Review: Pokémon Sun and Moon
It’s 1999. I’m eight years old, sprawled across my bedroom floor, but also wading waist-deep in the tall grasses of the Johto region. Enter Silver version, my first adventure as a Pokémon trainer. Fast forward 17 years, five generations, and three reboots; I’m 25 years old, sprawled across my bedroom floor, but also being carried by a Machamp through a cave on my way to fight the Elite Four. This game is everything I wished it was when I was little.
More accurately, Pokémon Sun and Moon are one step closer to the freestyle, open-world Pokémon experience we daydreamed about. After Game Freak gave the franchise an aesthetic overhaul in Pokémon X and Y, with a few tweaks in the following Generation III reboot, this installment is a bold streamlining of its prior improvements, making Generation VI look like a prototype for this adventure.
The Alola region feels far more lush and alive than any of its predecessors, for better and worse. The overworld teems with lively touches like ambient cries of local Pokémon and environmental puzzles that engage the full 3-D landscape. Battles are more fleshed out too, complete with trainers and their command animations in-frame with the fighting Pokémon. The boost in worldbuilding compliments its new challenges too, with wild Pokémon being able to call for help when injured.
The flipside to this, is that the more intricate visual effects butt up against the 3DS’s performance capabilities, resulting in some severe drops in framerate. Whenever more than two Pokémon are in battle, or if there’s a flashy visual effect happening, the game stutters.
As a progress-driven Pokémon player, I can’t be bothered by minigames that distract me from blazing through the campaign. Somehow, Game Freak knew this. The revitalized Pokémon-Amie (now Pokémon Refresh) incentivizes the time I spend with my partners. After battle, a small window appears asking me to initiate the feature. If a Pokémon is paralyzed, I can apply some medicine and a few belly rubs and send them on their way so the next time I use them, they go the extra mile in battle.
Small conveniences show Game Freak thinking proactively about optimizing the player’s experience, and that’s where the game shines as a whole. I no longer found myself jumping between menus for menial tasks like healing or moving Pokémon around in the storage boxes. The option to swap in a Pokémon you just caught straight to your party is a big deal, too. This game’s interface lends itself so well to muscle-memory, to the point that you can complete small menu tasks almost as fast as you think of them.
The biggest convenience (read: gift) we see is the Pokémon Ride system. Using Hidden Machines (or HMs) to teach Pokémon moves to navigate the overworld’s terrain puzzles became clunky generations ago. With Ride Pokémon, the player no longer has to relegate one or two members of their party to vehicles or bulldozers. Now you essentially have two parties: One for battling and one for traversing Alola.
Pokémon’s objectives are known to be one-note, from getting your starter to becoming Champion. While that’s still the case here in Sun and Moon, these familiar goals become a foundation for the Island Challenge, the freshest take on the standard Pokémon journey Pokémon yet.
In the Island Challenge, Gym battles are replaced altogether with missions that force you engage with the overworld in ways that feel more seamless than entering a gym and navigating its signature puzzle. Through trials, we interact with the strongest local Pokémon in a given area and the captains that oversee them. This system of progressing the character still has a long way before breaking away from formula, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Sun and Moon’s plot is also richer, if only by a little bit. The characters you hang around most have a greater sense of presence compared to the obligatory acquaintances from X and Y. These incremental changes in story built enough tension to drive me forward through until I had to stop and level-grind to continue. Even if the plot is one of the weaker elements of the franchise as a whole, Sun and Moon marks a stronger attempt to change that.
Pokémon Sun and Moon is an inspired reinvention of an already revitalized formula. As the franchise hits the technical limitations of its home console, will Game Freak use this as a chance to migrate to a Nintendo system with stronger processing power? Or will Nintendo’s next handheld be able to match the Pokémon developers’ expanding ambition?
Chris Kindred is a temporary Social Media Strategist at NPR. He moonlights as a freelance illustrator and games critic. You can find him tweeting at @itskindred
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