At this point, I’ve beaten the ‘main game’ (everything before the credits roll) and all of the significant postgame content. By ‘significant’, I mean everything except for the completion of the Pokédex and a few other fetch quests. Let’s dive in!
I’ve spoken at length about how I felt like the majority of Pokémon X and Y’s story was compressed to a point near the end of the game, and although Pokémon Sun feels like an improvement it still doesn’t totally satisfy me. Before completing my challenge on the final island, I felt like there was a large portion of gameplay where I was advancing the story with regards to Team Skull and the Aether Foundation without anything in between. Because of how well these portions are set up earlier on and how genuinely interesting they are it wasn’t as much of a hassle as the previous games, but it was still a bit more overwhelming than I would have liked.
When I finally got back to the final part of my Island Challenge I was pleasantly surprised by how things played out. The final Trainer I faced before the credits was challenging and put my whole adventure into perspective. After that last battle, they brought the main adventure to a close in a way that had me smiling the whole time. At this point I wasn’t entirely happy with the Aether Foundation story arc (more on that in a second), but the ending of the Island Challenge part of the story left me feeling great about the game as a whole; I almost forgot about some of the other loose ends.
Once I finally watched the credits and went through a few more cutscenes, I had the opportunity to finish off the ‘rest’ of the game (that is, the stuff that didn’t wrap up with the Island Challenge). I found it a bit weird that this particular bit of postgame wasn’t included during the main adventure, especially since it was a very significant part of the main game, and don’t think it was handled particularly well. It regards Ultra Beasts, which Nintendo featured quite prominently in their advertising, making it extra-weird that they were pretty much absent throughout the majority of the game. This is, without a doubt, the most disappointing part of an otherwise great game.
I’ll be writing my review very soon, so you’ll be able to see my impressions of the game as a whole, but I certainly have a lot to think about going into it. I feel like a lot of the initial reviews were extremely positive, perhaps because of all the hype, but I’m glad that I got to take a bit of extra time to really think about Pokémon Sun’s many successes as well as its faults. Be sure to check in for that within the next couple of days!
<< Ula’ Ula Island, Team Skull, and a Discussion about Game Difficulty
Spoilers:
Oh man, I was SO disappointed by the inclusion of Ultra Beasts in the game. There was a point during the main story when a bunch of wormholes opened up and various Ultra Beasts spilled out of them, only to be met by the Kahunas in combat, but you only have one brief encounter with UB-01 before that. Where did the Ultra Beasts go? It’s made very explicit in the postgame that the Kahunas didn’t defeat them for good, and considering how dangerous they’re made out to be nobody seems to pay much attention to them until after the credits.
After you beat the game, you get a mysterious letter and end up meeting The Looker, a member of the International Police who has appeared in many other Pokémon titles. He has been tasked with containing and protecting (read: catching) the Ultra Beasts, so he sends you out to tackle them one at a time. Each ‘chapter’ starts with The Looker telling you where the Ultra Beasts were last spotted, then you head out and try to capture them in the wild with special Poké Balls called Beast Balls. The problems? The Ultra Beasts aren’t particularly hard to catch (especially since you get tons of Beast Balls, despite the fact that they are apparently ridiculously expensive to manufacture), and there are points where you have to capture several of the same species of Ultra Beast. It doesn’t make them feel very special, and it definitely doesn’t live up to the excitement that Ultra Beasts generate throughout the main game. Sure, there are some neat story moments regarding the Aether Foundation, but for the most part it left me feeling disappointed.
The rest of the postgame is pretty much what you’d expect from a Pokémon game: filling up your Pokédex, collecting a few extra items (mostly ones that are useful in competitive play), and taking on some sort of Pokémon battling challenge (in this case, the Battle Tree where you face off against a sequence of trainers with competitive rules in place). Pokémon X and Y didn’t have a lot to do after you beat the game, and Pokémon Sun certainly has a lot more to offer. Even though I didn’t particularly like the Ultra Beast missions, it’s hard to deny that this is a pretty meaty postgame.
Thanks for sticking with me through these Adventure Logs! I’m really looking forward to starting this review, it will be interesting to see how my initial impressions of the game compare to what I know now. There were a lot of surprises, both for better and for worse!