Ty asks:

Greetings fellow Pokémaniac. First of all id like to say i love the blog, your thoughts, ideas and stories can keep me reading and thinking for days on end. Keep up the good work. So I’ve played every Pokémon gen, unfortunately haven’t got round to playing black/white 2 yet, and im only part way through Moon as it hasn’t grabbed me like i thought it would. In my opinion though, X and Y have been the best games to come so far (I’dtellyouwhybutI’mrunningoutofcharacters) Your thoughts on this? Ty.

Glad you’re enjoying it!

So obviously I’m still not done with Moon, because my writing process makes me play so slowly, and not ready to offer a final assessment or ranking. I really like everything I’ve seen so far though – the worldbuilding is excellent, the story is shaping up to be quite interesting, there are some cool characters, and although I still like generation VI’s Pokémon designs better, VII’s seem like they’re fine. My official position – subject to change in weeks to come – is that V has the best story, but VI was better overall. VII still has a shot at overthrowing either or both.

ill337erate asks:

I’m so happy you’re writing up your Moon playthrough!! Your posts already made me laugh out loud a few times and, as always, you make make thorough observations & bring up interesting points. Side note, did you notice Rotom call Ilima a dreamboat? Anyway, I wanted to let you know that different forms of the same species get their own dex entries in Sun and Moon. I strongly suggest looking at them all at some point! Several shed a new light on some of the pre-existing Pokémon forms.

I did notice, and he is. And that’s good to know; I’ll look out for it. I think maybe when this playthrough is over I want to do a sort of Alola Pokédex appreciation post, because some of this stuff is gold (and possibly dethrones the original Ruby and Sapphire in my personal rankings for best-written Pokédex).

RandomAccess asks:

Huh, for some reason I thought you were playing Sun, but since the normal trial featured rattatah instead of yungoos, I imagine you’re actually playing Moon. How do you feel about the inverted clock feature?

Well, those entries are titled “Pokémon Moon: Episode 1, 2, 3, etc”…

Anyway. It actually took me a little while to figure out what was going on, because at the moment I’m in New Zealand for Christmas with my family, but my DS was still set to US eastern time, so in practice the game was… I think six hours behind the actual time of day? Which is sort of how the game justifies it, of course – Alola is so far away from everything that it’s in a different time zone, and Professor Kukui actually asks you if you’re feeling any jet lag following your arrival from Kanto. Anyway. It seems perfectly harmless, and a nice way of emphasising what I assume will be a prominent day/night theme in the games (Yungoos’ Pokédex entry specifically talks about how it’s very active during the day and promptly collapses from exhaustion at dusk, so it makes a sensible opposite to the nocturnal Alolan Dark Rattata). Depending on your typical play schedule it might become inconvenient, but that’s true of the basic day/night system as well, and you can circumvent it easily enough by just lying to your DS about what time it is, if you really need to.

Cheshs asks:

You have no idea how excited I am for your opinions on S/M. The story was phenomenal, I loved the characters, all the new Pokemon, plot twists I didn’t expect … I genuinely and eagerly await your thoughts when you get the game! I just beat the main story with 58 hours clocked in.

An anonymous user also says, on a similar note:
“i’m genuinely excited for you to start gen VII because the new features remind me a ton of your “if I were in charge” series”

Well, colour me intrigued! I thought generation VI was very well-done all around, and I approved heartily of a number of its new features, which addressed a number of the same things that “If I Were In Charge” was supposed to; I’m excited to see how VII might build on that design philosophy. I’m scheduled to crawl out from under my spoiler-proof rock and begin my journey in Alola this Sunday (the 11th), so you can expect my initial ramblings either that day or the next.