So I've been replaying Pokemon Sun, finished Melemele and am almost done with Akala. And with my memory fully refreshed and three other playthroughs prior (SWSH, Platinum and ORAS), I can safely ask...
...When do the supposedly obnoxious, unbearable cutscenes and tutorials begin? Seriously, did I miss something? Did I buy a bootleg copy with the ultra bad stuff cut out due to shitty programming? Literally the entire time I was going through Melemele I was thinking "The cutscenes and handholding should start to get agonizing anytime now, right? How about now? Now maybe?" and yet that threshold just never came. For sure it would be nice if you could skip the catching tutorial or something, but that's how every game prior to SWSH operated. And as for constantly being stopped to talk I didn't see a hugely above average amount of that, certainly not like my Platinum playthrough where I literally only was able to walk one step from the starting position of my character in my room before Barry swooped in to say something.
I wanna argue more vehemently, but I'm genuinely just baffled. Someone mind explaining what exactly about SM's intro and first stretch through Melemele was so heinous that it turned people off from even replaying it?
I think it's a mischaracterised argument (not by you, by the people making the argument themselves) and it's a wider discussion about the character of Lillie, and one specific hour of gameplay right at the beginning.
Almost nothing that Lillie does matters. She stops the flow of gameplay to tell you about how she doesn't really know how to buy clothes, or that Nebby is situated at the end of Melemele Meadow to force the player to explore the area in full. It's very lazy game design in the worst way -- players accept laziness when done with humour like the dancing guys that formed a roadblock in Gen V. However, everything that Lillie does is attempted to be conveyed with urgency or importance, and that makes players feel like they need to be paying attention meanwhile the unimportance of everything she does then makes players feel like that attention was wasted. She also just had the misfortune of being everywhere the player went at the start of the game, from the Trainers' School to the boat ride to Akala Island, and sometimes players just get bored of seeing the same character over and over again.
The issue is that this doesn't come with any payoff. I don't have any issue with Lillie's role in the story and she's certainly central to the plot, but she also undergoes minimal to no character growth or development over the course of the game, and that's a
requirement for characters who keep intruding upon the player experience. She
does undergo character growth but it all happens at once, after she confronts Lusamine, as opposed to happening gradually during the multiple interactions with the player. All of the interactions prior to that confrontation only serve to establish the fact that she's weak and demure in just about every way known to man, but 20 one dimensional shapes are all still one dimensional, and that's the same with her character until her personality flip. With that kind of character development, it makes just as much sense to have her drop in on the player once an island to establish her meekness as it does to have her in every location the player visits, so it leaves the impression that all of those interactions were a waste of time.
Gladion undergoes much better, gradual character development and the pacing of his character is much better. That's why whenever anyone brings up the "obnoxious, unbearable cutscenes" they cite the cutscenes involving Lillie as their examples. And it's a shame that they try to extrapolate the flaws of one character into a more grand flaw of the game as a whole, because Lillie is by far the worst written character who drags down an otherwise pretty impressively written game -- for Pokémon, at least.
However, besides Lillie specifically, there's a specific string of events right when the player reaches Hau'oli City which feels very stagnant. After you waste a load of time at the Trainers' School (the first time the Trainers' School has been compulsory in the series), you: walk a bit, a lady interrupts you to tell you how to say hello, walk a bit, Hau gets a Rotom-Dex upgrade with you, walk outside the shop, Lillie stops you to to take a selfie and tell you she's going shopping, walk a bit, a man forces you to take a picture with Rotom-Dex, walk a bit, Lillie tells you she doesn't know how to buy clothes, walk a bit, Ilima stops you to talk to you about stickers, walk a bit, Team Skull stops you to fight you, you think you finally have freedom and then Ilima stops you to fight you, walk a bit, Hala wrestles a Tauros, and only then,
finally, can you go to the next route. This is, with mashing the A button as much as possible and skipping all the dialogue, half an hour of "gameplay" at the bare minimum. On a first playthrough where the player believes something important may happen and so doesn't skip the dialogue, it's around an hour of "gameplay" spent walking along a single road talking to people, with 2 compulsory battles as the only relief. 2 battles in an
hour. The fact that this is right at the start of the game sets a really sour note that many players carried with them through the rest of the game, making them overly critical of the amount of cutscenes even though after this point they're not really overused. Some people also count the Trainers' School in this awful part of the game because there's no Wild Pokémon or exploration, just a few compulsory battles with the only relief inbetween them being even more unimportant dialogue. However, I give the Trainers' School the benefit of the doubt because it would be fine as a location in its own right, and it's only counted as a part of this string because it happens to directly precede it.
I also understand the distaste that
leonard (from big bang theory) referenced with the period of the game preceding even this one also being too slow. I agree that it's too slow but equally, it's not quite so bad in my opinion. I didn't hate it at the time like I hated Hau'oli City, but in hindsight I agree that it's far too slow because SwSh has a very similar opening sequence that's streamlined while simultaneously being more attention-grabbing. The first part of the game always introduces the rival(s) and regional Professor, but Gen VII and VIII are even more comparative because they also both involve your rival guiding you through a route before you can get your starter. SM just took way more time with it because everything is laid out weirdly -- instead of the Professor living past where you receive your starter, you have to go up the hill to get your starter (before this there's also a pretty long cutscene), and then once you get your starter the literal first thing you do is backtrack past your house in order to get to the Professor's lab. It takes too long and the first cutscene involving Lillie should definitely have occurred after the player received their starter, involving some battling. But all in all I don't think it's
too egregious, perhaps because it's overshadowed by the egregiousness of Hau'oli City, though.