Pokemon Sun and Moon Aren't good Pokemon games.

[kilenem]

As a heads up, save before you fight as the Champion of the pokemon league. This is because after you become the champ, it doesn't save and you have to fight a legendary pokemon, that is a one time encounter.

The deepest circle of hell is reserved for save scummers and rage quitters...

I'd feel cheap doing that.

There is a special place in hell for devs who give you a ten minute cut scene on a handheld with out the ability to save like battery life isn't a issue.

 

[Metalix Knightmare]

Selective breeding isnt a dark part of our past, It's literally something we're still doing right now.

Quote me where I said past.

Okay, fine, I misquoted you on that one word. Fine.

It's still not fucking dark.

Seriously. It's the reason why we have so many types of dog running around.

The same can be said of many kinds of horses, yet we still havent made them grow chairs on their backs.

2. Refer to mine (and others) previous posts and arguments (e.g. Horses still don't have saddles). You're making us run in circles at this point. It's getting annoying.

No, but a Lapras could be born with an odd trait in it's shell that makes for a good seat, and so was selectivly bred to pass on that trait.

Actually, I just looked again at the Lapras in question.

FOR FUCK'S SAKE PEOPLE! LOOK at that thing! It's not even actually part of the shell! It's clearly strapped on!

How the HELL did this argument even get started!?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

39 minutes 28 seconds.

And they progress fucking slowly while they talk.

2 minutes on character creation. The rest has been walking from one cutscene to another.

And your only frame of reference are the Gameboy Colour games..

Yes, and in 40 minutes I had the Pewter Gym Badge, my starter had evolved and I was halfway through Mt. Moon with 6 mons in my pocket and then some in the bank. Now apparently the first 40 minutes of a normal Pokemon game have some overly enthusiastic douche treat you like you're watching Barney the Dinosaur while working in a JRPG You're The One storyline, before you even pick a starter or fight anybody.

Yeah... Not a very valuable opinion.

Thank you for giving my opinion some value. I don't give yours any. You're a staple of the Nintendo thread, automatically being contrarian to anybody who has so much as a criticism against the game. No offense meant, it's your thing.

That's like judging an entire movie based on its TV ad.

No, it's what it says on the tin: having a first impression 40 minutes into a game, having played other games in the franchise before.

-I'll repeat. At your time of writing, they had literally only played for about 20 minutes.

Blind contrarianism. Third episode had been out for 59 minutes.

You're remembering Red wrong.

Presumptuous. I'm remembering Blue.

You'll probably notice on many threads that I defend a lot of companies, not specifically Nintendo.

I'm not entirely sure who you are to be honest.

And I have the intelligence to know that 20 minutes of a 40 hour game is not enough to pass judgement.

I have the intelligence to perform inductive reasoning.

 

[Rylee Fox]

Myself, having played every main series pokemon game and remake (other than OR/AS) in my opinion, this is one of the best pokemon games ever made. The removal of the gyms gave them the ability to change a lot of things. The trials are all different and sometimes silly (fire trial) and you don't always know when a grand trial will hit you.

They made the game much more difficult than usual, something I quite like. The music, as always, is amazing, and the story is the best it's been in pokemon. (I'm aware pokemon was never really about the story) People complain about the slow start but I don't mind at all. I really enjoy stories and have been waiting for pokemon to finally come out with one that wasn't the typical: go to beat the gyms, encounter evil team, beat evil team, beat gyms, go to leauge, become champion, which is the plot of every pokemon game ever. Black and White mixed it up a bit but not quite enough.

When Black and White came out, I found I had to force myself to actually play them. The same way with X and Y. I figured I had just lost interest in the series after having played all of them since the original red and blue, so I skipped OR/AS entirely. Then I heard about sun and moons changes to the formula and played the demo. I got excited to play it. For the first time in years, I was actually excited to play a pokemon game again.

I got Sun version and found the pokemon game I had been waiting for, for years. One that changes everything, but keeps everything familiar at the same time. I like it so much I'm playing through it again just because I can (and because to fill my dex the way I want, I needed at least 2 playthroughs)

 

[Joccaren]

Presumptuous, and oh so very off mark in parts.. I'm going to call bullshit in others.

I hope the irony in this statement isn't lost on you.

Features such as 'choice in roadblock' are not "major features" to anyone. You all just need to stop being dramatic.

This comes up later in that;
1. Misquote, I said major issue, not feature. The two are not the same
2. Strawman. I'm not saying that the inability to choose your own roadblock is an issue, I describe my issue with the roadblocks and state that the present ones are lazy, at times infuriatingly so, add nothing to the world and do not provide the increased exploration and story potential of the older games. I.E; Red. You had people block your path, you had your rival block your path, you had HM things block your path, you had Snorlax block your path. Each of these had different mechanics around them, required different things to get past, built up the world in different ways, and some lead you to the discovery and capture of rarer Pokemon. These opportunities were missed in Sun and Moon.
3. Cherry picking one example, pretty sure you tried to pick on me for that so I'm kind of sitting here laughing at the layers of hypocrisy that you exhibit. There are a lot of problematic things with Sun/Moon, that are major issues for many who enjoy Pokemon games. One that I mentioned, the removal of Super-Training, is widely renowned as an utterly idiotic and painfully annoying move, since it has changed levelling the EVs of your Pokemon from a convenient 20 minute minigame, to a 20 hour AFK wait, and worse, the part that actually really pisses everyone off, makes resetting your EVs on a Pokemon into a game of grinding dozens of super-rare berries, farming friend coins and praying to the RNG for 3 high level versions of some of the rarer buildings in the friendship plaza, and farming your Pokemon to die to reduce their happiness, and allow you to use these features to reduce EVs so you can retrain them. Considering this is a pretty major part of competitive play, and for some even just the main game, that's a pretty core issue that's been raised for a lot of people. Instead of playing the game, more and more are turning to hacks to get the Pokemon they want, because god fucking damnit GameFreak you're making it harder to actually play the damn game. The same applies to Pokemon appearance rates with fishing, and various other things. Hell, my partner is pissed off as all hell at the new Shiny mechanics as they're fucking awful compared to the old ones, and that's something she cares deeply about - while I give no shits at all. Suffice to say, there's a lot of stuff, and the irony of you being presumptuous enough to claim none of it matters to anyone in a major way is, again, hypocrisy. As I said at the start, I hope the irony of your accusation isn't lost on you.

And the fact that you jump back and forth between arbitrarily calling the games great and terrible, despite the mainline games being pretty notoriously unchanged and stale for the last 20 years is a huge red light.

This is a terrible argument.
Zelda has notoriously been the same game for the last 20 years.
Same with Mario.
And Call of Duty.
And Battlefield.
And Final Fantasy before they did the new weird thing at... 10? IDK, don't follow the series that closely.
In fact, for pretty much every game series the same claim could be made. Exceptions being Bioware's more modern series as dear god they're schizophrenic with what they're doing with those games.
Know the thing though? Every single entry, in every single one of these franchises, is ranked according to the others as being good or bad, despite being near the same game to those who don't pay that much attention. Know why? Because they all change something each round. The core stays the same, but many other things change. Sometimes those changes are good. Sometimes they're not. But for those who follow the series, they're very apparent.
The same applies to Pokemon. I didn't arbitrarily call the games great and terrible, I gave my reasons. You skimmed past them, or didn't care as they weren't things that mattered to you. If you want more detail though;
Red/Blue/Yellow, Fire Red/Leaf Green, Ruby/Sapphire, Gold/Silver; Classic Pokemon games. All had their ups and downs, the cores were very similar, and provided a consistent experience though, so in the interest of keeping this even remotely managable in size, I'm not going to rate them too differently. These are what established what Pokemon is. They were challenging at times, unfairly so. They had larger 'dungeons' for you to explore, with more varied paths and little goodies to find. They had a wider variety of things in the world to do, such as wake Snorlax up, or go diving below the waves. Each game was primarily dedicated to its own generation of Pokemon, with occasional appearances from other regions. The worlds were interactive, and had Pokemon hidden in a number of different places, and with a number of novel mechanics to catch them being different; i.e: The safari zone, where you couldn't fight. Some of these were good, some weren't.
Diamond/Pearl; The core formula started to grow old, though honestly decreased challenge contributed to that, as did an increased focus on multiplayer and gimmicks with that silly underground thing, and the stupid minigames of blowing onto your DS to do stuff. The region also didn't quite grab me like the others did, part of me says it was the colour pallet, part of me feels the region itself had some issues. Suffice to say, its a lot of people's 'worst Pokemon game' for a reason, and while I don't give it that dishonour, it was where I started getting tired of it all. I kind of want to replay it now though.
Black/White; Horrible. Attempted reboot? Yeah... Ok. A lot of the Pokemon were a bit silly, unoriginal, or uncreative, but W/E. I can get past that. The world design though... Fucking awful. This is my worst Pokemon game. The stupid pseudo-curves throughout the map, the incredible linearity with very little side stuff to explore in the dungeons you visit, the focus on turning everything into a pretty set piece as opposed to having it be interactive and enjoyable [My favourite example of this; In Red, there is a long bridge you have to travel across. Its covered in trainers and battles, who use Pokemon that are reasonably new and unseen at that point in the game. In Black/White, there are several huge bridges, several times longer than that of Red. There is nothing at all on them, but one of them looks 'pretty' {See; stupid} because it does a triple spiral so they can show off their curved terrain]. I never even finished these games because they were simply painful to play. The story was apparently great, and I feel bad for having missed out on that, but my god the world was just... Bad. And that's what Pokemon is to me; the world you're playing in.
X and Y; Average games. Shook up the formula a bit, which was nice, with 1 battle rival, 1 pokedex rival, and 1 travel buddy to play around with. Many of the same world design issues as Black and White, with not a lot to explore off to the sides, smaller 'dungeons' that are more straight forward with, at best, minor puzzles, and areas focused more on set pieces than interactivity - but it was more toned down in terms of the set pieces, and the proper 3D world navigation made movement bearable again, whereas in Black/White it was painful to even walk through some areas thanks to the pseudo-curved terrain. Playable, enjoyable, but not terribly engaging.
Alpha Ruby/Omega Sapphire; While nostalgia wise my favourite gen will always be Fire Red/Leaf Green, I have to recognise this as the best Gen of Pokemon. While several minor details were changed from the Original Ruby/Sapphire that made the place lose some of its charm to me, most of it remained the same. The world was great, with varied bits of terrain, interactivity all over the place, 'secret' paths all over the place, large areas with things to explore and interact with in different ways - ect. Group EXP Share is a blessing. Super training and the bottom screen in general with amazingly convenient online play, and the Pokefinder and such... God yes. New mechanics with rustling bushes and sneaking up on them to find rare Pokemon - creative, and something different and enjoyable. While a lot of it was samey, the Post game was extensive and enjoyable, with near every legendary acquirable, and many of the entire series' Pokemon in general acquirable. While I personally found it diluted the experience a bit more than enhanced it, there's a bit of extra story stuff with Stephen and his whole Latios/Latias thing. Great game all round, and really what Pokemon Sun/Moon should have built on top of as a foundation; improving the weaknesses, keeping the strengths, and giving us a cool new region to play along in.
Sun/Moon; Equal ranking to Sinnoh, though having just played this I'd rather replay Sinnoh ATM. The new formula... Isn't Pokemon. Yay for those who never liked Pokemon, boo for those of us who did. The world is, again, pretty poor. There are a handful of small side paths at best to explore, most of them are 10 second deals blocked off by a HM equivalent. While the terrain is colourful and interesting, its disconnected - islands themselves are 100% separate entities from each other with no connections, and even on islands many areas just teleport you around the map in strange ways to ensure you don't have to explore, and can just quickly move through the story. Exceedingly linear and handholdy throughout the entire game. All QOL improvements from OR/AS are gone. The map is the worst map Pokemon has ever made, and is entirely useless. Creative, if not amazing, mechanics like rustling bushes and sneaking have been replaced with Pokemon running to you, and often not being rare, just slightly stronger version of an incredibly common Pokemon [Yes, this could happen in OR/AS too, but it was far more random as to which Pokemon would be the rustler, as opposed to Sun/Moon where its 100% fixed, sometimes with 2 Pokemon, normally with 1, which allowed for more rare Pokemon to be found in OR/AS, and you had the ability to tell which Pokemon it was before you battled it, AND to avoid the battle]. The Item spam is real. You are 100% unable to acquire many Pokemon such as Genesect or Arceus at the moment, but are given 20+ items for each of them to use as type swaps, despite never being able to use them. For the first time in a Pokemon game, the Gens unique pokemon are... Rare as all shit. Like the Alola region Pokemon, the poster feature for those into completing their Pokedex - have almost exclusively a <5% appearance rate, forcing people to grind for hours to find even one of some of the bastards. SOS battles are painful. While they had the ability to actually be a useful feature, the way they're implemented is just an annoyance. While the story is the best of the Pokemon games, the game is one of the slowest, constantly providing you with slowly-skippable dialogue through cutscenes or characters saying things, and constant fade in and fade outs during core parts of gameplay. I.E: The Rotom Dex. Cool idea. Horrible execution. All the functionality of the OR/AS bottom screen is gone - terrible move - and while sometimes he'll make a cool side comment while you're walking around that you can just read on the bottom screen, far more often you'll encounter him going "Woo, you've caught another Pokemon. Press A to hear me say some more stuff before you can actually check out what it is. Oh, and me telling you this is 2 screen fades that you otherwise wouldn't have had. Bzzzzt". Lets also ignore the stupidity of having a Rotom in your Pokedex, but not having the Pokedex entry for Rotom - and in fact, Rotom not existing in the Pokedex list at all. Removal of the requirement of HM bots? Good. The way it was handled? A bit stupid, and conflicting with the themes of the series. I could go on, but I already know you're not going to have read any of this, as evidenced by your replies so far, so why bother?

And like quite a few other people on this site, you fall into the trap of being opinionated, but always being intentionally vague as to why. It just raises the indicators that you're holding the opinions purely because you can, and it makes you move slightly against the grain. Rather than actually caring about the issue.

Hmm. Intentionally vague as to why...

Black/White were just... Bad IMO. Balance wise sure, their world design was pathetic though. It was actually painful to move around through various areas thanks to the shitty curvature, and so much of it was focused on making everything be a set piece to simply look cool, rather than be playable and enjoyable.

X and Y were... Better, but not a ton. While many things were simpler, world design was still an issue. At least it was possible to navigate in 3D without the painful shit.

The Pokedex is woefully incomplete. You are literally able to acquire Pokemon that do not exist in the Pokedex, as only the 300 pokemon Alola Dex exists, a national dex - standard since Gen II - does not exist.
We were introduced to a ton of great features with OR/AS; Super-Training, easy online play and connectivity, Pokenav/finder, and other bits and bobs that made it incredibly easy to do many of the more... Chore oriented parts of the Pokemon franchise. Are they in the latest iteration? No. Instead, they've removed half the functionality, and made the half that remains impossibly more complicated to perform.
The new Pokemon of this gen almost exclusively have a <5% encounter rate. Most pokemon you'll run into are from the other gens, which artificially pads out the game big time by hiding the pokemon that you're all excited to see so that you'll almost never see them without excessive grinding.
It throws you into battles straight out of a long 10 minute cutscene, with no opportunity to save. They haven't done that before, and by god is that just absolutely terrible game design.
The map is near non-functional, with how impossible it is to now tell the difference between walkable terrain/routes, and just random bits of scenery.
-snip-
The map is 100% disjointed and not interconnected. Several areas are 'connected', without anything to connect them, and on the larger scale each of the islands is completely separated from each other and not able to be travelled to without a ferry/fly. Even the original Ruby/Sapphire didn't do that - you took a boat, but were completely able to just surf that route later in the game.
The new fishing mechanics are legitimately terrible. 1% appearance rates are a fucking joke, and having to walk back and forth between areas to raise it to a still abysmal 10% appearance rate is just... Pathetic.

Yep, intentionally vague. I don't clearly state where the problems are ever. Nope. Not at all. I just say they're "Bad".
Or, I do explain where many core problems are, but don't go into a complete essay on it because the abridged version would be 3 pages long and still get slammed for "Being intentionally vague", and seeing as you have trouble reading what I post already, I have no reason to believe it would be worth the effort to fill in the exact details of every complaint, on a case by case basis running through hundreds of examples and how from a design perspective it is problematic and could be improved. Hell, even if you would read it, the best that could happen is an "Ok, I agree". Several days of typing just for that is not worth it, and more likely I'd get "Doesn't matter, still not terrible, I enjoyed it".

The person who is being intentionally vague here isn't me. I give me reasons, and examples. You go "Every game is the same", or "Every game has become more convenient" without actually giving examples of this - namely because they'd fall apart pretty quickly if you tried to, or would be so incredibly vague as to be meaningless still. The game's got problems. Ones that aren't a constant of the series, or that are a worse version of those problems. The fact that you don't care about them, doesn't mean no-one does, and doesn't mean they don't exist. Sun and Moon gets a lot of things right, it gets a lot of things wrong. It isn't one of the better Pokemon games. It isn't a bad in general game, but for the Pokemon franchise its rather disappointing.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Blind contrarianism. Third episode had been out for 59 minutes.

Yeah, how dare he not obsessively check a youtube channel he hates just in case the runtime he's criticizing was extended by ten minutes.

You're saying he doesn't know what he's talking about? Likewise.

Presumptuous. I'm remembering Blue.

Irrelevant; they're the exact same fucking game.

And I remember both just as well.

I'm not entirely sure who you are to be honest.

You're the one that called him "a staple of the Nintendo thread, automatically being contrarian to anybody who has so much as a criticism against the game."

Why would you even bring that up if you don't know who he is?

I'm not his chronicler, I just saw him on the last two or three Ninty threads pleading fanboyism. Give me a week and I won't remember his name or yours.

I have the intelligence to perform inductive reasoning.

Yet apparently not enough to refrain from judging it based on the Pokemon equivalent to the opening text crawl.

I want you to look up "inductive reasoning" and rephrase that.

 

[Kingjackl]

These games are everything I wanted from a new Pokemon game. It has the gameplay refinements and quality of life improvements of X and Y combined with the depth and challenge of Black and White. There are a few issues; people have already mentioned the linearity, the slow start and the rarity of a lot of the new Pokemon plenty of times. Plus they still haven't quite balanced the Exp Share. It's not as bad as it was in X and Y, since even if you're technically overlevelled, there are still a lot of ways for the bosses to keep you on your toes.

The story and characterisation is up there too. While it's ultimately the same "challenge the gyms/fight the evil team" dual plot as every other Pokemon game, it mixes things up just enough to feel fresh. It's also got a great cast of characters, helped by how it plays with a lot of the familiar tropes the Pokemon games have built up in their supporting cast. Team Skull are brilliant, Guzma is a riot, Kuikui is easily the best Professor in the series and Hau and Lillie were more likeable and interesting than I expected them to be. Gladion was kind of a joke though; yeah, I get it, he's got a sad backstory. Maybe I could bring myself to feel something for him if I wasn't laughing at that constant emo facepalm animation.

They have their issues, but it's also one of the most creative entries in Pokemon to date. I'm personally willing to overlook a few problems because of that.

 

[bjj hero]

As a heads up, save before you fight as the Champion of the pokemon league. This is because after you become the champ, it doesn't save and you have to fight a legendary pokemon, that is a one time encounter.

The deepest circle of hell is reserved for save scummers and rage quitters...

I'd feel cheap doing that.

There is a special place in hell for devs who give you a ten minute cut scene on a handheld with out the ability to save like battery life isn't a issue.

Amen to that.

 

[kilenem]

These games are everything I wanted from a new Pokemon game. It has the gameplay refinements and quality of life improvements of X and Y combined with the depth and challenge of Black and White. There are a few issues; people have already mentioned the linearity, the slow start and the rarity of a lot of the new Pokemon plenty of times. Plus they still haven't quite balanced the Exp Share. It's not as bad as it was in X and Y, since even if you're technically overlevelled, there are still a lot of ways for the bosses to keep you on your toes.

The story and characterisation is up there too. While it's ultimately the same "challenge the gyms/fight the evil team" dual plot as every other Pokemon game, it mixes things up just enough to feel fresh. It's also got a great cast of characters, helped by how it plays with a lot of the familiar tropes the Pokemon games have built up in their supporting cast. Team Skull are brilliant, Guzma is a riot, Kuikui is easily the best Professor in the series and Hau and Lillie were more likeable and interesting than I expected them to be. Gladion was kind of a joke though; yeah, I get it, he's got a sad backstory. Maybe I could bring myself to feel something for him if I wasn't laughing at that constant emo facepalm animation.

They have their issues, but it's also one of the most creative entries in Pokemon to date. I'm personally willing to overlook a few problems because of that.

I think pokemon is trying to make it so you can't just tank the game with one Pokemon. The problem is you're giving pokemon to fight with multiple types and sometimes you need at least 3 pokemon to beat the pokemon league. It would be super tedious to train 3 pokemon. The New EXP Share also allows to bring in new pokemon you caught during your Journey because again it would be super tedious to train pokemon you just caught. I believe this what Game freak was trying to do.

 

[Hero of Lime]

I really enjoyed Sun and Moon to be sure, especially in my first playthrough. I like the new Pokemon, I feel we got a nice new Pokedex worth of mons. The theme of the region and it's real world inspiration felt well expressed, more than any other region. It has the best professor, hands down. The removal of HMs of course, are the best fixes to the series in a long time, probably since making TMs reusable in gen 5 to be honest. Going in, the Trials replacing gyms were a tad worrying, but they were pretty refreshing, and I am totally okay with Gamefreak trying different Pokemon challenges aside from gyms in the future.

Things I appreciate, the story and characters. Now I feel both paled in comparison to gen 5's set of stories and characters, but they actually tried compared to the lackluster ones in X and Y. Lusamine and Guzma were definitely interesting villain characters, but at the same time, I felt both them and their teams were kinda underused throughout the game. You only have on big encounter with the Aether Foundation, and Skull gets more attention with battles, but not by much.

Now the things I disliked, the SOS Pokemon feature is just waaaaaaay to annoying to deal with. Great for shiny chaining, and nothing else. Allowing the wild Pokemon to call for help and attack in one turn is so frustrating to deal with, especially in the early part of the game where you are trying to level up your weaker Pokemon. And really, the post game was pretty lame. The UB hunt is cool and all, but once you complete that, there isn't anything to do aside from catching the remaining legends and going to the battle tree. I don't demand, or even want a second region for post game like so many other people always clamor for, but having a post game on the level of Black and White/2 or Platinum would be nice to get again. The gen 6 and 7 games kinda dropped the ball on post game, though ORAS's was pretty decent.

Now the complaints I've seen about linearity, I agree with, but this idea that Pokemon games have always been open experiences has never been true. Every game limits where you go, and what you can do, some just hide it better than others. To me, X and Y did this the worst, yet Black and White get all the blame for being "too linear." Those games still gave you places to go that were totally optional during your main adventure, whereas X and Y was really one big circle with nothing on the side of any substance.

Just as a side note, I feel there could have been less gen 1 pandering in this game. It never felt as gross as X and Y's, but it still felt kinda overbearing. Playable character being from Kanto, all Alolan forms are Kanto Pokemon, a lot of wild Kanto Pokemon in the region, especially in the early part of the game. Tons of references and mentions of gen 1 and Kanto, etc. It doesn't ruin the experience, but I was hoping they weren't going to do it again after X and Y. I don't hate gen 1 or Kanto, but it's gotten to the point where I just am so sick of that generation getting so much more spotlight than all the rest.

Phew. If you take the time to read all this, bless you.