. Now, this entire concept leaves me very conflicted, and has forced me to think about my feelings towards HMs as a whole. HMs have always been a burden to players, the famous HM slave image popping up in my head time and time again every time I think of it. HMs couldn't be forgotten easily, and required a move forgetter to actually rid a Pokemon of a weak move used to clear obstacles. What this led to in practical gameplay was players putting all their HMs on a Pokemon they never used in battle, or just a weak Pokemon in general, so it wouldn't clog up the restricted movepool of their main fighters. A classic example of this is Bibarel, and, if you ever play Gen 4, you'll know what I mean. No one liked HMs from the very beginning, because the player's Pokemon could have better moves, but they were ultimately stuck with these lower-power or less priority moves to simply complete the game. Yet, from a game design perspective, I really appreciate the HMs. As far as progression goes, this was the biggest incentive to beating a gym. Outside of the fun battle, access to using the HM outside of battle greatly increased the player's ability to move and find new locations. Just like the Z-Crystals, HMs increased the player's ability. I know the later games didn't utilize the HM's potential as much as they did in games prior, but, for what it was worth, the puzzles and discoveries made through carrying the right Pokemon with the right HMs lead to some pretty amazing discoveries and memories not easily forgotten. By getting rid of HMs altogether, I think we're losing that enabled feeling of the player, and the concept of unlocking the ability to explore, at least from a current perspective. With limited HMs and limited Pokemon slots, players ran the real risk of not being able to discover something because they weren't carrying the right gear. This incentivizes making a small sacrifice for a possibly gargantuan reward. It's a little time and space that a player has to conserve and consider the makeup of their team for in order to experience the full capacity of the game. It's that struggle that sort of makes the game that much more interesting, at least for me. In the modern era, where mystery and puzzles aren't even a goddamn concept in modern Pokemon games, I suppose it makes sense to get rid of the HMs altogether, but it removes the fun of what HMs used to mean. Where we used to place rocks strategically through holes so we can open up avenues to get through an ice room, we now move two blocks in a dungeon to be able to fight a legendary. The mystery and reward that HMs used to provide is no longer in existence. We can sacrifice the conservative approach to building a team for brevity and immediate rewards in the HM department, since we've already lost the interest and patience that HMs asked for the satisfaction of a good puzzle.

Of course, I know I sounded preachy talking about the concept of HMs being an integral and fun part of Pokemon, and I know no one is going to understand where I'm coming from. HMs, to many, have always been a hindrance to the Pokemon they could play with and the moves they could learn. You have to sacrifice Ember for Double Kick with Combusken now, since you gave up one of your slots to Cut, and you don't want to get rid of anything else in your moveset. I know that, and I appreciate the convenience of the removal of HMs in this game. Ultimately, I do think that this is the optimal play for the progression of Pokemon based on what we've seen in the past. However, if there's one thing this game is severely lacking in, it's mental prowess to complete. I don't think many can really argue against the fact that Pokemon is a pretty simple game. There are complex stats and learning how to optimize your Pokemon is something that I can get a professor to try to accomplish in their lifetime. However, something that's attracted both kids and adults to this game from the very beginning was it's low entry point. The type matchups were easy to understand, and many of the moves that were super-effective to any given type typically made a decent amount of sense. Sure, not all do, and I'm looking at Fairy types when I'm saying this, but a good majority do. So, where we got a lot of our stimulation came in part from balancing our team to have the most coverage on any given scenario, but also in the puzzles and challenges that came from gyms and exploring. Strength puzzles were my absolute favorite things to solve in the early Pokemon games, because there was time put into making them at least relatively challenging, and they were easy enough to reset so I could have another crack at them. As annoying as sliding ice puzzles were to some, or the fill-in-all-the-cracking-ice puzzles were to others, it made the game interesting and stimulated the mind beyond the generic water beats fire mentality that we're all stuck in. It forces problem solving and the ability to register one's environment, a concept that games as a whole espouses as one of the biggest and best reasons to play them. Games act as a tool to both provide catharsis and sharpen our minds. So, as I'm seeing Pokemon become easier and easier with every installment, and I see HM puzzles drift into a concept of the past, I can only see this as a negative aspect of the game moving forward. Yes, it makes the lives of the player easier, and it sure as hell speedens up the process of getting into battles, but at what cost? Should we sacrifice puzzles in Pokemon games just to optimize the battles, or were the puzzles an integral part of what made the journey in Pokemon games fun in the first place?

I know I'm not going to get a lot of support from outside on this point, and I entirely expect some readers to have either skipped down to the comment section to voice their disapproval of my opinion or to have stopped reading altogether, but that's just their problem in the end. I'm open to me being wrong on this point, but I do think the reduction of HM and HM usage in the games has led to an overall decline of entertainment in the Pokemon franchise as the games moved forward. This isn't strictly a 7th gen point, but a trend I've noticed and grew irritated with. The complete removal of HMs just forced a point into the foreground, and I wanted to steal the opportunity before it got away.

As far as Pokemon battles go, it's your standard bread and butter basic RPG style. It's your Pokemon against the wild Pokemon or opposing trainer's Pokemon, and you fight until one side is out of fighters. However, a new trait has come in wild Pokemon battles with SOS calls. Occasionally, wild Pokemon can call for help, and an additional Pokemon may enter the field on the wild Pokemon's side. The player will then have to fend off the two Pokemon with only one of their own. Knocking out the Pokemon in the initial slot will stop new Pokemon from arriving, as the Pokemon called cannot call any more Pokemon, but knocking out the Pokemon called can result in grinding for EXP. The SOS feature has also opened up the doors for easier methods of shiny hunting, finding Pokemon with hidden abilities, and even just finding rare Pokemon. Something that I know has irritated many friends of mine comes through how some Pokemon are only found through being called by another Pokemon. Mareanie, for example, is a Pokemon that only appears 20% of the time on a successful call from a Corsola, a Pokemon who, at maximum, is found at a 20% find rate through fishing in a bubbling spot. Goomy, on the other hand, can be called by any Pokemon, but only in the Lush Jungle or on Route 17 through a wild Pokemon calling for help while it is raining. And, to those of you who haven't played Pokemon in a while, the weather fluctuates in the seventh generation. That means it isn't always raining in those sites. Overall, I think this dynamic is a great addition to the game. The totem Pokemon have proven that this can be used to add difficulty to any given match, since the Pokemon is another target you have to knock out in order to obtain victory, and the player is essentially being double teamed. The tool can also be used to simply get specific abilities or items from Pokemon that you need in order to be competitive. Where this can be a trouble is if the player isn't strong enough to fight the Pokemon on that route, and the double team proves too strong for the player. This may also just consume the player's time far beyond what they want, since the battle is simply going to last longer through the addition of another target. And, above all, the player can't control who the opponent summons, or even if it attempts to summon at all. The SOS calls are entirely determined by the wild Pokemon, and the SOS call itself doesn't guarantee a Pokemon will come to assist it. This does create an interesting dynamic where the wild Pokemon dictates the flow of the battle, and it is especially useful in matches such as the Totem Pokemon battles, but I can see where people can get annoyed by this. Ultimately, I think it's a benefit to the franchise moving forward, but there are negative aspects with it as well.

As far as fundamental gameplay changes go, that's about as far as it comes. There are additional features with Poke Pelago, where you can develop isles as additional tools for getting resources or buffing up your Pokemon. This is a great resource for various things, but isn't necessary for the completion of the game. Many people can go the entire game without even realizing that Pelago was even implemented into the game, let alone all of its capabilities. The game doesn't even give a tutorial as to how it works. I've fiddled around with it and found use in its first and third isle for resources. However, it won't change the way you play the game. Pokemon Amie is back, except in the form of Pokemon Refresh. You can trigger this sometimes after battle, and other times through scrolling to the second page of the X menu. In this app, you can remove status effects from your afflicted Pokemon after battle as well as cleaning away any debris they may have picked up in the heat of the fight. There are no mini-games like there were in Amie, but petting and feeding the Pokemon make the process much simpler in raising the Pokemon's friendship levels. This is simply an easier Pokemon Amie with more practical uses, entirely through the ability to remove statuses after battle. Both these features are great in their own right, and they deserve some exploring by the player, but neither are mandatory for finishing the game, nor are either really revolutionary to the Pokemon franchise.

Where I was legitimately surprised with this game actually came from the story. As many of you know, Pokemon starts with a mother handing their child off to a professor to get their first Pokemon and to travel across the land to become the best Pokemon trainer in the world. However, unlike basically every Pokemon game to date, this game starts off with an opening cutscene that has literally nothing to do with the player. You see a blond haired girl running through a futuristic white building trying to stifle something in a bag. When she gets cornered, the thing jumps out of the bag and lets out a giant power.

After that mindfuck, we are brought to the Alola region and introduced to Professor Shirtless Kukui. He gives the player a basic rundown of the world around them, and tells the player to go find the Kahuna, who is basically the elder of the island. In search of the Kahuna, the player finds the same blond girl at a rickety drawbridge, worried about a creature towards the middle. Since she is a pacifist, she asks the player to run out and save the Pokemon. The player obliges, covering the weird blue-purple gaseous Pokemon from attacking Spearow. Then, just like in the introduction, the Pokemon lets out a giant power, and reduces the bridge below to nothing. The player and the Pokemon start falling to your doom, but, luckily, the island guardian Tapu Koko comes to the rescue. The guardian places the player safely back with your blond friend and flies off, leaving only a rock in its place.

After thanking the player, she leads them back to town where the Kahuna has finally returned from whatever the hell he was doing. He notices you are a new aspiring trainer in the Alola region, and promptly lets you choose your first Pokemon. However, there is a brief cutscene where the Pokemon must then choose you. You always get chosen by that Pokemon, but the scene is cute as you lift the Pokemon gently in your arms as two individuals, trainer and Pokemon, become an allied force. You then come across your rival in this game, Hau, who challenges you before even introducing himself. Unlike the rest of the games, Hau has the Pokemon weak to the player's starter.

After you promptly beat him, the Pokemon game really starts. Professor Shirtless Kukui teaches you how to catch Pokemon, and you and Hau partake in a ceremony to test your strength and prove to the island's guardian that you are a worthy contender to take on the trial challenge. It is also at this point that you properly figure out how the stone Tapu Koko dropped has any relevance, as it is the thing that eventually makes your Z-Ring, upon which allows you to perform Z moves with Z crystals. The island Kahuna then sends you on your way to try and complete the island's trials before challenging him and being able to move onto the next island and repeat the process.

There have been many complaints as to how long it takes to actually start the game, some players saying it took them as long as 2 hours to actually get their first Pokemon and begin their journey. The complaint is recognized, but what this long introduction allows is for the game to take a more narrative heavy focus. Pokemon games prior to this have never really held a large story focus, and the story was treated mostly like a joke to keep the battles flowing and to connect the various cities in the game. Sure, some stories were compelling, Black and White's story coming to my mind first, but the games were never built to tell a story, rather than to just let the player explore. However, this two hour intro really forces the player to get to know the main characters of the game and their place in the plot.

The plot proceeds as normal through the first island. There are brief bits of dialogue and learning about the setting throughout the Normal trial and the journey back from it to face off against the Kahuna. Lillie, the blond girl from before, asks you to put Nebby, the gaseous Pokemon she owns, back in her bag at a flower field, but it doesn't do much to advance the plot. You do get to meet Team Skull just before your encounter with the Normal trial, and you fend off against Team Skull grunts once more in the trial, but it's little more than your basic interaction with Rocket Grunts.

In the second island, things start to heat up. When the player first arrives on the second island, they're introduced to Professor Shirtless Kukui's wife, who is studying a phenomenon with wormholes and alternate dimensions. The player, upon leaving, makes a quick encounter with a break in the space around them, but there isn't much to go on beside that. The player is also first introduced to an edgelord named Gladion. Little is known about this guy the first time the player meet him other than how little he thinks of them. However, you run into him once more at the Battle Royal on Royal avenue. His position in the game isn't that clear at this point, but you can tell by his distinguished looks that he'll either be a later trial captain or an important character.

By the time you finish the second island and defeat Olivia, the second Kahuna, you are taken as a gift to the Aether Foundation. The Aether Foundation is set up as a paradise for Pokemon, and a reserve for their values. People with memory may also recall that this is the place where Lillie was fleeing from earlier. In this facility, the player, Hau and Lillie are introduced to Wicke, Faba and Lusamine, Lusamine being the president of the Aether Foundation and the other two being chair heads. The Foundation establishes itself as an altruistic foundation for the protection of Pokemon. However, something goes strange when a wormhole appears in the foundation, releasing an odd looking Pokemon no one has seen before. After the player defeats it, Lusamine looks rather strange, recognizing that there are even more Pokemon she hasn't seen before, and grows a terrifyingly large grin. Regardless, she sends the trio off on their way back into the world.

The player continues going through the trials of the third island and also has their first interaction with the leader of Team Skull, Guzma. Guzma has a bone to pick with Kukui, and brings up memories about how neither were selected to be trial captains, and they had to go alternate routes in life, Kukui choosing to become a professor and Guzma taking to a life of crime. This sets up a larger premise of Team Skull being the rejects of the Alolan trial system, those who failed to get through the trials and ultimately found themselves as rejects of the system. However, you must stand the moral high ground against those who have taken to a life of crime and Guzma is defeated for the first time.

It seems, though, that Team Skull isn't down and out. After the Ghost trial, Team Skull members capture Lillie and kidnap her. The player's first instinct is to head to Po Town and beat all of the Team Skull grunts in this area to get Lillie back. As such, you travel through the destroyed town, where even the Pokemon Center barely gets power, and Pokemon are healed by paying a grunt behind the counter. The entire town gives off the vibe of captured Saffron City from Kanto, where grunts are everywhere and the only way to get rid of them is to attack at the core, which is exactly what happens. By going through the mansion at the end of the road in Po Town, the player eventually finds themselves battling Guzma once more, and gaining intelligence that Lillie isn't actually in this area.

It is at this point that Gladion makes himself known again and wants to take the group the the Aether Foundation in secret. There, the trio of Hau, Gladion and the player infiltrate the basement levels of the lab and learn about the research the foundation had been doing into the wormholes and creating Pokeballs to capture the Pokemon from the other dimension. Beyond that, the road to Lusamine's mansion reveals that Team Skull was part of the Aether Foundation, helping them out in causing a ruckus. And, above all, Lusamine shows her true colors. She had frozen a copious amount of Pokemon in time, to "preserve" them and to retain their beauty, just how she was retaining her beauty, even at over 40 years old. Gladion and Lillie were her children, who stole Pokemon from her due to their dissent of her actions, to which she no longer recognizes them as family.

After the player beats Lusamine in battle, Lusamine opens a wormhole to be among the strange new creatures, and brings Guzma with her. The wormhole closes before the player and friends could intervene, but the plot has fully opened itself. The job is to now stop the corruption in the wormhole by this earthly being and to stop Lusamine from causing any more trouble. This is through summoning the legendary Pokemon and traveling into the wormhole and battling Lusamine in her most corrupted time.

Now, it should be noted that, throughout the journey, you see a lot of self loathing coming from Lillie, or at least a lot of self-depreciation. She is always comparing herself to the player, and how strong they seem to be. She can't even pick out her own style, as it was already picked out by her mother, someone she was forced to look up to and see as perfection. Even in the first introduction to Lusamine, Lillie is barely treated as part of the group. It is explained that Lillie was treated well while she agreed with Lusamine, but that love faded away after Lillie left, and it led to this feeling of being disempowered and lost without her mother. However, her character grows as she stands up for herself and what she believes is the right treatment of Pokemon. And, by the time you go out to officially stop Lusamine's plan, Lillie entirely changes her outfit and style. She no longer wants to be attached to this weak and reliant girl her mother made her out to be. This is proven most when, after you beat the game, she travels to Kanto to try and become a trainer herself. She's fully leaving behind the life she once lived, and trying to take the reins herself.

Of course, this game is no Persona, nor is it a Last of us, or even a Shadow of the Colossus. However, there was clearly much more thought put into the story. The lack of challenge put into the trials, as well as the frequency of those trials, led to a larger focus on the story that the game wanted to tell. And, to their credit, it was a really cool story. Lusamine acted as the embodiment of preservation, showing both the good it could do through the intentions of the Aether Foundation, and the ill it could do through personal actions. Yes, the Aether Foundation was corrupt at its core due to this, but the post game revealed that it wasn't what they truly wanted to do in the end, and all the members went back to making a sustainable environment for Pokemon to be happy. To this effect, Lusamine almost acts as a force of nature villain, where her entire existence is to show the power of that force of nature or idea, and that is some incredible writing on the part of the Pokemon staff. I also think the staff does a wonderful job of making the player feel both positively and negatively about the evil teams in this game. There's the obvious Aether feelings, where they clearly have good intentions but an evil boss, but Team Skull have their own sympathy side. As I said before, everyone in Team Skull is a reject of the trial system, and they can't afford to do anything outside of crime. This is made most evident through the challenge at Po Town, where there is no electricity, the player has to pay to be healed, and everything is in shambles. Team Skull doesn't have the resources to keep the town up and running because no one will support them, and it's almost a bit heartbreaking. I remember when I was first running through Po Town, and that was when I first felt really bad for them. If this was the life they had to go through in order to get marginal success, then I'd hate to have gone through whatever the system did to the rejects of the trials.

So, as a recap, the story does a fantastic job of establishing Team Skull, the Aether Foundation and Lillie, then developing those three tools of the bigger plot into foundation points for the story. This is something we haven't seen in Pokemon for a long time, a well-written and enjoyable story that is, and I applaud it.

After the main villain plot is over, there is some marginal difference in the elite four and how it acts to make it intriguing. First of all, all the elite four, minus one, are trainers you've met on your journey, two of which are kahunas you have battled before. Also, the Pokemon League in Alola was just being founded, so the Champion's room is simply an open chair for the player to take and claim as their own. After claiming the chair, a challenger will appear and try to take your spot as champion. It's an interesting change, just as a shift in focus. After beating the challenger, the player is given a fun celebration back in their hometown and they get the opportunity to capture Tapu Koko, the guardian that saved them in the first place. Lillie leaves to become a trainer in Kanto, and we cut to credits.

The postgame material is decent, but nothing noteworthy in my honest opinion. There is a plot surrounding beasts from the wormhole you traveled through and capturing said beasts, earning the player 1000000 Poke by the end of it all. The player can defend their title as the Champion from a varying cast of challengers. I've defended about 5 times so far, and my range has received Hau, Gladion and Professor Shirtless Steal-your-girl. You have the opportunity to battle characters from the story one last time for various tools, like the principal of the trainer school for a King's Rock, or Guzma for a Dawn Stone. However, it's nothing like Mystery Dungeon level, having a secondary plot and a bunch of other areas to explore. It's just the same islands and all the opportunities in the world to become stronger.

~~~

And now we draw to a close. Pokemon, with Sun and Moon, has taken a drastic shift in the way that it's being made. Yes, the battles are still the same, and those will never change, but everything else is. The gyms have been replaced by trials, and the story is becoming more of a central focus. The world is now entirely 3-D and free for the player to explore. What this shift will lead to, I haven't the foggiest idea. For all I know, this could be a bit test by Nintendo to see how people would react to change in their most beloved franchises. They already proved they were willing to do that with things like Hyrule Warriors. If something ever stuck out as a stagnant piece of Nintendo's history, it would be the Pokemon franchise, and most will still argue that it is that, even after Sun and Moon. However, I think this game proved that Pokemon can change and retain its core qualities. I was worried for the longest time what this would amount to, all of this change, but it turned out to be one of the best games in the franchise. Even after I've played it through and let the hype die down, I'd place this game easily as my #2 favorite mainstream Pokemon game, just behind Pokemon Heart Gold/Soul Silver. What this game provided was change in structure, true change in how we perceive the game. Yes, there's still a clearly evil team. Yes, the story still could use some developing. Yes, we go from town to town to take on their challenge and beat Pokemon, but we're experiencing it differently. It's not so much about the trainers we're fighting against, but more about the natural ability of Pokemon. The end goal, becoming the champion, means less than what story the game is trying to tell. Sure, Professor Currently Has My Heart Locked Up In A Safe In His Basement really wants to establish the Alola region as a powerful region to rival that of Kanto, but the story takes the cake in how much effort and time was put into it. The game made the player care more about the story than they did about becoming champion.

For this, Pokemon is showing a will to change. Pokemon is showing the desire to be relevant. There has always been the criticism that all Pokemon games are the same, and how Pokemon is one of the most formulaic games you will ever play. Yet, that's what's losing Nintendo's prowess and power over the market. ORAS sold poorly with their target demographic, and that was the biggest sign that there had to be change if Nintendo wanted to survive. This was the change they decided on. No more gyms, but enough remnants to the previous that it is recognizable to old fans. Is it better? I personally don't know. I loved this game, but what the changes mean still hide behind the formulaic wall Nintendo built. We don't know where these changes will take us. However, if they keep making great games like Sun and Moon, I'm more than willing to be along for that ride.

Description
If I had to give you my initial thoughts coming into Pokemon Sun and Moon as the game was released, I would actually have to tell you that I wasn't looking forward to it. I'm not sure if there will ever be a day where I actually give up Pokemon for good, or if there will ever be a day where Pokemon just won't be fun for me, but I was very worried as to the path that Sun and Moon were taking us. The trailers for the new Alola forms had me in mixed reactions. The lack of a proper gym system had me worried. Team Skull was silly and fun, so they had that going for them, but the Aether Foundation felt over-hyped at best and clearly evil beyond what Pokemon was advertising. As a result, I didn't want to pick up this game on release day like I did for X and Y or ORAS. It might have just been the cynicism that I had developed through the 6th generation of Pokemon, but I thought Pokemon was setting itself up for failure.

However, this was certainly the game of the winter if I was going to buy one, and with Persona 5's delay... again, there wasn't really anything holding me back from joining in on the fun of the battle with all my friends around campus. So, as a group, we walked down to the local Gaming Generations and picked up one of their last copies of Sun to start the journey.

Now that I've finished the game, I think it's ripe time to look into the mechanical changes Pokemon made between XY/ORAS and Sun and Moon. I've decided not to go out of my way to list off what I believe to be the positive aspects of 7th gen or what the negative aspects are, but rather to just talk about the significant changes that have been made to the franchise, and how that affects the game moving forward.

~~~

Back when I started playing X and Y, I thought that 3-D was the coolest thing, and the little Fletchling flying into our house and waking up the protag of the Kalos region was one of the coolest innovations of the time. There is no doubt that this new style of animation was far beyond anything we as Pokemon fans could have expected, but there comes a question of what actually changed? Sure, the game was in 3D now, so there was a sense that the world was becoming more real, and the game was expanding beyond the simple grid layout RPG we've all come to know and love. Aspects like the Roller Skates, Bicycle, and general free movement gave us a better perspective of that motif, and it was all meant to have its crux be focused around Lumiose City, this grand creation of the Pokemon Company as a shining beacon of how far the game has come, and how we can begin to explore the world in a completely different way. However, this isn't really the case. The game is still entirely constricted to a grid, whether the game liked it or not. The player had the option to free-run, and they had the option to move diagonal through areas, but that didn't stop the entire game's layout from being stuck on a grid, and the use of the d-pad from being a primary source of movement. Even in the grand Lumiose City, one could simply input a single direction from the d-pad, and walk in a circle around the city's perimeter, though the 3-D would make you believe you would run straight into a wall. It's no different from when Castelia City in 5th gen tried playing with perspective to make the city seem larger and more free than what it actually was. It was a spectacle difference, but the actual content, the actual ability of the player wasn't much different from before.

With Sun and Moon, we finally see the full break from the grid style system. No matter how hard the player tries, they can't lock into the grid system with the d-pad, nor can they stop themselves from only traversing through free-walk mode. As far as a shift in the game's overall tone goes, this is what 3-D truly means. What XY/ORAS provided was a graphics update to an old means of movement. In Sun and Moon, the entire game has to revolve around this free movement instead of the grid, which allows for significantly improved exploring spaces in the game. Now that the game isn't deadlocked into squares, the formations of paths, the patterns of grass, and the general layout of the routes feel more natural than ever before. Yes, they are still constricted to contain the player, most notably by sea, but that's simply to keep from having a sandbox over having a true RPG. This allows for the player to feel more immersed in the game, and furthermore for the game to feel more open. Discovering new territory in this land is all the more exciting. The player may subconsciously register that the game is still a game, and everything is laid out in its own right, but the freedom provided in movement gives the player an innate sense of wonder, as to where they will take themselves. Having been locked into the rigid movement of the game beforehand didn't allow as much curiosity to flourish. No matter how tall you build your skyscrapers or how grand you make your cities, they will feel rigid if your movement is built to be rigid. With the introduction of free movement, as allowed by 3-D, we finally get that understanding in a Pokemon game, and ultimately it allows for the game to be more interesting as a whole. You aren't stuck on the game's railroad anymore, or at least not as much. Now, you're experiencing the game.

As for the game you are experiencing, it's most notable to cover how the game handles its challenges as the story progresses. Instead of the stereotypical eight gyms in each region with a challenge at the end with the elite four and the champion of the Pokemon League, Sun and Moon vie for a different route. In the Alola region, aspiring trainers must undergo a series of trials throughout the four major islands, and then battle an island kahuna at the end of it all. The trials vary in their goal and challenge along the way to the player, but they always consist of providing Pokemon to the player to fight as a way of preparing the player for the boss of the trial. Each boss is labeled a Totem Pokemon. These totem Pokemon gain a stat bonus in a field varying on what the trial is, and have the ability to summon Pokemon to help them in the battle. Defeating the totem Pokemon results in a clearing of the Trial, and the reception of a Z-Crystal, an item that allows Pokemon to use a super-powerful move once a fight. For those familiar with mega evolution from 6th gen, this is essentially the same concept. Just like how you can only have one mega evolution per fight, you may only use one Z-move per fight, and the Pokemon you want to use that powerful move/ability with must carry a stone that correlates with that move/ability. For Z-moves, the power varies on the move you are using as a base. For example, using Ghostium Z's signature Never-Ending Nightmare on Shadow Sneak will increase the power from 40 to 100 base. However, if you wanted to use it on Shadow Claw, the base power increases from 70 to 140.

My feelings towards this change in format are still mixed, but mostly positive. The challenges preceding the ultimate trial challenge with the totem Pokemon are around the same amount of challenge as the gyms in the sixth generation, if not less challenging. To top it off, there are generally less Pokemon to fight than there were with trainers, so the buildup to the trial Pokemon isn't as difficult, and, as a result, isn't as fun. However, the tasks themselves are interesting enough to carry the player along until the true challenge. However, where the trials truly shine are with the Totem Pokemon and the reward for beating the challenge. The totem Pokemon are significantly stronger than those sprinkled throughout the trial, and give more of a challenge than most trainers can. I'm not sure how much of this can be attributed to the buff in stats that the Totem Pokemon get, or if it's simply that the Pokemon were designed to be tougher, but I digress. One of the best examples of this was the Lurantis at the end of Mallow's Trial on the second island. Lurantis's totem buff results in a +2 to speed, and the sun is out. For people who chose Litten as their starter, this match isn't really that much of an issue. The sun boosts fire-type moves, and Lurantis, being pure grass, is weak to fire. However, against the other starters, Lurantis is a menace. Lurantis knows Solar Beam, which, in sun, has no charge-up time, and is an all-around powerful move. Alongside the SOS call having a chance of finding Castform, who's Weather Ball knocks out bug types, ultimately makes the round much harder than what most people have experienced in the game up until that point. I will make the concession that the game is knowingly trying to get the player to pick up a water and a fire type Pokemon during each of the trials through the incentive of the Z-moves, and that fire type would have greatly helped in the process of fighting off against Lurantis, but the prominent fire type in the previous trial area was Salandit, of which only 1/8th of the population can evolve due to quirky evolution standards only allowing the females to evolve into Salazzle.

Oh, and speaking of the Z-Crystals, I open this advancement in the rewards for the challenges with open arms! With the gyms, beating the leader always gave the player a badge for beating the gym and a Technical Machine (TM) for the victory. If you're anything like me, the TMs mattered less to you by comparison to the allowed HM's ability to be used outside of battle, usually allowed after ect. amount of gyms beaten. To me, this meant progress in the game. The moves that my Pokemon learned naturally were usually enough to carry me throughout the game, so the TMs didn't mean much overall. Some of that stigma was taken away in 5th gen with the concept of unbreakable TMs, but it didn't stop the HMs, or hidden moves, from completely overriding the reward of the TM. This is to top off the already completely meaningless nature of the badges in the original games. What the badges held were largely symbolic value, a totem to which you have accomplished a feat and beaten a challenge. Though the designs were fun to look at, what did the badges actually do for the player? It did allow for them to use traded Pokemon at a certain level or lower, sure, but that was a balancing tool against game-breaking strategies with other games at the origin. If someone had a level 100 Arceus traded to little Timmy who had just only beaten Roark, that would defeat any challenge even proposed in the main story line and ultimately make the game a chore rather than an experience. The badges themselves weren't a reward of gaining anything, but of removing limits. I believe Egoraptor had a very similar idea with puzzles in Zelda games in his review of Ocarina of Time. When you complete a challenge in the games prior to Sun and Moon, you think, "Ugh, finally, the badge." The challenge itself may have been fun, but the reward for that challenge is trivial at best. In Sun and Moon, however, that entire stigma is reversed. Instead of removing limits on the player's behavior with increase of skill, the player is given more tools to achieve greater things! Z-moves are these wickedly strong attacks with a cool dance and giant wooshy-woo animations that explode the screen until you kill your opponent, and it even goes through Protect! That's awesome! Sign me the fuck up! This gives the player true motivation to complete the trial. The reward at the end of the trial gives the player something that makes them even stronger, and allows them to fight even harder against whatever adversity is flying in their face at that time. This is the sign of a true reward, and should be praised infinitely more than what the badges and TMs could ever provide.

Something that may have also put more emphasis on the importance of the Z-Moves and how badass of a reward it was came from the complete removal of HM's. So, for those of you who haven't touched a Pokemon game since Gen 1, Pokemon has drastically reduced how much they utilized HM's. By Gen 6, Cut was only a move the player needed if they wanted rare collectibles. Rock Smash was made into a TM. The only really mandatory HM's a person needed to have on their team were Surf and Strength, TMs that most people were ok with having in the first place, given how strong of a move it was in the first place. HMs were on a complete downfall, being used less and less for puzzles and obstacles restricting advancement in the game. It was obscenely clear that the HMs were tools to keep the player from advancing in the earlier generations, but as the games progressed, the obstacles usually were laid out on story instances, or just the need to complete the Pokemon League Challenge.

So, what happened in Alola? Well, HMs were taken away completely and replaced with these random-summon Pokemon to assist with any issues with terrain or obstacles. Tauros became Rock Smash (and the new Bicycle), Stoutland acted as your item finder, Mudsdale galloped over rocky terrain (think Rhyhorn in XY), Machamp used strength, Lapras was your regular surf while Sharpedo was the Super-surf (you could break breakable rocks in water) and Charizard was used for Fly. Each was earned as the game progressed to tackle new scenarios as they appeared. You could also travel back to previous parts of the game and unlock some special items that weren't accessible before, but that's par for the course in a game like this. Now, this entire concept leaves me very conflicted, and has forced me to think about my feelings towards HMs as a whole. HMs have always been a burden to players, the famous HM slave image popping up in my head time and time again every time I think of it. HMs couldn't be forgotten easily, and required a move forgetter to actually rid a Pokemon of a weak move used to clear obstacles. What this led to in practical gameplay was players putting all their HMs on a Pokemon they never used in battle, or just a weak Pokemon in general, so it wouldn't clog up the restricted movepool of their main fighters. A classic example of this is Bibarel, and, if you ever play Gen 4, you'll know what I mean. No one liked HMs from the very beginning, because the player's Pokemon could have better moves, but they were ultimately stuck with these lower-power or less priority moves to simply complete the game. Yet, from a game design perspective, I really appreciate the HMs. As far as progression goes, this was the biggest incentive to beating a gym. Outside of the fun battle, access to using the HM outside of battle greatly increased the player's ability to move and find new locations. Just like the Z-Crystals, HMs increased the player's ability. I know the later games didn't utilize the HM's potential as much as they did in games prior, but, for what it was worth, the puzzles and discoveries made through carrying the right Pokemon with the right HMs lead to some pretty amazing discoveries and memories not easily forgotten. By getting rid of HMs altogether, I think we're losing that enabled feeling of the player, and the concept of unlocking the ability to explore, at least from a current perspective. With limited HMs and limited Pokemon slots, players ran the real risk of not being able to discover something because they weren't carrying the right gear. This incentivizes making a small sacrifice for a possibly gargantuan reward. It's a little time and space that a player has to conserve and consider the makeup of their team for in order to experience the full capacity of the game. It's that struggle that sort of makes the game that much more interesting, at least for me. In the modern era, where mystery and puzzles aren't even a goddamn concept in modern Pokemon games, I suppose it makes sense to get rid of the HMs altogether, but it removes the fun of what HMs used to mean. Where we used to place rocks strategically through holes so we can open up avenues to get through an ice room, we now move two blocks in a dungeon to be able to fight a legendary. The mystery and reward that HMs used to provide is no longer in existence. We can sacrifice the conservative approach to building a team for brevity and immediate rewards in the HM department, since we've already lost the interest and patience that HMs asked for the satisfaction of a good puzzle.

Of course, I know I sounded preachy talking about the concept of HMs being an integral and fun part of Pokemon, and I know no one is going to understand where I'm coming from. HMs, to many, have always been a hindrance to the Pokemon they could play with and the moves they could learn. You have to sacrifice Ember for Double Kick with Combusken now, since you gave up one of your slots to Cut, and you don't want to get rid of anything else in your moveset. I know that, and I appreciate the convenience of the removal of HMs in this game. Ultimately, I do think that this is the optimal play for the progression of Pokemon based on what we've seen in the past. However, if there's one thing this game is severely lacking in, it's mental prowess to complete. I don't think many can really argue against the fact that Pokemon is a pretty simple game. There are complex stats and learning how to optimize your Pokemon is something that I can get a professor to try to accomplish in their lifetime. However, something that's attracted both kids and adults to this game from the very beginning was it's low entry point. The type matchups were easy to understand, and many of the moves that were super-effective to any given type typically made a decent amount of sense. Sure, not all do, and I'm looking at Fairy types when I'm saying this, but a good majority do. So, where we got a lot of our stimulation came in part from balancing our team to have the most coverage on any given scenario, but also in the puzzles and challenges that came from gyms and exploring. Strength puzzles were my absolute favorite things to solve in the early Pokemon games, because there was time put into making them at least relatively challenging, and they were easy enough to reset so I could have another crack at them. As annoying as sliding ice puzzles were to some, or the fill-in-all-the-cracking-ice puzzles were to others, it made the game interesting and stimulated the mind beyond the generic water beats fire mentality that we're all stuck in. It forces problem solving and the ability to register one's environment, a concept that games as a whole espouses as one of the biggest and best reasons to play them. Games act as a tool to both provide catharsis and sharpen our minds. So, as I'm seeing Pokemon become easier and easier with every installment, and I see HM puzzles drift into a concept of the past, I can only see this as a negative aspect of the game moving forward. Yes, it makes the lives of the player easier, and it sure as hell speedens up the process of getting into battles, but at what cost? Should we sacrifice puzzles in Pokemon games just to optimize the battles, or were the puzzles an integral part of what made the journey in Pokemon games fun in the first place?

I know I'm not going to get a lot of support from outside on this point, and I entirely expect some readers to have either skipped down to the comment section to voice their disapproval of my opinion or to have stopped reading altogether, but that's just their problem in the end. I'm open to me being wrong on this point, but I do think the reduction of HM and HM usage in the games has led to an overall decline of entertainment in the Pokemon franchise as the games moved forward. This isn't strictly a 7th gen point, but a trend I've noticed and grew irritated with. The complete removal of HMs just forced a point into the foreground, and I wanted to steal the opportunity before it got away.

As far as Pokemon battles go, it's your standard bread and butter basic RPG style. It's your Pokemon against the wild Pokemon or opposing trainer's Pokemon, and you fight until one side is out of fighters. However, a new trait has come in wild Pokemon battles with SOS calls. Occasionally, wild Pokemon can call for help, and an additional Pokemon may enter the field on the wild Pokemon's side. The player will then have to fend off the two Pokemon with only one of their own. Knocking out the Pokemon in the initial slot will stop new Pokemon from arriving, as the Pokemon called cannot call any more Pokemon, but knocking out the Pokemon called can result in grinding for EXP. The SOS feature has also opened up the doors for easier methods of shiny hunting, finding Pokemon with hidden abilities, and even just finding rare Pokemon. Something that I know has irritated many friends of mine comes through how some Pokemon are only found through being called by another Pokemon. Mareanie, for example, is a Pokemon that only appears 20% of the time on a successful call from a Corsola, a Pokemon who, at maximum, is found at a 20% find rate through fishing in a bubbling spot. Goomy, on the other hand, can be called by any Pokemon, but only in the Lush Jungle or on Route 17 through a wild Pokemon calling for help while it is raining. And, to those of you who haven't played Pokemon in a while, the weather fluctuates in the seventh generation. That means it isn't always raining in those sites. Overall, I think this dynamic is a great addition to the game. The totem Pokemon have proven that this can be used to add difficulty to any given match, since the Pokemon is another target you have to knock out in order to obtain victory, and the player is essentially being double teamed. The tool can also be used to simply get specific abilities or items from Pokemon that you need in order to be competitive. Where this can be a trouble is if the player isn't strong enough to fight the Pokemon on that route, and the double team proves too strong for the player. This may also just consume the player's time far beyond what they want, since the battle is simply going to last longer through the addition of another target. And, above all, the player can't control who the opponent summons, or even if it attempts to summon at all. The SOS calls are entirely determined by the wild Pokemon, and the SOS call itself doesn't guarantee a Pokemon will come to assist it. This does create an interesting dynamic where the wild Pokemon dictates the flow of the battle, and it is especially useful in matches such as the Totem Pokemon battles, but I can see where people can get annoyed by this. Ultimately, I think it's a benefit to the franchise moving forward, but there are negative aspects with it as well.

As far as fundamental gameplay changes go, that's about as far as it comes. There are additional features with Poke Pelago, where you can develop isles as additional tools for getting resources or buffing up your Pokemon. This is a great resource for various things, but isn't necessary for the completion of the game. Many people can go the entire game without even realizing that Pelago was even implemented into the game, let alone all of its capabilities. The game doesn't even give a tutorial as to how it works. I've fiddled around with it and found use in its first and third isle for resources. However, it won't change the way you play the game. Pokemon Amie is back, except in the form of Pokemon Refresh. You can trigger this sometimes after battle, and other times through scrolling to the second page of the X menu. In this app, you can remove status effects from your afflicted Pokemon after battle as well as cleaning away any debris they may have picked up in the heat of the fight. There are no mini-games like there were in Amie, but petting and feeding the Pokemon make the process much simpler in raising the Pokemon's friendship levels. This is simply an easier Pokemon Amie with more practical uses, entirely through the ability to remove statuses after battle. Both these features are great in their own right, and they deserve some exploring by the player, but neither are mandatory for finishing the game, nor are either really revolutionary to the Pokemon franchise.

Where I was legitimately surprised with this game actually came from the story. As many of you know, Pokemon starts with a mother handing their child off to a professor to get their first Pokemon and to travel across the land to become the best Pokemon trainer in the world. However, unlike basically every Pokemon game to date, this game starts off with an opening cutscene that has literally nothing to do with the player. You see a blond haired girl running through a futuristic white building trying to stifle something in a bag. When she gets cornered, the thing jumps out of the bag and lets out a giant power.

After that mindfuck, we are brought to the Alola region and introduced to Professor Shirtless Kukui. He gives the player a basic rundown of the world around them, and tells the player to go find the Kahuna, who is basically the elder of the island. In search of the Kahuna, the player finds the same blond girl at a rickety drawbridge, worried about a creature towards the middle. Since she is a pacifist, she asks the player to run out and save the Pokemon. The player obliges, covering the weird blue-purple gaseous Pokemon from attacking Spearow. Then, just like in the introduction, the Pokemon lets out a giant power, and reduces the bridge below to nothing. The player and the Pokemon start falling to your doom, but, luckily, the island guardian Tapu Koko comes to the rescue. The guardian places the player safely back with your blond friend and flies off, leaving only a rock in its place.

After thanking the player, she leads them back to town where the Kahuna has finally returned from whatever the hell he was doing. He notices you are a new aspiring trainer in the Alola region, and promptly lets you choose your first Pokemon. However, there is a brief cutscene where the Pokemon must then choose you. You always get chosen by that Pokemon, but the scene is cute as you lift the Pokemon gently in your arms as two individuals, trainer and Pokemon, become an allied force. You then come across your rival in this game, Hau, who challenges you before even introducing himself. Unlike the rest of the games, Hau has the Pokemon weak to the player's starter.

After you promptly beat him, the Pokemon game really starts. Professor Shirtless Kukui teaches you how to catch Pokemon, and you and Hau partake in a ceremony to test your strength and prove to the island's guardian that you are a worthy contender to take on the trial challenge. It is also at this point that you properly figure out how the stone Tapu Koko dropped has any relevance, as it is the thing that eventually makes your Z-Ring, upon which allows you to perform Z moves with Z crystals. The island Kahuna then sends you on your way to try and complete the island's trials before challenging him and being able to move onto the next island and repeat the process.

There have been many complaints as to how long it takes to actually start the game, some players saying it took them as long as 2 hours to actually get their first Pokemon and begin their journey. The complaint is recognized, but what this long introduction allows is for the game to take a more narrative heavy focus. Pokemon games prior to this have never really held a large story focus, and the story was treated mostly like a joke to keep the battles flowing and to connect the various cities in the game. Sure, some stories were compelling, Black and White's story coming to my mind first, but the games were never built to tell a story, rather than to just let the player explore. However, this two hour intro really forces the player to get to know the main characters of the game and their place in the plot.

The plot proceeds as normal through the first island. There are brief bits of dialogue and learning about the setting throughout the Normal trial and the journey back from it to face off against the Kahuna. Lillie, the blond girl from before, asks you to put Nebby, the gaseous Pokemon she owns, back in her bag at a flower field, but it doesn't do much to advance the plot. You do get to meet Team Skull just before your encounter with the Normal trial, and you fend off against Team Skull grunts once more in the trial, but it's little more than your basic interaction with Rocket Grunts.

In the second island, things start to heat up. When the player first arrives on the second island, they're introduced to Professor Shirtless Kukui's wife, who is studying a phenomenon with wormholes and alternate dimensions. The player, upon leaving, makes a quick encounter with a break in the space around them, but there isn't much to go on beside that. The player is also first introduced to an edgelord named Gladion. Little is known about this guy the first time the player meet him other than how little he thinks of them. However, you run into him once more at the Battle Royal on Royal avenue. His position in the game isn't that clear at this point, but you can tell by his distinguished looks that he'll either be a later trial captain or an important character.

By the time you finish the second island and defeat Olivia, the second Kahuna, you are taken as a gift to the Aether Foundation. The Aether Foundation is set up as a paradise for Pokemon, and a reserve for their values. People with memory may also recall that this is the place where Lillie was fleeing from earlier. In this facility, the player, Hau and Lillie are introduced to Wicke, Faba and Lusamine, Lusamine being the president of the Aether Foundation and the other two being chair heads. The Foundation establishes itself as an altruistic foundation for the protection of Pokemon. However, something goes strange when a wormhole appears in the foundation, releasing an odd looking Pokemon no one has seen before. After the player defeats it, Lusamine looks rather strange, recognizing that there are even more Pokemon she hasn't seen before, and grows a terrifyingly large grin. Regardless, she sends the trio off on their way back into the world.

The player continues going through the trials of the third island and also has their first interaction with the leader of Team Skull, Guzma. Guzma has a bone to pick with Kukui, and brings up memories about how neither were selected to be trial captains, and they had to go alternate routes in life, Kukui choosing to become a professor and Guzma taking to a life of crime. This sets up a larger premise of Team Skull being the rejects of the Alolan trial system, those who failed to get through the trials and ultimately found themselves as rejects of the system. However, you must stand the moral high ground against those who have taken to a life of crime and Guzma is defeated for the first time.

It seems, though, that Team Skull isn't down and out. After the Ghost trial, Team Skull members capture Lillie and kidnap her. The player's first instinct is to head to Po Town and beat all of the Team Skull grunts in this area to get Lillie back. As such, you travel through the destroyed town, where even the Pokemon Center barely gets power, and Pokemon are healed by paying a grunt behind the counter. The entire town gives off the vibe of captured Saffron City from Kanto, where grunts are everywhere and the only way to get rid of them is to attack at the core, which is exactly what happens. By going through the mansion at the end of the road in Po Town, the player eventually finds themselves battling Guzma once more, and gaining intelligence that Lillie isn't actually in this area.

It is at this point that Gladion makes himself known again and wants to take the group the the Aether Foundation in secret. There, the trio of Hau, Gladion and the player infiltrate the basement levels of the lab and learn about the research the foundation had been doing into the wormholes and creating Pokeballs to capture the Pokemon from the other dimension. Beyond that, the road to Lusamine's mansion reveals that Team Skull was part of the Aether Foundation, helping them out in causing a ruckus. And, above all, Lusamine shows her true colors. She had frozen a copious amount of Pokemon in time, to "preserve" them and to retain their beauty, just how she was retaining her beauty, even at over 40 years old. Gladion and Lillie were her children, who stole Pokemon from her due to their dissent of her actions, to which she no longer recognizes them as family.

After the player beats Lusamine in battle, Lusamine opens a wormhole to be among the strange new creatures, and brings Guzma with her. The wormhole closes before the player and friends could intervene, but the plot has fully opened itself. The job is to now stop the corruption in the wormhole by this earthly being and to stop Lusamine from causing any more trouble. This is through summoning the legendary Pokemon and traveling into the wormhole and battling Lusamine in her most corrupted time.

Now, it should be noted that, throughout the journey, you see a lot of self loathing coming from Lillie, or at least a lot of self-depreciation. She is always comparing herself to the player, and how strong they seem to be. She can't even pick out her own style, as it was already picked out by her mother, someone she was forced to look up to and see as perfection. Even in the first introduction to Lusamine, Lillie is barely treated as part of the group. It is explained that Lillie was treated well while she agreed with Lusamine, but that love faded away after Lillie left, and it led to this feeling of being disempowered and lost without her mother. However, her character grows as she stands up for herself and what she believes is the right treatment of Pokemon. And, by the time you go out to officially stop Lusamine's plan, Lillie entirely changes her outfit and style. She no longer wants to be attached to this weak and reliant girl her mother made her out to be. This is proven most when, after you beat the game, she travels to Kanto to try and become a trainer herself. She's fully leaving behind the life she once lived, and trying to take the reins herself.

Of course, this game is no Persona, nor is it a Last of us, or even a Shadow of the Colossus. However, there was clearly much more thought put into the story. The lack of challenge put into the trials, as well as the frequency of those trials, led to a larger focus on the story that the game wanted to tell. And, to their credit, it was a really cool story. Lusamine acted as the embodiment of preservation, showing both the good it could do through the intentions of the Aether Foundation, and the ill it could do through personal actions. Yes, the Aether Foundation was corrupt at its core due to this, but the post game revealed that it wasn't what they truly wanted to do in the end, and all the members went back to making a sustainable environment for Pokemon to be happy. To this effect, Lusamine almost acts as a force of nature villain, where her entire existence is to show the power of that force of nature or idea, and that is some incredible writing on the part of the Pokemon staff. I also think the staff does a wonderful job of making the player feel both positively and negatively about the evil teams in this game. There's the obvious Aether feelings, where they clearly have good intentions but an evil boss, but Team Skull have their own sympathy side. As I said before, everyone in Team Skull is a reject of the trial system, and they can't afford to do anything outside of crime. This is made most evident through the challenge at Po Town, where there is no electricity, the player has to pay to be healed, and everything is in shambles. Team Skull doesn't have the resources to keep the town up and running because no one will support them, and it's almost a bit heartbreaking. I remember when I was first running through Po Town, and that was when I first felt really bad for them. If this was the life they had to go through in order to get marginal success, then I'd hate to have gone through whatever the system did to the rejects of the trials.

So, as a recap, the story does a fantastic job of establishing Team Skull, the Aether Foundation and Lillie, then developing those three tools of the bigger plot into foundation points for the story. This is something we haven't seen in Pokemon for a long time, a well-written and enjoyable story that is, and I applaud it.

After the main villain plot is over, there is some marginal difference in the elite four and how it acts to make it intriguing. First of all, all the elite four, minus one, are trainers you've met on your journey, two of which are kahunas you have battled before. Also, the Pokemon League in Alola was just being founded, so the Champion's room is simply an open chair for the player to take and claim as their own. After claiming the chair, a challenger will appear and try to take your spot as champion. It's an interesting change, just as a shift in focus. After beating the challenger, the player is given a fun celebration back in their hometown and they get the opportunity to capture Tapu Koko, the guardian that saved them in the first place. Lillie leaves to become a trainer in Kanto, and we cut to credits.

The postgame material is decent, but nothing noteworthy in my honest opinion. There is a plot surrounding beasts from the wormhole you traveled through and capturing said beasts, earning the player 1000000 Poke by the end of it all. The player can defend their title as the Champion from a varying cast of challengers. I've defended about 5 times so far, and my range has received Hau, Gladion and Professor Shirtless Steal-your-girl. You have the opportunity to battle characters from the story one last time for various tools, like the principal of the trainer school for a King's Rock, or Guzma for a Dawn Stone. However, it's nothing like Mystery Dungeon level, having a secondary plot and a bunch of other areas to explore. It's just the same islands and all the opportunities in the world to become stronger.

~~~

And now we draw to a close. Pokemon, with Sun and Moon, has taken a drastic shift in the way that it's being made. Yes, the battles are still the same, and those will never change, but everything else is. The gyms have been replaced by trials, and the story is becoming more of a central focus. The world is now entirely 3-D and free for the player to explore. What this shift will lead to, I haven't the foggiest idea. For all I know, this could be a bit test by Nintendo to see how people would react to change in their most beloved franchises. They already proved they were willing to do that with things like Hyrule Warriors. If something ever stuck out as a stagnant piece of Nintendo's history, it would be the Pokemon franchise, and most will still argue that it is that, even after Sun and Moon. However, I think this game proved that Pokemon can change and retain its core qualities. I was worried for the longest time what this would amount to, all of this change, but it turned out to be one of the best games in the franchise. Even after I've played it through and let the hype die down, I'd place this game easily as my #2 favorite mainstream Pokemon game, just behind Pokemon Heart Gold/Soul Silver. What this game provided was change in structure, true change in how we perceive the game. Yes, there's still a clearly evil team. Yes, the story still could use some developing. Yes, we go from town to town to take on their challenge and beat Pokemon, but we're experiencing it differently. It's not so much about the trainers we're fighting against, but more about the natural ability of Pokemon. The end goal, becoming the champion, means less than what story the game is trying to tell. Sure, Professor Currently Has My Heart Locked Up In A Safe In His Basement really wants to establish the Alola region as a powerful region to rival that of Kanto, but the story takes the cake in how much effort and time was put into it. The game made the player care more about the story than they did about becoming champion.

For this, Pokemon is showing a will to change. Pokemon is showing the desire to be relevant. There has always been the criticism that all Pokemon games are the same, and how Pokemon is one of the most formulaic games you will ever play. Yet, that's what's losing Nintendo's prowess and power over the market. ORAS sold poorly with their target demographic, and that was the biggest sign that there had to be change if Nintendo wanted to survive. This was the change they decided on. No more gyms, but enough remnants to the previous that it is recognizable to old fans. Is it better? I personally don't know. I loved this game, but what the changes mean still hide behind the formulaic wall Nintendo built. We don't know where these changes will take us. However, if they keep making great games like Sun and Moon, I'm more than willing to be along for that ride.