Sun & Moon: The Review Panel: Part 2

Codraroll

Mechanics-wise, Gyms have always followed a pretty simple recipe: "Puzzle, then boss." You walk around a big building solving some simple task, or following a specific path, and battling trainers along the way. Then you reach the Gym Leader and have a difficult battle. In a sense, trials are largely similar, but I feel they are executed better. The puzzles aren't just "path puzzles", or flipping switches, there is much greater variety. Among other things, you get to try out item hunts, the Poké Finder, or recognizing audio cues. The puzzles are also vowen better into the story; it's made clear to players that the puzzles are customary and the totem battle is just their final piece. I prefer the structure of coming for a puzzle, and ending with a Pokémon battle, to the Gyms, where you come for a battle but have to brave a puzzle first for some reason. Why were Gyms built like mazes in the first place? What advantage could that possibly have for the Gym Trainers who study there?

In most of the trials, there are very few Pokémon battles before the Totem Pokémon, and they are rather short. The battles are short interruptions to the puzzle and don't come across as obstacles on the way to the final battle in the same way Gym Trainers are. In many Gyms, players would enter, half-solve the puzzle, beat a few Trainers, exit the building, heal their Pokémon, come back, solve most of the puzzle while beating a couple more trainers, and then exit the building again to heal before the Gym Leader battle. There is little overall flow to the Gyms, and when you backtrack to heal, I feel that a lot of the immersion is broken. Trials are a lot more condensed, where the pre-boss battle experience is sacrificed for a smoother flow. This opens up for a much better dramaturgy, too. Beating the Ghost trial was a highlight to me, where you ventured deeper and deeper into the abandoned Thrifty Megamart until the Totem appeared. The part where you have to look behind you through the Poké Finder to find Mimikyu was particularly genial.

The least impressive trial to me was the Water trial. "Surf over there!" "Surf over there!" "The trial is almost over, just beat that Pokémon!" While Totem Wishiwashi had a really epic cutscene and a really epic battle, the trial itself wasn't very exciting. Likewise, the Dragon trial was very underwhelming. For the final trial in the game, one would expect that they had put together something epic and memorable. And then they just have you walk down a tunnel, battling two Pokémon along the way.

I feel like I have to rank the battles separately from the trials, the same way one might rank Gym puzzles and Gym Leaders separately. As mentioned above, the Water trial was underwhelming, but the battle against Totem Wishiwashi may very well be among the best in the series. School Wishiwashi already is a monster in its own right, but with an ally Pokémon at its side, the result is a very difficult battle. I had one of my toughest battles ever against Wishiwashi and an accompanying Alomomola, which kept healing Wishiwashi with Heal Pulse or boosting its moves with Helping Hand. The highlight of the battle was finally pushing Wishiwashi below 25 % HP with my last Pokémon. The terrifying monster was reduced to a wimpy little fish, which did pitiful damage with its Water Gun and was promptly outsped and KOed on the next turn.

I also have to give my ovations to the Totem Lurantis battle. The way it showcases strategies with White Herb and Sunny Day is brilliant and makes the battle difficult (but possible to prepare for). However, its execution was a little blemished by the long and unskippable cooking cutscene when you returned to the battle after losing. With my (intentionally) underleveled team, I had to go through that sequence four times.

In my opinion, none of the Totem battles were bad per se. The first battle against Totem Gumshoos in Sun was a little underwhelming, but I guess it was easier to start simple when introducing the concept. All the subsequent Totem Battles were very well made, or should I say orchestrated. The designers clearly intended the battles to play out in specific ways, with specific strategies for players to overcome. That's a compliment, by the way, sometimes you have to orchestrate battles to truly deliver a good game experience.

The one problem I have with Totem battles is that the strategies they showcase can't easily be reproduced by players. There are very few double battles in the game for players to try out these strategies, and some of the utilized held items (such as Totem Lurantis's aforementioned White Herb) are one-off or postgame only. The game is careful to show you what is possible, but it doesn't give you any opportunities to explore the possibilities until the game is all but over.

Codraroll

Ride Pokémon is a very good concept that, unfortunately, feels a little half-executed. It is easy to see what they tried to do: have the players utilize Pokémon to overcome obstacles in your adventure. This is the same basic idea that HMs also try to convey. Anybody who has seen the Pokémon Anime would want to use their Pokémon for other things than battle, and obstacles make a perfect setup in that regard. The player is not meant to use their Pokémon for battle only, but to befriend them and rely on them to overcome small and large problems. Battles are a very important aspect of the franchise, true, but so are the ideas of friendship and helping each other. Riding around on your Pokémon is the ultimate embodiment of this idea.

...which is why the Poké Ride falls a little short of the mark. You are not utilizing your own Pokémon to overcome these obstacles. You are calling on somebody else's Pokémon, like a taxi, to ferry you across the obstacle and then be gone again. You never get to a point where you think "this would be the perfect job for my starter!" and send out your own, trained Pokémon to move that rock or ferry you across the sea or sniff out hidden items. It's somebody else's Pokémon, it's always the same Pokémon for the same job, and you will never interact with it outside that one, single job.

That being said, getting to ride Pokémon around is still very fun. Storming down the main shopping street on the back of a Tauros, gracefully splashing around the bay on a Lapras, or being cradled in Machamp's strong arms. It's miles better than seeing a picture of your Pokémon and then a bush being cut; the Pokémon are actually out there and doing a job. That is a really cool feat, and if they manage to expand on it to include more Pokémon in the future, they may achieve that dream of useful overworld interaction with your Pokémon companions. And to answer the question asked, I think Tauros serves as a decent replacement for the Bike. Having to hold down B to run is a little annoying but completely understandable. It's a little hard to control Tauros's turns with precision at high speeds, so a speed toggle is necessary. And I think it would be much more annoying to press B to slow Tauros down, for instance. Utilizing the the press-B-to-run control scheme we've known from the Running Shoes for four generations is by far the most intuitive solution.

For the record, my favorite Poké Ride is probably Sharpedo. It is amazingly "drifty" when turning and really fast on straight sections. It's a shame you can't use it for fishing, as that comes across as a rather contrived excuse so as not to make Lapras completely obsolete. Least favorite by far is Mudsdale. Calling Sharpedo and Lapras lazy excuses is really an overstatement when stuff like Mudsdale is in the game. Its sole purpose is to take you across rocky terrain. But rocky terrain only appears after you have found Mudsdale, so there's nowhere you think "I wish I had something to help me across here". Mudsdale is a solution to a problem that wouldn't have existed without it. Rocky terrain was clearly put into the game to give Mudsdale a purpose, not the other way around. Whenever I come across it, I think "Great, now I have to summon Mudsdale again." Mudsdale is useless; it's slower than Tauros, and it doesn't solve a puzzle as much as force you to open a menu to proceed.

Codraroll

I dislike SOS calls. That's all that needs to be said. But I'll say a lot more anyway. SOS calls slow the pace of the game down to a crawl. Want to defeat a wild Pokémon for some quick EXP? Too bad, the battle is forcibly dragged on since the Pokémon you just defeated has summoned a replacement. Want to just get away from an unwanted battle? Oh no, the Alola Pokémon are all too slow to escape Golbat on turn one. Let's wait for a few more seconds while it attempts to summon an ally, after it has already used a move on us. Want to hunt for hidden abilities? Welcome, my friend, to hell.

SOS calls wouldn't have been too bad, actually, if not for one thing: the feature replaced the DexNav, which was the best new feature introduced to Pokémon for several generations. The DexNav was close to perfect; it gave people a reason to jump into tall grass, and every wild Pokémon battle you suffered through helped building your search level, which you could make good use of in the future. It would tell you in advance about useful Egg moves or hidden abilities. I never used it to hunt for shinies, but I appreciated every other aspect of it. It was the perfect integration of the PokéDex into gameplay, and Game Freak chose to scrap it. Kinda weird that they did that, considering how the Rotom Dex would be a perfect heir to the feature. But I guess cracking jokes is much more important for a PokéDex than, you know, showing you information about captured and available Pokémon in the area.

Personally, I feel like SOS calls were tacked on to give Sun and Moon more "NEW!!!" features. That the designers wanted to make new bells and whistles, even though the existing ones worked perfectly already. They also take over a little after horde battles, which may have been scrapped from Sun and Moon for technical reasons (anyone who has played a Double battle on the earliest iteration of the 3DS can attest to the fact that it doesn't handle battles very well when there are more than two Pokémon on the field). SOS calls might have been a neat idea in isolation, but it's overshadowed by the feature it replaced. This obvious step down makes me dislike SOS calls even more. Not for what they are, but for what they are not.