Pokémon Ultra Moon (3DS)

Pokémon Sun and Moon took an unexpected direction with the seventh generation of mainline Pokémon titles, choosing to heavily emphasize the story and writing behind the monster collecting adventure more than ever. While some were displeased by the actual Pokémon combat and catching coming to a stop so often to tell it, the story actually featured character arcs and individuals with more depth than the series had ever attempted before. That and the wonderful tropical setting of Alola made Sun and Moon titles that stood out in a series often criticized for stagnation, but one tradition that wasn’t tossed away was the franchise’s propensity to release an enhanced version of the game a year after. Usually this game aims to rectify issues, add in more gimmicks, and make more Pokémon available, but Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon took a very odd approach and undermined that story that made Sun and Moon so special.

With Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon essentially the same game but with a few creatures and less important characters different between the two, they both follow the same story path, that originally being something similar to what Sun and Moon did. The player’s customizable character heads off on their Pokémon adventure, collecting the powerful creatures known as Pokémon across the four islands of the Hawaii-inspired region of Alola. Along they way they’ll need to prove their strength in various Island Trials, these being hosted by individuals with an affinity for a certain type of Pokémon and a trial usually tied to that type. For example, the young tech wiz Sophocles’s trial involves arranging the battery-like bug Charjabug to connect circuits while the grass enthusiast Mallow has you explore a jungle for ingredients to make a special meal. Each of these trials culminates in a battle with a special Totem Pokémon who is much larger and stronger than a typical member of their species, these boss battles usually a good enough challenge especially when the Totem Pokémon starts calling in help from other monsters that begin to deploy strategies to tear through your team of six Pokémon as best they can.

However, while this personal journey of the player is what guides many of the battles and justifies traveling to new locations, the appealing elements of the plot come from the characters who join them on their journey. The most important character is Lillie, a young lady in white who ran away from an incredibly sheltered life to rescue the helpless but mischievous nebula Pokémon Cosmog. Lillie beings almost as helpless as this Cosmog she’s named Nebby and the player serves as her escort and friend as she tries to become confident in herself and find a safe future for her little Pokémon, but soon things will catch up with her and her family enters the story for a bit of interesting drama. However, while all of this is going on, a strange duo known as the Ultra Recon Squad keep popping up as they are trying to investigate the powerful Ultra Beast known as Necrozma and how they can help their universe of darkness escape the dangers caused by this beast of incredible light. At first these seem two concurrent stories, Ultra Moon adding in this Necrozma plotline to better explore a Pokémon that was just sort of there in the original Sun and Moon, but as you begin to notice Lillie come out of her shell, interact with and learn the sad truth of the group of hoodlums pestering people around the islands known as Team Skull, and prepare to really hit the stride of what Sun and Moon’s story did to stand out, Ultra Moon tosses it all away in favor of a confused pursuit of the undercooked Necrozma threat.

Appearing suddenly and resolved rather quickly, the Necrozma diversion upends the pivotal moments of Ultra Moon’s plot trajectory, leaving Lillie less of a character as she stagnates in her development and a confused narrative about the family emerges where an abuser never learns their lesson while their victims never really act to change the situation. This souring of the story with a rather slapdash attempt to wrap things up properly with the antagonistic forces of the game denies the player some satisfcation, and while there are plenty of side characters with fun designs and personalities to sustain the player’s Pokémon journey, the character stories not only missed a chance to be touching, but actively strayed away from the previous games doing just that. With so much of the plot carried over it’s odd they’d remove one of its key aspects, but it does throw some character resolutions into a post-game plot about Team Rainbow Rocket connecting various dimensions for the player to basically face off with the main villains of the previous Pokémon games. More of a nostalgia trip with some unique battles to cap off your fight to the top of Alola’s burgeoning Pokémon League, this post-game isn’t bad but certainly not a finale to the story despite having a few bits that try to tie everything up before you put the game down.

Still, despite some disappointing directions, the story does have a leg up on most Pokémon game plots while also featuring much of the same excellent gameplay designs and appealing monsters that make this such a long standing and successful franchise. Pokémon are a wide array of powerful beasts who have various sorts of elemental affiliations or special affinities that dictate their strengths and weaknesses in a battle. Pokémon can have two types, and depending on how they line up, you might find yourself with a Flying type Pokémon who will take heavier damage from the attacks of the Electric type, but the Flying type in turn has an advantage over Pokémon in the Fighting type category. Most type relationships make sense like Fire being more effective against Ice Pokémon or Poison failing to do anything to creatures that are made of Steel, and the web of interactions between these types is the baseline of the combat system. With each Pokémon able to learn four moves, they can try to cover different type advantages with their damaging attacks, pick moves with extra effects like Body Slam having a chance to paralyze Pokémon on top of dealing damage, or they can pick a move with purely strategic value like Tailwind increasing the speed of your team for a few turns or Torment preventing the enemy Pokémon from using the same attack two turns in a row.

Z-Moves are also a special tool, these super-powerful attacks only usable once per battle and adding another consideration as you need to decide who might be the best pick for using such a useful attack and making sure you choose the best time to use it. This turn-based roleplaying game’s battles have many other elements to consider like held items that can boost stats or heal creatures, Abilities that all Pokémon inherently have that influence the fight like the koala Pokémon Komala being immune to the Sleep status, and the option to switch out creatures or fight in two on two arrangements. Building a team involves many considerations and there’s no one perfect team, and while the main game doesn’t ask for you to be too strategic to succeed, the multiplayer and post-game elements like the Battle Tree require you to get creative and tactical with the specific team of six you’ll fight with.

Collecting Pokémon is also a huge element in Pokémon Ultra Moon with there being 403 creatures considered native to the game and many more if you transfer them in from older titles. Alola is a wonderful host to the Pokémon catching process and a great setting altogether, the island chain able to tap into the tropical aesthetic while still having plenty of location diversity. You’ll find yourself in lush jungles, on a volcano, and crossing beaches as you might expect, but one island has a ranch area near a Wild West inspired town, a snowy mountain is the centerpiece of Ula’ula Island despite also having a desert area, and Aether Paradise is an artificial floating headquarters built out in the ocean. You get a nice dose of island life frequently without aesthetic stagnation, and even the Pokémon designs get in on exploring both the tropical theme and completely breaking from it. Beneath palm trees you might run into the creature known as Crabrawler that is a mix between coconut crab and a stereotypical boxer, each island has its own Oricorio bird variation that favors different dance moves like hula and flamenco that match up to their unique typings, and each island has a guardian deity that mixes a creature with a humanoid figure such as Tapu Bulu looking like an island fairy with bull features. Ultra Beasts are a deliberate break from typical Pokémon design concepts to represent the fact they are from other dimensions, and ones like the set of wires known as Xurkitree or the new tower-looking creature Stakataka definitely feel like they’re from another world and thus justified as such powerful creatures. However, you can still find something cute and not setting dependent like the little dog with stones in its fur Rockruff or the spider Pokémon with a bubble over its head Dewpider. Leaning into the setting does produce a lot of great creatures, so even though some like the oddly patterned psychic fish Bruxish are a bit of a design disaster, creative concepts like the monster Palossand that is a sand castle haunted by a ghost show the benefits of boxing in your design concepts to try and evoke the setting.

While finding newer creatures like the haunted seaweed Dhelmise that wraps around itself around an anchor might be the main attraction, plenty of old Pokémon make return appearances here too, this being fairly obvious when you run into the franchise’s electric mouse mascot Pikachu in a whole valley devoted to him. However you can also find quirky creatures like the hovering psychic squid Inkay that will evolve only if you level it up to the right level and hold your 3DS upside down and the luchador wrestling inspired bird Hawlucha. Not only do plenty of familiar Pokémon increase the genetic diversity of the islands and your options for combat, but some creatures have regional variants that take older Pokémon and alter their appearance and typing. An Alolan Exeggutor takes the palm tree Pokémon and extends its neck to a ridiculous height while swapping out the Psychic typing for Dragon, and the Poison type sludge pile known as Muk gets a dark typing to represent its new psychedelic coloration that came from eating the island chain’s specific type of waste. Acquiring Pokémon is an interesting process in itself, the player needing to find patches of grasses or exploring the game’s puzzle dungeons like the caves and jungle for wild creatures. Once one is encountered you can increase you chances of a successful capture by weakening it, inflicting status effects, or using different types of Poké Balls, but there is an annoying feature that wild Pokémon rely on often where they might call on other wild monsters to join in the fight and you can’t catch them until they’re the only Pokémon left standing on that side of the field.

The “call for help” feature is an unfortunate slowdown to the catching process, but as indicated with Inkay earlier, evolution is an important part of the collection process and one that helps in combat as well. Some creatures like the orb of an owl known as Rowlet only need to gain experience in battle to reach their stronger forms, evolving when they hit certain level milestones. Others like the bundle of magnets known as Magneton must be trained in the right place, the icy sauropod Amaura only evolves when it reaches the right level at night, and the girly Grass type Steenee will only become her more regal and long-legged evolution Tsareena once it has learned Stomp. While some evolution paths require knowledge outside of the game to reasonably achieve, learning how the Pokémon can grow, where they might be hiding, and gathering them all is a rewarding process not only because of their contributions to the battles that make up the action section of gameplay but because it’s a process that requires effort and elbow grease that culminates in an impressive collection of interactive creatures to show off. Pokémon Refresh is actually a very nice way to interact with the creatures you want to grow close to too, the player able to pet them, feed them, and groom them, this even paying off in the game’s adventure as increased adoration for the player will make Pokémon capable of surviving lethal hits, dodging enemy attacks, and even shaking off status effects.

As for other differences between Pokémon Ultra Moon and what seems to be the superior set of games Sun and Moon, there are a few new minigames and side activities to interact with. The player can fly through Ultra Wormholes to search for legendary Pokémon, Ultra Beasts, and creatures otherwise unavailable in Alola, but the game’s use of the 3DS’s motion sensing is prone to error and it can take a fair while to find the portal in the flying minigame that you might want to enter. Mantine Surfing is a more casual amusement, the player able to hop on the manta ray Pokémon’s back to perform tricks as they surf waves between islands. Totem Stickers are hidden all around the islands and can be used to turn specific Pokémon of your own into their gigantic Totem variants, this more interesting because of the constant reward for looking around rather than the actual tangible effects. Besides Team Rainbow Rocket though, most new elements are minor amusements to do between the real action and Ultra Moon does end up struggling to justify its existence as a separate game while still also containing a lot of what makes the games it’s meant to be upgrading so good. As such, it’s hard to recommend it over Sun and Moon or even to people who have played those games while at the same time still having plenty of enjoyable aspects inherent to the Pokémon series’s design, the setting, and the characters that still remain in good shape.

THE VERDICT: Pokémon Ultra Moon is a definite step down from Sun and Moon’s story, and the extra little plot bits added aren’t enough to ever recommend Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon over the games they are meant to be improving upon. The new minigames aren’t substantial enough either, but Pokémon Ultra Moon still turns out to be a great adventure just because it has the excellent combat and creature collection inherent to its brand. While it is the inferior way to experience Alola and its characters, it still has a wonderful setting with plenty of appealing people and Pokémon, the combat is intricate and filled with potential, and catching all the different monsters is an enjoyable challenge. Necrozma may be a bit of a basic addition to the island hopping adventure’s course of events, but you can still enjoy Pokémon Ultra Moon a lot even though a superior version of the same story and world came out a year earlier.

And so, I give Pokémon Ultra Moon for 3DS…

A GREAT rating. While some game remakes miss the point of the original or have some technical flaw, a case like Pokémon Ultra Moon is a rare one. Almost everything that made Sun and Moon special is here right up until the sudden change to the course of events that harms the efficacy of the plot. A girl’s character growth and a complex family situation are shoved aside and dealt with badly in favor of throwing in a new threatening Pokémon whose own part of the plot is sudden and over too quickly. Necrozma didn’t even need to interrupt or alter events to be included so it damaging the plot is an odd direction to take things, but you still have so much of what made Sun and Moon’s story enjoyable despite it constantly slowing down the adventure. Team Skull are a goofy but intriguing set of thugs who make for interesting obstructions, the trial captains appear multiple times and usually have a pronounced personality so they’re fun to interact with, and you can still get some joy from seeing where Lille’s redirected arc goes even if it misses the mark on tying it up. For many though, they might just want to run around the wonderful tropical setting catching and battling Pokémon, and there’s nothing to fault here. The fights can be tough at times or too easy at others but multiplayer and certain fights like Totem battles and the Battle Tree ask for intelligent combat choices, and making your team through your own hunting efforts is definitely satisfying. Exploring, battling, and collecting are in wonderful shape and suitably complex while still being an accessible experience even for younger players.

The thing that Pokémon Ultra Moon and its companion version Ultra Sun will never be able to shake off despite their small additions and refinements is that they are inferior to their predecessors. It’s not by a huge margin since the crucial turn-based battling gameplay is still in excellent shape, but if it’s going to have the story focus still present in the same manner as the predecessor, you’re essentially left weighing up the two plots and finding Ultra Moon wanting. I’d almost compare it to buying a car, with the first one being better when it comes to the basics of driving like fuel efficiency but a later model having a few unnecessary but nifty bells and whistles but driving worse.  If you have the first car there’s no reason to go out of your way to get the new one, especially since its additions don’t justify losing the most important aspect of the first vehicle. Getting both when they’re so similar also feels foolish, so despite being so similar in quality, that first car wins out because it nailed the most important element. Sun and Moon have the story that is worth playing through more and Ultra Moon’s additional Pokémon and little added minigames don’t make up for the plot adjustments, so it’s best to stick with the one that handles one of its most important aspects better. Ultra Moon, despite begin a great experience simply because so much of it is mechanically sound, is perhaps one of the best games I’d never recommend anyone to buy because it’s outdone by something so functionally similar, and in a fairly shameful display, it’s the very games it was nominally meant to be improving upon.