Pokemon Sun begins somewhat similarly to other Pokemon games. You're a 10-11-year old boy or girl, that looks like 13-16-year old boy or girl, living in a world inhabited by creatures known as Pokemon. Pokemon are creatures with phenomenal elemental powers and weird pun names that don't work in this world because they don't have real animals to make the puns make sense. Now that you're 10(or 11), you have been deemed old enough to become a Pokemon trainer, a person who catches, trains and battles Pokemon in order to become strong enough to battle all the region's boss trainers, after which you'll be able to compete in the final challenge, normally a gauntlet of five really powerful trainers, where you will then be crowned the region's champion and receive the honor of having to defend your title over and over again until you inevitably lose your love of Pokemon and become bitter and resentful and go up on a snowy mountain for three years without a jacket waiting for someone strong enough to revitalize your love for Pokemon battling. It's a simple formula, as everyone will tell you, but that's kind of the point with Pokemon. It's a very formulaic series, but this simple formula is very non-obtrusive, allowing the player a lot of freedom in how they choose to play the game. At least, in theory.
Pokemon Sun, more specifically, has your player character just moving into the Alola region, a tropical archipelago based on real-world Hawaii. After meeting this region's professor, a man named Kukui, you're told that a person in the next town over is waiting for you so you can receive your first Pokemon. After arriving there to find this mysterious person, who Kukui is only calling Kahuna, is not around, Kukui sends you off to look for the Kahuna near the ruins where the island's guardian spirit resides. Rather than finding the Kahuna, you find a girl roughly about your age and a Pokemon in trouble. You, being the totally heroic and extremely reckless child that you are, rush out to save them, only to end up plummeting to your doom. Luckily, the guardian spirit of the island decides you're worth rescuing, and you and the girl head back to the village where Kukui is waiting to find the Kahuna has arrived. The girl introduces herself as Lillie and we get ready to get our starter Pokemon and start our journey proper.
The start of Pokemon Sun is admittedly not anything groundbreaking, but as far as the series goes, it's the strongest the series has ever had. For better or worse, Pokemon games have grown in a more narrative focused direction as the series has evolved. That is very true for Pokemon Sun and Moon as well, this is a heavily narrative focused game and you get that impression literally from the first moments you play it. This is admittedly not for everyone, a lot of people prefer their Pokemon games to be less narrative focused and more about the personal journey, and I totally understand that. I myself have had my issues with the constrained feeling of Pokemon in recent years and feel that, while I have liked the narratives of most of the more narrative focused Pokemon games, that some balance should be found. But Sun and Moon do a lot to get you instantly invested in the narrative and if this is the direction Pokemon is going on, this is a good sign that it won't be all negatives.
The narrative isn't the only thing that's strongly established in this opening, however. We start to see a lot of hints of the lore present in Pokemon Sun and Moon right from the get-go. Alola is a very different region than what we've previously had or at least a combination of pre-existing ideas to create something more new than familiar. Alola uses its Pacific Island-based setting to establish a very different set of customs than previous regions. Alola doesn't have a lot of the traditional trappings of Pokemon. Alola doesn't have gyms, for instance. Instead, Alola has trials, which take place in a naturally formed area, usually, and involve you completing a specific task for the person who designed said trial, the Trial Captain. And instead of fighting a gym leader at the end, you instead fight what is known as a Totem Pokemon, a bigger, stronger, smarter version of a wild Pokemon that is imbued with the powers of nature. When you beat all Trials on the island you're currently on, you are able to participate in the Grand Trial, a battle against that island's Kahuna, which is a very strong trainer chosen by the island's guardian spirit. And each trial, rather than simply awarding you with a gym badge, awards you with a Z-Crystal of whatever type the trial was, which will then unlock a very powerful move of that type when used in battle.
Pokemon Sun and Moon also introduced a long overdue mechanic in Pokemon, regional variants. Often a region will be largely inhabited by Pokemon that are new to that region, but there will usually be Pokemon native to previous regions as well, coexisting alongside them. And, in the context of the real world, this difference in location would normally result in variations to adapt to the difference in the environment. For instance, take the series mascot, Pikachu. Pikachu is naturally native to the Kanto region, which a region primarily consisting of forests, grasslands and mountains. As a result, the Pikachu we know is adapted for those regions. But take another region that Pikachu is native to, like the Hoenn region. The Hoenn region, much like Alola, is a very tropical region. This difference in the environment would make you assume that, if you took a Pikachu from Kanto and a Pikachu from Hoenn, they'd have distinct differences, if not being basically different creatures despite being the same species. This, however, wasn't the case before Alola.
Pokemon Sun and Moon also choose to finally rid yourself of the need for one of the most annoying mechanics in Pokemon, Hidden Machines. Hidden Machines, or HMs, have been the bane of Pokemon players since the original game. They are moves your Pokemon need to learn to progress within the game and can't unlearn naturally like they can any other move. Not to mention they're all mostly awful and put a real restriction on you while building movesets for your Pokemon. The seventh generation, however, expands upon a mechanic briefly touched upon in the previous Pokemon games, Ride Pokemon. In Alola, you gain access to a device called the Ride Pager, which allows you to summon specific Pokemon at any point you need to to help you do tasks that were previously the job of HM moves. This isn't a massive, groundbreaking change to the formula like a lot of the other cool new additions to the Alola region, but it's a nice improvement to the series overall that I hope sticks around for future installments.
I didn't care much for the villains of Pokemon Sun and Moon initially. You meet the first of two villain teams in the game very early on and they don't make a very good impression. Team Skull start off basically being a joke, a bunch of bullies and punks that steal from people largely because they're bored and speak almost entirely in rhyme. Even the characters in the game can't be bothered to pretend to be intimidated by Team Skull. But, as it goes on, Team Skull won me over. They're not at the most intimidating villain team, but they have a genuine kinship with each other and seem more like a giant, weird family than just 'the loser villain team'. This is coupled with a genuinely heartfelt late-game revelation that Team Skull is essentially a safe place for people who feel abandoned by the world, and even if they're a bunch of bullies and thugs, they're doing it more out of angst than actual malice. And the characterization of the Skulls is top notch. Even if the majority of them are nameless, faceless Team Skull grunts, pretty much every one of them is brimming with personality. They're both funny and sincere and, while not great as villains, they're still a fun batch of characters.
That isn't to say that everything in the Alola region was perfect, far from it. While the trials are a nice change of pace, in theory, most of them feel rather haphazard. A lot of the trials are either built around concepts that never fully feel like they were finished before the game shipped or are just straight battle gauntlets against weak wild Pokemon before battling against the Totem. One of the trials even uses its lack of polish for comedic effect which, while funny in the moment, kind of seems like when a movie is self-aware of its cliches but doesn't do anything to really comment on it. The only really good trials are the Grass trial, which involves you finding hidden items in a large jungle that, while easy, presents an interesting change of pace from the first 1/3 of the game which was very battle heavy, and the Ghost trial, which is a rather loving Fatal Frame reference that actually ends up being surprisingly spooky. There are also too few trials in the game, it feels. There are certain objectives needed to get Z-Crystals that in some ways feel like a trial, but there are only seven actual trials in the game. This doesn't sound too out there for Pokemon since normally there are eight gyms and, technically speaking, there's more present in Alola in terms of gym-like challenges because of the Grand trials. But when there are multiple trials that basically amount to 'beat three weak enemies and then the boss' with no puzzle involved, it feels lighter than it's predecessors.
The difficulty is also a major talking point about Pokemon Sun and Moon. As mentioned above, Pokemon has more recently been moving towards a more narrative-driven direction in recent years and it doesn't show any signs of stopping that. And I'm not entirely against that, Pokemon games are role-playing games and even if my belief is that the approach should be to give the players an option as to what objectives they wish to complete to fulfill their dream of becoming the best that no one ever was, including skipping normal measures of progression like gym battles and defeating the villain team, role-playing games are normally very narrative driven. The issue I do have with it though is that Pokemon has become incredibly easy of late. There are few fights in Pokemon Sun that you'll be sweating over, and even those usually end up healing you once you've finished them. I wouldn't be surprised if you were on autopilot throughout a lot of Pokemon Sun and Moon, especially given the story proper doesn't get started up until fairly late in the game, at a point where you'll have built up a fair amount of ill will towards Sun and Moon if you weren't enjoying Alola.
This isn't helped at all by the other villain team, honestly. While I inevitably came around on Team Skull as a bunch of teenage dirtbags acting out because they feel the world is against them, a notion I can honestly relate to, the Aether Foundation had no such arc in my opinion. I'm going to preface this by saying that Lusamine, the president of the Aether Foundation, is quite possibly the best villain in the Pokemon series. I won't spoil why because that part of the game is something I believe everyone should experience for themselves, but we'll just say that she's evil in a very real way rather than being a cartoonish super villain. The team itself, however, I take serious issue with, and to explain why I'll need to take you back a couple generations to the villains of Pokemon Black and White.
Team Plasma was a group that a lot of people deigned hypocritical as they spoke about Pokemon liberation and yet they used Pokemon themselves. My personal belief is that these claims of hypocrisy are unfounded, as Plasma's usage of Pokemon would, in their eyes, be a necessary evil because you can't do anything in the Pokemon world without Pokemon battles being involved, but these claims still exist and it's important to my distaste for the Aether Foundation. The Aether Foundation feel like the equivalent of when a live-action Disney remake just puts in heavy-handed exposition to fill in supposed plot holes that they found on someone's Tumblr one time. Not to mention their status as a 'surprise villain' despite being very obviously evil and very unnecessarily the villains. Their turn to being villains is so abrupt, in fact, that you could almost argue that the staff has no idea what's going on and by the time the next major cutscene rolls around, they've already forgotten they essentially tried to kill you. They, fortunately, don't take up too much of your time though and, like I said, while the team itself isn't great, their leader is a great villain, and is the catalyst to the best character arc in the series history, bar none.
But, in the end, all of this is secondary to the real focus of Pokemon games, the Pokemon themselves. The core of the series has always been the capturing, training and battling of a team that is exclusively picked by you. This full freedom of choice is what initially drew a lot of kids to Pokemon. Each experience is very unique and so many little things in Pokemon make it near impossible to fully replicate a run. The game can hold your hand as much as it mistakenly feels is necessary, but in the end, your Pokemon team will always be very you. And I feel like it's important to finish this off by talking about my own team from this run of Pokemon Sun.
Before we begin commenting on the individual team members of this run, I had some restrictions set in place for how I was doing this run and how I will do any future Pokemon runs that end up on the 52, should this situation occur. I have long wanted to do a run where, besides my starter Pokemon, the only Pokemon I'm allowed to catch and train and the signatures of the gym leaders and Elite Four members of the region, and then test my creativity with team building from there. I chose to do this for this run of Pokemon Sun, opting to swap Gym Leaders for the Trial Captains and Kahunas, though keeping the Elite Four rule as it only added one extra eligible family that Trial Captains and Kahunas didn't cover. I also chose to set the restriction that, as my runs of Pokemon Moon weren't too far off in the past, I wouldn't use any Pokemon I had previously used in those runs, which made my pool of eligible Pokemon slightly smaller. With that out of the way, let's get into my team.
We, of course, begin with our starter. The starter Pokemon is one of my favorite concepts in all of Pokemon and, after playing a game like Hacker's Memory where what Digimon you start with is really unimportant, it made me realize why. Your starter Pokemon is the Pokemon you'll really form that bond with. Its evolution is like a real-time gauge of how you're growing as a trainer. It was there from the moment you've started your journey and will be there long after you end it (unless you delete). This conceptual bond you two share is probably why I haven't ever done a run where I ditched my starter Pokemon, even if it would give me more freedom in my team picks. So it's such a shame that this time around, my starter was Litten.
I don't have very many good things to say about Koa, my Litten/Torracat/Incineroar, so positives first. I am 100% on board with this thing design-wise. Tigers are amongst my favorite animals and, even though I don't like wrestling, a wrestling tiger is just a solid concept. And while it was very much not the most versatile member of my team, any fight that I designated it for, it performed well. But, I had issues with Koa right out the gate, and they're entirely personal biases. I don't like Fire-type Pokemon. The way they play isn't conducive to how I play Pokemon. I only picked it because I had already done the other two starters when I played and replayed Pokemon Moon. As a result, I was struggling to give it a fair chance. But, I had plenty of time with it, as I didn't get another team member throughout the majority of the first quarter of my run. And I spent the entire time thinking how nice it would be for me to finish the first island and get my second team member because it was even worse than I imagined. It's movepool is extremely bad until it evolves. It can dish out good damage, but will often go last because of how slow it is and remains fairly fragile throughout its life. By the time it gained a second type, the advantages it gained were already redundant on my team. It was, quite honestly, the first time in my 20 years of playing Pokemon that I ever regretted my starter choice. Needless to say, it hung in the back throughout the majority of my run, only really coming out when there was something only Fire could efficiently deal with
Lio Hae, my Rockruff/Lycanroc, was almost the opposite case of her adoptive brother, but also very similar in a lot of ways. Lio Hae was the team's sweeper. Her job was to deal a lot of damage as quickly as possible to cover up for the fact that she was also the team's most fragile member. When I was picking my team for this run, Lio Hae was probably the team member I was most confident about. I knew going in exactly what I was getting with her and she more than delivered on that front. However, her type didn't exactly give her a lot of chances for advantage and, as the game progressed, Lio Hae was contributing less and less in major fights. But, for most of the game, Lio Hae cleaned up very well on regular trainers and wild Pokemon, and she has the unique distinction of being the only team member to solo one of the Elite Four, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, she was probably my least unique team member but that by no means is indicative of Lycanroc being a bad Pokemon. It's just exactly what I was expecting and I was happy with what I got.
Bouncee, my Bounsweet/Steenee/Tsareena, came out of both want and necessity. The restrictions I placed on this run created a bit of an immediate issue. I had initially intended on adding Bouncee to the team later on when I could catch it for myself, rather than having to trade it via in-game trade. However, I had a very early boss fight that I likely wouldn't have been able to beat without a ton of grinding and, as a result, I opted to just bite the bullet, do the in-game trade and get her early. Bouncee was not entirely dissimilar to Lio Hae in terms of her role on the team. She was a powerhouse, first and foremost. She wasn't as strong as Lio Hae, nor as fast, but she was way more versatile than her, even though overall she probably got less play. Bouncee, unfortunately, grew far faster than the rest of the team, due to her status as a traded Pokemon. This made me largely reluctant to use her and I often made arguably bad calls in attempts to keep my other Pokemon on level with her, a futile effort overall as she ended up finishing the game almost ten levels ahead of her teammates. Her damage was nothing to snuff at, though, and she was the secret weapon throughout my run, a great switch in when I didn't know who else to switch into.
Punawelewele(or just 'Puna') was my Dewpider/Araquanid and he came right out of nowhere. When I was deciding this team, I was sure at first that my weakest link would be Puna. His typing was weird, his ability didn't seem especially useful and his stats, while attractive to someone who tends to play defensively, made me worried the rest of the team was going to have to carry him in terms of actual damage dealing. I even had a backup Pokemon just in case he performed too poorly and he was stopping progress. And I'm happy to say, I was wrong in every front. Puna was, by far, the best member of the team. His defenses made him basically my default opener throughout the run. His movepool gave him not only the versatility I desired from my tank, it gave him a surprising amount of power to back it up. He immediately had good synergy with the rest of the team members, and him and Lio Hae grew into a very effective duo. This giant awkward spider rapidly became one of my favorite Pokemon throughout this run and I can't think of a scenario where Puna didn't perform at least adequately. If there is any takeaway from this post, let it be that you need to try out Araquanid in a future Pokemon run.
Hale Kakela, my Sandygast/Palossand, started out being exactly what I thought I was going to get from Puna. Part of this was how late he came into the journey. By the time I added Hale Kakela to the team, Lio Hae, Bouncee and Puna were all already fully evolved and Koa wasn't going to be too far off. Couple that with Hale Kakela taking a long time to evolve himself, and I was sure that I had the right prediction with the wrong team member. Thankfully, other than some extremely early rough, coarse patches, Hale Kakela performed splendidly. Hale Kakela was my team's only designated special attacker, and quickly became a godsend in matches with bulky opponents. His typing also made for some great attack combinations and he immediately stood out due to his wide variety of self-healing moves, making his own bulk much more worthwhile. And, of course, he became a great match to Puna, as his higher special defensive stat and Puna's higher physical defense stat became perfect matches. Especially after he evolved, he solidified the team's preexisting synergy while also expanding it.
When Pokemon Sun and Moon came out I had recently had a bit of a falling out with Pokemon. X and Y were very hollow, lifeless experiences in my opinion. And the less I say about Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, the better. I felt that perhaps it was time to move along, leave Pokemon to a new generation. And then Sun and Moon came out and revitalized my love for the series. The new stuff is admittedly not big and not fleshed out enough, but it's still a nice breath of fresh air. The story takes a long time to get going but quickly endears itself to you and, at points, is tear-jerking. I may come across as overly emotional because it's two games in a row for the 52 that I'll admit almost made me cry, but even on the third playthrough of the seventh generation, I got teary eyed at the ending. Especially the final message of the game, which even thinking about just makes me glad I went on this journey at all, rather than opting to finish my stay with the Pokemon series. Sun and Moon are thoroughly flawed, don't get me wrong. But I still think they're the best the series has had since the 2010s and I highly suggest you play through them.
I hope you enjoyed this look at a game that I absolutely love. I know it ran super long, but I hope you stuck with it. I promise we'll have a couple short ones soon to balance things out. In the meantime, enjoy your day, play some Pokemon, and we'll see you back here next time for the sixth game of the 52, Soul Axiom.
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