On October 18^th, the “Pokemon Sun and Moon” demo was released for the Nintendo 3DS. And with that release, the world went absolutely mad with what is referred to as “data mining,” which means to gather new information based off of what is already given. What this meant for the release was that when it was released, it was essentially hacked so that people could figure out any number of things about the upcoming game. There was a lot that was discovered about the game, but there are three really important things that were found.

1. The starters' final evolution.

It is no secret that people have been anticipating the final evolution for the starters for generation seven of “Pokemon.” It’s one thing that most people need to know before making their decision on which tiny creature they’d prefer starting with. What was discovered through data mining were the identities of said starters, which were surprisingly leaked months before the demo’s release. While we don’t have names, we have the images of what they will look like, which is almost always the big factor when determining starters.

2. The (supposed) amount of Pokemon in the Alolan Region.

There’s been a lot of talk about how many new Pokemon will be in the new games. “Pokemon X and Y” had around 75 new Pokemon to add to the ever-growing list. While getting 75 might be thought of as pretty decent, those who’ve played these games since their inception know that the original “Pokemon” games had 151 Pokemon, which is two times as much as what was in “X and Y.” So, with all that in mind, people are very anxious about the amount of new Pokemon, and rightfully so.

There are multiple interpretations as to what has been found in the data mining. Some say that about 75 percent of the new Pokemon have already been presented to the masses via leakage and trailers put out by Nintendo. Others believe that 100 percent has been leaked, which I honestly believe to be false based off of news that came out recently about a never-before-seen Pokemon appearing on a new trading card box. With this information in mind, I highly doubt the validity of the “100 percent” statement.

3. Change in game mechanics.

The last thing that I wanted to look at are the potential change in game mechanics. This is important to all that play “Sun and Moon,” particularly because whatever they change could make or break the game. Not too much information has surfaced yet as people are continuing to work on looking through the data, but one thing that we can say for certain is that the usage of “HM”s will be completely removed. HMs were moves that players could teach their Pokemon to use outside of battle.

Let’s say there’s a tree in your way; you use Cut. If you want to go out on the water, you use Surf. I am very eager to see how they implement all of the changes with this, because we’ve had HMs from the very start of “Pokemon.” Now the game gives you the option to ride on "rental Pokemon," which are Pokemon that you can rent to get from place to place. Some can smash through rocks, some can fly, some can swim. And they will definitely change the way we play the game.

There's a lot that I haven't covered, but these three are the biggest ones to me. The next month will tell us what we need to know as we wait for the fateful day, November 18th, when the games come out.