{"id":117,"date":"2016-11-24T02:15:18","date_gmt":"2016-11-24T07:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/?p=117"},"modified":"2016-11-24T02:15:18","modified_gmt":"2016-11-24T07:15:18","slug":"game-ramblings-26-pokemon-sun-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/?p=117","title":{"rendered":"Game Ramblings #26 &#8211; Pokemon Sun &#038; Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pokemon-sunmoon.com\/en-us\/\">More info from Nintendo\/Game Freak<\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Genre<\/strong>: JRPG<\/li>\n<li><strong>Platform<\/strong>: 3DS<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So one of the things that was continually talked about pre-release for these games was how much the 7th generation\u00a0was going to change up the formula for Pokemon. \u00a0Having now finished the game, I&#8217;m not that convinced they really changed much at all, and in a lot of ways they seem to have stripped out features to get to a simplified base to start the generation. \u00a0While I&#8217;m pretty comfortable saying that as usual, this was a fantastic game and is the best Pokemon entry that&#8217;s been released, it feels like another iterative step in the series, and not at all a big change to the formula.<\/p>\n<p>So, I guess to start, let&#8217;s look at what actually is new. \u00a0We&#8217;re in a new region, Alola, this time taking place on a bunch of islands. \u00a0The theme of a lot of the new 80 or so Pokemon in the Gen 7 Pokedex revolves around this, particularly in the large amount of legendaries available in the post-game content. \u00a0In addition, there&#8217;s a handful of Gen 1 Pokemon in new Alola forms, such as the Dark\/Normal Rattata or Ice\/Steel Sandshrew. \u00a0In all you&#8217;re talking about 100 or so new entries into your overall strategy. \u00a0There&#8217;s also a replacement to Gen 6&#8217;s Mega Evolutions called Z-Moves, super powered moves tied to type- or Pokemon-specific Z-Crystals that are found throughout the main story.<\/p>\n<p>So all that is well and good, but is largely comprised of expected changes. \u00a0From there we have to get into the kinda sort asterisk changes that were really claimed as the big steps forward, as well as some features that were removed from Gen 6 games that are definitely to be missed.<\/p>\n<p>The big one here is the change associated with gyms. \u00a0Gyms are gone! You aren&#8217;t collecting badges! &#8230;kind of. \u00a0Gyms were effectively replaced by a new captain challenge system. \u00a0Each captain challenge is a special area on each island in which you take on a type-specific challenge. \u00a0As an example, in one you are tasked with researching a series of disturbances in a lake, culminating in a series of water Pokemon fights, with the reward being a water Z-Crystal. \u00a0Long story short, they technically aren&#8217;t gyms, and technically aren&#8217;t badges, the functionality is effectively the same, going from area to area to fight type-restricted fights. \u00a0Alongside the gym changes, there&#8217;s also some big asterisks associated with changes to the Pokemon League that are effectively covered in the story.<\/p>\n<p>As far as removals go, Alpha Sapphire\/Omega Ruby extended the gameplay of Gen 6&#8217;s post-game in some smart ways that no longer exist. \u00a0 The first big one of these is the Soar feature, where you could fly on the back of Latios or Latias over the Hoenn region, giving you access to both battles against flying Pokemon, as well as a larger number of Soar-exclusive legendary Pokemon areas, and post game content. \u00a0In addition, the DexNav feature is completely removed. \u00a0This has two important consequences. \u00a0First, the per-route visual indicator of what Pokemon are available is gone. \u00a0Second, the entire hidden Pokemon feature is gone. \u00a0In general the second-screen experience is effectively only restricted to combat inputs and an always-on Town Map, which fairly heavily simplified the count of non-essential mechanics available to the player. \u00a0In addition, the removal of Mega Evolutions is at the very least curious given the amount of marketing push it received throughout the entirety of Gen 6.<\/p>\n<p>All that being said, overall I still think the game is a step forward. \u00a0In shedding some of the old mechanics, they have definitely simplified the game back to a much cleaner slate, giving them\u00a0a\u00a0good base to start with looking forward to the probable move to the upcoming Switch. \u00a0It also provides\u00a0some questions as to how they are going to handle the assumed\u00a0Gen 4 remakes when they&#8217;re ready to move in that direction. \u00a0The team at this point seems to have caught up to a lot of the type mechanics added within the last couple of generations, with a lot of the new Pokemon adopting dual-type combos never seen before. \u00a0The addition of region-specific forms also gave us curious new type combinations, lending a bit of mystery to what kind of Pokemon is coming up next when you&#8217;re told that you will be facing\u00a0a Sandslash. \u00a0If they really run with some of these features through the rest of Gen 7, we could be set for a huge jump in the quality of the Pokemon games from this point forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>More info from Nintendo\/Game Freak Genre: JRPG Platform: 3DS So one of the things that was continually talked about pre-release for these games was how much the 7th generation\u00a0was going to change up the formula for Pokemon. \u00a0Having now finished the game, I&#8217;m not that convinced they really changed much at all, and in a &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/?p=117\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Game Ramblings #26 &#8211; Pokemon Sun &#038; Moon&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":120,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,2],"tags":[15,5,14],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-3ds","category-jrpg","tag-3ds","tag-jrpg","tag-pokemon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":121,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions\/121"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.dwgames.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}