BCC 21-10: PSD (Patreon)

I've been playing Pokemon Sun lately, and I've really started to enjoy it. I was big into Pokemon when it first came out, but I had actually sort of lost interest in the series after Gold/Silver. I've played most of the games in the series, but I never really had the patience to get into any of the games beyond just playing though the first couple towns  then losing focus and playing something else.

I came back seriously into the franchise, though, with X/Y. Those games were definitely built with a lot of fan service for players like me, who were mostly interested in the first generation of games. It had a lot of tweaks that made the game easier to pick up and play... clearing out a lot of the annoyance from older generations.

After that I played Omega Ruby, and although I beat the game, I wasn't nearly as enthusiastic about it. I feel like that game really did kind of remind me of the problems with the series that had sort of gotten me to lose interest in the franchise... you had a plot that took itself too seriously while being extremely shallow, a lot of repetitive gameplay, etc.

Sun hits a great balance. There's definitely a focus on story, with your main character developing a recurring friendship with other characters (instead of just meeting someone in a new town, then never seeing them again). Mostly I enjoy a change in theming with the worldbuilding around the story.

Within the game, you're just as likely to find Pokemon as NPCs wandering around towns. And they take advantage of that by making them feel more like integral parts of the way the world works... many of the games have characters state as much, but you still mostly see it as a fairly mundane world, with Pokemon mostly appearing just in combat.

However, with this game we see a lot of mundane tasks handled by Pokemon. Even in-game, rather than getting a bicycle to help with travel, the main character is given a Tauros to ride. This leads in to one of the biggest improvements of the game... the ability to summon helper pokemon  completely replaces the HM system. HMs were a pain... they were mostly mediocre moves, which you were forced to teach to at least one pokemon in your team just in case you came across an obstacle in the game world. It's a small change that greatly improves the feel of the game, and also helps to reinforce the idea of Pokemon as a part of the world itself, and not just a weird cockfighting thing that's constantly going on the background of a normal world.