I am a huge fan of Pokemon. Pokemon was my first initial foray into RPGs, and for that I'll be incredibly grateful. I have a memory of playing a Final Fantasy Legend game on the Game Boy at my friend's house, but I didn't really get it. I was pretty young, so it was understandable. He also had a Sega Master System, so his taste in video games was a bit off of my beaten path.
Anyway, my first taste of RPGs came at a winter camp out I attended with some other boys from area churches. Rather than enjoying the outdoors, I spent a good chunk of my time playing Pokemon Blue on my friend's Game Boy (Pokemon was, at the time, brand new). I was completely hooked. It was a fantastically immersive experience. You were playing as a boy, on a great adventure. The visuals were excellent, the design of the Pokemon was really cool (Charizard for life), and all of my friends were playing it in short order, and watching the tv show. I quickly saved up my money ($30, I believe), and bought a copy of Pokemon Red.
I have completed every Pokemon game's quest (at least one version), have caught every Pokemon in 2 iterations (Red and Y), have played several of the spinoff games, have watched a good chunk of the episodes of the TV show, and genuinely love the franchise. Every game in the series has some merit and is enjoyable in its own right, although my favorites are Emerald and Y.
Pokemon came back big time last year, with the launch of Pokemon Go, and the announcement of new games on the 3DS. With how much I adored Y (I think I put over 150 hours into it), I was extremely excited for Pokemon Sun, and even pre-ordered it. And I very rarely buy brand new games (maybe once per year).
Pokemon Sun was good, but not quite as good as Y. There were a number of extremely annoying things about it, but the core gameplay was fun. Story is always peripheral to the core gameplay of Pokemon, but the story was good. The music was also good, but not quite to the level of Emerald or Red/Blue. There were a few cool new Pokemon (although more boring ones than cool ones), and the Alola redesigns of existing Pokemon were extremely cool.
I didn't like several things about the game, though. I hope that some of these things will be addressed in new patches (I just know Game Freak is reading this ;)).
First, Sun introduced a new mechanic in which wild Pokemon can call allies when they are low on health. Sometimes these allies can be rare Pokemon that cannot be found in the wild. You can also use this mechanic to increase your chance of finding shiny Pokemon, and for time efficient EV farming. Cool, right? WRONG. Now, if they tinker with the mechanics a bit, this could work. But the reality is that with rarer or harder to catch Pokemon, this mechanic can become a nightmare. Why? Because you can only throw poke balls when there is one wild pokemon present. And the reinforcement can be called every turn! It will frequently happen that you will have to kill the ally pokemon several turns in a row before you ever get a chance to throw a poke ball. If it's a pokemon with a low catch rate, you can sometimes spend ten minutes just trying to catch it. Worse, if it's a pokemon with a low catch rate, low encounter rate, and self-damaging moves, these pokemon can be so frustrating to catch that it's simply a better use of your time to trade for one.
Second, being a retro gamer, I would have loved if the D-Pad could have been used to control your character. It's been that was since Pokemon Red, and it wouldn't have taken much to program this into the game. You could easily use the code from Y. You can still use it to select moves (I think), but simple motion would have been much more comfortable for me with the D-Pad enabled.
Third, and perhaps most frustrating, the game launched without a Pokedex for back catalogue Pokemon (Pokemon that can't be caught in the wild in Sun or Moon). This is mind-numbingly stupid, as the game has code for each Pokemon to be usable in the game, with full movesets, sprites, cries, and battle animations. Excluding this made the task of keeping track of your Pokemon, as well as which ones you need to catch 'em all, impossible. I really hope they patched this, more than anything else.
Fourth, it really feels like the Game Freak team is just running out of ideas for new Pokemon. Many of the designs, frankly, looked stupid. I know there's only so many animals out there to pick from for models, but a Donald Trump themed Pokemon? Really?
Anyway, I enjoyed it on the whole, but a few basic flaws kept me from loving it the way I did Y. I hope the next game learns these lessons, and I hope that subsequent patches fix these problems (they may already have done so). But the existence of patches shouldn't enable developers to release unfinished games, and it feels like Game Freak, who generally has a very good reputation for launch quality, didn't put in the full effort that they should have, electing to add essential elements to the Pokemon after launch.
I'd give Pokemon Sun an 8.3/10.
-TRO
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