Japanese Release

I tried to play a dump of the Japanese version on my hacked 3DS. It displayed a black screen for two minutes, clearly to keep me in suspense, and then it returned to the home screen. Downloading the file took like an hour on the campus WiFi.

I couldn’t play a questionably legal dump of a free demo a few hours before the US release.

0/10

US Release

Oh goodness, where do I start? This demo did a pretty good job getting me more excited for the full release. There are a plethora of positive points (and a few negative) to cover, but I'll start with Alola itself.

Why Bother With The Real Hawaii?

I'll cut to the chase, even though the demo has been slimmed down and goes out of its way to restrict where you can go, Alola feels alive. The streets of the city in the demo are teeming with little touches that make it appear inhabited to a degree that previous games in the series just haven’t. There are vehicles next to the appropriate buildings, there are street signs at the main junction, and there are even little swinging gates separating different properties. The interiors of the buildings are stocked with detailed furnishings of the kind you would expect: the police station has a water cooler, a coffee machine, and even a mascot; the ferry station has ticket machines, a vending machine off in a corner and what looks like a magazine rack next to a small refreshment counter; etc. While these are purely aesthetic touches, they really help the case that Alola is going to be a fantastically designed region. I really only have two complaints in regards to what we've seen of the region. First of all, there is no reason for me to be treated to a loading screen whenever I open one of those little green gates to enter a yard with tall grass. That's not to say that the loading screens are particularly long, they are just jarring. My other complaint is that the cave on Ten-Carat Hill is very bland. I realize that this isn't unusual for the Pokemon series, but when the rest of the demo has so much detail, it's a shame to explore a cave with no discernible features beyond rocks. I mean, why not dripping from some spots on the ceiling, some moss on the walls, or even dusty footprints that hint at what species of Pokemon live in the cave? These are very minor concerns but they surprised me a bit given how polished the demo, and by extension, the full game seems.

An Interface That Makes Sense

I have a confession to make. The interface in previous Pokemon games upsets me to no end. I was excited to see the aesthetic upgrades that Game Freak made to the UI; they are slick, but what really excited me the most was the new bag layout. In previous generations, the icons for each pocket of the bag were indecipherable and unintuitive enough that one would be better off attempting to make sense of ancient Sumerian clay tablets after a decade of continuous high-speed sandblasting than try to figure out which pouch holds what variety of item. This game's bag has icons that are clear representations of what one will find in each pocket. It was comforting to see that Z-crystals have their own pocket as well. In XY and ORAS, mega-stones were kept in the same pocket as other held items, and for something so useful to not have its own pocket seemed asinine to me. Berries got their own pocket, but mega-stones didn't? Who even uses berries? Berries are what you use when you are desperate and forgot to buy healing items that actually restore enough health to be worth the seconds of your life you lose every time you press the necessary sequence of buttons to heal your Pokemon. The bag redesign is awesome; it solves a design gripe that I've had for a while but neglected to discuss much myself because admittedly it's silly of me to be so annoyed about it. For me, this means that I will likely spend more time during the story managing my Pokemon's held items and such.

Team Skull: They Aren't Bad, They're Just Hard… Yo.

I could write and probably will write an entire article on how much I love Team Skull. I was ecstatic that Game Freak wanted to give us a little preview of their antics in the demo. From what we've seen of them, I think it can safely be said that there is no way they are the primary antagonists. They are incompetent and absurd and so far have yet to demonstrate any sort of a plan or goal. The grunts behave as if they do little other than snort mountains of ground-up prescription drugs multiple times a day. Upon confronting you, they frantically wave their arms in some kind of bizarre facsimile of gang signs, and upon defeat they run off to tell their administrator, who quickly shows herself to be calm and collected, unusually friendly, and somewhat uninterested in doing her job. She congratulates you on being strong enough to defeat her underlings and turns to walk away, to the shock of the two grunts who were thrashed by you and Hau only minutes prior. Their indignation reminds Plumeria that it's her job to take revenge for them. Once you defeat her, she seems mostly unfazed and compliments your strength. I can't help but laugh at these guys, and I'm glad that they seem as if they will provide some intense comic relief while leaving some room for another threat, namely the Ultra-Beasts, to take center stage.

Final Score:

Positives

• Aesthetically pleasant and refreshing.
• Enjoyable soundtrack.
• Ash-Greninja seems strong and will likely be very useful in the full game.
• Team Skull might as well be called Team Meme.
• Nintendo effectively scrubbed most potential spoilers from the demo to thwart data miners.

Negatives

• The fantastic atmosphere is broken up by weird loading screens that will likely be in the final product.
• The only cave demonstrated is very bland. Hopefully there will be more unique “dungeons” in the full game.
• Ash-Greninja seems too strong and will likely be very useful in the full game.
• Nintendo effectively scrubbed most potential spoilers from the demo to thwart data miners.

Overall, I'm much more hyped for Sun and Moon and the demo helped ease some of my concerns about how well the game could run on a 3DS, and how much content they could really pack into a region made up of islands. The game releases on November 18 ^th worldwide.