I'm actually very new to Pokémon. The first game I played was Leaf Green… in 2021. My girlfriend being into Pokémon rubbed off onto me, and I eventually got hooked. Before then, I really could not care less about the series. I had seen a few episodes of the anime when I was six or seven, and probably got a few cards but that was just because it was the cool thing at the time in primary school.
All that to say, I don't really have nostalgia for the series, not in the usual sense anyway. I can look back and reminisce on the good old days of Pokémon Sapphire in the ancient year of 2022, but I'm honestly looking at the series through entirely unbiased eyes.
So over the past few years as I've been playing the games in generational order, from LeafGreen, to HeartGold, Sapphire to Platinum to Black to X and now to Moon, there's been one consistent trend I've noticed: odd number generations are fantastic (LeafGreen, Sapphire, Black), and even number games range from not great (Platinum) to downright abysmal (HeartGold; fight me).
So after playing through the pretty mid X, right after the exceptional Black, I was apprehensive. I knew the pattern was favouring Moon, but on the other hand, Black was genuinely one of my favourite games of the year when I played it. I was having trouble believing that Gen 7 would find a way to outdo it, especially now that I was firmly in the rather notorious 3D era.
My gosh, I was wrong. This game somehow manages to not only beat Black for the title of my favourite Mon game, but also just… one of my favourite games I've played.
Alola
Pokémon Sun and Moon are set in the lush, pristine archipelago of Alola, based on Hawaii. The region is split into four sun-drenched isles, and a couple of smaller islands and "islands".
After the relative disappointment of Gen 6, with the big jump into 3D feeling surprisingly unimportant, Gen 7 fully embraces the enormous technological jump with Alola, and feels like what Gen 6 should have been.
The pretty static camera of old gives way to one that seemingly never stays still, moving every which way in order to best highlight the stunningly beautiful scenery around it. The tropical setting really pushes the 3DS in ways not seen before — when the majority of the console's library consists of 2D platformers, Pokémon Moon looks like Elden Ring in comparison.
Imposing green cliffs reveal seemingly endless ocean behind them, and yet the noise and bustle of cityscapes is never too far around any corner. The ever-present lush plant life, sometimes highlighting, sometimes obscuring the multitude of secrets wandering from the main road.
There are real incentives to explore everything too, far more so in previous games. I'll get into these more later, but I was organically exploring every tiny little corner of this map, in a way few other games have managed to convince me to.
Playing through Moon feels like they listened to all my complaints about X (ten years after it released) and flipped everything on its head. It feels weird talking about immersion in a Pokémon game, but it's true. The world feels alive in a way that no other Mon game has, and the immersion that brings is paramount to pushing the game into goated territory.
The region is split into four main islands, with each successive one being locked behind game progression. Right off the bat, I think they really could've done more with this idea. All the islands feel kinda same-y once you start exploring them.
KoniKoni City, on Akala Island, gives us a glimpse of this alternate reality; a picturesque little seaside town, themed after a traditional Japanese market. But wouldn't it have been cool if this motif expanded to the entire island, or perhaps even a subregion within the island? I'd love that! Each island having a unique design cue, maybe each inspired by its respective Tapu Pokémon, just as an example.
Even still, Alola is chock-full of little bits of soul, just like KoniKoni. It was genuinely fun to explore and find all the little secrets, in a way that few past Mon games invited me to do. I was truly engaged the entire way through; the meandering pathways and genuinely exciting to find little areas with unique NPCs or little side areas to do. I can immediately recall the recycling centre atop a hill, where a father is looking to nurture his son to take over his company, or the little cove with the Wimpod, and how that annoyed me to no end. Small, unremarkable-yet-memorable places like these help create a believable and rich world, and Alola does this truly exceptionally.
Gameplay
After twenty years of following identical gameplay structures, funnily enough, the most drastically changed thing in this game is the progression, and it's surprisingly all in positive ways! Gone are the eight gyms + Elite Four of old. In Alola, there are the Island Trials.
To complete an island, you first have to beat the island's trial, set out by the Trial Captain. These trials are, importantly, actually fun! They're nothing fancy, but they provide genuine surprise for each one you do, which has been sorely missing up until this point. Every single other Pokémon game, you go to a gym, beat a handful of trainers, then beat the captain. Repeat, never rinsed. There were always gimmicks to gyms, but they never really amounted to much more than "figure out how to move around".
Trials and their captains allowed the designers to truly let their imaginations go wild, and it really shows with the range of challenges presented to the player. Ranging from a simple 'progress through the cave and fight rats', to a scavenger hunt through a forest, looking for items for the Captain's cooking. It's really engaging, far more than any gym in any other Pokémon game.
The end of a trial ends in a battle, not with the captain, but with a juiced up Pokémon titled the Totem Pokémon. I like this change as well, as the Totems always felt like the culmination of the trial, where gym captains' teams were always… hit or miss, to say the least.
All to say, the progression is a massive breath of fresh air compared to previous games. This more than anything, imbues the game with a sense of discovery, just from how different it is to past games. You always felt like you knew what to expect with a Pokémon game. Not with Moon, however, this game makes sure to upend all the expectations you've built up in the series, and I love it for that.
The whole concept of Ride Pokémon, too! My gosh, nixing HMs, if you think about it, doesn't functionally change the progression of the game all that much, but in practice, it's a meaningful change that drastically reduces the annoyances found in previous games. The mere fact that you don't have to have one specific party member dedicated to using HMs is something that I've been wanting… basically ever since the beginning. And not only did they deliver on this pipe dream of mine, they went about it in just about the best way they could have. Ride Pokémon is the perfect example of this game's creativity, and one of so many small quality-of-life fixes they've made to the formula.
Combat
Look, it's Pokémon. If you were expecting any major shakeup of the core gameplay, it's not here. Instead, it's a pretty competent and, above all, rock solid rendition of the classic formula, with some meaningful additions, some ho-hum additions, and some extremely irritating additions.
The big headline features are, of course, Z-Moves. I liked these far more than I was ever expecting. Defeating the Island Kahunas earns you Z Crystals that correspond to each Type. These can be given to a Mon, which allows it to transform moves of that type into super-charged Z Moves, once per battle.
This. Is. Unbelievably good. I was not at all a big fan of the Mega Evolutions from Gen 6, to be honest. They were cool for all of five minutes, and then they got really old, especially when half of the Megas look barely different from their base Mon.
Z Moves, on the other hand, feel a lot more creative overall. Mega Evolutions, for the most part, seemed to be reserved for either powerful Pokémon, giving them even more marketability (Charizard), or weak Pokémon, giving them hopefully one singular fighting chance (Mawile). However, most of the Mega forms were quite underwhelming, and the whole gimmick just felt a little cheap in the end.
On the other hand, basically every single attacking move gets a Z Move associated with it, and it can be used by any Pokémon that learns it. I LOVE this. It doesn't restrict the fancy new gimmick to the specific few Mon that the devs deemed worthy enough, but instead elevates everyone in the party.
I also think the balance and flow in battle is just better with Z Moves; Mega Evolution required two steps to pull off a move, and the Mega could utilise its boosted stats until switched out. This necessitated the boosts themselves to be less-than-stellar to keep any semblance of balance and restraint.
Z Moves laugh in the face of "restraint", and instead offer you the opportunity to punch a fucking teddy bear in the face with a 175 Base Power move, with all the ridiculous over the top sound effects and (somehow) exceptional animations to accompany it. It's ludicrous and excessive in all the right ways, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a highlight of the battle system for me.
Unfortunately, the combat isn't all excellent, and this tarnish in quality is named SOS Battles. I have no fucking idea whose idea this was to implement, but it takes the already tedious nature of the average battle and makes it nigh unbearable. Don't you love slowly chipping an annoyingly bulky opponent down, only to, on the same turn as an attack, call for a carbon fucking copy of itself down from the heavens, just to make your life a little harder with zero benefit to you? It's an awful mechanic, and I really don't understand the thinking behind it. I'm aware it does actually increase shiny odds, for the fifteen people who seriously shiny hunt, but I can't imagine that justifies the "feature" at all.
It's not like it makes the combat any harder at all anyway! The game is piss easy as you'd expect, and SOS Battles only serves to frustrate the player, not increase the challenge in any meaningful way.
I had also heard of other complaints from players at the time, such as the fact that the game now shows you how effective each move you have is, against your opponent… People were complaining about this? I can guarantee that everybody who complained about this feature wasn't who it was supposed to help, and likewise, the people that this feature was targeted towards and possibly helped, were not on r/stunfisk complaining about it; it's a complete non-issue.
Story & Characters
Pokémon Black felt like a turning point in what a Pokémon game could be, and this most evident in the story. The story felt full of heart in a way no previous game did. It's still a classic Pokémon story through and through, but it was the way it was told and the believability of the characters which made it unforgettable to me. A few cutscenes from that game I know will never leave me. I of course have to bring up the scene where N takes you for a ride on a ferris wheel. Once at the top, he reveals to you that he was the head of the villainous Team Plasma, after appearing as a friend for so long. After this long, that still gives me chills.
Pokémon X was an immeasurable downgrade in this regard. Of all the changes it made, regressing the story back to Baby's First Dichotomy was by far the most egregious. It can be said that the story in this game isn't vital, but we have direct evidence to the contrary! Pokémon Black, and indeed Moon, show just how influential a good story is to any game; it's the motivation that helps me get through the game, and one of the driving forces in making any game memorable to me.
It starts with the characters. It isn't an exaggeration to say that the main cast of Pokémon X made me actively dislike playing the game, at least all the parts that actually involved them. I was seriously dreading every single rival battle; not from the actual battle, but from having to interact with all the characters which I just did not want to interact with. The characters weren't just underdeveloped (to put it lightly), every single last one of them were actively grating. Holy hell, everyone had one thing to say at every interaction. Tierno? He likes to dance. He doesn't give a single fuck about anything else, but he dances!! That nerd? He only wants to complete the Dex. Not a single other thought in that head.
Okay, that was a little played up. But the point stands: these types of one-track, uninteresting, and frankly unlikeable characters did exist in previous games, but after how exceptional they were in Black, displaying actual vulnerability and multifaceted personalities at many points in the story, X felt like a bad joke.
Pokémon Moon, I'm glad to say, stands shoulder to shoulder with its ancestor. It's certainly not perfect and traces of X certainly do remain at points, but the overall narrative is exceptional for the series.
Pokémon Moon is the story of Lillie. It's the genuinely touching story of liberation of a sheltered, dependant girl from underneath the overbearing gaze of her slightly psychopath mother. There was real substance to it all and at the end, when she waved goodbye, I felt a hint of real sadness, it genuinely felt like saying goodbye to an old friend. Definitely not something I've felt before in many games at all, let alone Pokémon games.
Technical
A quick touch on some technical aspects for completeness' sake. Obviously, these are running on the 3DS, so I wasn't expecting any miracles, but I was quite surprised at how competently these games run.
Other than during a few particularly elaborate moves in battles (battles in general actually), the game was just about locked at its max frame rate. While this of course isn't the end of the world for a Pokémon game on a 3DS, it absolutely doesn't hurt, and it does genuinely provide some level of immersion. There's nothing quite as distracting as exploring a world, and getting yanked out of it as the game slows to a crawl as the console struggles to make sense of what's happening on screen.
I was playing on a New 3DS however (hence the crunchy-ass screenshots), which does have significant processing upgrades over the original models. I don't have access to any original 3DS' to compare, however, so it could be a lot worse on that platform.
Conclusion
Pokémon Moon achieves what it sets out to do, and then a whole lot more. It's easily the pinnacle of Pokémon games to this point, and I can't wait to see what will next clear the very high bar this game has set.
It meaningfully improves the 3D Pokémon formula in almost every way imaginable, and it shows just how good a Pokémon game can be, and I hope nobody forgets that fact.
Unfortunately, it has too much water.