Thoughts on SuMo (and Gen 7)

Thoughts on SuMo (and Gen 7)

So I'm about 80 hours in Pokemon Sun now and while I've yet to go after the legenaries in this game I'd like to get this out of the way while I still have a fresh memory of the game.

I suppose I'll start with the story/setting. I kind of liked the story progression in this game especially with the player filling in the role of "superior rival" that Blue filled in Gen 1. My major quips about the story are how dialouge bogged the first and fourth islands were. There were periods where it kind of felt like I was reading a visual novel with how much dialouge there was for a Pokemon game. The scaling during the mid game also felt really off. By the 3rd island my team's average level was around level 38 while I was still encountering NPCs with mons around 25-30. I know Pokemon's generally an easy RPG but this was a bit much. Towards the end though, things started to really ramp up so it's not really something major; just something I wanted to mention. I liked the idea of the trials and fighting strong pokemon per type. I would like to see them take it a step further next gen and make the trials different battle types (doubles, weather, terrain, inverse, multi, etc.).

This part probably won't apply to 99% of players but for me it's what sold me on Gen 7 > Gen 6.  My favorite changes would have to be the IV judge as well as Hyper Training. Both of these make training/breeding competitive mons significatly easier compared to Gen 6. For the unaware, in Gen 6 you had to talk to an NPC to figure out the scaling for your bredded mon's base stats. This made breeding pretty tedious as you would have to hatch eggs in one town, check the results in another, then return to withdraw the parents or continue hatching eggs (at least in ORAS both the IV judge and day care were in the same area). I wish tracking effort values was more exact in this generation besides having a vague graph but it's better than nothing.

Speaking of effort values, SOS battles are also a nice boon for training/aquiring competitive mons. In Gen 6 we had horde battles find and catch mons to get their hidden abilities as well as use to train for effort values. While SOS battle have arguably made catching pokemon more difficult (if you don't use a status effect), they also hasten the process for aquring effort values and getting hidden abilites for select pokemon. They also provide mons with better IV stats the longer they last.

The small tweaks they made to the Game Mechanics and U.I this generation were also really well done. Having stats and field effects tracked for you during a battle is really nice (especially for competitive). The addtion of 3 team boxes is also cool. I'm also ok with them shifting away from Mega Evolutions in favor of Z-moves. Z-moves allow for a wider variety of mons to be potentially viable in competitive whereas Mega Evolutions not only made a few select mons viable but it kept others out as well.

I guess overall I feel positive about this generation. Story was ok but I'm much more interested to see how VGC unfold once transfers open up. I for one am really looking forward to getting 700+ mons into Gen 7.