"Why I think that Sun and Moon are the worst games yet [Long post]"

I am going to be very critical of these games. If you love SM and don't like seeing people criticize them, turn away or read at your own discretion. Note that I do not think Sun and Moon are completely without redeeming qualities; there are things I like about them, but this thread will not be the place for discussing those things. So let's dig in.Level designMy biggest issue with Sun and Moon. Alola is a small region with very little aptitude for exploration. Optional locations to explore are almost unheard of, and there is only a single true dungeon in the game (Vast Poni Canyon). The maps are heavily streamlined and lack the substance found in older games.Take Ten Carat Hill for example, one of the precious few locations to discover on your own terms in Alola. The map layout is simply a plain hallway that leads to a big empty field. It's boring. This problem is not limited to the overworld.For another example, let's take Aether Paradise and compare it to the Team Rocket hideout in Celadon City. The latter was designed like a level in a video game, with the sliding puzzles serving as obstacles. Same with the Aqua/Magma hideout in Lilycove, which used teleporters instead. The Aether Paradise has none of that. It's just empty hallways that substitute level design with dialogue. The best example of this is probably Distortion World versus Ultra Space - both of them are different dimensions, but one of them is an expansive map where you can easily get lost and need to solve a few puzzles to proceed. The other is a small, empty corridor where you read some dialogue.Between that and things like the cave entrance in Wela Volcano Park that teleports you to the top of the mountain, the elevators on Mt. Lanakila and the Exeggutor Express, there are many points in this game where I feel robbed of the dungeon content that Pokémon has (almost) always provided in the past.I want more Seafoam Islands, more Mt. Mortar, more Abandoned Ship, more Clay Tunnel. Exploring, clearing and finding secrets like rare TMs, valuable items or even legendary Pokémon within places like those is one of the most important things in Pokémon to me. It's the high point of the adventure, and Alola offers almost none of it.New major featuresNewcomers in this category include Festival Plaza, the Poké Finder and the Poké Pelago. I've seen enough discontent about Festival Plaza here to know that people are generally underwhelmed by it, so I'll try to make this short.Festival Plaza depends entirely on either grinding or luck. To get Festival Coins, you either run in a circle and answer mundane questions or play so-called minigames that simply consist of running in circles and answering mundane questions but with a time limit. The grinding in itself is not fun. You need those coins to level up your plaza and get new facilities, but what facility Sophocles offers when you level up is random.Alternatively, you can purchase your desired facility from a visiting player, but the price of any 5⋆ facility is exorbitant. You will need to answer an obscene amount of questions to afford buying a facility in this way, and thus getting what you want out of Festival Plaza depends entirely on luck (Sophocles) or grinding (buying from visitors).Now you'll probably be thinking about the Global Missions and those sweet 4000 FC payouts that made decking out your plaza a cinch. This is nice and all, but fact of the matter is that it is also not future-proof. One day Global Missions will not longer be happening, which penalizes new players immensely, and will also discourage replaying the game. Imagine if you feel like playing through the story again in a few years and there are no Global Missions to help you level your plaza. Never mind that it's also a worse catalyst for online features than the PSS, I think Festival Plaza is some of the worst content Game Freak has come up with yet.The Poké Finder essentially is not too different from Festival Plaza - luck and grinding, except now it's both. It also has no payoff unlike the Festival Plaza which at least offers some very useful perks with the right facilities.You need 1.5 million likes in order to "finish" this content and get a stamp on your trainer passport. For an optimal picture, you'll get 10-15K likes, and you'll have to be lucky to get the best Pokémon in the spot to spawn. To make things worse, there is no incentive whatsoever to switch Poké Finder spots once you've unlocked the last one. What do you get after taking hundreds of pictures of Bewear and Fearow and hitting 1.5m likes? Besides the stamp, a call feature that sometimes make the Pokémon turn towards you. There's nothing beyond this point, so like I said, there is no payoff.Now as for the Poké Pelago, I realize that many people think highly of this feature, but I just don't see it. It can be summed up as such: make the game play itself for you. What is the point of EV training and item gathering when you just start a timer and wait for your reward? There is no player involvement beyond starting the countdown and waiting to collect the spoils. It makes me miss the fun and interesting minigames and activites from older games - the Pokéathlon, which was an excellent piece of content since it provided both gameplay that was fun in itself as well as useful rewards that made it worthwhile to play. Sinnoh underground digging comes to mind, too. Even Dodrio Berry Picking does.The storyNow, common opinion is that this is the aspect in which Sun and Moon shine brightest. I'm not seeing it, but I have to say that I'm generally predisposed against core Pokémon having a narrative. I don't like being stopped by NPCs so they can spoonfeed me their dialogue. I don't like being held back from exploration (which as I said before is a huge part of Pokémon for me) and I certainly don't like it when the developers replace puzzles and map complexity with long monologues and cutscenes.However, looking into the quality of the narrative itself rather than merely its prominence in the game... my opinion of it doesn't improve. I don't think the characters are well-written or memorable. There's a relatively huge amount of dialogue on this game, but very little of it is of any substance or moves the plot forward. Lillie, Kukui and Hau love to talk without saying anything. They're usually just gushing over how cool the current location is or providing tutorials, and I don't find it interesting at all.Other characters are equally one-dimensional despite having much less dialogue. Guzma is a walking catchphrase. He does nothing important in the story except be there to serve as a boss battle, but for some reason he described himself as "your boy" once in a trailer and people started memeing like there was no tomorrow. Likewise with most of the trial captains.You see Lusamine once and talk to her for around a minute before the game gives you some very obvious hints that something is wrong with her, and then you leave. When you come back, she's suddenly crazy. Lillie, despite being so central to the game and having so much dialogue, doesn't really develop until after the first Lusamine battle and then it's kind of a 90 degree turn with no build-up. The pacing of the story is poor, and because I never felt any attachment to Lillie I also felt no payoff at the climax of it. For a bit of comparison, I don't think there's a character in Alola that develops as well as Silver does in HG/SS, or has a story as interesting as Emma from X/Y.There are many missed opportunities, such as the part where Lusamine turns into an alien fusion monster only for it to be a regular trainer battle, or the fact that Type: Null, the supposed "Ultra Beast Killer" is never actually shown on-screen interacting with an Ultra Beast in any manner. There are also some plot holes or unfulfilled plot points. Remember when Lusamine opened wormholes and the Ultra Beasts supposedly attacked people while the island Kahunas tried to hold them back? Hapu, in passing, mentions fighting them once but otherwise absolutely nothing comes of that. "Is that what that thing was that came to Poni Island? A beast? Tapu Fini and I tried to fight it, but it nearly did us both in. We did not stand a chance."On the topic of Island Trials (which I'm counting as story because they're a one-off and central to the plot), I feel that they were a very poor attempt to innovate the gym formula. The Fire and Electric trial quizzes are jokes that you can basically only get wrong if you do it on purpose, as opposed to something like Blaine's gym where even a player who has been paying attention could potentially answer incorrectly. The Water, Dragon and Ghost trials amounted to walking down straight paths while stopping at checkpoints to listen to Lana or use the Poké Finder. At no point in any trial did I feel like I actually had to think to complete it.ConclusionsThere are various nitpicks I could bring up such as the butchered fishing, the framerate issues, the lack of a National Pokédex and especially the postgame content. There are also much more subjective topics such as the Pokémon designs and the music, but let's not get into those.Overall I feel that Sun and Moon focused on the aspects that are not Pokémon's strengths (the narrative and railroading nature of it), while heavily neglecting what has made Pokémon so great to me, the exploration, seeing new places and Pokémon, the growth of my own Pokémon, and longevity through great postgame features. via /r/pokemon http://ift.tt/2ujl6AI