Pokémon Moon, Episode 2: In Which I Am Seduced By The Opulence Of Metropolitan Life

After getting my Pokédex sufficiently haunted, the next stop is apparently the Hau’oli Outskirts Pokémon Centre. Alolan Pokémon Centres have incorporated Pokémarts, in the style of their Unovan and Kalosian counterparts, but also have cafés for the region’s countless tourists to sit and relax. The café serves some items we recognise from older games, including Lemonade and Moomoo Milk, but these aren’t healing items for your Pokémon anymore; they’re purely for the enjoyment of the trainer. The café’s real gameplay purpose seems to be to provide treats for your Pokémon that come free with your drinks – Pokébeans to feed them in the Refresh screen, Sweet Hearts and imported Lumiose Galettes to heal injuries or status ailments, and even the occasional Rare Candy. The barista is also a fount of gossip and dubiously useful life advice. It’s an atmospheric addition more than anything else, and not particularly significant, but it’s also the first damn moment I’ve been allowed to feel like I’m actually on holiday, so I linger in the café for a while longer, trying to ask the barista in increasingly overt and desperate terms for “something a little stronger,” before Lillie shows up and drags me to our next destination…

…the Hau’oli trainers’ school.

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Pokémon Moon, Episode 1: In Which I Am Rescued From Certain Death By An Island Deity

All I wanted was a goddamn holiday.

“Come to sunny Alola,” the brochures said. “Let all your cares wash away,” they said. “Relax on the beach and enjoy the sunset with a glass of cool Pinap juice,” they said. “Immerse yourself in the vibrant local culture,” they said.

The brochures did not mention roads blocked by irritable Tauros, strange waifish girls with dangerous and suicidal cosmic Pokémon, “quests” handed out by mysterious and fickle gods, ritualised duels to please the aforementioned fickle gods, or anything that might be described as a series of “trials.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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Anonymous asks:

Are you going to do the series where you decide whether a Pokemon is actually good or not for Alola?

Good question. I mean, I’ll do some sort of individual review for each Pokémon once I’ve played the game, definitely. I don’t know how much I want those to look like what I did for Unova and Kalos, though. I think that depends on how I react to the overall feel of the whole group of 7th generation Pokémon. Like, when I did Unova, a lot of the way I wrote those reviews was the result of my being frustrated about one particular decision and its consequences – namely, that Game Freak chose to use no pre-5th-generation Pokémon in Unova, but simultaneously undercut that decision by including so many designs that felt like one-for-one replacements for 1st-generation Pokémon (this one is here because they couldn’t have Pidgey, this one is here because they couldn’t have Geodude, this one is here because they couldn’t have Muk… etc). And that’s why I did the whole “I hereby affirm/deny this Pokémon’s right to exist” thing, of course, because I had really strongly polarised feelings about… well, really everything in Black and White, not just the Pokémon designs. I had very different feelings about Kalos; the Pokémon were… not better, Unova at its best is just as good as Kalos, but more consistent; I had trouble finding anything to seriously dislike in Kalos. Well. Except Dedenne. But f%&k Dedenne.

So yeah, we’ll see what I think of Sun and Moon as a whole and go from there. Honestly I’m even kind of toying with doing something really weird, like some sort of in-universe in-character discussion of the different Pokémon that just totally jumps off the deep end with respect to, like, being a review. But I would have to see if I can make that work, or if I even like it.

Anonymous asks:

I know you don’t like to speculate, but what would your opinion be on Sun and Moon bringing in facets of the Ranger games / mentality into the main series (as some people apparently think due to similarities between the ranger regions and alola)? It’s pretty unlikely, but what do you think such a thing could add to world-fleshing-outness, conflict, story, et cetera?

Well, I think you’re right about it being unlikely – the fact that Alola is an island region (if that’s what we’re getting at? Not sure what else there is) seems like a pretty flimsy reason to make a prediction like that to me. But having said that, I don’t think it would necessarily be a bad idea to, say, replace HMs for field moves with a minigame where you convince a wild Pokémon to temporarily join you and help you to clear an obstacle. HM moves are a pain, and you can potentially get a nice sense of negotiation with the wild Pokémon, show how they fit into their environment, and emphasise that wild areas really belong to them. Other parts of the Ranger philosophy, like having only one partner Pokémon rather than large teams, seem incompatible with the basic assumptions of the gameplay; you could have characters who live with Pokémon in that way, but I suspect that much of the significance of that would be lost if the player wasn’t the one doing it. If you don’t actually play from the Rangers’ perspective, they probably just seem from the outside like trainers who only have one Pokémon. You can’t really make the Rangers the villains either, for obvious reasons, although a faction like that certainly would have been an interesting presence in a story like that of Black and White, just to make things more complicated for everyone – what would they have thought of Ghetsis’ rhetoric of Pokémon liberation? It would be also interesting to introduce some new mechanics that emphasise the uniqueness of the player’s relationship with the starter Pokémon in the same way as the Ranger games do, but that’s probably something you have to build from scratch to serve the very different gameplay of the core series.

Anonymous asks:

I hope we get an Ice/Poison type in Alola.

*shrug* Sure.

…were you hoping for more?

Anonymous asks:

I don’t know if you’ve looked closely at the screenshots from Pokemon Sun and Moon, but if you have what are your thoughts on the bird Pokemon they show. Do you think it will be another generic starter bird? Maybe a starter?

Okay so something you should understand about me is that I am a terrible, awful wet blanket when it comes to pre-release speculation. Like, pretty much anything that anyone says at this point, my reaction is “yeah but there is literally no way you can prove that so I don’t care.” Case in point, with that half-finished wireframe model we saw for a few seconds, I’m not even 100% convinced it wasn’t a Skarmory. I mean, it’s probably not because it looked like it had some kind of poofy headdress thing, but the first time I saw that trailer it honestly didn’t even occur to me that I might be looking at a new Pokémon at all. And even once we get that far, I just have zero interest in using such incredibly scanty information to make vague and poorly informed guesses about something that we’re just going to be straight up told in a few months anyway. I’m boring like that.

I much prefer making vague and poorly informed guesses about subjects that Game Freak is never going to give us more information about. That way I can never be definitively proven wrong! Muwhahahahaha!