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'm of the opinion that Melemele is torture. It's an example of flabbergastingly bad game design considering the time period it came out. I rank Sun and Moon among the worst Pokémon games overall (Above D/P, with SwSh way further down), so my opinion might be a little skewed, but here goes:
I think the Pokémon games have a very fun gameplay loop. Get a Pokémon, explore the world, assemble a small team, battle against other Pokémon, watch your team grow and improve until you can take on the toughest trainers in the land, and dive into various little secrets and sidequests along the way. Sun and Moon take a very, very long time before you get into this loop. For a start, there are a couple of exposition-heavy and somewhat lengthy scenes before you even leave your house. After you take a few more steps, there's some more talking. Then you're allowed to explore the- oh, wait, no, you can barely step out of the garden before the screen fades to black and you're told to follow Hau up the path to Iki Town. Make sure not to deviate from the set path at any point, because if you do, the screen will fade to black again and set you the right way.
So, Iki Town. The first place you're allowed to roam and explore, if memory serves correctly. There's literally nothing to do there, nothing to find. Exploration isn't rewarded in the slightest, and so, it feels pointless. Like a waste of time, which you'll only have confirmed once you've been to every nook and cranny and talked to everybody. So you trudge up Mahalo Trail (again, a straight line with nothing to do) to have the cutscene with Nebby on the bridge. Which works fine as a piece of storytelling, I guess, but that gameplay loop I talked about is nowhere to be found. You haven't explored, you haven't found Pokémon, and it feels like everything has gone on rails until now (via several minutes of cutscenes and dialogue). The only thing you've actively taken action to do is moving from points A to B to C and so on. You get an item here, but you can't do anything with it whatsoever, it literally only exists so you can hand it over to somebody in the next cutscene. After this, it's time to pick a starter and have your first Pokémon battle, which serves as a tutorial. You only have two moves to play with. Have fun. Then there's more cutscenes, and a skip to the next day. Okay, so now the tutorial is over? Oh no, it has only just begun.
So now you're allowed to move freely again, provided you want to move up Route 1, because that's where you are going. There are other paths, of course, but you aren't allowed to take them. Route 1 has a tiny bit of exploration, a few items, you can catch a few trashmons and battle a couple of trainers, but it's still very much an on-rails experience. Your only choices are which trashmons you want to catch, or not, you'll do just as fine without them. Cue another battle with Hau and yet more cutscenes. Everybody cheers at the festival as another day ends. So
now the tutorial is over? Aw heck no.
The next day, you're railroaded to the Professor's house. In-game, two days have already passed without the player being able to do much, and I think this exacerbates the feeling of "just let me do my own thing soon!" There are two more trashmons to find in that one patch of grass outside Kukui's hut, but nothing you'd ever want to add to your team, and there are another few meters of text to plough through before you can go anywhere. Said anywhere turns out to be the Trainer's School, which again you aren't allowed to leave or skip, and exploration is still at a minimum while potential interesting team-mates are still nowhere to be found. But at least there's a somewhat challenging battle with the Teacher at the end. And then a cutscene. And now you're done with school, so hopefully we can consider the tutorial to be over. Time to finally get into that gameplay loop!
... hahaha. No.
Enter Hau'oli City. With more cutscenes. Lillie has to show you the clothes shop. Hau has to eat his Malasadas. You have to deal with the Team Skull grunts, a rampaging Tauros, talk to Ilima, and the patches of grass are freaking closed off behind gates. It's no big loss, though, the only Pokemon there you haven't encountered before is Abra. It'll take a sweet long time of wading through trashmons to figure that out, however.
So, let's review the gameplay loop again. You have got a Pokémon to start with. You might have begun to assemble a team, but unless you like the novelty of new Pokémon or don't mind the Jokémon factor of the old ones available so far (or have ground like mad for something like Happiny or Munchlax), you haven't found any mainstays of your team yet. Exploration up to this point has been pitiful. You have mostly been railroaded up and down routes shaped like corridors. One way forward, one way back, no branches. If you've put some effort into exploring, the stuff you have found will overwhelmingly consist of cheap consumable medicine or Poké Balls. Up to this point, there has only been a couple of things to find that might affect gameplay: A TM at the Trainer's School (Work Up, hooray - a stat boosting move in a game where no battles last long enough for them to be useful) and a Silk Scarf outside the apparel shop - moderately useful since you're swimming in Normal-type moves in the earlygame, but it can't be said to be very impactful. What little exploration you've done hasn't been rewarding, to put it like that, or given you tools to sprite up your playstyle. You haven't got through enough battles yet for your team to have changed much beyond what you were given at the start.
At this point, we're hours into the game with very little to show for it. You've barely been able to deviate from the path laid out by the developers, and the few occasions where this has been possible, you're not getting anything out of it. The Pokémon selection has been lousy with trashmons (plus Magnemite and Abra, if you are so inclined - presumably not on a repeat playthrough, however). There has been vast amounts of text to mash the button through, but as far as player engagement goes, you've barely been able to move from one cutscene to the next, with a few short battles (2x Hau, 5 trainers on Route 1, 5 at the Trainer's School, 1 Team Skull Grunt and Ilima) where you can put your skills to the test (that is, repeatedly use Tackle and that one coverage move). Again, more than an hour is likely to have passed at this point, much more if you've tried to explore, and there almost hasn't been any gameplay. In earlier games, I'd be beyond the first Gym by now with at least three Pokémon by my side out of dozens made available up to that point. Here, it still feels like the tutorial is in full swing.
Playing this part of the game, I feel restrained on hands and feet. I want to go out and explore Alola, but I'm barely allowed to walk twenty meters down a corridor at a time before there's a new cutscene. The world is out there, but you're not allowed to experience it except by the carefully metered out spoonful. There has been nothing interesting to do, nothing interesting to find, just tons of exposition. Just let me play already!
Granted, things get better once Route 2 is eventually opened up. There are more Pokémon, more stuff to find, more freedom, and less hassle, although there is another boring tutorial before the Grand Trial (which itself feels pretty scripted). Only from Route 3 onwards does it feel like you're left to your own devices and free to explore. But this feels way, way late in the game, especially if you're already familiar with how the basics of the game work.
The gameplay of the rest of the game, however, is also badly marred by the "GO DOWN THE CORRIDOR TO THE FLAG, WHERE THERE WILL BE A CUTSCENE!" type of gameplay. It's not quite as restrictive as Melemele Island is, but it's bad throughout the entire game. You're constantly told where to go even though there usually is only one direction it's possible to move in. There are unskippable cutscenes way too often, and exploration is minimal because every route is so small and linear. But it doesn't quite reach the unbearable levels of Melemele Island. Sun and Moon are bad games in that regard. But hey, at least not as bad as Sword and Shield, which has the same problems (better in some regards, worse in others) but with a vastly higher potential gone to waste.
