Which is cool, because they basically lead me to the closed-off Poni Gauntlet area that'll eventually lead to the Battle Tree if I'm getting my Sun/Moon lore right. And they seem to have taken over Looker and Anabel's role in this game. While I'm slightly disappointed because I kind of always thought that the International Police was a cool concept that never actually did anything significant outside of the Ultra Beast hunting in Sun/Moon, the Ultra Recon Squad certainly works so much better as quest givers for this particular quest. And in increasing Hau's role throughout the Ultra games, we get Hau along with us for the ride as well.This time around, the target is... a brand-new Ultra Beast, Stakataka! And I can't lie, the name made me giggle when I first saw it. I knew UB-Assembly and UB... er... disco-ball head dude exist because I saw the trailers, but I didn't know their official names. And, well, Stakataka! (Disco-ball is the less-funny but cooler Blancephalon) I capture Stakataka no problem, it's exactly the same as all the UB fetch quests in Sun/Moon, except, y'know, Stakataka is just so dang funny. It's just a wall! With chunks of the wall bricks sliding down and becoming legs! And each brick is an eye! Stakataka is hilarious in Pokemon Refresh, too. It's got what amounts to Shuckle stats and thus I don't really care to put it in my party, but hey.
I also get to bugger off to Mahala Trail, where I first met Lillie and Nebby. And unlike Sun/Moon and a significant improvement to how it happened there, Lillie actually has a proper reason to give Nebby to me instead of training it herself. Lillie apparently knows that Necrozma is suffering because of the lack of light, and for the good of both Lunala and Necrozma, the two of them should be held by the same trainer so Necrozma doesn't suffer. There's the whole 'Nebby needs someone who can help it battle' thing thrown in there too, but at least the other reason is dominant in Lillie's dialogue, and thus it doesn't feel jarring that Lillie wants Nebby to find a battling trainer but at the same time leaves to Kanto to... be... a trainer. Yeah. Anyway, Lunala, like Necrozma, has an insanely low catch rate so I catch Nebby in a Pokeball, and immediately fuse Necrozma and Lunala together.
I assume because it's consensual, I'm not hurting Nebby? But by god, I might un-separate them later on because I just think that the fused Luna-crozma form just looks so dumb.
In battle, though, I can access an 'Ultra Boost' form and turn Luna-crozma into... Ultra Necrozma, with a cool animation of having the armour pieces fly up and assemble before the draconic body of light is formed! That is pretty fucking badass, and I think this is treated as some kind of Mega Evolution, too -- Ultranecrcozmium Z is like a Mega Stone and a Z-Crystal at the same time, and Ultra Necrozma's Z-move is the amazingly over-the-top Light that Burns the Sky.
So yeah, in-between the Stakataka mission, I go around and complete a bunch of side-quests and do a lot of capturing of random Pokemon, evolving random Pokemon and just take the time to enjoy Alola. I am sitting pretty at 91 Totem Stickers and maybe I'll do a more thorough search later on. I do a bunch of the new sidequests like the missing Meowth and the Left Pokeball and go through a bunch of Machamp Shove areas and all that fun jazz. There's a lot of new sidequests in US/UM compared to S/M, which isn't necessary but it's still pretty damn nice that they added these.
So... what's new this time around? I return after the Stakataka mission (which surprisingly is the only UB mission, and I don't get ones to capture Nihilego and the others) and none other than Sophocles shows up... and by god, he's talking about Festival Plaza! I don't care! I literally do not care, and I was already forced into a Festival Plaza tutorial... wait, what? Team Rocket took over Festival Plaza? ...Well this just became super-awesome. Both the fact that Festival Plaza is finally relevant by virtue of being tied into the Team Rainbow Rocket subplot, and also the fact that, well, Team Rocket fucked up Festival Plaza, and no one else notices because Festival Plaza is shit, yo! Sadly there's some weird bit where I can't use my own Pokemon and had to use a rental one. The choices for me included a Zapdos with a Rain Dance/Thunder moveset and I just zapped Team Rocket Grunts with a motherfucking Zapdos, rocking it like 1995.
And, hell, the Rocket-style makeover of Festival Plaza is cool, and even Sophocles has to admit that. (He really did)
This is just a prologue because it's just a single-battle mission to force me into the Battle Avenue system (did we really need the very strangely shoehorned 'two faceless AI trainers fight alongside you but you still control the Pokemon' bullcrap? Just make it like Battle Factory and make everything full rental) and Sophocles regains the control of the virtual world and ejects Team Rocket out. It's cool! I like it.And then on the next next day, Mom's Meowth flicked open the TV to show us a piece of news, which shows Lusamine and Wicke talking in a news interview, and then... Team Rocket strikes! The cameraman apparently got punched in the face by Giovanni, but they basically invaded the Aether Foundation! "Pokemon Ultra Moon: Episode RR" has begun, and I have heard so many good things about this postgame storyline. Considering the only real post-game storyline that I actually loved is the Delta Episode from Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire (oh, and, y'know, fucking stapling Kanto onto the Johto games), I'm definitely super-hyped to experience this.
The first part of the Rainbow Rocket storyline has me and Lillie walk up to the now-badass transformed Rocket castle, which looks just so much cooler than the sterile Aether aesthetic. And who else to show up but... Faba! Who apparently sold out Aether Foundation and gave all their technology to Giovanni, only so that he can advance even more? Faba's insane, and a dick, and... in perhaps one of the most unexpected plot twists, Lillie offers to fight with me! Sure, all she has is a big fat Clefairy that Light Screens and Reflects and the odd Moonblast or two, but she actually fights alongside me to rescue Lusamine, and she even fights (and knocks out) a Rocket Grunt off-screen!I absolutely loved how Faba's line of dialogue is basically "I can't take on the champion alone, but you'll trip him up, Lillie!"
So yeah, Faba's down, and I have... six generation's worth of evil bad guys to fight through!
But that's going to wait until the next part, because I'm going to talk about how the Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon subplot additions work for the characters as compared to Sun/Moon. The plotline is absolutely fine. I have critiqued the Ultra Recon Squad's dialogue and just how much of their dialogue is pointlessly-long foreshadowing without much content within them, but overall I do feel that the whole Necrozma storyline is pretty compelling and worked relatively decently within the shell of the Aether/Skull/Ultra Beast stuff. But there were some things that they did right and some things that they kinda fumbled on, and that's on the handling of some characters.
And here, I'll be talking about the five main characters that get the most change from the storyline. Almost everyone else basically does the same thing or aren't particularly changed (Wicke's still saccharinely nice, Faba's still a twat, Plumeria is still a cool big sister punk)... but let's go through the five main characters: Hau, Gladion, Lillie, Lusamine and Guzma.
Hau first, because I think Hau might be the character that I completely loathed throughout Sun/Moon. He's presented as our rival, but instead of being challenging he was a huge, huge pushover. And more offensively, he just... kinda interrupts me every single step of the way with some 'helpful' dialogue or whatever. In Sun/Moon, he goes through a slight bit of character development of basically deciding to not be a wuss and go with me and Gladion to Aether Foundation and help to fight the Aether grunts, but essentially disappears from the game afterwards.Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon fixes that a lot. And I do like that they still retained Hau's happy-go-lucky, Malasada-eating personality, because if you change that you won't still be writing Hau, but, oh, Silver or Blue or one of the more hardcore evil rivals. But Hau's very interesting. There's the whole bit where the game actually gave him a far more threatening party, having his party be filled up a bit earlier and replacing his shitty Komala with a far more respectable Tauros and Noivern (that Noivern shows up everywhere too). But more importantly, after the bit of character development and his participation in the Aether battles, Hau doesn't just stop there. After the Aether chapter, Hau basically decides to man up and actually get stronger, because he realizes that being helpless to protect Lillie and the kids in Aether House is something that he cannot live with -- and that helplessness makes his journey not fun. That still retains his whole 'this adventure is fun!' deal while adding a sense of maturity that Hau should really have gotten.
And during Mina's trial (another vast improvement in the game, IMO), you actually meet Hau a couple of times through your journey as he fights his way through the trials and keeps warning us that, hey, he's gonna catch up with us! And the game makes his desire to beat Hala far more prominent, and when you reach Victory Road (oh, another vast improvement to the game) and... I forgot if it was Kukui or Gladion who told me, but when they told me that 'Hau beat Hala!' it's actually feels like a huge 'oh, shit, that happened!' moment.
And so the culmination that it's Hau that ends up being our final battle in the Pokemon League instead of Kukui, where he has truly resolved to man up and be a proper 'rival' character... while all the while never betraying his sunniness... the addition of all these scenes for Hau definitely make him so much more improved as a character. I still don't care about his goofy tutorial bullshit throughout a lot of Melemele and Akala, but Hau has definitely shot up beyond the more boring rivals of Generations III-VI (Hugh aside, because Hugh is awesome) and actually gained a personality. And all with the addition of a couple of scenes.
Gladion is going to be slightly less of a problem to talk about, because his character arc is mainly the same. He's still this cold, mysterious dude who's a member of Team Skull (did that part of his character ever go anywhere, be it in S/M or in the new games?) and seems suspicious, having the mysterious being Type: Null, and later being revealed to be Lusamine's daughter and is all angsty and loner and Sasuke until he decides to trust me and Hau to help him storm Aether Paradise... the problems I have with Gladion's writing, which is how he's initially introduced, is still there, but even with the change in Lusamine's motivations (which I'll get to later) it doesn't really change Gladion's characterization that much. I did like that he actually feels like he gets some closure in his character arc instead of, like Hau, just essentially disappearing into the background after the Aether Paradise arc. It makes far more sense for Gladion to be the one to ride a boat and journey to other regions to better himself and be a better fighter, and his being sent off by Wicke and Lusamine is definitely a pretty neat and effective moment. No real problems with Gladion, although he's always been pretty solid.
Lillie is perhaps another character that I don't really care about that much, even moreso than Hau. Unlike Hau, who at least embodies the whole 'Pokemon is fun!' mentality, Lillie is just... there. She's just so wishy-washy as she tries to work out of her shell of emotional abuse and try to be independent, and her character arc throughout the Aether Paradise where she finally stands up to Lusamine and screams at her, and then changes her hairstyle and clothes to be independent from the influence of Lusamine, and later goes with us to Poni Island and Ultra Space, has always been well-written... but it's mostly underscored by the fact that even in these periods where she bullshits about her "Z-powered form!" she never actually... does anything! We get some cute moments, but I never really felt like the show actually showed her character growth concretely. And, as I mention above, one of the biggest idiosyncrasies in her character development is that so much of her character is devoted around protecting and saving Nebby -- but she then gives Nebby to me without any real reason beyond 'he can be a better trainer that can give you better battles!' and then a couple of scenes later, she decides to... be a trainer? Without the Pokemon she treats as a child? I've always thought that felt jarring.Here, a lot of Lillie's scenes in confronting her mother in Ultra Space is nixed, with the simple fact that the Nihilego-Lusamine climax being adapted out, which I feel kind of robs Lillie's huge climactic moment of confronting her mother. Or rather, it turns the confrontation in Aether Paradise into the huge 'Lillie stands up against Lusamine' scene, which, as it turns out, works out just fine. Lillie's role in Poni Island is also relatively cut down, so while she is still unsure and determined at the same time, it's not as obnoxiously wishy-washy as it was before, especially as she ends up being one of the voices alongside Hapu to essentially turn the Ultra Recon Squad into allies.
Lillie's role in the climax is still cut out very much, though, with her disappearing after Necrozma sucks Nebby into itself, and that's where I think the Ultra games was a little unfortunate, since Lillie is reduced to, well, Sun/Moon Hau, popping up here and there and reacting throughout cutscenes and the ending credits, but we don't really care. But the two scenes in the post-game really serves her character well. The first, as I described above, is how Nebby is given to us in this game. It's in service of allowing Necrozma to not suffer, and it's not done abruptly either. It's done in a far more emotional place, where I first meet Lillie and Nebby for the first time, instead of randomly after the crisis is over, so it really makes it feel like Lillie has put some thought into this decision alongside Nebby while I was off beating the Elite Four. Which is cool!
And best of all? Lillie's proactiveness when it comes to Aether Foundation being taken over by Team Rainbow Rocket. I'm not 100% sure if Lillie gets more badass things to do after this, but what she did in this confrontation with Faba in front of the Rocket Castle is certainly pretty awesome! Sure, Lillie's Clefairy isn't as badass as Hau's Raichu or Gladion's Type: Null, but the fact that Lillie's first scene in Aether Paradise is challenging a Rocket Grunt and telling me to go (if you go back, the Grunt's on his back, and so far only Gladion's been successful at knocking bad guys on their back), and later actually joins me in fighting Faba, who spends the entire conversation talking Lillie down. So yeah, pretty badass character development. She's not a badass like the other two rivals, but she's definitely served somewhat better in the Ultra games.
Guzma has several huge changes to the character, in that everything after Aether Paradise is different with him. He doesn't freak out in Ultra Space, he doesn't have a weird moment in the post-game where he randomly talks to us all tsundere-like and asks me to battle, and gets admonished by Hala. But here, Guzma gets humbled and tossed out of Necrozma, presumably after a curb-stomp battle. He's in over his head, and after everything is over he decides to disband Team Skull... only for Team Skull to stick around to him nonetheless, again, like Gladion, giving his story an actual closure in the credits as opposed to the bullshit we got in the Sun/Moon credits. The fact that Guzma is damaged (and possibly emotionally abused by his parents) and has a huge, huge inferiority complex and lashes out onto the world is still around, but the way that he matures is far more sensible in the Ultra games. It's not Hala showing up and telling him to not be a douchebag. It's the fact that, by seeing me and Hau throughout the game, he's finally seen what the Island Challenge is all about, and his short, quiet scene of apology during Mina's trial where he shows up in Aether House and the conversation about companionship with Hau and me is far, far more proper for his character growth and redemption compared to how it was in Sun/Moon, where, after a lifetime of being trapped under the influence of adults (similar to Gladion and Lillie) Guzma's character ends... with one of those adults essentially telling him to properly learn from him. It feels strangely written, and perhaps not bad, but Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon's arc for Guzma is so, so much better. Here's hoping he gets something to do in the RR story.
Where I have glowing things to say about the first four characters, Lusamine is one that... is so ill-served by the Ultra games. So she's an abusive control freak with a saviour complex in Sun/Moon, and easily one of the most unique and, love her or hate her, perhaps one of the most engaging villains in the Pokemon game franchise period. She's openly derisive of her kids, disowns them, abuses Pokemon for power, and talks about 'protecting' what she deems beautiful, but does it in such a twisted way. Oh, and she's the leader of a nominally good protection foundation. And you eventually learn that all her negative emotions are actually amplified a thousandfold thanks to her interactions with Nihilego and Nihilego's toxins, and when you finally go to Ultra Space and smack Nihilego down and free her, she's... confused.Here, though, the whole Nihilego subplot is completely lifted, with Nihilego's only appearance being in the Aether Paradise when it pops out of the Wormhole, and there appears to be no indication that Nihilego is influencing Lusamine. Yet she still acts abusive, she's still got a basement filled with frozen Pokemon she wants to keep for all eternity, and she's, well, still batshit crazy. Yet after being beaten down by Necrozma, she's just like "run, kids!" and then kind of just passes out. The Ultra Recon Squad do call her out on her insanity, but she never actually... does any repentance on that. She just gets accepted by Lillie and Gladion and the Aether people no problem, and even is respected enough to show up in news reports, despite organizing an army of thugs, freezing Pokemon, opening wormholes and all that jazz. I dunno. Lusamine's character got such a disservice in US/UM, being shown to only be beaten down by Necrozma, and now by Giovanni as a true damsel in distress (instead of a 'we need to save her from her own madness' deal) which I feel is a definitely hugely poor take on her.
So yeah. Have too many words on character analysis. Next up... Rainbow Rocket!
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