Pokemon Sun LP, Part 1: Tutorials, Tutorials Everywhere

Let Play: Pokemon Sun, Episode 1

I haven't done a Let's Play on this blog since... since forever. But hey, I finally got my hands on a copy of Pokemon Sun and while I haven't exactly been playing a lot of it, I did get through an hour or two of playtime before Hearthstone's Gadgetzan expansion distracted me and I suddenly have to grind through quests to get packs to get the new cards to make new decks. But Pokemon! And Pokemon posts tend to get far higher views than anything I do for Hearthstone (and there's not much to say about Gadgetzan that hasn't already been said other than to list the cards I got... and who cares?) so let's talk Pokemon! It's going to be a more... review-ish thing more than a step-by-step of what I do in the game. If you want that, I'd think that it would be far more enjoyable to watch someone do that. There's a couple of Let's Players of Pokemon Sun/Moon that I would recommend. Google TheJWittz for a more mellow let's play and King Nappy for a very high-energy one.

But let's talk  about my own experience with the game. I basically reached the first relatively big settlement, Hau'oli City, which is the city that the demo took place in. Right off the bat Sun and Moon is a far more story-oriented game compared to previous generations, even Generation V -- the generation with arguably the biggest focus in the stories of both their games. After the whole 'world of Pokemon' speech taking over the webcam which is very cool, we even get to see a cutscene! It runs on the game engine so it isn't like super fancy or anything, but we get to see this cute girl Lillie running away from... dudes in white suits and whatnot, carrying a Cosmog with her. Then some mysterious huge explosion! It's like the cold open to a Pokemon movie, and I appreciate it.

But after that it kinda goes downhill. Because Pokemon games have never been the hardest or most complex things, and the sheer amount of hand-holding that the game puts you through is maddening. It's one thing to grid you along pathways so you get to experience the cutscenes and storylines, but it's another thing to literally stop you from going any other road and do a fade-to-black screen transition unless you follow the professor's specific road, because that particular road is not yet ready to be accessed. What's wrong with a regular old man or fighting trainers blocking the way?

And honestly, did we really need so many tutorials? It's like we get a battle tutorial, a catching tutorial, a tutorial for status effects, a tutorial for TM's, even a freaking tutorial for the Pokemon Center and every single stall in it. And every single person and trainer is far, far more talkative about friendly "tips" and, yeah, while there are new players out there, I really think that this time around they went way too excessive compared to, well, literally every single game before this. Every second line of dialogue out of every character is about how nice Alola is, or like, 'HEY DID YOU KNOW STATUS CONDITIONS ARE AS SUCH AND SUCH AND SUCH!' I miss the time in previous games where they explain TMs with like one line of dialogue or two, and even as a kid I understood it.

It's a bit of a sad moment where the game where Pokemon finally tries something new like getting rid of the 8-gyms system and HM's, it falls into this sinkhole of being overtly hand-holdy and making things way too railroady and simplistic. I do hope this just lasts for the duration of the first trial or island, otherwise Sun would be a pain in the ass to get through.


And, yeah, I get that your character in Sun and Moon is supposed to be a super newbie at everything, but so are every single protagonist in the previous games, and those games were never this hand-holdy. And the starting experience ends up being exhaustingly bland at times, especially when interacting with Kukui or with Mom. Mom's dialogue is especially atrocious -- she's just so boring. Kukui at least has some crazy oh yeah, cousin style dialogue going even if his pokemon attack puns get old after, like, the second time he does it.

The cutscenes were cool, though. I absolutely love the rustic, very tribal-yet-kinda-modern feel of Iki Town, the festival to Tapu Koko was a nice little lore bit, and the cutscene of Spearows attacking Cosmog and me going in the rickety bridge to rescue Cosmog (without a Pokemon, no less!) before Tapu Koko flies in, blasts the Spearows away and rescues me. That is absolutely cool, and incorporating the lesser legendary Pokemon into the storyline and giving them cutscenes... that's pretty awesome.

Also awesome is the visuals and audio of the thing. There's a significant step-up from XY, and the change from the grasslands and cities of Kalos into the more rural, tribal and rustic Hawaii-inspired Alola is a very noticeable one. The game just looks absolutely wonderful.

Anyway, story time. Basically, I am a new immigrant into Alola with my Mom and her Meowth, and Professor Kukui is just this very chill, cousin, woo, that goes into people's house without permission and whatnot. Kukui brings me along and railroads me into Iki Town to find the Kahuna, which is like the tribal leader. I go up to the Mahalo Trail, which is an awesome bit of scenery, before I rescue Nebby the Cosmog, and Tapu Koko rescues me.

Then Lillie and I return back to Iki Town, where we meet the Kahuna. And his grandson, Hao. Oh, Hao. You might just be my least favourite 'rival'. He's just so... whatever. We've had friendly rivals like Brendan/May, Barry, Serena/Calem, Bianca and Cheren before, but Hao is just so devoid of personality beyond 'friendly exposition guy'. To top it off, he's not even challenging. I used to dread bumping into Blue and Silver and May and Barry because of how powerful their parties can be, if nothing else because of their starters, but Hao? Hao picks the wrong starter, what an utter dunce he is. He chooses the starter weak to mine. And the Generation VII starters already have a STAB move. So. Yeah. Not a big fan of Hao. Lillie and Kukui are cool, though.

There's a bigger ceremony involved in choosing your starter, which is less of a spontaneous thing and more of a coming of age ceremony or whatever, and I do like the little cutscene of Rowlet and my character having to accept each other and it's not just "here, have a Pokemon, maybe you'll get along". Then come the string of tutorials and whatnot, which I'll just gloss over. There's a festival, which is cool if it actually involved a fighting festival and not just 'fight Hao, he's still crap'. I did love the area around Kukui's lab, and Kukui's lab is very fun to explore -- lots of detail and care put into the design of Kukui's lab, which I definitely appreciate.

Rotom Dex is cool. It's not as in-your-face as I thought it would be, and he actually has some dialogue, and I do love the little mini-map feature.

The Pokemon Trainer School is... the area looks cool, but there's so little to do there. You get handed the EXP Share, and you just are told to run around look for trainers, who try their best to be educational and forcibly shove information about the game that you either already know or should be able to find out by simply battling. It's very tedious, and after completing this particular sidequest it's what got me to call it a day. I did like the little gradual meeting of the Tauros that I assume will eventually be available for me to summon any time.

I'm surprised by how little new Pokemon I meet so far, though. I mean, Pikipek the regional bird and Yungoos the regional rodent are around all the way from route 1, of course, and there are Alolan Rattatas, but so much of the Pokemon that are around in these areas are older Pokemon -- Caterpie, Slowpoke, Wingull, Pichu, Spinarak, Magnemite... I mean, I don't hate older Pokemon and I want a nice balance between the old and the new, but still, there generally are more newer Pokemon being showcased in these earlier routes. Minor complaint, though. It's a fun exploration moment nonetheless.

One thing that I like is how even though Route 1 technically encompasses everything around Iki Town and East of Hau'oli City, the population of Pokemon is different. Like, the grass around the dirt roads contain your Yungooses, Rattatas, Caterpies and Pikipeks, while the grass near the oceanfront contain Slowpokes and Wingulls. It's something that's rarely seen before in Pokemon where a same route has different grass patches with different populations.

The grass around the school basically has a couple of powerhouses that basically screams 'catch me', which are Magnemite and Alolan Grimer, both having very defensive typings in Electric/Steel and Poison/Dark. Magnemite in particular is very useful and is basically something that's an absolute boon given this early in the game -- normally in all the games Magnemite appears in, he's not available until, like, the fifth or sixth gym or so. But oh well, I'm not about to use older Pokemon in this playthrough. I'll try my best to use newer Pokemon, although I'm not too keen on having Yungoos, Pikipek or Alolan Rattata as my main fighters (definitely not Alolan Meowth) so right now the only Pokemon doing any fighting is my Rowlet, with Magnemite being thrown into fights just to tank hits and Magnet Bomb anything that Rowlet cannot touch.

Overall I might seem like I'm bitching a bit, and I might be... but I still had a very, very enjoyable time playing through this game. I mean, it's fucking Pokemon. How can I not love it? There's just some points of criticism that I make that I think is perfectly valid. At the end of the stupid Trainer School, the trial captain Irima (apparently Kahunas and trial captains are different, so we're getting eight 'bosses' if there's one for each island) shows up and basically tells me to meet him, so it's going to hopefully get more interesting.

So far, though, Lillie and Hao is forcing me step by step on every block of Hau'oli City to stop and they talk and talk and holy shit all of this could've been done easier if the non-named NPCs are allowed to just do their introdump. I mean, I get that they're trying to push these characters and all, but man, just let me do the exploring by myself. Don't need one of them to stop me and pull me to the already big and stand-out building.

The Pokemon Snap minigame is a bit of a letdown so far, in that the spots are very limited in what you can see and photograph... though it might just be this one tutorial spot.  The fake-Twitter-Instagram thing that it uploads it to is funny, though, and I laughed when I realized what it was parodying. Nintendo, staying in with the times, yo.

I last saved halfway through Hau'oli City. What else can I say? I think I'll check out the trials after this. Hopefully we'll get less tutorials and all that. Oh, and I find it pretty cool that the cities have grass patches where I can encounter wild Pokemon. I find that absolutely something that's a bit overdue in Pokemon games.

My party at this point is basically Rowlet (who I nicknamed Green Arrow) and Magnemite (nicknamed Gigaton), with the rest being made up of hangers-on. Lulu the Caterpie evolved into Metapod and while I love Butterfree, I'm planning on using this region's regional bug if/when I find him, so yeah, she's going to have to chill in the box. The other three members of my party at the moment -- who will all get boxed when I catch more interesting things -- are Pikipek, Yungoos and Slowpoke. I absolutely love the little tool that allows you to put Pokemon you just captured into your party and boot one of the six you have into the PC.

Stay tuned for more Pokemon Sun and Moon!