I honestly wouldn’t get your hopes up. The only reason the legendaries are returning in the Crowned Tundra is so that VGC could do a GS Cup in upcoming years. Now whether you find Dynamax encounters ‘different’ enough to make it feel special is up to you.
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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
To be fair, I am a bit concerned of how they will handle this myself.
Mainly, due to Dynamax.
Dynamax in current VGC format is okay and even relatively balanced, but we've seen in Smogon formats how ridicolously bad "ubers" with Dynamax can escalate, as well as certain specific combos (looking at you Terracott).
I do worry for a VGC that'd become literally Xerneas/Duskmane every team where not even phazing/fake out counterplay exists.
We know from current SwSh that all pokemon except the 3 gen 8 leges can regularly Dynamax, so I am worried for the competitive format. I do wonder if GF realizes what's coming.
All my optimism (which is already pretty low) toward their decision making isn't enough to not worry for what's going to happen when Crown Tundra hits and every legendary + later Ubers become viable.
I'd personally prefer to not have a "GS Cup" at all this gen, because I don't think it'll be interesting at all.
I’d highly doubt it, GF’s reason why Dynamax is ‘balanced’ seems to have been use your own, which is like saying that Darkrai balanced because you can use your own. GF and TPC also think Xerneas is balanced because the two legendaries of this gen have two steel moves that double if power if you are Dynamaxed, both of which are super effective on Xerneas. Not saying that I agree with them at all though.
Yung Dramps
awesome gaming
Edit 2: This is totally disowned lol
Edit: Ok so it's not like anyone's ever gonna go back and read this over-a-year-old-post buried under over a hundred new pages anyway, but I've kinda fallen out of favor with this essay. I just feel that it's overly hyperbolic and dismissive of things USUM did, and that the disclaimer tucked at the very very end is just a thinly-veiled, half-hearted copout to conceal my formerly exaggerated hatred for this game. I've made my peace with USUM, I've learned to appreciate what it did, and I am ready to move on from being the "hurr durr usum bad" guy. I'll keep this up because I did put a lot of hard work into it and figure erasure is never the answer, just know it doesn't really represent my thoughts anymore.
So uhh... Remember that thing I hyped up as not coming for a while? Well I actually got it done much faster than expected! Keep in mind what you are about to read was designed to be shared many different places, so it repeats some stuff I've said before on this very thread. I also think it makes sense here since it's way too big for the "Little things that annoy you" thread and has a number of pretty spicy takes littered throughout, hell the entire thing is in response to what I perceive as an increasingly popular sentiment.
Without further ado, Yung Dramps presents...
Edit: Ok so it's not like anyone's ever gonna go back and read this over-a-year-old-post buried under over a hundred new pages anyway, but I've kinda fallen out of favor with this essay. I just feel that it's overly hyperbolic and dismissive of things USUM did, and that the disclaimer tucked at the very very end is just a thinly-veiled, half-hearted copout to conceal my formerly exaggerated hatred for this game. I've made my peace with USUM, I've learned to appreciate what it did, and I am ready to move on from being the "hurr durr usum bad" guy. I'll keep this up because I did put a lot of hard work into it and figure erasure is never the answer, just know it doesn't really represent my thoughts anymore.
So uhh... Remember that thing I hyped up as not coming for a while? Well I actually got it done much faster than expected! Keep in mind what you are about to read was designed to be shared many different places, so it repeats some stuff I've said before on this very thread. I also think it makes sense here since it's way too big for the "Little things that annoy you" thread and has a number of pretty spicy takes littered throughout, hell the entire thing is in response to what I perceive as an increasingly popular sentiment.
Without further ado, Yung Dramps presents...
An Exhaustive (And Partially Disowned) Breakdown on the Detrimental Nature of
ULTRA SUN AND ULTRA MOON
Please read each section in order, top to bottom!
Please read each section in order, top to bottom!
I’m gonna be fair to these games. Even I can admit that they actually did develop and flesh out the Alola region and mechanics in some really neat ways. My favorite new addition is probably Mantine Surf, it’s an entertaining and well-presented minigame with a great competition element to see who can do the gnarliest tricks and rack up the highest score. I also really love the Battle Agency despite it not being the most popular. It’s basically the Battle Factory, which is why it’s so awesome. Alola Photo Club is also a cool proto-Trainer Cards I guess.
There’s also... Well... Uh...
I’m not gonna say that’s where the nice things I have to say about these games end, but it is the end of the unconditional nice things. This means that from this point forward, the few remaining things these games do right come with huge caveats that ultimately either cancel out or outright supercede any good will those extra things could’ve generated. But before we get to the bad things that were done, let’s go over what wasn’t done...
There’s also... Well... Uh...
I’m not gonna say that’s where the nice things I have to say about these games end, but it is the end of the unconditional nice things. This means that from this point forward, the few remaining things these games do right come with huge caveats that ultimately either cancel out or outright supercede any good will those extra things could’ve generated. But before we get to the bad things that were done, let’s go over what wasn’t done...
While I love Sun to death, I’ve also come to recognize that people have some fairly notable issues with these titles, even if they didn’t bother me personally. I’ve seen everything from complaints about the slow start on Melemele, the generally higher-than-average cutscene count, crappy encounter tables making certain Pokemon pointlessly obtuse to obtain, overly linear route design, Rotom Dex being a little too chatty, so on and so forth. Again, none of these things bother me personally, but I still would’ve liked and appreciated the Ultra titles for minimizing and getting rid of these roadblocks wherever possible so those who didn’t like that stuff could come a few steps closer to loving this region as much as I do.
But nope, for all these things I mentioned Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon either didn’t fix those problems or didn’t fix them enough to satisfy those who made the complaints to begin with. A lot of the encounter %s are still wack, Melemele still goes by pretty slowly with stuff like the mandatory Trainer’s School session not being altered, and most egregiously of all the infamous cutscenes weren’t really trimmed down at all, if anything the issue is now worse as those extensive dialogues are being used to tell a vastly inferior story. Another issue that got unquestionably worse was Rotom-Dex, who went from being kinda charming to becoming even more chatty and forcing the player into the nigh-mandatory Roto Loto mechanic that could be used to cheese the game in absurd ways with no other parallel in the franchise from omni-boosting to recharging Z-Moves. And as for the issues people had with linearity... we’ll get to that.
Either way, compare this to how Platinum tried to improve DP’s atrocious performance wherever it could and added those sorely-needed extra cross-gen evos and their lines the originals’ Pokedex needed (although tbf this shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with, more a case of DP sucking balls than anything), or how ORAS revamped some of the key players of the original RSE cast to make them much more well-developed and memorable. And BOTH of those examples were able to do this while also adding new and exciting pieces of content to explore and play through, the same sort of content that large parts of USUM had to be mutilated to fit in. But hey, at least that stuff is mostly good, right? After all, earlier I mentioned some of the extra features I like in these games. Well, here’s the thing about those additions; those were the exceptions.
But nope, for all these things I mentioned Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon either didn’t fix those problems or didn’t fix them enough to satisfy those who made the complaints to begin with. A lot of the encounter %s are still wack, Melemele still goes by pretty slowly with stuff like the mandatory Trainer’s School session not being altered, and most egregiously of all the infamous cutscenes weren’t really trimmed down at all, if anything the issue is now worse as those extensive dialogues are being used to tell a vastly inferior story. Another issue that got unquestionably worse was Rotom-Dex, who went from being kinda charming to becoming even more chatty and forcing the player into the nigh-mandatory Roto Loto mechanic that could be used to cheese the game in absurd ways with no other parallel in the franchise from omni-boosting to recharging Z-Moves. And as for the issues people had with linearity... we’ll get to that.
Either way, compare this to how Platinum tried to improve DP’s atrocious performance wherever it could and added those sorely-needed extra cross-gen evos and their lines the originals’ Pokedex needed (although tbf this shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with, more a case of DP sucking balls than anything), or how ORAS revamped some of the key players of the original RSE cast to make them much more well-developed and memorable. And BOTH of those examples were able to do this while also adding new and exciting pieces of content to explore and play through, the same sort of content that large parts of USUM had to be mutilated to fit in. But hey, at least that stuff is mostly good, right? After all, earlier I mentioned some of the extra features I like in these games. Well, here’s the thing about those additions; those were the exceptions.
Up until this point you’ve had to digest bigass blocks of text. Well now it’s time for your eyes and brains to rest somewhat, for as I dissect the crappy extra features and locations of these games and explain why none of them were worth the time and effort invested it’ll be done in bullet-point form!
So yeah, I’ve made it pretty clear that I don’t appreciate a lot of the new things USUM tacked on. But hey, even if it’s not new content I like, it’s still more stuff to do. Someone out there will enjoy Rainbow Rocket or traversing Ultra Space in spite of their flaws, it’s just more extensions to a really great main campaign... Is what I would say if we lived in that hypothetical fantasyland. Yes folks, it’s finally time to address the elephant in the room...
- Part 1: The New Areas
- Pikachu Valley: The landmark personification of “Wha..?”. In every sense of the word, it has no compelling purpose: It doesn’t expand Alola’s worldbuilding in a meaniningful way, it doesn’t provide any really engaging side activities aside from a new Poke Finder spot, it’s just an empty, boring shrine to the mascot of the franchise. The most notable thing about it is that by scanning the correct QR code you can get the Ash Hat Pikachu and the Pikashunium Z. Wait... Does that mean they made an entire new location for this specific purpose?! If so, holy crap what an abhorrent waste of resources!
- The Kantonian Gym: Y’know what? As a worldbuilding junkie this is actually a pretty cute concept, a mock gym for Alola residents to experience what the Gym Challenge is like is a clever addition that gives Malie City a little more pizazz. And yet, just like Pikachu Valley, albeit to a lesser extent, it’s just kinda there. I guess you can fight a few trainers with typical middling NPC teams, but that’s about it, all you really get in return is a fake gym badge despite having to pay 1,000$ to enter the facility to begin with. You don’t even fight Ryuki as the “Gym Leader”, just some random Black Belt with a single Machoke. When was the last time you heard anyone say “Man, the Kantonian Gym made some great memories for me” or “Dude, you NEED to buy the Ultra versions to experience the Kantonian Gym”?
- The Ultra Space Locations and Ultra Megalopolis: I put them all together because they have the exact same problem. They look nice, have some solid music, extra bits of lore and a super duper sparkly epic and strong Ultra Beast/Necrozma at the end, and yet at the end of the day they’re just freaking corridors! This was Game Freak’s chance to address the complaints about the relative linearity of the originals by adding new areas with dungeons and other places to explore and traverse before getting to the main event and they blew it! The absolute worst offender is Ultra Megalopolis, an entire futuristic city with a heavy, almost cyberpunk-like atmosphere reduced to a hallway to Ultra Necrozma without a single enterable building or so much as a freaking side street. And don’t even get me started on the absolute jokes that are legendary encounters in this game, with every single one from Mewtwo to Giratina, from Rayquaza to Yveltal using the same handful of stock locations with only the most bog-standard attention to detail, and what would you know they’re still corridors. ORAS at least had a few of them (Ho-Oh and Lugia, Heatran, Regigigas) hang around on the Hoenn map, and even the Mirage Island legends got their own little biomes, it wasn’t that much but it was better than this. Going back to the Ultra Beasts in particular and the whole theme of sacrifice with these titles I genuinely preferred how they were handled in the original Sun and Moon. Sure you didn’t get your fancy corridors, but instead a neat little story about helping Looker and the gnarly-looking amnesiac secret agent Anabel stop an Ultra Beast invasion, travelling around Alola to do so. I’m not going to pretend it was some mindblowing experience or storyline but at the very least it was overwith relatively quickly, gave you extra copies of the version exclusives for trading purposes and even netted you an extremely nice 1,000,000$ completion award. And now with that out of the way we can move on to Part-
- Dividing Peak Tunnel: Wait, what? This was in the original Sun and Moon, what gives? Hold on... In those games you just entered and came out the other end automatically because it was just a basic-ass tunnel with nothing of note, but in these they for some reason made it a full location you have to spend the time to traverse manually. Well, ok, if that’s the case then I’m willing to bet that they probably added something new, maybe expanded it to have some things to- This was literally just to facilitate a cutscene with the Ultra Recon Squad. I mean yeah, you can catch Wimpod and Kecleon in here, but that’s it, that is literally the only other thing that happens in this “new and improved” tunnel, it was all-in-all “””expanded””” primarily to give the URS a scene which could’ve easily been slapped on when you come out at the other end!! Oh and don’t worry, I’ll get to those bozos later, but for now we gotta move on to Part 2 of this section, for real this time.
- Part 2: New Gameplay Additions
- Mina’s Trial: That’s right boys and girls, before we even get into postgame content we gotta talk about a brand new final trial! And wouldn’t ya know, it’s a complete waste of time that drags the final stretch of the game down! For starters its mere presence and placement after the Ultra Necrozma battle creates the “extra gym tacked on after the villain plot climax” problem which I hated in games like Platinum and ORAS, except this is the only main series ”enhanced” game to my knowledge to create that problem when it didn’t previously exist. Then there’s the trial itself, which involves flying around Alola and rematching previous Trial Captains to make a flower or whatever. All of these fights are underwhelming 3 Pokemon washes and it generally feels like an afterthought, especially when you look at the teams and realize they’re just leveled-up, fully evolved versions of battles they had in the original Sun and Moon, except in those games they were completely optional and let you learn more about the Trial Captains in the process of finding and battling them. Then there’s Totem Ribombee, who I’ll get to in a later section.
- Ultra Space Ride: I’ve already explained in depth how hard the actual Ultra Space locations suck, but what about the minigame to reach them? Well since these titles apparently decided they hadn’t defaced the originals enough already, they went ahead and added segments where the game temporarily becomes Superman 64 with you flying through bloody rings on the back of either Solgaleo or Lunala. Unlike Mantine Surf there is no strategy, no addicting push to replay it and get the best performance possible, you just keep going and going and going until you find the right ring, go through it, get your legendary or relatively easy shiny and rinse and repeat until you’ve got everything or have stopped caring.
- Rainbow Rocket: This was it, the big headlining postgame attraction of these titles, above Mantine Surf, above the Battle Agency, above even any of the Ultra Space exploration stuff. An interdimensional army of Rocket goons led by Giovanni and 5 other returning villains from Maxie and Archie to Lysandre from timelines where they succeeded with their plans AND caught their respective mascot legends in the process have now set their sights on Alola, with you and some of the other big cast members including Lillie and Guzma having to stop them. Such an awesome fanservicey premise that ties into the alternate dimension lore both Alola games have been steadily building up, and the ultimate result is just really mediocre. While comments could be made about the design and traversal of the Rainbow Rocket hideout, the bulk of the issues with this postgame story come down to the fact it missed 85-90% of the point of big crossovers like this: Having all these characters with different backgrounds, ideals, goals and personalities interact. Throughout the entire story the only villains shown on-screen so much as talking to each other are Maxie and Archie, which barely even counts since that was a pre-established rivalry dating back to the original Gen 3 games. Everybody else is deliberately gated off to their own rooms, delegated to blurting out the bare basics to get the people who haven’t been keeping up with the franchise since they existed and making callback lines (e.g. Lysandre doing Xerosic’s “oops you fired the Ultimate Weapon” shtick) to get the people who do remember them to grow those nostalgia boners without saying or doing anything beyond that. Well... With one exception. Ghetsis is probably the one RR villain I’d say was mostly done justice, starting his appearance right off with a plan to manipulate Giovanni himself and take over the organization, and after he’s defeated comes the infamous scene of him tackling and threatening to kill Lillie, the one extremely memorable cross-generation interaction in an arc which should’ve been filled to the brim with them that makes it clear how messed up Ghetsis is even compared to the other baddies, followed by another great and wonderfully cathartic scene of Colress warping in and freaking Hakaing the bastard out of the way. If every villain got moments like these along with time to just talk amongst themselves with appropriate personal clashes Rainbow Rocket would’ve been more than worth the price of admission. But even besides that there are other problems. For one thing, while giving everyone their respective mascot legendary does facilitate some challenging fights, it’s also really contrived in some instances when you think about it. For example, Maxie and Archie imply via dialogue that their plans still would’ve backfired on them with Maxie being swallowed up by a fissure and Archie being consumed by the ocean, just now without a player character or similarly powerful trainer to clean up their mess. Ok, that’s an interesting idea... So why do they still have Groudon/Kyogre respectively? There’s also the matter of the remixes: unlike every other returning character (i.e. Battle Tree cameos) except for Red and Blue, Game Freak felt fancy with the Rainbow Rocket cast and decided to give them all remixes of their original themes, and I’m sorry but most of these are, at the very least, inferior to their original versions. Maxie/Archie’s new theme sounds inebriated compared to the bombastic and imposing RSE and ORAS mixes, Lysandre’s is also too slow, Ghetsis’ new theme doesn’t sound anywhere near as ominous as the original and oh dear god what did they do to Cyrus? Giovanni’s is pretty neat, but then again he technically never had a unique theme up until this point so who knows, if he did Rainbow Rocket may have butchered it too!
So yeah, I’ve made it pretty clear that I don’t appreciate a lot of the new things USUM tacked on. But hey, even if it’s not new content I like, it’s still more stuff to do. Someone out there will enjoy Rainbow Rocket or traversing Ultra Space in spite of their flaws, it’s just more extensions to a really great main campaign... Is what I would say if we lived in that hypothetical fantasyland. Yes folks, it’s finally time to address the elephant in the room...
Let me get this out of the way: I am not going to be explaining why the altered story of Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon is a horrendous blemish on the originals because frankly everybody already knows why. This behemoth of a paper is already getting ludicrously long and I don’t need to spend even more time serving as the 500th explanation as to how Lillie was neutered, how the climax and ending were bungled up beyond repair, the lack of attention to detail in trying to make Lusamine more sympathetic, so on and so forth. Instead, I am going to be discussing a certain recent justification that I have heard floated around more and more, something to the effect of:
“The story downgrades don’t matter for the gameplay was improved”
Alright... Listen. I don’t wanna be that guy. I don’t wanna be the fat, sweaty loser who’s like “Your opinion is wrong” because every single person has their own priorities as to what is important to them when playing this series, videogames as a whole really. And in normal circumstances, I would be inclined to agree with this statement. First and foremost, I come to Pokemon for exciting battles, memorable creatures to catch and train and a vibrant, fun world to facilitate all that and other activities, I am not expecting nor will I ever expect Casablanca-tier plots. But with all that said, this rationale infuriates me. This statement, in my eyes, is built off the idea that story and gameplay in videogames are mutually separate things which have no bearing on one another, and maybe if we were still in the 80s where videogames weren’t really seen as capable of telling complex stories it would be true to some extent. But Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon are just a little under 3 years old, released in a time where stories in games are held in higher regard than ever before, where they are seen not just as an excuse for the gameplay loop to get off the ground but as a complement to it, good stories enhancing fun gameplay and vice versa. With the catastrophic damage done to the storytelling in these titles, even USUM’s totally unaltered battles with only a vague connection to the plot feel just a bit more hollow, with that sensation varying across the game. Take the Mt. Lanakila duel with Gladion; in both games it’s more or less the same minus USUM giving him Zoroark over Weavile, but it’s far more impactful as a send-off to the character in the originals since you just got done with the out-of-control Mother Beast, finally liberating the family from her declining mental state rather than in USUM where you fought some unrelated light monster and an entire trial beforehand. Looking at other games, RSE and ORAS’ final Wally battles aren’t really all that different team-wise minus the latter incarnation having Mega Gallade over Gardevoir, but the ORAS battle is universally recognized to be the superior rendition and by extension more fun due to the much greater emphasis placed on Wally’s arc in the touched-up plot of those games.
Everything I just said would still apply even if USUM had the most perfect, most majorly improved, most well-balanced and magnificent boss fights in the series. But once again we don’t live in that hypothetical fantasyland. In fact, here comes my potential big hot take of this essay: With a handful of exceptions, I think that on the whole USUM’s boss design took a huge dip in quality from the originals. But before I elaborate on that, I want to first be fair and list some of the examples of...
Deep breathing, deep breathing... Ok, so assuming you haven’t already checked out by this point you’re probably wondering when this massive block of text is going to end. Well that end is coming pretty soon, but it seems like there are three more sections to go, right? Well, not exactly. For all intents and purposes, consider the upcoming Ultra Recon Squad portion “optional”, as in it’s just a break for me to rant and “The Releases Stuck In Time” is where the final sliver of actual critique kicks off. Either way you resume reading, let’s get going once more starting with...
“The story downgrades don’t matter for the gameplay was improved”
Alright... Listen. I don’t wanna be that guy. I don’t wanna be the fat, sweaty loser who’s like “Your opinion is wrong” because every single person has their own priorities as to what is important to them when playing this series, videogames as a whole really. And in normal circumstances, I would be inclined to agree with this statement. First and foremost, I come to Pokemon for exciting battles, memorable creatures to catch and train and a vibrant, fun world to facilitate all that and other activities, I am not expecting nor will I ever expect Casablanca-tier plots. But with all that said, this rationale infuriates me. This statement, in my eyes, is built off the idea that story and gameplay in videogames are mutually separate things which have no bearing on one another, and maybe if we were still in the 80s where videogames weren’t really seen as capable of telling complex stories it would be true to some extent. But Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon are just a little under 3 years old, released in a time where stories in games are held in higher regard than ever before, where they are seen not just as an excuse for the gameplay loop to get off the ground but as a complement to it, good stories enhancing fun gameplay and vice versa. With the catastrophic damage done to the storytelling in these titles, even USUM’s totally unaltered battles with only a vague connection to the plot feel just a bit more hollow, with that sensation varying across the game. Take the Mt. Lanakila duel with Gladion; in both games it’s more or less the same minus USUM giving him Zoroark over Weavile, but it’s far more impactful as a send-off to the character in the originals since you just got done with the out-of-control Mother Beast, finally liberating the family from her declining mental state rather than in USUM where you fought some unrelated light monster and an entire trial beforehand. Looking at other games, RSE and ORAS’ final Wally battles aren’t really all that different team-wise minus the latter incarnation having Mega Gallade over Gardevoir, but the ORAS battle is universally recognized to be the superior rendition and by extension more fun due to the much greater emphasis placed on Wally’s arc in the touched-up plot of those games.
Everything I just said would still apply even if USUM had the most perfect, most majorly improved, most well-balanced and magnificent boss fights in the series. But once again we don’t live in that hypothetical fantasyland. In fact, here comes my potential big hot take of this essay: With a handful of exceptions, I think that on the whole USUM’s boss design took a huge dip in quality from the originals. But before I elaborate on that, I want to first be fair and list some of the examples of...
- Boss Fights That Got Better
- Gladion #1 uses Illusion fake-out strats with Zorua and Zubat.
- The Grand Trial Olivia battle has Anorith and Lileep over Nosepass and Boldore. Gives her more types than just pure Rock including a nice safeguard against Water Pokemon.
- Guzma #2 at Po Town has 3 Pokemon instead of 2.
- Boss Fights That Got Worse
- In his Grand Trial, Hala has Machop over Mankey. This is the first of many, MANY arbitrary Pokemon replacements purely to show off the new and shiny Pokedex expansions... Except Machop was already in the original SM dex, so they made this change just for the hell of it. Either way, Mankey was a way more unique pick that gave Hala his own flavor than Machop yet again. There’s so many of these changes that I’d look even more insane than I already do if I broke down why each and every one of them suck, so I’m just gonna do what IMO are the other two worst offenders, starting with...
- Guzma has Ariados replaced with Vikavolt. This is emblematic of another dumb category of changes I like to call “muh difficulty” changes. Sure, Vikavolt is a much stronger opponent that even gets him some more Alola representation, but I actually think Ariados is a much more fitting pick for Guzma, fits in better with the whole cast-aside trashy underdog theme and gave an infrequently seen Pokemon some time to shine. To me, harder absolutely does not equal better, and there are some much bigger examples of this coming right up. But first...
- Lusamine has Mismagius replaced with Lopunny. Not Mega Lopunny, mind you, base form Lopunny. If I have to explain to you why this is a tremendous downgrade you either know nothing about Pokemon or are just incredibly horny.
- Now let’s get on to some of the new Trial fights, starting with Totem Araquanid! As you might imagine, I prefer Totem Wishiwashi for several reasons. For starters, the build-up to this fight was way cooler, fighting all the little Wishiwashis before confronting the fused form in an epic stormy battlefield as it dramatically leaps out of the water... Good stuff! Yeah, sure, technically Totem Araquanid has the same intro, but it just ain’t the same and feels really lazy, especially considering it still shows Solo form Wishiwashi leaping out when it appears. Also while I’m normally not the guy who complaints about underleveled boss fight Pokemon (eg Ghetsis’ Hydreigon), I think the fact that Totem Wishiwashi was the minimum level to be in its School form was a nice touch, whereas Totom Araquanid is 2 levels lower than it should be to actually evolve. Again, normally I wouldn’t care that much, but all in all this trial feels like a hasty retooling into an overall lamer boss for the sake of being different rather than having an actual cool idea.
- Something similar applies with Totem Alolan Marowak. Possibly more challenging, but Totem Salazzle was a much more surprising and funny pick for the Totem mon considering the prior cutscene and making Marowak the new one just adds an extra bit of redundancy seeing as one of the mid-trial fights already had you fight Alolan Marowak.
- Yet again something similar applies with Totem Togedemaru. Again, more challenging and well-constructed overall probably, but I’m sorry, Totem Vikavolt’s set-up and just the Pokemon itself is way, WAY cooler, even despite using physical moves it has an omniboost to make up for it somewhat.
- And finally there’s the new Totem Ribombee and it’s OK I guess? It’s actually a pretty neat little fight, but like with many, many other things it comes with a caveat, that being it replacing Totem Kommo-o as the final Totem battle. Look, I have nothing against Ribombee, it’s a cute lil bug who I’m using in my current Sun playthrough, but man facing off against the 600 BST warrior dragon in the hauntingly silent innermost reaches of Vast Poni Canyon was a way more badass send-off to the Island Trial than a souped-up early route bug. Doesn’t help that the trial preceding it was tedious and unfitting as hell with a very “slapped-together” feeling.
- Now all of that is bad enough, but even if all of those things didn't exist, the next 3 boss fights are the worst downgrades by far and drop down these games’ boss design several pegs on their own, all the other stuff notwithstanding. Get ready for the Wretched Replacements, in progressing order from very bad to “oh god why”:
- Hala being replaced with Molayne at the Elite Four: Again, nothing against Molayne, but out of all the possible Alolan Elite Four contenders he’s at the very bottom rung. Hala was an awesome and kinda poetic pick, of course a sumo wrestler who was your first Grand Trial opponent would make sense to be part of the final challenge to test how far you’re come since then! Meanwhile Molayne, while a PC technician, doesn’t also mean he’s a good battler, and as such he seems like he’d be way more busy than Hala. This is the epitome of an arbitrary change with no real point other than to force a difference even if the ultimate result is way more lame. But this is just a warm-up compared to the next two...
- Hau replacing Kukui as Champion: Yet again, I have absolutely nothing against Hau, he’s a fun character who gets a bit too much hate for being the typical friendly rival scapegoat. And I’ll give him this: compared to other mid-gen Champion changes it’s nowhere near as bad. It’s not as poorly justified and random as Wallace replacing Steven and it’s not as borderline sacriligious as Trace replacing Blue. That said, a downgrade is still a downgrade, and this one has several reasons behind it. For starters if you ask me I’d say Kukui has the much better team with monsters like Magnezone, Snorlax, the starter strong against yours and even a Lycanroc lead that sets up Stealth Rock, whereas a lot of Hau’s choices are kind of middling, including having one less move on his starter compared to Kukui. In addition, and I’m sorry for this funny malasada boy, but you just aren’t Champion material. Aside from the fact Kukui canonically fucks, he also was the one who went through all the effort of building up a Pokemon League to rival Kanto’s , the most active and lovable professor character by far that the franchise had ever seen up to this stage, including having a pre-existing battle career as the Masked Royale, with all that in mind of course he’d be the one of the best picks to test Alola’s first Champion to see if they could hold the title properly. At the same time though he was also a really cool surprise, especiallhy since again up until this point we were used to professors just sitting in their labs, studying Pokemon and rarely doing much beyond that. Finally, there’s the music, more specifically Hau’s souped-up rendition of his battle theme. Aside from being IMO an inferior composition it also completely misses the point of what made Battle at the Summit so special: Seeing as you were the one to take the throne and defend your title against Kukui, it was YOUR theme, so mixing in the song of this other guy who really isn’t that much more significant than Kukui or Lillie wasn’t a good call. But even all of THAT is nothing compared to by far the biggest boss downgrade in the entire game...
- Ultra Necrozma replacing Mother Beast Lusamine: Yup, I’m not kidding, nor is that a typo. Because as much as people love to jerk off this excuse of a boss fight for its difficulty, its entirely artificial, horrendously balanced difficulty, that is the only, and I mean the ONLY thing it has over Mother Beast as a conclusion to the legendary plot. In every other aspect, it is a pathetic, downright insulting nosedive in quality. Nothing needs to be said about the story aspect and build-up about it, some dumbass light monster that hijacks the plot right at the climax will never be able to trump the backdrop of the progressing decline and damage Lusamine has caused, cumulating in her becoming an unsightly monstrosity and rejecting everything she has worked to protect out of insanity, nor is Necrozma just fucking off to Victory Road to be caught with a basic-ass Pokeball a more satisfying conclusion than Lusamine being freed and Lillie heading off to Kanto to get her cured. As for the fight itself, while Mother Beast’s battle has some flaws like static Pokemon selection compared to fight #1 including a conspicuous lack of Nihilego, Ultra Necrozma projectile shits all over what Gen 7 tried to do with its Totem fights using actual strategies by going full garbage ROM Hack mode and facing the player with a 10+ level higher Legendary from the last boss with +1 to all stats and all its moves just being offensive and nothing more. The difficulty is not created via skillful use of items, a well-balanced team, helpful allies or any kind of unique strategy, it’s literally just “hurr durr big difficulty spike scary strong monster that kills butt with big moves!!!”, a cheap shot and nothing more. All of this is not good design, nor is bottlenecking players into a select few Pokemon like Zoroark just to survive the onslaught and in that particular Pokemon’s case to game the AI. In case I haven’t made it crystal clear by now: HARDER. DOES. NOT. EQUAL. BETTER. If people are legitimately so desperate for a “truly difficult” fight (which imo this series has already produced on multiple occasions, including in Gen 7 itself, without having to resort to such absurd lengths), then WHY ARE YOU PLAYING POKEMON?!
Deep breathing, deep breathing... Ok, so assuming you haven’t already checked out by this point you’re probably wondering when this massive block of text is going to end. Well that end is coming pretty soon, but it seems like there are three more sections to go, right? Well, not exactly. For all intents and purposes, consider the upcoming Ultra Recon Squad portion “optional”, as in it’s just a break for me to rant and “The Releases Stuck In Time” is where the final sliver of actual critique kicks off. Either way you resume reading, let’s get going once more starting with...
There are very, and I mean VERY few characters in Pokemon I outright hate. Some are definitely far less thought out and developed than others (see pretty much every XY character aside from Lysandre and maybe AZ), but at most they’re just kinda boring. And in a generation filled with some of the best characters in the entire series from Gladion to Lillie to Guzma to even most of the Trial Captains and Kahunas being awesome, this makes how much I loathe the Ultra Recon Squad stick out even more. When looked at objectively as characters they’re already XY-tier boring, barging into random cutscenes to blurt exposition about Necrozma with no real rhyme or reason, as well as not developing in any meaniningful way. But more than anything, the reason why I titled this section the way I did, is because the URS is emblematic of nearly every single problem these games introduced or didn’t fix, including but not limited to:
- The broken plot with their ridiculous “oh btw we have the other mascot lol” dump after Lusamine and Guzma already jumped into the ultra wormhole
- The lack of fixes to the linearity issue despite having chances to introduce more exploration-heavy locations via Ultra Megalopolis
- The totally arbitrary changes such as the aforementioned Dividing Tunnel “””expansion””” just to accomodate another cutscene with them
- The garbage new boss fights. First off, you don’t even fight 2 of the 4, and the other half you do fight are 1. Version exclusive and 2. Don’t use anything other than one Pokemon, that being either Furfrou or later Poipole, not Naganadel, Poipole. They barely even qualify as boss fights, they unironically make the GSC Rocket Executives look badass in comparison, and yes, that includes Archer as well. Did I mention that the singular Poipole for both Dulse and Zossie uses Nasty Plot, two physical moves and Toxic? In the last fight? Despite having Venoshock in a previous encounter?
In the aftermath of these titles’ release, the most resounding question, the most common cirticism was a singular question: Why? Why were these games made not even a year after the originals? Why did they feel the need to change so many things arbitrarily or even for the worse? And possibly the biggest “why” of all, why weren’t they just DLC for the originals? Since then the debate over whether these games were necessary rages on and continues to marr their reputation, but I feel like everyone involved in this debate (or at least the instances I’ve seen) consistently miss a crucial point.
The last true traditional “enhanced version” prior to USUM’s release was Pokemon Platinum, which launched in Japan on September 13, 2008. Early that very same year on January 31st, Super Smash Bros. Brawl was also released on the Wii, and among other strengths and shortcomings one of its most damning flaws was the infamously unstable online infrastructure that made matchmaking hell for many. While Pokemon never experienced anything like that, the fact of the matter was that even in these early years where online gaming was in in its infancy and DLC had yet to truly catch on as a mechanism to enhance games post-launch, Nintendo was pretty behind the curve even for that standard on their flagship console for the generation, let alone a handheld. Even if the wizards at Game Freak figured out a way to make Platinum’s extra content and improvements DLC for Diamond and Pearl it probably wouldn’t have been worth it, so it made sense to stick to releasing it as a separate “definitive edition” of sorts.
But even as DLC and online gaming continued to grow, the second games of the generations that came after worked to justify themselves. Black and White 2 were outright sequels to the original games which in many ways did better jobs at being “alternate retellings” than what USUM was hyped up to be, dramatically changing the story structure, introducing new characters and giving new roles to the first BW games’ cast in ways that stayed true to their original depictions. X and Y didn’t get any sort of sequel or enhanced version despite many people thinking even today they should’ve got something in hindsight, but instead Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were released, remakes of Gen 3 that were effectively new regions with new characters and other stuff. Compared to those examples USUM did by far the poorest job of justifying its existence as a separate game despite coming out even later at a point where even the 3DS could handle DLCs and free updates just as fine as the high-end machines. And whether it was because of the fan outcry or an internal change of mind, Game Freak must’ve realized this at some level because now with Sword and Shield we’ll be getting exactly what many people wanted USUM to be: DLC that will make SWSH better games on their own rather than forcing people to “upgrade” for move tutors or whatever with a new version. And sure, maybe some of the main game’s faults wont be fixed this way (which isn’t even guaranteed anywhere), but even if that’s the case the opposite still applies, none of the good things about SWSH in its current state will risk being tarnished. They most likely will never stoop to USUM’s low of being a bizarre frankenstein that tramples over its own triumphs to deliver mediocre to bad content and story additions, that is scorned for its perceived redundancy and outdated money-grubbing.
And yet...
The last true traditional “enhanced version” prior to USUM’s release was Pokemon Platinum, which launched in Japan on September 13, 2008. Early that very same year on January 31st, Super Smash Bros. Brawl was also released on the Wii, and among other strengths and shortcomings one of its most damning flaws was the infamously unstable online infrastructure that made matchmaking hell for many. While Pokemon never experienced anything like that, the fact of the matter was that even in these early years where online gaming was in in its infancy and DLC had yet to truly catch on as a mechanism to enhance games post-launch, Nintendo was pretty behind the curve even for that standard on their flagship console for the generation, let alone a handheld. Even if the wizards at Game Freak figured out a way to make Platinum’s extra content and improvements DLC for Diamond and Pearl it probably wouldn’t have been worth it, so it made sense to stick to releasing it as a separate “definitive edition” of sorts.
But even as DLC and online gaming continued to grow, the second games of the generations that came after worked to justify themselves. Black and White 2 were outright sequels to the original games which in many ways did better jobs at being “alternate retellings” than what USUM was hyped up to be, dramatically changing the story structure, introducing new characters and giving new roles to the first BW games’ cast in ways that stayed true to their original depictions. X and Y didn’t get any sort of sequel or enhanced version despite many people thinking even today they should’ve got something in hindsight, but instead Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were released, remakes of Gen 3 that were effectively new regions with new characters and other stuff. Compared to those examples USUM did by far the poorest job of justifying its existence as a separate game despite coming out even later at a point where even the 3DS could handle DLCs and free updates just as fine as the high-end machines. And whether it was because of the fan outcry or an internal change of mind, Game Freak must’ve realized this at some level because now with Sword and Shield we’ll be getting exactly what many people wanted USUM to be: DLC that will make SWSH better games on their own rather than forcing people to “upgrade” for move tutors or whatever with a new version. And sure, maybe some of the main game’s faults wont be fixed this way (which isn’t even guaranteed anywhere), but even if that’s the case the opposite still applies, none of the good things about SWSH in its current state will risk being tarnished. They most likely will never stoop to USUM’s low of being a bizarre frankenstein that tramples over its own triumphs to deliver mediocre to bad content and story additions, that is scorned for its perceived redundancy and outdated money-grubbing.
And yet...
It’s no secret by this point that I think Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon are a complete mess that are only held up by the threads of the originals that weren’t defiled. To me their additions are mostly worthless, and what was given is not nearly enough to compensate for what was lost in terms of the enjoyment and structure of the main campaign.
But that’s the key phrase here: To me. As weird and downright baffling as it can be sometimes, I’ve come to accept and appreciate that these games have developed a following. I’ve met and talked to people who found Ultra Necrozma exhilarating, who loved to battle through Rainbow Rocket and face off their childhood nemeses, who couldn’t get enough of the Ultra Space locations and learning more about the Ultra Beasts through them. I know and regularly talk to people for whom these titles raised the original Sun and Moon from middling to some of the best in the series. And for that, in spite of all my reservations and criticisms, some more rational than others, I could never begin to dream of a world where they didn’t exist, and I am grateful even that whatever these games did was enough to get more people to see Alola as the wondrous, well-developed region it is and derive as much joy from it as I do from the base games. Don’t forget some of the really great discussions generated in the wake of their release as to what people find important in Pokemon games and how the two versions of Alola met or didn’t meet those standards. Therefore with some hesitance, but not too much, I tip off my hat to you, Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra M-
WAIT!!!! Since the climax no longer has you going to confront Lusamine in Ultra Space, that means Guzma never gives his “Ya’ll are stupid” line...
...I take all of that back these games are irredeemable trash and should’ve been cancelled
But that’s the key phrase here: To me. As weird and downright baffling as it can be sometimes, I’ve come to accept and appreciate that these games have developed a following. I’ve met and talked to people who found Ultra Necrozma exhilarating, who loved to battle through Rainbow Rocket and face off their childhood nemeses, who couldn’t get enough of the Ultra Space locations and learning more about the Ultra Beasts through them. I know and regularly talk to people for whom these titles raised the original Sun and Moon from middling to some of the best in the series. And for that, in spite of all my reservations and criticisms, some more rational than others, I could never begin to dream of a world where they didn’t exist, and I am grateful even that whatever these games did was enough to get more people to see Alola as the wondrous, well-developed region it is and derive as much joy from it as I do from the base games. Don’t forget some of the really great discussions generated in the wake of their release as to what people find important in Pokemon games and how the two versions of Alola met or didn’t meet those standards. Therefore with some hesitance, but not too much, I tip off my hat to you, Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra M-
WAIT!!!! Since the climax no longer has you going to confront Lusamine in Ultra Space, that means Guzma never gives his “Ya’ll are stupid” line...
...I take all of that back these games are irredeemable trash and should’ve been cancelled
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This might sting for you, but I do not consider Galar as unique as it tries to be... and in fact, I would call it a rip-off. I already have two hard evidences that might give you an idea why I said it.
Exhibit A: Too Much Focus on Gen 1... and the Execution
This Exhibit isn't exclusive on Galar, as it was already the case back in Gen 6 and especially in Gen 7 where it goes out of control. But the focus on Gen 1 itself isn't the biggest problem; the biggest problem is how it can be a big indication of rushed ideas.
Almost like exclusive Z-Moves before it, almost all non-Gen 8 Gigantamax forms are Gen 1 (exceptions this time being Garbodor and, if counted as Gen 7, Melmetal), and three NFE Gigantamax forms at that. Considering that several fans and I dislike multiple of the Gigantamax designs as it fails to really give a kaiju feels, I feel like the Gigantamax forms (or moreso which Pokémon gets one) are really aftertaste instead of a seriously considered idea. It felt far too marketing-driven for it's own good.
Not only that, but it also resulted three Gym Leaders and Leon to have a Gen 1 Gigantamax, and not helping is that Galar officially declares Charizard, Machamp and Gengar (if I get the group right) as the most popular Pokémon of Galar, based on a poster. It felt especially forced and even unbelievable, since each country or individual region doesn't have the same most-popular animals or even most-popular breed in real life.
Even more shocking is that the over-focus on Gen 1 isn't even there in Galar forms. While five lines are Gen 1, it wasn't really to the point of dominance as there was also Corsola (Gen 2), Linoone line (Gen 3) and three Gen 5 lines, which are Darumaka line, Yamask and Stunfisk. A big improvement from how Alolan Forms somehow is entirely Gen 1 and thus avoided the pit-trap it landed on like it was the case with non-Gen 8 Gigantamax (with only one or two exceptions so far, which are too little compared to around seven of Gen 1 G-Max forms and more to come).
While the focus on Gen 1 is understandable since it allows for better marketing with mainstream audience, it reaches a point where it played a part of the franchise becoming far too mainstream and ended up embarrassingly balances between giving quality-of-life improvements for fans and appealing to the mainstream audience.
Exhibit B: Criminally Generic Settings in Galar
One big problem with the Wild Area is that it played the settings way too safe, and Galar itself doesn't have locations with unique names outside of the Wild Area itself (and it's sub-areas, if you will). The cities you saw in Galar does have the British feels into it, but it's more of a "checklist" than anything astounding. While the Expansion Pass may have the Isle of Armor and Tundra Crown a more unique flavor, the problem remains in the Galar Mainland (main game).
The Gyms being modeled like stadiums is a nice touch and makes sense in the UK-inspired region... but that's as far of a plus I can give for the Gym design. Everywhere else feels from a bit dull to outright mediocre, and there is a reason why some call Galar a barren place. Being a Point A to Point B region like Kalos before it also hurts, with the only freedom being the Wild Area, which by itself is also barren.
There you have it. The time constraint by yearly release (especially in 2010s and even now) can and will drain out the uniqueness (and even some functionality) of Galar and future regions. While the Expansion Pass coming true may put a stop to a obligatory third version(s), time will tell if it will help softening the time constraint or not. One thing for sure, I will wholeheartedly disagree with anyone saying that Galar is the most region. I won't say it's the most generic, but it's far from the most unique.
Exhibit A: Too Much Focus on Gen 1... and the Execution
This Exhibit isn't exclusive on Galar, as it was already the case back in Gen 6 and especially in Gen 7 where it goes out of control. But the focus on Gen 1 itself isn't the biggest problem; the biggest problem is how it can be a big indication of rushed ideas.
Almost like exclusive Z-Moves before it, almost all non-Gen 8 Gigantamax forms are Gen 1 (exceptions this time being Garbodor and, if counted as Gen 7, Melmetal), and three NFE Gigantamax forms at that. Considering that several fans and I dislike multiple of the Gigantamax designs as it fails to really give a kaiju feels, I feel like the Gigantamax forms (or moreso which Pokémon gets one) are really aftertaste instead of a seriously considered idea. It felt far too marketing-driven for it's own good.
Not only that, but it also resulted three Gym Leaders and Leon to have a Gen 1 Gigantamax, and not helping is that Galar officially declares Charizard, Machamp and Gengar (if I get the group right) as the most popular Pokémon of Galar, based on a poster. It felt especially forced and even unbelievable, since each country or individual region doesn't have the same most-popular animals or even most-popular breed in real life.
Even more shocking is that the over-focus on Gen 1 isn't even there in Galar forms. While five lines are Gen 1, it wasn't really to the point of dominance as there was also Corsola (Gen 2), Linoone line (Gen 3) and three Gen 5 lines, which are Darumaka line, Yamask and Stunfisk. A big improvement from how Alolan Forms somehow is entirely Gen 1 and thus avoided the pit-trap it landed on like it was the case with non-Gen 8 Gigantamax (with only one or two exceptions so far, which are too little compared to around seven of Gen 1 G-Max forms and more to come).
While the focus on Gen 1 is understandable since it allows for better marketing with mainstream audience, it reaches a point where it played a part of the franchise becoming far too mainstream and ended up embarrassingly balances between giving quality-of-life improvements for fans and appealing to the mainstream audience.
Exhibit B: Criminally Generic Settings in Galar
One big problem with the Wild Area is that it played the settings way too safe, and Galar itself doesn't have locations with unique names outside of the Wild Area itself (and it's sub-areas, if you will). The cities you saw in Galar does have the British feels into it, but it's more of a "checklist" than anything astounding. While the Expansion Pass may have the Isle of Armor and Tundra Crown a more unique flavor, the problem remains in the Galar Mainland (main game).
The Gyms being modeled like stadiums is a nice touch and makes sense in the UK-inspired region... but that's as far of a plus I can give for the Gym design. Everywhere else feels from a bit dull to outright mediocre, and there is a reason why some call Galar a barren place. Being a Point A to Point B region like Kalos before it also hurts, with the only freedom being the Wild Area, which by itself is also barren.
There you have it. The time constraint by yearly release (especially in 2010s and even now) can and will drain out the uniqueness (and even some functionality) of Galar and future regions. While the Expansion Pass coming true may put a stop to a obligatory third version(s), time will tell if it will help softening the time constraint or not. One thing for sure, I will wholeheartedly disagree with anyone saying that Galar is the most region. I won't say it's the most generic, but it's far from the most unique.
While we don't know the full list of DLC mons, guess what the DLC additions look like? The answer might (not) surprise you! This is a shameless copy/paste from something I did in a different thread.
Galarian Form distribution prior to update:
5 Kanto origin families, 6 Pokemon
1 Johto origin family, 1 Pokemon
1 Hoenn origin family, 2 Pokemon
3 Unova origin families, 4 Pokemon
Galarian Form distribution after update (currently known):
8 Kanto origin families, 10 Pokemon [+3/+4]
1 Johto origin family, 2 Pokemon [+0/+1]
1 Hoenn origin family, 2 Pokemon [+0/+0]
3 Unova origin families, 4 Pokemon [+0/+0]
Gigantamax distribution prior to update:
10 Kanto Pokemon
1 Unova Pokemon
1 GO(???) Pokemon
14 Galar Pokemon
Gigantamax distribution after update (currently known):
12 Kanto Pokemon [+2]
1 Unova Pokemon [+0]
1 GO(???) Pokemon [+0]
18 (19) Galar Pokemon (Urshifu has two forms)[+4 (5)]
To put it a bit more plainly, Kanto is getting +2 Gigantamax, +4 Galarian versions, Galar is getting +4 (or +5) Gigantamax, Johto is getting +1 Galarian version (off a Kanto native prevo), and all other regions so far have nothing confirmed.
Even now, Kanto has 46% of all Galarian forms which jumps to 56% with currently confirmed Pokemon after the DLC drops.
Frankly, I think Game Freak should just toss out the practice of basing each entire region on real-world countries. Half the time they aren't even sticking to the culture they're basing themselves on anyway. See for instance: Japanese Oni as the legendary trio in the New York region? A desert with an underground Egyptian temple in the middle of Manhattan? Norse-inspired legendaries in the France region? Aliens taking over Hawaii? A monkey and a chameleon being starters in a region based on the UK?
Don't get me wrong, I think they're sometimes pulling it off pretty well. Alola generally has a nice Polynesian feel to it, Kalos has some nice French countryside, and some of the towns in Galar are decidedly British. But the nature of the games often demand that they insert biomes, cultural elements, or creatures in the region that have absolutely nothing to do with wherever they are basing the region on. I'd much rather see the region taking in real-world inspiration on a town-by-town level, which it already kinda does but kinda doesn't. Put in a big British city in the region, for instance, and revel in the British setting for that one city, but when they need to have a decidedly-not-English desert next door, with Malian architecture or something, they should stop pretending we're still in Britain. When they are putting in such specific references to places that clearly aren't the UK, it results in quite a mismash.
Take the town of Stow-on-Side in Galar, for instance. It's a dry, dusty mountain town perched on high cliffs, whose main attraction is the outdoor market where spices and tropical fruits are sold under the cover of parasols to shield the vendors and goods from the baking sun. I'm no UK native or expert, but it doesn't look like anything in Britain to me. Its architecture is reminiscent of a South American mountain town, if anything. So what is it doing in a region based on the UK? Or even, how is the region based on the UK when it has places like that in it? Heck, the name is very UK-like, it sounds like a cozy British town, but when a place is Somewhere-on-Side it explicitly means there's a river called Side running through it, and there clearly isn't. Stow-on-Side tacks a British name on a Peruvian village. It's as if the town was designed independently of the region it's in, and it's jarring. The places that look like they're in the UK work nicely with the narrative that says they're in the Poké-UK, but the places that look like they belong elsewhere kinda shatter the illusion - or makes me question why the narrative insists they're in the Poké-UK at all. Same goes for the decidedly Eastern dojo in the upcoming DLC. Again, it's fine that they have a dojo, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Poké-UK culture. By putting pagoda towers on the Isle of Armor, Game Freak has already given up on the UK setting, so why is it still going for that crown-and-armor theme?
My go-to game for examples of things done better than Pokémon, Breath of the Wild, pulls this off great. The desert town looks nothing like the volcano town, and neither look like the water town or the mountain town. They all do the things that feel natural for the environment they are in. That game's world has Aztec-style temple ruins in the jungle, Polynesian-style straw huts in the tropical beach town and small Swiss cottages in the freezing mountains, and it feels natural. This all works because they're not, for instance, framing Hyrule as Fantasy Mexico, even though there are locations reminiscent of Mexico in it. That would have clashed badly with the other elements which explicitly aren't Mexican. Granted, there's the caveat that different biomes are inhabited by different peoples, with their own cultures and their own architecture, but, well, that's not too different from the real world, is it? People in deserts have different ways of life than people in tall mountains, even within the same country. When gameplay considerations mandate that deserts are placed right next to tall mountains, in a region based on a country which doesn't have either, the cultural impact needs to be adapted likewise. And then it stops looking like the country they started out with, instead it starts looking like somewhere else entirely, and that's where it clashes for me.
So by basing their regions on single countries, Game Freak are setting up restrictions they can't even follow through with. Sure, they're getting very good vibes out of it for the locations that match the base country - again with the English or French countrysides of Galar and Kalos, the beaches of Alola, or the tall skyscrapers of Castelia City, but they step out of the boundaries when they add elements that have nothing to do with those countries. And that eager willingness to step out of the boundaries whenever necessary makes me question why the boundaries are meant to be there in the first place. Why pretend you're basing a region on New York when you add volcano caves and oni to it? Why pretend you're in the Britain, then add a town that would look more in place in Peru? Why have a sandy desert on a Hawaiian island? Such departures from the setting makes the setting feel half-baked. It's not the place it pretends to be, so why pretend it's that place at all? Can't they invent a Galarian culture and architecture from the ground up, instead of using British imagery as a crutch they're willing to toss away half the time anyway? Or, well, "toss away" is a stretch, they're merely replacing it with a Japanese or Peruvian or Egyptian or Mexican crutch ... you get the idea.
So yeah, for the next gen: Please, let us have a generic region. One that could be a little bit of anywhere, with design inspirations taken from various places when the need arises. Attaching the whole region to one real-world place gives too many restrictions, and when they are broken anyway it just feels jarring. Stick to the established restrictions, or cut them off entirely.
Don't get me wrong, I think they're sometimes pulling it off pretty well. Alola generally has a nice Polynesian feel to it, Kalos has some nice French countryside, and some of the towns in Galar are decidedly British. But the nature of the games often demand that they insert biomes, cultural elements, or creatures in the region that have absolutely nothing to do with wherever they are basing the region on. I'd much rather see the region taking in real-world inspiration on a town-by-town level, which it already kinda does but kinda doesn't. Put in a big British city in the region, for instance, and revel in the British setting for that one city, but when they need to have a decidedly-not-English desert next door, with Malian architecture or something, they should stop pretending we're still in Britain. When they are putting in such specific references to places that clearly aren't the UK, it results in quite a mismash.
Take the town of Stow-on-Side in Galar, for instance. It's a dry, dusty mountain town perched on high cliffs, whose main attraction is the outdoor market where spices and tropical fruits are sold under the cover of parasols to shield the vendors and goods from the baking sun. I'm no UK native or expert, but it doesn't look like anything in Britain to me. Its architecture is reminiscent of a South American mountain town, if anything. So what is it doing in a region based on the UK? Or even, how is the region based on the UK when it has places like that in it? Heck, the name is very UK-like, it sounds like a cozy British town, but when a place is Somewhere-on-Side it explicitly means there's a river called Side running through it, and there clearly isn't. Stow-on-Side tacks a British name on a Peruvian village. It's as if the town was designed independently of the region it's in, and it's jarring. The places that look like they're in the UK work nicely with the narrative that says they're in the Poké-UK, but the places that look like they belong elsewhere kinda shatter the illusion - or makes me question why the narrative insists they're in the Poké-UK at all. Same goes for the decidedly Eastern dojo in the upcoming DLC. Again, it's fine that they have a dojo, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Poké-UK culture. By putting pagoda towers on the Isle of Armor, Game Freak has already given up on the UK setting, so why is it still going for that crown-and-armor theme?
My go-to game for examples of things done better than Pokémon, Breath of the Wild, pulls this off great. The desert town looks nothing like the volcano town, and neither look like the water town or the mountain town. They all do the things that feel natural for the environment they are in. That game's world has Aztec-style temple ruins in the jungle, Polynesian-style straw huts in the tropical beach town and small Swiss cottages in the freezing mountains, and it feels natural. This all works because they're not, for instance, framing Hyrule as Fantasy Mexico, even though there are locations reminiscent of Mexico in it. That would have clashed badly with the other elements which explicitly aren't Mexican. Granted, there's the caveat that different biomes are inhabited by different peoples, with their own cultures and their own architecture, but, well, that's not too different from the real world, is it? People in deserts have different ways of life than people in tall mountains, even within the same country. When gameplay considerations mandate that deserts are placed right next to tall mountains, in a region based on a country which doesn't have either, the cultural impact needs to be adapted likewise. And then it stops looking like the country they started out with, instead it starts looking like somewhere else entirely, and that's where it clashes for me.
So by basing their regions on single countries, Game Freak are setting up restrictions they can't even follow through with. Sure, they're getting very good vibes out of it for the locations that match the base country - again with the English or French countrysides of Galar and Kalos, the beaches of Alola, or the tall skyscrapers of Castelia City, but they step out of the boundaries when they add elements that have nothing to do with those countries. And that eager willingness to step out of the boundaries whenever necessary makes me question why the boundaries are meant to be there in the first place. Why pretend you're basing a region on New York when you add volcano caves and oni to it? Why pretend you're in the Britain, then add a town that would look more in place in Peru? Why have a sandy desert on a Hawaiian island? Such departures from the setting makes the setting feel half-baked. It's not the place it pretends to be, so why pretend it's that place at all? Can't they invent a Galarian culture and architecture from the ground up, instead of using British imagery as a crutch they're willing to toss away half the time anyway? Or, well, "toss away" is a stretch, they're merely replacing it with a Japanese or Peruvian or Egyptian or Mexican crutch ... you get the idea.
So yeah, for the next gen: Please, let us have a generic region. One that could be a little bit of anywhere, with design inspirations taken from various places when the need arises. Attaching the whole region to one real-world place gives too many restrictions, and when they are broken anyway it just feels jarring. Stick to the established restrictions, or cut them off entirely.
Expanding on this monstrous takedown which is lagging my phone as I type...So uhh... Remember that thing I hyped up as not coming for a while? Well I actually got it done much faster than expected! Keep in mind what you are about to read was designed to be shared many different places, so it repeats some stuff I've said before on this very thread. I also think it makes sense here since it's way too big for the "Little things that annoy you" thread and has a number of pretty spicy takes littered throughout, hell the entire thing is in response to what I perceive as an increasingly popular sentiment.
Without further ado, Yung Dramps presents...
An Exhaustive Breakdown on the Detrimental Nature of
ULTRA SUN AND ULTRA MOON
Please read each section in order, top to bottom!
I’m gonna be fair to these games. Even I can admit that they actually did develop and flesh out the Alola region and mechanics in some really neat ways. My favorite new addition is probably Mantine Surf, it’s an entertaining and well-presented minigame with a great competition element to see who can do the gnarliest tricks and rack up the highest score. I also really love the Battle Agency despite it not being the most popular. It’s basically the Battle Factory, which is why it’s so awesome. Alola Photo Club is also a cool proto-Trainer Cards I guess.
There’s also... Well... Uh...
I’m not gonna say that’s where the nice things I have to say about these games end, but it is the end of the unconditional nice things. This means that from this point forward, the few remaining things these games do right come with huge caveats that ultimately either cancel out or outright supercede any good will those extra things could’ve generated. But before we get to the bad things that were done, let’s go over what wasn’t done...
While I love Sun to death, I’ve also come to recognize that people have some fairly notable issues with these titles, even if they didn’t bother me personally. I’ve seen everything from complaints about the slow start on Melemele, the generally higher-than-average cutscene count, crappy encounter tables making certain Pokemon pointlessly obtuse to obtain, overly linear route design, Rotom Dex being a little too chatty, so on and so forth. Again, none of these things bother me personally, but I still would’ve liked and appreciated the Ultra titles for minimizing and getting rid of these roadblocks wherever possible so those who didn’t like that stuff could come a few steps closer to loving this region as much as I do.
But nope, for all these things I mentioned Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon either didn’t fix those problems or didn’t fix them enough to satisfy those who made the complaints to begin with. A lot of the encounter %s are still wack, Melemele still goes by pretty slowly with stuff like the mandatory Trainer’s School session not being altered, and most egregiously of all the infamous cutscenes weren’t really trimmed down at all, if anything the issue is now worse as those extensive dialogues are being used to tell a vastly inferior story. Another issue that got unquestionably worse was Rotom-Dex, who went from being kinda charming to becoming even more chatty and forcing the player into the nigh-mandatory Roto Loto mechanic that could be used to cheese the game in absurd ways with no other parallel in the franchise from omni-boosting to recharging Z-Moves. And as for the issues people had with linearity... we’ll get to that.
Either way, compare this to how Platinum tried to improve DP’s atrocious performance wherever it could and added those sorely-needed extra cross-gen evos and their lines the originals’ Pokedex needed (although tbf this shouldn’t have been a problem to begin with, more a case of DP sucking balls than anything), or how ORAS revamped some of the key players of the original RSE cast to make them much more well-developed and memorable. And BOTH of those examples were able to do this while also adding new and exciting pieces of content to explore and play through, the same sort of content that large parts of USUM had to be mutilated to fit in. But hey, at least that stuff is mostly good, right? After all, earlier I mentioned some of the extra features I like in these games. Well, here’s the thing about those additions; those were the exceptions.
Up until this point you’ve had to digest bigass blocks of text. Well now it’s time for your eyes and brains to rest somewhat, for as I dissect the crappy extra features and locations of these games and explain why none of them were worth the time and effort invested it’ll be done in bullet-point form!
- Part 1: The New Areas
- Pikachu Valley: The landmark personification of “Wha..?”. In every sense of the word, it has no compelling purpose: It doesn’t expand Alola’s worldbuilding in a meaniningful way, it doesn’t provide any really engaging side activities aside from a new Poke Finder spot, it’s just an empty, boring shrine to the mascot of the franchise. The most notable thing about it is that by scanning the correct QR code you can get the Ash Hat Pikachu and the Pikashunium Z. Wait... Does that mean they made an entire new location for this specific purpose?! If so, holy crap what an abhorrent waste of resources!
- The Kantonian Gym: Y’know what? As a worldbuilding junkie this is actually a pretty cute concept, a mock gym for Alola residents to experience what the Gym Challenge is like is a clever addition that gives Malie City a little more pizazz. And yet, just like Pikachu Valley, albeit to a lesser extent, it’s just kinda there. I guess you can fight a few trainers with typical middling NPC teams, but that’s about it, all you really get in return is a fake gym badge despite having to pay 1,000$ to enter the facility to begin with. You don’t even fight Ryuki as the “Gym Leader”, just some random Black Belt with a single Machoke. When was the last time you heard anyone say “Man, the Kantonian Gym made some great memories for me” or “Dude, you NEED to buy the Ultra versions to experience the Kantonian Gym”?
- The Ultra Space Locations and Ultra Megalopolis: I put them all together because they have the exact same problem. They look nice, have some solid music, extra bits of lore and a super duper sparkly epic and strong Ultra Beast/Necrozma at the end, and yet at the end of the day they’re just freaking corridors! This was Game Freak’s chance to address the complaints about the relative linearity of the originals by adding new areas with dungeons and other places to explore and traverse before getting to the main event and they blew it! The absolute worst offender is Ultra Megalopolis, an entire futuristic city with a heavy, almost cyberpunk-like atmosphere reduced to a hallway to Ultra Necrozma without a single enterable building or so much as a freaking side street. And don’t even get me started on the absolute jokes that are legendary encounters in this game, with every single one from Mewtwo to Giratina, from Rayquaza to Yveltal using the same handful of stock locations with only the most bog-standard attention to detail, and what would you know they’re still corridors. ORAS at least had a few of them (Ho-Oh and Lugia, Heatran, Regigigas) hang around on the Hoenn map, and even the Mirage Island legends got their own little biomes, it wasn’t that much but it was better than this. Going back to the Ultra Beasts in particular and the whole theme of sacrifice with these titles I genuinely preferred how they were handled in the original Sun and Moon. Sure you didn’t get your fancy corridors, but instead a neat little story about helping Looker and the gnarly-looking amnesiac secret agent Anabel stop an Ultra Beast invasion, travelling around Alola to do so. I’m not going to pretend it was some mindblowing experience or storyline but at the very least it was overwith relatively quickly, gave you extra copies of the version exclusives for trading purposes and even netted you an extremely nice 1,000,000$ completion award. And now with that out of the way we can move on to Part-
- Dividing Peak Tunnel: Wait, what? This was in the original Sun and Moon, what gives? Hold on... In those games you just entered and came out the other end automatically because it was just a basic-ass tunnel with nothing of note, but in these they for some reason made it a full location you have to spend the time to traverse manually. Well, ok, if that’s the case then I’m willing to bet that they probably added something new, maybe expanded it to have some things to- This was literally just to facilitate a cutscene with the Ultra Recon Squad. I mean yeah, you can catch Wimpod and Kecleon in here, but that’s it, that is literally the only other thing that happens in this “new and improved” tunnel, it was all-in-all “””expanded””” primarily to give the URS a scene which could’ve easily been slapped on when you come out at the other end!! Oh and don’t worry, I’ll get to those bozos later, but for now we gotta move on to Part 2 of this section, for real this time.
- Part 2: New Gameplay Additions
- Mina’s Trial: That’s right boys and girls, before we even get into postgame content we gotta talk about a brand new final trial! And wouldn’t ya know, it’s a complete waste of time that drags the final stretch of the game down! For starters its mere presence and placement after the Ultra Necrozma battle creates the “extra gym tacked on after the villain plot climax” problem which I hated in games like Platinum and ORAS, except this is the only main series ”enhanced” game to my knowledge to create that problem when it didn’t previously exist. Then there’s the trial itself, which involves flying around Alola and rematching previous Trial Captains to make a flower or whatever. All of these fights are underwhelming 3 Pokemon washes and it generally feels like an afterthought, especially when you look at the teams and realize they’re just leveled-up, fully evolved versions of battles they had in the original Sun and Moon, except in those games they were completely optional and let you learn more about the Trial Captains in the process of finding and battling them. Then there’s Totem Ribombee, who I’ll get to in a later section.
- Ultra Space Ride: I’ve already explained in depth how hard the actual Ultra Space locations suck, but what about the minigame to reach them? Well since these titles apparently decided they hadn’t defaced the originals enough already, they went ahead and added segments where the game temporarily becomes Superman 64 with you flying through bloody rings on the back of either Solgaleo or Lunala. Unlike Mantine Surf there is no strategy, no addicting push to replay it and get the best performance possible, you just keep going and going and going until you find the right ring, go through it, get your legendary or relatively easy shiny and rinse and repeat until you’ve got everything or have stopped caring.
- Rainbow Rocket: This was it, the big headlining postgame attraction of these titles, above Mantine Surf, above the Battle Agency, above even any of the Ultra Space exploration stuff. An interdimensional army of Rocket goons led by Giovanni and 5 other returning villains from Maxie and Archie to Lysandre from timelines where they succeeded with their plans AND caught their respective mascot legends in the process have now set their sights on Alola, with you and some of the other big cast members including Lillie and Guzma having to stop them. Such an awesome fanservicey premise that ties into the alternate dimension lore both Alola games have been steadily building up, and the ultimate result is just really mediocre. While comments could be made about the design and traversal of the Rainbow Rocket hideout, the bulk of the issues with this postgame story come down to the fact it missed 85-90% of the point of big crossovers like this: Having all these characters with different backgrounds, ideals, goals and personalities interact. Throughout the entire story the only villains shown on-screen so much as talking to each other are Maxie and Archie, which barely even counts since that was a pre-established rivalry dating back to the original Gen 3 games. Everybody else is deliberately gated off to their own rooms, delegated to blurting out the bare basics to get the people who haven’t been keeping up with the franchise since they existed and making callback lines (e.g. Lysandre doing Xerosic’s “oops you fired the Ultimate Weapon” shtick) to get the people who do remember them to grow those nostalgia boners without saying or doing anything beyond that. Well... With one exception. Ghetsis is probably the one RR villain I’d say was mostly done justice, starting his appearance right off with a plan to manipulate Giovanni himself and take over the organization, and after he’s defeated comes the infamous scene of him tackling and threatening to kill Lillie, the one extremely memorable cross-generation interaction in an arc which should’ve been filled to the brim with them that makes it clear how messed up Ghetsis is even compared to the other baddies, followed by another great and wonderfully cathartic scene of Colress warping in and freaking Hakaing the bastard out of the way. If every villain got moments like these along with time to just talk amongst themselves with appropriate personal clashes Rainbow Rocket would’ve been more than worth the price of admission. But even besides that there are other problems. For one thing, while giving everyone their respective mascot legendary does facilitate some challenging fights, it’s also really contrived in some instances when you think about it. For example, Maxie and Archie imply via dialogue that their plans still would’ve backfired on them with Maxie being swallowed up by a fissure and Archie being consumed by the ocean, just now without a player character or similarly powerful trainer to clean up their mess. Ok, that’s an interesting idea... So why do they still have Groudon/Kyogre respectively? There’s also the matter of the remixes: unlike every other returning character (i.e. Battle Tree cameos) except for Red and Blue, Game Freak felt fancy with the Rainbow Rocket cast and decided to give them all remixes of their original themes, and I’m sorry but most of these are, at the very least, inferior to their original versions. Maxie/Archie’s new theme sounds inebriated compared to the bombastic and imposing RSE and ORAS mixes, Lysandre’s is also too slow, Ghetsis’ new theme doesn’t sound anywhere near as ominous as the original and oh dear god what did they do to Cyrus? Giovanni’s is pretty neat, but then again he technically never had a unique theme up until this point so who knows, if he did Rainbow Rocket may have butchered it too!
So yeah, I’ve made it pretty clear that I don’t appreciate a lot of the new things USUM tacked on. But hey, even if it’s not new content I like, it’s still more stuff to do. Someone out there will enjoy Rainbow Rocket or traversing Ultra Space in spite of their flaws, it’s just more extensions to a really great main campaign... Is what I would say if we lived in that hypothetical fantasyland. Yes folks, it’s finally time to address the elephant in the room...
Let me get this out of the way: I am not going to be explaining why the altered story of Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon is a horrendous blemish on the originals because frankly everybody already knows why. This behemoth of a paper is already getting ludicrously long and I don’t need to spend even more time serving as the 500th explanation as to how Lillie was neutered, how the climax and ending were bungled up beyond repair, the lack of attention to detail in trying to make Lusamine more sympathetic, so on and so forth. Instead, I am going to be discussing a certain recent justification that I have heard floated around more and more, something to the effect of:
“The story downgrades don’t matter for the gameplay was improved”
Alright... Listen. I don’t wanna be that guy. I don’t wanna be the fat, sweaty loser who’s like “Your opinion is wrong” because every single person has their own priorities as to what is important to them when playing this series, videogames as a whole really. And in normal circumstances, I would be inclined to agree with this statement. First and foremost, I come to Pokemon for exciting battles, memorable creatures to catch and train and a vibrant, fun world to facilitate all that and other activities, I am not expecting nor will I ever expect Casablanca-tier plots. But with all that said, this rationale infuriates me. This statement, in my eyes, is built off the idea that story and gameplay in videogames are mutually separate things which have no bearing on one another, and maybe if we were still in the 80s where videogames weren’t really seen as capable of telling complex stories it would be true to some extent. But Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon are just a little under 3 years old, released in a time where stories in games are held in higher regard than ever before, where they are seen not just as an excuse for the gameplay loop to get off the ground but as a complement to it, good stories enhancing fun gameplay and vice versa. With the catastrophic damage done to the storytelling in these titles, even USUM’s totally unaltered battles with only a vague connection to the plot feel just a bit more hollow, with that sensation varying across the game. Take the Mt. Lanakila duel with Gladion; in both games it’s more or less the same minus USUM giving him Zoroark over Weavile, but it’s far more impactful as a send-off to the character in the originals since you just got done with the out-of-control Mother Beast, finally liberating the family from her declining mental state rather than in USUM where you fought some unrelated light monster and an entire trial beforehand. Looking at other games, RSE and ORAS’ final Wally battles aren’t really all that different team-wise minus the latter incarnation having Mega Gallade over Gardevoir, but the ORAS battle is universally recognized to be the superior rendition and by extension more fun due to the much greater emphasis placed on Wally’s arc in the touched-up plot of those games.
Everything I just said would still apply even if USUM had the most perfect, most majorly improved, most well-balanced and magnificent boss fights in the series. But once again we don’t live in that hypothetical fantasyland. In fact, here comes my potential big hot take of this essay: With a handful of exceptions, I think that on the whole USUM’s boss design took a huge dip in quality from the originals. But before I elaborate on that, I want to first be fair and list some of the examples of...
And that’s it! Now to riff on the...
- Boss Fights That Got Better
- Gladion #1 uses Illusion fake-out strats with Zorua and Zubat.
- The Grand Trial Olivia battle has Anorith and Lileep over Nosepass and Boldore. Gives her more types than just pure Rock including a nice safeguard against Water Pokemon.
- Guzma #2 at Po Town has 3 Pokemon instead of 2.
- Boss Fights That Got Worse
- In his Grand Trial, Hala has Machop over Mankey. This is the first of many, MANY arbitrary Pokemon replacements purely to show off the new and shiny Pokedex expansions... Except Machop was already in the original SM dex, so they made this change just for the hell of it. Either way, Mankey was a way more unique pick that gave Hala his own flavor than Machop yet again. There’s so many of these changes that I’d look even more insane than I already do if I broke down why each and every one of them suck, so I’m just gonna do what IMO are the other two worst offenders, starting with...
- Guzma has Ariados replaced with Vikavolt. This is emblematic of another dumb category of changes I like to call “muh difficulty” changes. Sure, Vikavolt is a much stronger opponent that even gets him some more Alola representation, but I actually think Ariados is a much more fitting pick for Guzma, fits in better with the whole cast-aside trashy underdog theme and gave an infrequently seen Pokemon some time to shine. To me, harder absolutely does not equal better, and there are some much bigger examples of this coming right up. But first...
- Lusamine has Mismagius replaced with Lopunny. Not Mega Lopunny, mind you, base form Lopunny. If I have to explain to you why this is a tremendous downgrade you either know nothing about Pokemon or are just incredibly horny.
- Now let’s get on to some of the new Trial fights, starting with Totem Araquanid! As you might imagine, I prefer Totem Wishiwashi for several reasons. For starters, the build-up to this fight was way cooler, fighting all the little Wishiwashis before confronting the fused form in an epic stormy battlefield as it dramatically leaps out of the water... Good stuff! Yeah, sure, technically Totem Araquanid has the same intro, but it just ain’t the same and feels really lazy, especially considering it still shows Solo form Wishiwashi leaping out when it appears. Also while I’m normally not the guy who complaints about underleveled boss fight Pokemon (eg Ghetsis’ Hydreigon), I think the fact that Totem Wishiwashi was the minimum level to be in its School form was a nice touch, whereas Totom Araquanid is 2 levels lower than it should be to actually evolve. Again, normally I wouldn’t care that much, but all in all this trial feels like a hasty retooling into an overall lamer boss for the sake of being different rather than having an actual cool idea.
- Something similar applies with Totem Alolan Marowak. Possibly more challenging, but Totem Salazzle was a much more surprising and funny pick for the Totem mon considering the prior cutscene and making Marowak the new one just adds an extra bit of redundancy seeing as one of the mid-trial fights already had you fight Alolan Marowak.
- Yet again something similar applies with Totem Togedemaru. Again, more challenging and well-constructed overall probably, but I’m sorry, Totem Vikavolt’s set-up and just the Pokemon itself is way, WAY cooler, even despite using physical moves it has an omniboost to make up for it somewhat.
- And finally there’s the new Totem Ribombee and it’s OK I guess? It’s actually a pretty neat little fight, but like with many, many other things it comes with a caveat, that being it replacing Totem Kommo-o as the final Totem battle. Look, I have nothing against Ribombee, it’s a cute lil bug who I’m using in my current Sun playthrough, but man facing off against the 600 BST warrior dragon in the hauntingly silent innermost reaches of Vast Poni Canyon was a way more badass send-off to the Island Trial than a souped-up early route bug. Doesn’t help that the trial preceding it was tedious and unfitting as hell with a very “slapped-together” feeling.
- Now all of that is bad enough, but even if all of those things didn't exist, the next 3 boss fights are the worst downgrades by far and drop down these games’ boss design several pegs on their own, all the other stuff notwithstanding. Get ready for the Wretched Replacements, in progressing order from very bad to “oh god why”:
- Hala being replaced with Molayne at the Elite Four: Again, nothing against Molayne, but out of all the possible Alolan Elite Four contenders he’s at the very bottom rung. Hala was an awesome and kinda poetic pick, of course a sumo wrestler who was your first Grand Trial opponent would make sense to be part of the final challenge to test how far you’re come since then! Meanwhile Molayne, while a PC technician, doesn’t also mean he’s a good battler, and as such he seems like he’d be way more busy than Hala. This is the epitome of an arbitrary change with no real point other than to force a difference even if the ultimate result is way more lame. But this is just a warm-up compared to the next two...
- Hau replacing Kukui as Champion: Yet again, I have absolutely nothing against Hau, he’s a fun character who gets a bit too much hate for being the typical friendly rival scapegoat. And I’ll give him this: compared to other mid-gen Champion changes it’s nowhere near as bad. It’s not as poorly justified and random as Wallace replacing Steven and it’s not as borderline sacriligious as Trace replacing Blue. That said, a downgrade is still a downgrade, and this one has several reasons behind it. For starters if you ask me I’d say Kukui has the much better team with monsters like Magnezone, Snorlax, the starter strong against yours and even a Lycanroc lead that sets up Stealth Rock, whereas a lot of Hau’s choices are kind of middling, including having one less move on his starter compared to Kukui. In addition, and I’m sorry for this funny malasada boy, but you just aren’t Champion material. Aside from the fact Kukui canonically fucks, he also was the one who went through all the effort of building up a Pokemon League to rival Kanto’s , the most active and lovable professor character by far that the franchise had ever seen up to this stage, including having a pre-existing battle career as the Masked Royale, with all that in mind of course he’d be the one of the best picks to test Alola’s first Champion to see if they could hold the title properly. At the same time though he was also a really cool surprise, especiallhy since again up until this point we were used to professors just sitting in their labs, studying Pokemon and rarely doing much beyond that. Finally, there’s the music, more specifically Hau’s souped-up rendition of his battle theme. Aside from being IMO an inferior composition it also completely misses the point of what made Battle at the Summit so special: Seeing as you were the one to take the throne and defend your title against Kukui, it was YOUR theme, so mixing in the song of this other guy who really isn’t that much more significant than Kukui or Lillie wasn’t a good call. But even all of THAT is nothing compared to by far the biggest boss downgrade in the entire game...
- Ultra Necrozma replacing Mother Beast Lusamine: Yup, I’m not kidding, nor is that a typo. Because as much as people love to jerk off this excuse of a boss fight for its difficulty, its entirely artificial, horrendously balanced difficulty, that is the only, and I mean the ONLY thing it has over Mother Beast as a conclusion to the legendary plot. In every other aspect, it is a pathetic, downright insulting nosedive in quality. Nothing needs to be said about the story aspect and build-up about it, some dumbass light monster that hijacks the plot right at the climax will never be able to trump the backdrop of the progressing decline and damage Lusamine has caused, cumulating in her becoming an unsightly monstrosity and rejecting everything she has worked to protect out of insanity, nor is Necrozma just fucking off to Victory Road to be caught with a basic-ass Pokeball a more satisfying conclusion than Lusamine being freed and Lillie heading off to Kanto to get her cured. As for the fight itself, while Mother Beast’s battle has some flaws like static Pokemon selection compared to fight #1 including a conspicuous lack of Nihilego, Ultra Necrozma projectile shits all over what Gen 7 tried to do with its Totem fights using actual strategies by going full garbage ROM Hack mode and facing the player with a 10+ level higher Legendary from the last boss with +1 to all stats and all its moves just being offensive and nothing more. The difficulty is not created via skillful use of items, a well-balanced team, helpful allies or any kind of unique strategy, it’s literally just “hurr durr big difficulty spike scary strong monster that kills butt with big moves!!!”, a cheap shot and nothing more. All of this is not good design, nor is bottlenecking players into a select few Pokemon like Zoroark just to survive the onslaught and in that particular Pokemon’s case to game the AI. In case I haven’t made it crystal clear by now: HARDER. DOES. NOT. EQUAL. BETTER. If people are legitimately so desperate for a “truly difficult” fight (which imo this series has already produced on multiple occasions, including in Gen 7 itself, without having to resort to such absurd lengths), then WHY ARE YOU PLAYING POKEMON?!
Deep breathing, deep breathing... Ok, so assuming you haven’t already checked out by this point you’re probably wondering when this massive block of text is going to end. Well that end is coming pretty soon, but it seems like there are three more sections to go, right? Well, not exactly. For all intents and purposes, consider the upcoming Ultra Recon Squad portion “optional”, as in it’s just a break for me to rant and “The Releases Stuck In Time” is where the final sliver of actual critique kicks off. Either way you resume reading, let’s get going once more starting with...
There are very, and I mean VERY few characters in Pokemon I outright hate. Some are definitely far less thought out and developed than others (see pretty much every XY character aside from Lysandre and maybe AZ), but at most they’re just kinda boring. And in a generation filled with some of the best characters in the entire series from Gladion to Lillie to Guzma to even most of the Trial Captains and Kahunas being awesome, this makes how much I loathe the Ultra Recon Squad stick out even more. When looked at objectively as characters they’re already XY-tier boring, barging into random cutscenes to blurt exposition about Necrozma with no real rhyme or reason, as well as not developing in any meaniningful way. But more than anything, the reason why I titled this section the way I did, is because the URS is emblematic of nearly every single problem these games introduced or didn’t fix, including but not limited to:
I could go on, but the point has been made, and frankly I just want this to be overwith. If you bothered to read this portion, NOW we will move on to talk about why Ultra Sun and Ultra moon are...
- The broken plot with their ridiculous “oh btw we have the other mascot lol” dump after Lusamine and Guzma already jumped into the ultra wormhole
- The lack of fixes to the linearity issue despite having chances to introduce more exploration-heavy locations via Ultra Megalopolis
- The totally arbitrary changes such as the aforementioned Dividing Tunnel “””expansion””” just to accomodate another cutscene with them
- The garbage new boss fights. First off, you don’t even fight 2 of the 4, and the other half you do fight are 1. Version exclusive and 2. Don’t use anything other than one Pokemon, that being either Furfrou or later Poipole, not Naganadel, Poipole. They barely even qualify as boss fights, they unironically make the GSC Rocket Executives look badass in comparison, and yes, that includes Archer as well. Did I mention that the singular Poipole for both Dulse and Zossie uses Nasty Plot, two physical moves and Toxic? In the last fight? Despite having Venoshock in a previous encounter?
In the aftermath of these titles’ release, the most resounding question, the most common cirticism was a singular question: Why? Why were these games made not even a year after the originals? Why did they feel the need to change so many things arbitrarily or even for the worse? And possibly the biggest “why” of all, why weren’t they just DLC for the originals? Since then the debate over whether these games were necessary rages on and continues to marr their reputation, but I feel like everyone involved in this debate (or at least the instances I’ve seen) consistently miss a crucial point.
The last true traditional “enhanced version” prior to USUM’s release was Pokemon Platinum, which launched in Japan on September 13, 2008. Early that very same year on January 31st, Super Smash Bros. Brawl was also released on the Wii, and among other strengths and shortcomings one of its most damning flaws was the infamously unstable online infrastructure that made matchmaking hell for many. While Pokemon never experienced anything like that, the fact of the matter was that even in these early years where online gaming was in in its infancy and DLC had yet to truly catch on as a mechanism to enhance games post-launch, Nintendo was pretty behind the curve even for that standard on their flagship console for the generation, let alone a handheld. Even if the wizards at Game Freak figured out a way to make Platinum’s extra content and improvements DLC for Diamond and Pearl it probably wouldn’t have been worth it, so it made sense to stick to releasing it as a separate “definitive edition” of sorts.
But even as DLC and online gaming continued to grow, the second games of the generations that came after worked to justify themselves. Black and White 2 were outright sequels to the original games which in many ways did better jobs at being “alternate retellings” than what USUM was hyped up to be, dramatically changing the story structure, introducing new characters and giving new roles to the first BW games’ cast in ways that stayed true to their original depictions. X and Y didn’t get any sort of sequel or enhanced version despite many people thinking even today they should’ve got something in hindsight, but instead Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were released, remakes of Gen 3 that were effectively new regions with new characters and other stuff. Compared to those examples USUM did by far the poorest job of justifying its existence as a separate game despite coming out even later at a point where even the 3DS could handle DLCs and free updates just as fine as the high-end machines. And whether it was because of the fan outcry or an internal change of mind, Game Freak must’ve realized this at some level because now with Sword and Shield we’ll be getting exactly what many people wanted USUM to be: DLC that will make SWSH better games on their own rather than forcing people to “upgrade” for move tutors or whatever with a new version. And sure, maybe some of the main game’s faults wont be fixed this way (which isn’t even guaranteed anywhere), but even if that’s the case the opposite still applies, none of the good things about SWSH in its current state will risk being tarnished. They most likely will never stoop to USUM’s low of being a bizarre frankenstein that tramples over its own triumphs to deliver mediocre to bad content and story additions, that is scorned for its perceived redundancy and outdated money-grubbing.
And yet...
It’s no secret by this point that I think Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon are a complete mess that are only held up by the threads of the originals that weren’t defiled. To me their additions are mostly worthless, and what was given is not nearly enough to compensate for what was lost in terms of the enjoyment and structure of the main campaign.
But that’s the key phrase here: To me. As weird and downright baffling as it can be sometimes, I’ve come to accept and appreciate that these games have developed a following. I’ve met and talked to people who found Ultra Necrozma exhilarating, who loved to battle through Rainbow Rocket and face off their childhood nemeses, who couldn’t get enough of the Ultra Space locations and learning more about the Ultra Beasts through them. I know and regularly talk to people for whom these titles raised the original Sun and Moon from middling to some of the best in the series. And for that, in spite of all my reservations and criticisms, some more rational than others, I could never begin to dream of a world where they didn’t exist, and I am grateful even that whatever these games did was enough to get more people to see Alola as the wondrous, well-developed region it is and derive as much joy from it as I do from the base games. Don’t forget some of the really great discussions generated in the wake of their release as to what people find important in Pokemon games and how the two versions of Alola met or didn’t meet those standards. Therefore with some hesitance, but not too much, I tip off my hat to you, Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra M-
WAIT!!!! Since the climax no longer has you going to confront Lusamine in Ultra Space, that means Guzma never gives his “Ya’ll are stupid” line...
...I take all of that back these games are irredeemable trash and should’ve been cancelled
Ultra Space was handled like garbage, specially theareas that the Ultra Beasts reside in. Besides being functionally just hallways, the fact that there was barely anything to explore and gaze at from the worlds of these creatures who are supposedly half-not even Pokemon, and were indeed hyped up as such during the story of both SM and USUM (besides Guzzlord's chomping on future Alola, I'll admit that was pretty cool), is pure disappointment. I was expecting more fron the Ultra Wormholes and it honestly just feels lazy
This. Not to mention, the whole minigame ...ugh. The motion controls you have to go to an obscure building at the opposite side of the map to change are bad enough (and it's, like, textbook bad), but the gameplay of it is awfully tedious, with a lengthy bit of tunnel gameplay before every random encounter, and you have to exit Ultra Space completely to get another shot at a portal - complete with the unskippable introductory cutscene and everything.
It's as if the concept artists spent eight months to come up with the design for Ultra Space, leaving the programmers only two months to actually implement it. Looking at the concept art for Ultra Megalopolis, for instance, it's clear that they had some nice ideas, but the implementation is outright tragic. And SwSh takes that situation and ramps it up to a whole game.
Yung Dramps
awesome gaming
Y'know, upon really thinking about it the Ultra Space locations weren't really that insane. Ultra Ruin you mentioned was cool, I also like Ultra Jungle with even the trees looking like flexing muscle men (also the funny theme), but that's really about it, should you take out the Ultra Beasts they become a lot more generic, albeit nice-looking. It doesn't help they didn't even give locations to Naganadel, Blacephalon and Stakataka. Like Codraroll says, it feels like the artists had big ideas but when it came time for the dev team to put those ideas into a playable form they just couldn't get it to work well for whatever reason. Speaking of his remark, damn I shoulda added that bit about how tedious the start-up is and the ridiculous way to disable motion controls!
I specifically remember Pheromosa's area. A desert with gems embedded into buildings on the background. That huge boulder you had to push at some point (hey wait a minute where do the Pokemon for the Poke Rides show up from in Ultra Space? Whatever). I thought it might have some sort of alien looking civilization or ruins of some sort, even if it was just a town and then some sort of "shrine" for the Ultra Beast... But no, all I got was pushing glorified rocks around, a cutscene, and an overgrown albino cockroach
I believe they mentioned in an interview that Unova was a "melting pot", cause Masuda saw a ton of ethnic groups there. That's why Unova has a ton of Pokemon not native to Americas. As for the Legendary Pokemon, I wonder the reason why other countries took the place of Legendary Pokemon is because America does not have any "mythology" to begin with. It was founded in 1776, and only a bit over a 200 years old. It was pretty modern compared to Japan, which is thousands of years old.
Alola was clearly done with a tourist vibe. Their hotels and travel bureaus everywhere, players are strongly encouraged to take photos, and the tourist trainer class is everywhere. In contrast, Saffron City, based on Tokyo, the largest city in Japan, has none of that, despite being an extremely popular tourist location.
As for and Stow and Side, I looked here. The author couldn't find an exact location for Stow on Side, Glimwood Tangle, and Ballonea. Maybe they just wanted some diversity? As for Kalos and Norse Mythology, the Franks were a group of people who did worship Norse Mythology so its not completely off.
I did feel Galar felt less a tourist trap. Lot of Pokemon are references to British Culture, trends and events ( Polteageist, Duraludon, Obstagoon, Fossil Abominations, Starter Pokemon, as well as Zacian and Zamazenta ) . Yeah, I know they are some oddballs like Galarian Corsola line, but I think the Pokemon in Galar are significantly more accurate than Kalos than Alola. I'm not against out of place inspirations, but it does feel weird that you have orangutans and Pandas in Hawaii and France respectively.
I wonder if my feeling of that comes from the fact that Jame Turner, a British man, was the art director, and was able to help provide an accurate depiction of British culture. Maybe if they had someone from Hawaii and France work as a major role the games development, there would more accurate?
Maybe they use real-life locations because its just easier map from it rather than designing it from scratch?
Thing is, they have an accurate depiction of British culture wherever they try to depict British culture ... but sometimes they choose to depict entirely different cultures instead. This really undermines the overall British concept, if that makes sense. Galar is decidedly British in some places ... but then they throw in some exceptions so glaring one wonders what the point of the Britishness of the rest of the game is. Take the upcoming Isle of Armor expansion, for instance. It's supposedly inspired by the Isle of Man. Why, then, does the Kubfu plot center around a dojo? With pagoda-style battle towers? I have nothing against Japanisms in general, but one can't help but think they clash badly with the supposed overall concept for the region. It's not like it would be impossible to find more British-looking equivalents if they had wanted to. Or alternately, basing the Isle of Armor on someplace else than the Isle of Man.
...and therein, I guess, lies the problem of basing the region on one country in the first place. The need for diversity means they have to make exceptions, and lots of them. They're sticking to the Britain concept for as long as it's convenient, but they will happily override the concept whenever they feel like it, and that makes the concept feel pointless in the first place. If what they want to do can't be done within the restrictions they set up, why do they bother with the restrictions at all? Sure, fill the region with Japanese dojos and Peruvian mountain towns and Germanic fairy-tale forests and Alpine spa towns, but don't give the region an overall British setting then. It makes Galar feel 70% Britain and 30% whatever the heck they felt like. The exceptions from the base concept are uncommon enough to stand out as glaring, but still done so often that the base concept feels heavily watered out and ultimately unnecessary. If they're only going to take it to 70%, why bother at all?
Because, well, some degree of "melting pot" will always be necessary. Even the regions based on Japan, where the creators have to be pretty familiar with the geography and culture, feature some foreign biomes such as deserts, which Japan doesn't have. Similarly, they usually have to find inspirations for creatures and legends outside of Japanese mythology. They always need to mix and match a bit, so why not go all out with the mixing? Have a region where orangutans, camels, penguins, pigeons, and dragons live side by side without pretending they're all native to one corner of the real-life globe. If they absolutely need to use real-life cultures as a crutch in the design process, split the region into 4-5 parts and base each bit on one place. Make the southwest take part in Italy, the southeast take part in India, the northeast in Australia and the northwest in Korea, for instance.
Honestly, despite being a fan of the Galar region, I don't think Game Freak mapped the locations in the games to real life locations particularly well. The article you linked claimed 3 different locations were all influenced by Gloucestershire (Forest of Dean, Cotswolds, and Sandford (fictional town filmed in Gloucestershire)) which is only one unimportant county with no notable cities in it, and I'm guessing the author of the article lives there. I can see where he's going with it because Postwick does resemble a village in the Cotswolds very well, and the hill range is famous for having many valleys that fill with fog on cold mornings so it totally could be the inspiration for the Slumbering Weald... except that it's not where it should be on the Galarian map.
In fact, nothing is where is should be on the Galarian map. Circhester is almost definitely based on Bath Spa, which is located almost parallel to London on the west coast where London is on the east coast. In Galar, it's located to the southeast of Wyndon (the map is inverted so it should be to the east of it here, but not to the south). Also, Wyndon isn't even located on the coast like it should be, it's right in the middle of the land. Motostoke is based on some hybrid of Liverpool and Manchester, which is reasonable because they border each other, but these cities are also far south of Hammerlocke even being separated from it by a section of the Wild Area, when Hammerlocke is probably based on York, which is very close to both Liverpool and Manchester.
And it's not improved by looking at the landmass of Galar itself, because no locations line up well if you do it that way either. Spikemuth lines up with Kent, one of the only areas in the UK which doesn't have a run down grungy city like Spikemuth is. Stow-on-Side lines up with Gloucestershire which as previously mentioned is a range of rolling green hills.
Galar's a cool region but it's really difficult to see where the inspiration actually comes from for most of the places, and this is partially due to some really weird design choices, namely only using England and not using Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland. I can see them wanting to stay out of including Northern Ireland for political reasons, but Wales and Scotland are part of the same landmass as England is, so excluding them from the Galar region is such a strange choice. Especially because the mountain ranges of Scotland are perfect for the Ice-Type area (whereas Bath Spa Town is not and it's a huge reach), and Ballonlea could actually make complete sense in Wales with some modifications, since it's where fae mythology reached its heights.
Overall Galar gives off the impression of over-reliance on James Turner's knowledge where additional research would have made the games more British. And there's enough to work with in Britain that they could have made a diverse and interesting region only using Britain as a country (perhaps I'll try it myself one day), it's on Game Freak that the final product isn't particularly British.
See, I'm in two minds about this.
I'm generally quite fond of the idea of regions in the Pokemon world being analogues to their counterparts in the real world (as my post a few pages back alluded to). But you're right that the frequent culture crossovers and mis-matches, like having a lion Pokemon native to France or a Pokemon based on an Egyptian sarcophagus native to New York City, are pretty jarring. But I think it's kind of unavoidable if they choose to make regions correspond to real places, which I think gives the Pokemon world a charm and character it wouldn't have if it was just any old planet.
Like, the Muskedeers from Gen 5 are French-inspired. Then one generation later we had a region based on France, where they would have fitted FAR better. Now presumably GF didn't plan far enough ahead to know ahead of time that the Gen 6 games would be France-inspired, and if they had they might have opted to reserve the Muskedeers for the next games (as was done with Shellos and Gastrodon).
And this raises a slight problem with, for instance, the Tao trio, who have a strongly Chinese influence - what if Gen 9 is based on China? Maybe they'll make the region's legendaries based off African mythology. But what if Gen 10 is set in Egypt?
So the choice is leaving a perfectly good design to gather dust for the next three generations until they set a game in a region appropriate to it, or just saying "screw it" and using it anyway even if it doesn't make the most sense to have wild pandas and lions running around France. I think I'd prefer to have good designs, even if they don't perfectly match the region they're in.
(And you can always rationalise it a bit and say that oh, maybe Litleo and Pyroar actually do originate from whatever Kenya-analogue we'll get in the fifty-ninth generation and just happened to spread to Kalos, and now it's more common there than any other region and that's why it's considered a Kalos native. I think these things are largely gameplay and story segregation, tbh.)
As to locations in regions: I'm more willing to be lax with that, particularly when you consider that each region tends to have biomes for various Pokemon types (most regions have some sort of volcanic area, some kind of icy cave, a jungle, a desert, an ocean, and so on) regardless of how much sense it makes. Unova in particular is hilariously unlike the real New York, but it's one of my favourite regions all the same. I live in London and thought that Wyndon was a pretty hollow and sucky representation of the place (and why on earth the main entrance to the city is some impassable tundra is beyond me). But it doesn't bother me hugely. Again, I'd rather have a somewhat-interesting region even if it doesn't align perfectly with what's there in real life. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and the real-world link gets fans interested and provides a fun starting point for at least some of the Pokemon that live there.
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There is the third and more logical choice, though, which is "don't make the region specifically about France, so that pandas and lions wouldn't look so hopelessly out of place". To sum it up on three lines, that's what I'm kinda annoyed they aren't doing. If they want France, lions and pandas wouldn't fit. If they want lions and pandas, France wouldn't fit. So why insist on keeping the French theme for the entire region AND to have lions and pandas in it as well?
Yung Dramps:
Sorry took a while to respond to your post, it was big so I left it for the weekend. Not going to respond to everything, obviously, but I do want to quickly first say this is a well put together overview of the issues with USUM that many people have had and I agree with most of the points (and ones I don't are minor points).
Now onto some of the things I wanted to respond to:
HOWEVER, I can also understand why these changes are done: because if they weren't done the region would be tedious and same-y looking. Real life environment is kind of boring as its usually the same few types of terrain for miles, especially true for major cities. One thing I tell myself is that there's another reason we call Unova "Poke-New York", Kalos "Poke-France", and Galar "Poke-UK" aside being a joke. It's because it's not that these regions are those places put into the Pokemon world, rather the regions are those places Pokemon world equivalence. Pokemon takes place in a world where magical creatures that control the elements can be captures in a pocket-sized orb and bond together with humans to love, play, and work. Pokemon are seemingly as intelligent as an average person but are more instinctual, the wildlife environments are their home as cities & town are human's homes. And much like how humans would change things to adapt to them, I could see how people have both adapted and terraformed their environment to match their needs possibly resulting in strange environments in certain places (like random deserts, jungles, and arctic areas).
When they say Pokemon is based on a region, I actually think of it the way you suggested: they're taking this generic place with certain iconic locations and placing it in Pokemon. They'll likely keep the iconic locations, maybe even add in a few from other places they feel fit in or may need for justify having a certain Pokemon in the game, and then work from there mostly keeping the environments the same but then having some radical changes here and there to spice up the adventure. I say, don't look too hard at a region through a looking glass; instead of critiquing what it changed appreciate what they decided to include from that real world location.
... Though I will grant I can't help but feel anytime they include a Japanese-based feature they're either pandering to their home audience or doing so to make them feel more comfortable in the region.
BTW Poipole is from Ultra Megalopolis so we haven't seen Blacephalon's and Stakataka's home world. Though we do have concept art that was used for merch and from what I could tell Blacephalon is from someplace that is constantly shooting firework explosions up into the sky and Stakataka is from a forest world.
Sorry took a while to respond to your post, it was big so I left it for the weekend. Not going to respond to everything, obviously, but I do want to quickly first say this is a well put together overview of the issues with USUM that many people have had and I agree with most of the points (and ones I don't are minor points).
Now onto some of the things I wanted to respond to:
Pikachu Valley: As you said, waste of time and shameless shrine to the series mascot. Heck, even if you brought your own Pikachu there's nothing for it. They could have maybe thrown in a Pikachu family move Tutor that taught Pikachu all the Egg Moves it could get (aybe throw in a reference to Cosplay Pikachu by letting your Pikachu learn its exclusive moves). However the dumbest part of the whole place is the trailer Pikachu run out of.
They could have maybe used it for a mini-game, but instead you just watch as Pikachu run out of it. They keep count so of course you're curious what happens when you get to 1k Pikachu. The answer? NOTHING! Yeah, sure, it was my choice to do so with no prompt I would get something, but if you're going to keep count I kind of expect some pay off aside the guy being impressed I watched that many Pikachu run out of the trailer.
Another idea, post game give the player a Shiny Pichu Egg. Actually, that's another thing which bothers me about the Pikachu Valley is it kind of feels unbelievable. Okay, fine, I can understand there being no Raichu (though once again would have been nice if we did and they're just keeping watch or something, acting as guards), but you're telling me with ALL of these Pikachu around there's not one Pichu? Not even a Pichu Egg? All these Pikachu are platonic friends? Heck, I'd also throw in some of the other Pikaclones just for variety sake. As long as most of the residents are Pikachu you can call it Pikachu Valley.
The Kantonian Gym: The biggest disappointment for me was that it was such an obvious place for a cameo. Just have Lt. Surge one day be in the Gym, not as a Gym Leader, just as one of the normal trainers as he's amused with the inaccurate recreation. Not only that they could have him remember your character was the one he gave an autograph to.
Also, if the Badge isn't going to do anything, don't give me the Badge. What's the point? Just have him give like Pearls or Big Pearls (since Vermillion is a port city the "Gym Leader" could say he collected a lot of pearls when he was over at Vermillion so giving them out as a reward in replacement for a Badge).
The Ultra Space Locations: Not even going to bother mentioning Ultra Megalopolis as there's nothing more to say (we don't even see another resident aside from the Ultra Recon Squad members). But I do want to touch on something you said: that you'd rather do the Looker missions again. And, yeah, why didn't they add onto the Looker missions instead of chopping it? Have Looker asks the player to help fight off the Ultra Beast as he did in the original game, but instead of catching them (you'd be forced to knock them out) they'd run back through an Ultra Wormhole. While that would finish the Looker mission, you could then go to the Ultra Recon Squad and they could help send you to the Ultra Beast's home world. And while I would have liked if the areas were as big as any other dungeon in the game, I think doing this would have been understandable why the area was small.
As for the other Legendaries, specific environments where you originally battled them would have been nice but if that couldn't done would have preferred if I was just teleported to a random place in Alola where the battle takes place:
They could have maybe used it for a mini-game, but instead you just watch as Pikachu run out of it. They keep count so of course you're curious what happens when you get to 1k Pikachu. The answer? NOTHING! Yeah, sure, it was my choice to do so with no prompt I would get something, but if you're going to keep count I kind of expect some pay off aside the guy being impressed I watched that many Pikachu run out of the trailer.
Another idea, post game give the player a Shiny Pichu Egg. Actually, that's another thing which bothers me about the Pikachu Valley is it kind of feels unbelievable. Okay, fine, I can understand there being no Raichu (though once again would have been nice if we did and they're just keeping watch or something, acting as guards), but you're telling me with ALL of these Pikachu around there's not one Pichu? Not even a Pichu Egg? All these Pikachu are platonic friends? Heck, I'd also throw in some of the other Pikaclones just for variety sake. As long as most of the residents are Pikachu you can call it Pikachu Valley.
The Kantonian Gym: The biggest disappointment for me was that it was such an obvious place for a cameo. Just have Lt. Surge one day be in the Gym, not as a Gym Leader, just as one of the normal trainers as he's amused with the inaccurate recreation. Not only that they could have him remember your character was the one he gave an autograph to.
Also, if the Badge isn't going to do anything, don't give me the Badge. What's the point? Just have him give like Pearls or Big Pearls (since Vermillion is a port city the "Gym Leader" could say he collected a lot of pearls when he was over at Vermillion so giving them out as a reward in replacement for a Badge).
The Ultra Space Locations: Not even going to bother mentioning Ultra Megalopolis as there's nothing more to say (we don't even see another resident aside from the Ultra Recon Squad members). But I do want to touch on something you said: that you'd rather do the Looker missions again. And, yeah, why didn't they add onto the Looker missions instead of chopping it? Have Looker asks the player to help fight off the Ultra Beast as he did in the original game, but instead of catching them (you'd be forced to knock them out) they'd run back through an Ultra Wormhole. While that would finish the Looker mission, you could then go to the Ultra Recon Squad and they could help send you to the Ultra Beast's home world. And while I would have liked if the areas were as big as any other dungeon in the game, I think doing this would have been understandable why the area was small.
As for the other Legendaries, specific environments where you originally battled them would have been nice but if that couldn't done would have preferred if I was just teleported to a random place in Alola where the battle takes place:
Articuno at the peak of Mount Lanakila.
Zapdos inside Blush Mountain's Geothermal Power Plant.
Moltres at the top of Wela Volcano Park.
Mewtwo in Resolution Cave.
Raikou/Entei in Lush Jungle.
Suicune in Brooklet Hill
Lugia/Ho-Oh in Maile Garden.
Regirock outside the Ruins of Abundance.
Regice in Mount Lanakila's Icy Caves.
Registeel in Thrifty Megamart (Abandoned Site).
Latias/Latios on Exeggutor Island.
Kyogre/Groudon on Poni Breaker Coast.
Rayquaza at the Altar of the Sunne/Moone.
Uxie outside Maile City's library.
Mesprit in Memorial Hill.
Azelf outside Royal Avenue's Battle Royal Dome.
Dialga/Palkia at the peak of Mount Hokulani.
Heatran in Diglett's Tunnel.
Regigigas in Aether Paradise.
Giratina in Hau'oli Cemetery.
Cresselia in front of Po Town's Shady House.
Cabalion in Poni Gauntlet.
Terrakion in Ten Carat Hill.
Virizion in Verdant Cavern.
Tornadus/Thundurus at
Landorus in Berry Fields.
Reshiram/Zekrom at the Lake of the Moone/Sunne.
Kyruem in Plains Grotto.
Xerneas/Yveltal outside the Ruins of Life.
Zapdos inside Blush Mountain's Geothermal Power Plant.
Moltres at the top of Wela Volcano Park.
Mewtwo in Resolution Cave.
Raikou/Entei in Lush Jungle.
Suicune in Brooklet Hill
Lugia/Ho-Oh in Maile Garden.
Regirock outside the Ruins of Abundance.
Regice in Mount Lanakila's Icy Caves.
Registeel in Thrifty Megamart (Abandoned Site).
Latias/Latios on Exeggutor Island.
Kyogre/Groudon on Poni Breaker Coast.
Rayquaza at the Altar of the Sunne/Moone.
Uxie outside Maile City's library.
Mesprit in Memorial Hill.
Azelf outside Royal Avenue's Battle Royal Dome.
Dialga/Palkia at the peak of Mount Hokulani.
Heatran in Diglett's Tunnel.
Regigigas in Aether Paradise.
Giratina in Hau'oli Cemetery.
Cresselia in front of Po Town's Shady House.
Cabalion in Poni Gauntlet.
Terrakion in Ten Carat Hill.
Virizion in Verdant Cavern.
Tornadus/Thundurus at
Landorus in Berry Fields.
Reshiram/Zekrom at the Lake of the Moone/Sunne.
Kyruem in Plains Grotto.
Xerneas/Yveltal outside the Ruins of Life.
Mina's Trial: Now I like that they gave Mina a Trial and don't mind the way they did it. Does it bog the game down, maybe a bit? But I more looked at it like it was a victory lap then them stretching gameplay time out.
Ultra Warp Ride: I've said it before and I'll say it again, they added one or two too many mechanics. Get rid of the electric orbs which slow you down & get rid of the warp hole tiers and I think it would have been much better (also let us start with analog control with the option to use motion controls).
Rainbow Rocket: I wished it wasn't kept to the confines of Aether Paradise.
Ultra Warp Ride: I've said it before and I'll say it again, they added one or two too many mechanics. Get rid of the electric orbs which slow you down & get rid of the warp hole tiers and I think it would have been much better (also let us start with analog control with the option to use motion controls).
Rainbow Rocket: I wished it wasn't kept to the confines of Aether Paradise.
Like after seeing what unfolds on TV and to the Aether Paradise you're contacted by Wicke who tells you she's trapped in Aether Paradise but she contacted someone at the Aether Foundation building on Route 8 to help you free them. You go to Route 8 and meetup with Colress who explains before going to the Aether Paradise there was other similar signtures appearing around Alola and those should be investigated. When you get there you'll team up with some NPCs and battle a few Rocket grunts causing trouble nearby. After that you then meet the villain leaders and what they're doing where they are: Archie was sent to Seafolk Village to get boats to cause sea travel disruptions (Hapu & Mina help the player), Maxie sent to Wela Volcano Park to gather energy from the volcano (Kiawe & Olivia help the player), Cyrus sent to Hokulani Observatory to create communication interference (Sophocles, Molayne & Acerola help the player), Ghetsis sent to Shady House to try and recruit Guzma and Team Skull (Plumeria & Nanu help the player), and Lysandre sent to Heahea City to steal the Dimensional Research Lab's technology and research (Mallow, Lana, & Kahili helping the player). The villains would have a quick interaction with the player before being teleported back Aether Paradise. Colress then contacts you and tells you a new signal just appeared in Iki Town. Getting help from Hau, Hala, and Ilima with the Team Rocket grunts, you then meet Giovanni who wanted to meet the trainer that he heard was getting in his way and invites the player to the Aether Paradise before teleporting away. Before I move on, just so we have interactions between the villains, I think a fun thing to do would be, after foiling the plans of the first villain who just teleports away, after foiling the plan of the next villain the previous villain teleports in to recall them having a quick back & forth before both teleporting away.
This leads to arriving to the Aether Paradise (with Lillie & Colress, though Colress seemingly vanishes upon arriving) and you'll have to battle your way inside, getting a quick scene of Faba talking with the last villain who plans you foiled. They go inside Rocket Castle and you battle (and defeat) Faba who pretends he was being mind-controlled and lets you go inside Rocket Castle. Inside you'll see the first and last villains who plans you foiled talking with each other. The last one suddenly teleports away as Giovanni takes his place, him welcoming the player & friends and explainign if they want to rescue Lusamine they'll need to defeat all the villains. Giovanni would then have a quick interaction with the first villain you foil and both teleport away. It continues as it did in the games (except you can challenge the villains in any order, Ghetsis getting his own room) with Lillie staying in the main room to provide free healing & Guzma appearing later to provide his help. But just before you face the final villain you see they're talking with Lusamine. Lusamine teleports away and the battle and defeat the final villain. Note, whatever order you face Ghetsis, upon his defeat he'll reveal he's holding Wicke hostage but that's when Colress appears and reveals he's been following the player and teleporting the villains back to their home world once you defeated them; Wicke would then either go along with Colress (having her own invisibility suit, she was trying to sneak around when Ghetsis caught her) or go with the player to the main room if Ghetsis was the final villain.
With the final villan gone you go back to the main room to find Guzma knocked out and Lillie gone. Colress and Wicke join in as you wake up Guzma and he explains that Lusamine appeared to him and Lillie before sending out a strange Pokemon which knocked him out. Colress says Giovanni is in the basement and the player going in alone as Colress plans a way to restore Aether Paradise to normal and Wicke tends to Guzma's injuries. In the basement you find Giovanni, Lusamine, and a captured Lillie. Lillie tries warning the player something is wrong with Lusamine, a Nihilego then appearing from a wormhole and fusing with her to become the Mother Beast and you battle (and this time she also has a Nihilego she uses to battle with). Lusamine is defeated and she unfuses with the Nihilego, Giovanni dissapointed in the outcome and teleports Lusamine & Lillie away to have a 1-on-1 against the player. And with Giovanni defeated, he relents and turns Aether Paradise back to normal and teleports away himeself. Lillie and Lusamine were teleported to the main room where Colress, Wicke, and Guzma were as the player joins back with them to wrap up the story (don't worry about Lusamine, she wasn't fused with Nihilego so she just needs some antidote and a good night's sleep to fully recover). And of course we end with Giovanni looking on from outside the Aether Paradise, wondering which world he'll bring his evil to next before teleporing away.
Addressing your concern I put in little moments here and there for the villains to not only interact but let the player decide which villain interacts with who (thus giving it some replayability).
This leads to arriving to the Aether Paradise (with Lillie & Colress, though Colress seemingly vanishes upon arriving) and you'll have to battle your way inside, getting a quick scene of Faba talking with the last villain who plans you foiled. They go inside Rocket Castle and you battle (and defeat) Faba who pretends he was being mind-controlled and lets you go inside Rocket Castle. Inside you'll see the first and last villains who plans you foiled talking with each other. The last one suddenly teleports away as Giovanni takes his place, him welcoming the player & friends and explainign if they want to rescue Lusamine they'll need to defeat all the villains. Giovanni would then have a quick interaction with the first villain you foil and both teleport away. It continues as it did in the games (except you can challenge the villains in any order, Ghetsis getting his own room) with Lillie staying in the main room to provide free healing & Guzma appearing later to provide his help. But just before you face the final villain you see they're talking with Lusamine. Lusamine teleports away and the battle and defeat the final villain. Note, whatever order you face Ghetsis, upon his defeat he'll reveal he's holding Wicke hostage but that's when Colress appears and reveals he's been following the player and teleporting the villains back to their home world once you defeated them; Wicke would then either go along with Colress (having her own invisibility suit, she was trying to sneak around when Ghetsis caught her) or go with the player to the main room if Ghetsis was the final villain.
With the final villan gone you go back to the main room to find Guzma knocked out and Lillie gone. Colress and Wicke join in as you wake up Guzma and he explains that Lusamine appeared to him and Lillie before sending out a strange Pokemon which knocked him out. Colress says Giovanni is in the basement and the player going in alone as Colress plans a way to restore Aether Paradise to normal and Wicke tends to Guzma's injuries. In the basement you find Giovanni, Lusamine, and a captured Lillie. Lillie tries warning the player something is wrong with Lusamine, a Nihilego then appearing from a wormhole and fusing with her to become the Mother Beast and you battle (and this time she also has a Nihilego she uses to battle with). Lusamine is defeated and she unfuses with the Nihilego, Giovanni dissapointed in the outcome and teleports Lusamine & Lillie away to have a 1-on-1 against the player. And with Giovanni defeated, he relents and turns Aether Paradise back to normal and teleports away himeself. Lillie and Lusamine were teleported to the main room where Colress, Wicke, and Guzma were as the player joins back with them to wrap up the story (don't worry about Lusamine, she wasn't fused with Nihilego so she just needs some antidote and a good night's sleep to fully recover). And of course we end with Giovanni looking on from outside the Aether Paradise, wondering which world he'll bring his evil to next before teleporing away.
Addressing your concern I put in little moments here and there for the villains to not only interact but let the player decide which villain interacts with who (thus giving it some replayability).
Lusamine's Team Switch:
Molayne Replaces Hala: My gripe at the pick was choosing Hala. There was a VERY important reason why Hala was an Elite Four member aside being a Kahuna: Hau. Hau's goal from the start was to beat his grandfather. In the original Sun & Moon, your first Title Defense is against Hau, which means he has accomplished his original goal! Sure, his new goal is beating you to become Champion, but at the very least you know while he may not defeat you he did defeat his longtime goal of wanting to beat Hala. Now in USUM, it's awesome it's Hau you fight for the Champion position first instead of Kukui, but with Hala no longer part of the Elite Four you have to be told by Hau he defeated his grandfather. Much like with it better to see Lillie talk back to Lusamine in SM then hearing it happened off-screen in USUM, the subtle realization of Hau's achievement felt better since it would have had to happen just before he challenge the player. In SM I can picture Hau leaving Hala the last Elite Four member to battle, and upon defeating him he then goes up to face the player. Awesome! In USUM, he defeats Hala probably in a private match and then has to go through Victory Road and the Elite Four before challenging the player. That feels less dramatic.
Ultra Recon Squad: I don't get it, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!
"Oh well they never battled before so they're not good at it"
THAT'S NOT A GOOD EXCUSE! They worked with Lusamine and the Aether Foundation long enough, they could have said they quickly learned that using MORE THAN ONE POKEMON was probably a good idea.
You battle them four times in the story. Here's an idea how to tell a story with them via their battles:
No, that would be the one(s) who made that change.
Molayne Replaces Hala: My gripe at the pick was choosing Hala. There was a VERY important reason why Hala was an Elite Four member aside being a Kahuna: Hau. Hau's goal from the start was to beat his grandfather. In the original Sun & Moon, your first Title Defense is against Hau, which means he has accomplished his original goal! Sure, his new goal is beating you to become Champion, but at the very least you know while he may not defeat you he did defeat his longtime goal of wanting to beat Hala. Now in USUM, it's awesome it's Hau you fight for the Champion position first instead of Kukui, but with Hala no longer part of the Elite Four you have to be told by Hau he defeated his grandfather. Much like with it better to see Lillie talk back to Lusamine in SM then hearing it happened off-screen in USUM, the subtle realization of Hau's achievement felt better since it would have had to happen just before he challenge the player. In SM I can picture Hau leaving Hala the last Elite Four member to battle, and upon defeating him he then goes up to face the player. Awesome! In USUM, he defeats Hala probably in a private match and then has to go through Victory Road and the Elite Four before challenging the player. That feels less dramatic.
Ultra Recon Squad: I don't get it, WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!
"Oh well they never battled before so they're not good at it"
THAT'S NOT A GOOD EXCUSE! They worked with Lusamine and the Aether Foundation long enough, they could have said they quickly learned that using MORE THAN ONE POKEMON was probably a good idea.
You battle them four times in the story. Here's an idea how to tell a story with them via their battles:
First Battle: Have it be a Double Battle (you know, because there is TWO of them) each having 4 Pokemon. However have each Pokemon be in a different kind of Poke Ball. This is to show that they're not only researching capturing and using Pokemon but also how the ball can have different effects, a subtle hint (or you can have them outright say it) that this is where they get the idea to make a special Poke Ball that capture Ultra Beasts.
Second Battle: This can be a single battle against Dulse/Soliera. They use the same two Pokemon they had before but this time they have a third: Poipole in a Beast Ball. This shows they have made the Beast Balls, they successfully captured an Ultra Beast, and they have now just tested to see if an Ultra Beast will follow commands which it did.
Third Battle: This is the battle where they're defending Aether Paradise. This is another Double Battle. This time each use 3 Pokemon each and while its revealed that Zossie/Phyco have also caught a Poipole in a Beast Ball, Dulse/Soliera reveal they evolved their Poipole into a Naganadel!
Fourth Battle: Dulse/Soliera test you to see if you're worthy to use their Solgaleo/Lunala to Ultra Warp Ride. In addition to Naganadel and the two other Pokemon they had they added on two more Pokemon for a total of five.
Fifth Battle (Post Game): Adding in a Fifth Battle cause it makes sense. Instead of them just thanking you for helping them, Zossie/Phyco challenge you to a single battle noting they've never battled you 1-on-1. They have evolved their Poipole into Naganadel and caught 3 more Pokemon giving them a full party of 6.
Battle Tree: Finally, after the fifth battle you can challenge the two that are in your game in the Battle Tree.
Second Battle: This can be a single battle against Dulse/Soliera. They use the same two Pokemon they had before but this time they have a third: Poipole in a Beast Ball. This shows they have made the Beast Balls, they successfully captured an Ultra Beast, and they have now just tested to see if an Ultra Beast will follow commands which it did.
Third Battle: This is the battle where they're defending Aether Paradise. This is another Double Battle. This time each use 3 Pokemon each and while its revealed that Zossie/Phyco have also caught a Poipole in a Beast Ball, Dulse/Soliera reveal they evolved their Poipole into a Naganadel!
Fourth Battle: Dulse/Soliera test you to see if you're worthy to use their Solgaleo/Lunala to Ultra Warp Ride. In addition to Naganadel and the two other Pokemon they had they added on two more Pokemon for a total of five.
Fifth Battle (Post Game): Adding in a Fifth Battle cause it makes sense. Instead of them just thanking you for helping them, Zossie/Phyco challenge you to a single battle noting they've never battled you 1-on-1. They have evolved their Poipole into Naganadel and caught 3 more Pokemon giving them a full party of 6.
Battle Tree: Finally, after the fifth battle you can challenge the two that are in your game in the Battle Tree.
No, I say they all for the most part give the kaiju feeling. But here's the issue with that: a lot of kaiju are just an animal made bigger. And note many kaiju are based on small animals, particularly bugs, which means we normally don't see the details these animals have with their face. Part of a shock with a kaiju is that we can now see all the details of the face and when they've been grown to 1000x their size it's terrifying. However the same can't be said when you do that with a Pokemon. Pokemon are not only cartoony but we can see all the details of their face and many Pokemon they chose to grow are already as big if not bigger then a human. The kaiju feeling gets lost as we're not really seeing any new details about them. Yes, some get new additions to their design so they don't look exactly like the base Pokemon but the additions aren't enough to make the Gmax Pokemon feel like they're, say, a new evolution step. This is why I kept on banging on about them tossing Mega Evos aside because Mega Evos, at least in their designs, is what I think people actually want: super forms of a Pokemon, a form that looks like it could be made into its own evolution stage. And let me add the disclaimer this isn't true for all Gmax Pokemon and Mega Evos, but on the whole I think this is the case.
While I see where you're coming from, I also don't want them to just completely stop making regions based off real world locations. I can sorta understand some frustration for people who live in a country/city that was made into a Pokemon game then seeing these environments that aren't in their in real life. I've would like to say/joke that I work in Unova, but I can't as there's no desert in the middle of Manhattan as there is in Unova.
HOWEVER, I can also understand why these changes are done: because if they weren't done the region would be tedious and same-y looking. Real life environment is kind of boring as its usually the same few types of terrain for miles, especially true for major cities. One thing I tell myself is that there's another reason we call Unova "Poke-New York", Kalos "Poke-France", and Galar "Poke-UK" aside being a joke. It's because it's not that these regions are those places put into the Pokemon world, rather the regions are those places Pokemon world equivalence. Pokemon takes place in a world where magical creatures that control the elements can be captures in a pocket-sized orb and bond together with humans to love, play, and work. Pokemon are seemingly as intelligent as an average person but are more instinctual, the wildlife environments are their home as cities & town are human's homes. And much like how humans would change things to adapt to them, I could see how people have both adapted and terraformed their environment to match their needs possibly resulting in strange environments in certain places (like random deserts, jungles, and arctic areas).
When they say Pokemon is based on a region, I actually think of it the way you suggested: they're taking this generic place with certain iconic locations and placing it in Pokemon. They'll likely keep the iconic locations, maybe even add in a few from other places they feel fit in or may need for justify having a certain Pokemon in the game, and then work from there mostly keeping the environments the same but then having some radical changes here and there to spice up the adventure. I say, don't look too hard at a region through a looking glass; instead of critiquing what it changed appreciate what they decided to include from that real world location.
... Though I will grant I can't help but feel anytime they include a Japanese-based feature they're either pandering to their home audience or doing so to make them feel more comfortable in the region.
Expanding on this thought, another gripe I have with the Ultra Space worlds is that we don't learn anything about them aside from what we see. Like what are the unique quality of this world that we either can't see or explains how it is as it is? Exactly how does the Ultra Beast exist in some of these places; how does it thrive, have adapted, the environment adapt to the UB?
BTW Poipole is from Ultra Megalopolis so we haven't seen Blacephalon's and Stakataka's home world. Though we do have concept art that was used for merch and from what I could tell Blacephalon is from someplace that is constantly shooting firework explosions up into the sky and Stakataka is from a forest world.
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As I read these lines, I thought you were building to an interesting twist, and was disappointed when the twist never came: one of the villains Giovanni recruited was Lusamine from the original Sun and Moon.
I was thinking of doing that and honestly that could very well be the twist since, well, alternate dimensions. However I wanted to keep things simple plus remember Giovanni did say he was planning on brainwashing Lusamine so I just went off that thought where he was successful doing that.
Yung Dramps
awesome gaming
Thanks for responding Pika! Don't got much to respond to in your response other than...
Might as well use this post as an addendum of sorts: One thing I forgot to mention in the original post is that I actually preferred how OG SM handled Zygarde as well. While for some it was tedious I actually found the Zygarde Cell collection thing to be a pretty fun sidequest that encouraged you to explore Alola and pay attention to your surroundings in return for getting a cool legendary to help you on your quest, a unique challenge which doesn't require the atrocious process of actually catching a legendary. In USUM Zygarde is shoved into Resolution Cave during the postgame at 50% off the bat and the remaining Zygarde Cells and Cores to get it to Complete form are just given to you. What's even the point, then? Might as well start it out at 100% with the option to disassemble it, but even better JUST KEEP THE FREAKING OG ZYGARDE CELL SIDEQUEST!!! What was the issue, for real?
Yeah I guess it's not the worst thing ever, more than anything my issue was that it replaced Totem Kommo-o as the final trial.
Might as well use this post as an addendum of sorts: One thing I forgot to mention in the original post is that I actually preferred how OG SM handled Zygarde as well. While for some it was tedious I actually found the Zygarde Cell collection thing to be a pretty fun sidequest that encouraged you to explore Alola and pay attention to your surroundings in return for getting a cool legendary to help you on your quest, a unique challenge which doesn't require the atrocious process of actually catching a legendary. In USUM Zygarde is shoved into Resolution Cave during the postgame at 50% off the bat and the remaining Zygarde Cells and Cores to get it to Complete form are just given to you. What's even the point, then? Might as well start it out at 100% with the option to disassemble it, but even better JUST KEEP THE FREAKING OG ZYGARDE CELL SIDEQUEST!!! What was the issue, for real?
The issue (for me) is that I casually collected them during my journey through the game, and by the time I had around ~90, I had zero clues as to where to remaining ones were, as I had forgotten a majority of the locations where I picked them up at. Add on to that that for some Cells you need to be in either the day or night, I ended up revisiting around 50 to 60 locations, which took a tedious amount of time. To avoid needless backtracking you either need to have played the game quite a bit, or look at a guide, which doesn't exactly appeal to me. I rather liked the totem stickers for USUM, as they rewarded you with cool, but otherwise not very important totem pokemon. They were also quite a bit less grindy to collect.
Ah. I didn't realize that was originally a thing, but it seems that was part of the original Rainbow Rocket. Also apparently Giovanni wants to build an army of ultra beasts?
I can't help but feel that this undercuts my opinion of Giovanni. Part of why I liked Giovanni is that he felt somewhat grounded in reality. He's greedy, power hungry, and tyrannical, and like many real-world people like that, he sought to gain power and wealth through force and intimidation. Sure, he exists in a world full of animals that are far more sentient, dangerous, and exploitable than our own, but it's still easy to draw parallels with real-world criminal and/or totalitarian leaders. Even when Rainbow Rocket introduced more fantastical elements ripped straight out of superhero comics, like interdimensional conquest and a Legion of Doom, I was under the impression that Giovanni was still operating with the same general tactics, just on a much larger scale. But now that I know that Rainbow Rocket Giovanni's plan involved mind control and an alien army, his actions become too far removed from reality, and he becomes less interesting. I like my villains to be at one of the extreme ends of the spectrum from goofy, non-threatening, and/or hammy (Dr. Doofenshmirtz, Uncle Iroh before he stopped being a villain, Bowser) to a chillingly brutal reminder of the evil that exists in this world (The Beast from Over the Garden Wall, Princess Azula, Ghetsis). The original Giovanni leaned towards the latter extreme, while Rainbow Rocket Giovanni is comparatively closer to the bland center.
I would argue that having a particularly strong army would have been necessary for Giovanni to expand beyond his current situation. He's clearly no longer in position to hide behind his previous connections (since, coming into a new universe, he has none), but lacks the resources to actually fight a world allied against him. If I remember correctly, he basically kidnapped the other bosses during their celebrations and then convinced them to work for him, most likely because if he tried to e.g. take Unova from Ghetsis, he would lose. So he finds a region where each section is easy to isolate and the high-tech infrastructure is so centralized it can be taken in one covert operation and intends to make a base he can strengthen his forces from. Sure, it's not a down-to-earth business move, but it's about as down-to-earth a military move as he can make.
As for focusing on UBs, I could see it being an attempt to manage his risks on future endeavours. If he's intending to get something major out of any given universe, he will most likely need to at least beat the strongest individual somehow (this is obviously the hard part, it's where he fails in USUM). By focusing his doctrine on elite forces (i.e. one admin with kartana rather than dozens of grunts with raticates), he can have a higher standard of loyalty and reduces the possibility that any one operative gets captured with their dimension-hopping tech intact (and most worlds won't be able to make an effective counterattack without at least knowing which universe the enemy base is in).
Edit: forgot about Lusamine. There's the possibility he wants a spokesperson for Alola (keeping his image up would be more important at his home base), and it's reasonable for him to expect to be able to "convince" another Team Leader to do something tangentially related to their own goals at best after the last five successes.
As for focusing on UBs, I could see it being an attempt to manage his risks on future endeavours. If he's intending to get something major out of any given universe, he will most likely need to at least beat the strongest individual somehow (this is obviously the hard part, it's where he fails in USUM). By focusing his doctrine on elite forces (i.e. one admin with kartana rather than dozens of grunts with raticates), he can have a higher standard of loyalty and reduces the possibility that any one operative gets captured with their dimension-hopping tech intact (and most worlds won't be able to make an effective counterattack without at least knowing which universe the enemy base is in).
Edit: forgot about Lusamine. There's the possibility he wants a spokesperson for Alola (keeping his image up would be more important at his home base), and it's reasonable for him to expect to be able to "convince" another Team Leader to do something tangentially related to their own goals at best after the last five successes.
I mean I get why he wants an army of powerful Pokemon. It's the focus on ultra beasts specifically that sets me off. Sure, someone trying to build an army of powerful Pokemon would naturally be interested in ultra beasts, but they would also be interested in Pokemon like Dragonite or Volcarona. The way RR Giovanni phrases it, it sounds like he's interested in ultra beasts not out of pragmatism, but because "oooh aliens are cool and strong, so if I have an army of aliens, I will be cool and strong".
Basically, it reminds me of the Bug Catcher from Brawl in the Family: