Pokemon Sun/Moon PLUS ULTRA (Alola Region Games)

[Your Vest Friend]

Feraligatr with Liquidation MMM GOOD.

Haven't been able to play much of the game today due to my charger breaking. Should fix that by tomorrow, but so far things have felt very similar to S/M. 

[Ellipsis-Ultima]

Music spoilers

Spoiler

So... I'm not feeling most of the Villain Team boss remixes that much, the exception was Ghetsis' battle theme, prolly because it was close to the original and it didn't overdo the futuristic noises.

 

[Salamander]

Here's a curio for everyone who remembers the rather bizarre run-up to the launch of the Ultra titles: Eurogamer is still claiming that Pokemon Stars, a rumoured updated version of Sun/Moon for the Switch, was genuine and that development merely changed direction to give us the Ultra games instead.

[Sonictrainer]

Pokemon is doing a "Year of Legendary Pokemon" Event.

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A YEAR OF LEGENDARY POKÉMON!

In celebration of the amazing power of Legendary Pokémon, look forward to opportunities to obtain these magnificent Pokémon over the course of the year. Every one of the Pokémon you'll get for your Pokémon Ultra Sun, Pokémon Ultra Moon, Pokémon Sun, or Pokémon Moon game is at least level 60 and will know awesome moves to help you dominate in battle! Plus, they may be holding a valuable Gold Bottle Cap to let you maximize the individual strengths of one of your Pokémon via Hyper Training.

Have fun collecting and battling with these awesome Legendary Pokémon all year long!

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Available at GameStop,
February 2-28, 2018

The Legendary duo of Palkia and Dialga leads the year-long parade of Legendary Pokémon. Palkia and Dialga will be available at participating GameStop stores starting February 2, 2018. Visit GameStop and you can receive a code to get Palkia in your Pokémon Ultra Sun or Pokémon Sun game, or Dialga in your Pokémon Ultra Moon or Pokémon Moon game. Be sure to redeem your code in your game by May 23, 2018.

Palkia (Ultra Sun)

• LEVEL: 100
• ABILITY: Pressure
• MOVES: Spacial Rend, Aura Sphere, Draco Meteor, & Hydro Pump

Palkia (Sun)

• LEVEL: 60
• ABILITY:Pressure
• MOVES: Aura Sphere, Aqua Tail, Spacial Rend, Hydro Pump

Dialga (Ultra Moon)

• LEVEL:100
• ABILITY:Pressure
• MOVES: Roar of Time, Aura Sphere, Draco Meteor, & Flash Cannon

Dialga (Moon)

• LEVEL: 60
• ABILITY:Pressure
• MOVES: Aura Sphere, Iron Tail, Roar of Time, & Flash Cannon

After Dialga & Palkia in February, the schedule is as follows:

• March: Regigigas & Heatran
• April: Raikou & Entei
• May: Xernas & Yveltal
• June: Shiny Zygarde
• July: Thundurus & Tornadus
• August: Groudon & Kyogre
• September: Latios & Latias
• October: Reshiram & Zekrom
• November: Lugia & Ho-oh

 

[Your Vest Friend]

Didn't they just do this 2-3 years ago?

[DarkRula]

They did a Mythical event to celebrate the 20th that also lasted a year. This is just similar, except giving out 'mon we can theoretically already get within the games [so long as the effort is put in].

[NegaMix]

So, this is basically a chance to obtain the Legendary Pokemon you can't catch in one particular version. (You can catch Palkia in Ultra Moon, but you'd need a seperate game to get Dialga.) It's not a bad idea for those who only have one Ultra game, and can't obtain the opposite Legendary. (Plus, it beats trying to get one from the GTS...)

That said though, I dunno if I'll be getting all of them since, with some exceptions (Dialga, Xerneas, Shiny Zygarde) I can just catch the ones I'm missing in Omega Ruby.

[Red]

Will these be in Cherish Balls? I'd really like the Dialga event but I have Ultra Sun. Would be great if they were tradeable.

[NegaMix]

Just now, Red said:

Will these be in Cherish Balls? I'd really like the Dialga event but I have Ultra Sun. Would be great if they were tradeable.

Chances are they will be. (Though it's not the Cherish Ball that makes them untradeable on the GTS, it's the Classic Ribbon attached to them. Either way, I hate it!)

But if you've got a friend with Ultra Moon, you should be able to trade them without issue. Only the GTS (and Wonder Trade, I think) prevents them from being traded.

[Salamander]

I just wrapped up Ultra Moon for tonight, with the postgame as complete as I feel inclined to.  It's a good game, that's for certain, and I've enjoyed playing it; but it has a few issues, and in some regards I think it might actually be inferior to its predecessor, though it also has some additions I enjoyed.  A rough overview:

When a third version, or as we must now call them an enhanced version, comes along, there is a natural expectation that there'll be enough fresh content to make it feel like a different experience.  Ultra Moon falls, I think, just short of that lofty goal.  Certainly there have been some changes, indeed exactly the ones I would advocate: The Pokedex has been expanded, several of the Totem Pokemon have been swapped out for functional alternatives, and various puzzles have been modified; I was pleased to find that Lana's trial now began the moment you started jumping through hoops for her rather than kicking off just for the boss battle, and Kiawe's trial is now slightly less of a joke, too.  I don't even remember what Sophocles's trial was originally, but the Charjabug puzzles were good fun, especially seeing them slide off the board and into their little trays - although the game flagrantly lies to you about the direction they're facing in not mattering.  It's great that Mina actually has a trial now, even if it has nothing to do with Fairy-types, though I did appreciate the joke of the last Totem Pokemon being comparatively tiny.  Mantine Surf is surprisingly fun, even if they only found a way to organically integrate it exactly once.  Regionally, there are a few small flourishes - a Pikachu-related area which serves no purpose I can see, the Alola Photo Club which I'm sure is nice for those who like that sort of thing, and the Malie City Kanto Gym parody which is genuinely pretty hilarious.  But these changes... don't add up to much.  There isn't really a sweeping sense of difference in the world; even the differences in the plot take most of the game to kick in.  And those...

Yes, I'm particularly concerned about the plot.  I see what they were going for, of course, because they could do nothing else than add Necrozma in to the story; but this creates a number of problems.  Rewriting Lusamine's ultimate goal undercuts her character a bit, along with one of my favourite elements of Sun/Moon, that being that there was no grand evil plan, just a character-driven story of a really bad mother.  Another pressing issue is that the Ultra Beasts are now even more pointless; if you only replaced the midgame encounter with Nihilego with a battle with an underlevelled Necrozma, you could entirely cut them from the game.  It seems increasingly likely that the role of the Ultra Beasts changed considerably in development, and they are now just redundant legendaries; how this was supposed to be helped by adding another two is beyond me, when we could have had more of the great but horribly underused Alolan Forms instead.  And removing the postgame Ultra Beast Looker quests in favour of one pointless hangout with the Ultra Recon Squad devalues their integration into Alola considerably.  As for the Ultra Recon Squad themselves, they're an ill-thought-out addition, visibly tacked on; their role is to stand around explaining the plot, casually dropping in major plot beats like the existence of other worlds which had better build-up in the original.  Furthermore, the addition of Mina's trial means that, once again, the climax of a Pokemon game's story comes between the seventh and eight gyms.  Just put the ending at the end, GameFreak!  You got it right in Black and White!  With that said, I'll grant that Episode RR was good, nostalgic fun - with the caveat that once again the marketers chose to spoil just about all of it.  I'm seriously considering trying to go spoiler-free for the next generation...

It's possible that I have unrealistic expectations of an enhanced version.  But when the last ones were Black 2 and White 2, which got two years in development and added stacks - and when GameFreak decided again to have two enhanced versions rather than trying to do something interesting with just one...  Yes, one certainly feels that Pokemon Z was more necessary than this game.  But we lost that because GameFreak thought the 3DS was on the way out, and we got this because Sun/Moon extended the 3DS's lifespan and they needed a filler title.  Gen VII was fantastic, but had circumstances been different, it could have been better.  I hope Gen VIII will get the management it needs.

And speaking of Gen VIII, here's my wishlist, in no particular order:

• Keep PokeRide: Hidden Machines reach their ultimate and perfected form in Ride Pokemon, which let us see Pokemon do cool things in the world under our command without forcing our Pokemon to sacrifice a move slot.  I want to see more of this; I want to see more inventive Ride functions, I want to see old HMs brought back with a new spin, I would even be happy for new Pokemon to be designed primarily to be Ride Pokemon.  With one caveat: They must feel distinct and necessary.  Mudsdale feels artificial.
• Keep Totems: Totem Pokemon are great.  They put the focus and challenge back on Pokemon rather than the humans who use them, and turn particular Pokemon into exciting, tough showcases.  A lot of the trials don't even need human guidance; Acerola's Ghost-type trial, for instance, could have stood alone, like the Dragon trial.  At the same time, we don't need to actually sacrifice more elaborate trials, or gyms, or what have you.  Just stick the Totems in-between as bonus extras out in the world, filling up the type representation for challenges.  In Gen VII, you could occasionally discover particular Z-Crystals just sitting alone in pedestals out in the world; add optional Totems to that, and it would have been great.  That's one possibility I see for Totems in the future.
• Keep the difficulty: In Kalos, I was at level 100 by the time I reached the Pokemon League.  Here, the game seemed to catch up with me in the latter stages - and while Po Town was a sad joke full of losers with Pokemon that should have evolved ten levels ago, the difficulty and the variety of Pokemon I faced cranked right up afterwards.  That's not even starting on that possibly too difficult Ultra Necrozma battle!  More of this, please.
• Bring back mazes: The trouble with 3D is that it's meant that pathways have to be bigger, which has resulted in routes and dungeons being a lot less complex - just one main pathway wriggling along with a few side-paths.  I yearn for the multi-path, multi-level dungeons we used to have, full of mystery and choices.  I notice that the encounter rate for Surfing has plummeted; do the same for caves, zoom the camera out a bit, add a minimap as good as the overworld map, and let us get lost again.
• Bring back puzzles: I feel like the only time in this game that I really solved a puzzle was during the deliberately nostalgic Episode RR, and in fact the game had so few puzzles that I was genuinely surprised to see, for instance, the delightful conveyor arrow tiles again.  Strength in particular hasn't been worthwhile since the boulders stopped being small enough to see over and started just being lock-and-key rather than an element of Zelda-like block-pushing puzzles; and does it have to be so slow?  But the big loss in Alola were the massive, set-piece puzzles we used to get in gyms, full of moving parts and unique, artificial rulesets.  The loss of those is the greatest argument I can think of for bringing back gyms in some capacity.  Barely ever did I have to actually think while playing this game.  I miss it.
• Bring back wilderness: Kalos in particular, and in a different way Alola, have felt especially... pedestrianised.  You aren't going out on a big adventure into the wilds with your Pokemon; you're just following literal roads, long-established paths set out before you and with literal progress barriers making sure you do everything the way adults want you to.  I want to see a region that's untamed, at least in places; areas you can visit which feel like barely anyone else has ever been there, lonely and trackless.  Sinnoh gave me this feeling, at the best of times.  I want to see it back.
• Use fewer trainers: Essentially an extension of some of the above points, this is a game which sometimes feels like it's crawling with people everywhere.  Granted, they're partly there to make good use of the game's expanded Pokedex, and I celebrate that as a contrast to the drudgery of ORAS and its millions of trainers who use exactly the same Pokemon again and again - but here's the thing: The vast majority of them use one Pokemon.  Just one.  Barely any trainers in this game are using even half of their full six slots; it's a waste.  No wonder the Experience Share exists, because you're barely ever going to be switching Pokemon!  In any case, trainers just aren't as interesting since they lost the ability to walk up and block your path, changing the layout of the mazes you walked.  3D makes it difficult to go back to that, but don't bother using trainers unless they have good teams or they're playing an interesting role in the environment.

And that's that.  Alola was fun, but I didn't need to play this game and kind of regret getting it.  Roll on Generation VIII!  Just so long as everything isn't spoiled this time.

[Red]

All 3 Alola starters now have their hidden abilities courtesy of PokeBank!

[Agie]

I beat the main game in Ultra Moon. My verdict? As someome who never playednthe original Sun or Moon, I definitely recommend it to those who don't own them.

I rather enjoyed the story, the characters, and the art style, as always, is quite nice. I do kinda like the graphics, though I admit, the main character's perpetual smile does look a little dopey.

I will say the additions and changes to the story...well, I never experienced the original, but this version of the story felt natural to me. Nothing felt off, anyways.

The Roto Loto, though, I have mixed feelings on. Do be prepared to wait a very long time if you want a specific item, and said item rarely pops up. And I can't sell Roto powers; a shame, since with the stuff I never, ever use, that might actually give them some kinda purpose, even if that purpose is "I get more money." It seems the more I use an item, the less likely I am to get it.

That said, if you do own the original Sun & Moon, then it will be up to you if the update is worth it. And even then, if you decide to snag it, getting to most of the new stuff will require you to go through events that from what I heard, are mostly the same as the original with only minor changes or additions; the more significant additions and changes don't come into play until you're well into the main story. So you better be in the mood for a revisit.

In other words, if you don't have the original Sun & Moon, I definitely recommend this one. Might actually be the ideal way to go for some. But if you do own the originals, that's a bit trickier, and all I can say is that it's up to you.

[8ther]

Question, Is it possible to encounter a NPC trainer who uses a non-Alola based starter in the Battle Royal before beating the league?

[BlueFlare]

@SurrealBrain That was a good read. You know,  a part of me wants to get USUM but knowing that differences between the original games and these are so scanty, I can't get my ass up to travel Alola for once more.

[Sonictrainer]

April's Legendary Duo is Raikou & Entei.

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Available at Target, April 22–29, 2018
Spring ahead with the Legendary Pokémon Raikou and Entei, available at participating Target stores. You can receive Entei in your Pokémon Ultra Sun or Pokémon Sun game, or Raikou in your Pokémon Ultra Moon or Pokémon Moon game at Target from April 22–29, 2018.

Entei (Ultra Sun)

• Level: 100
• Ability: Pressure
• Held Item: Gold Bottle Cap
• Moves: Sacred Fire, Stone Edge, Iron Head, & Flame Charge

Entei (Sun)

• Level: 60
• Ability: Pressure
• Moves: Stomp, Bite, Swagger, & Lava Plume

 

Raikou (Ultra Moon)

• Level: 100
• Ability: Pressure
• Held Item: Gold Bottle Cap
• Moves: Thunderbolt, Volt Switch, Extrasensory, & Calm Mind

Raikou (Moon)

• Level: 60
• Ability: Pressure
• Moves: Reflect, Crunch, Thunder Fang, & Discharge

 

[StratusAsterion]

Umm Target is gone in Canada.....

[NegaMix]

They're only obtained in Target stores for the North American distribution. Canada gets them via the Pokemon Trainer Club Newsletter, according to Serebii.

[StratusAsterion]

OH thank goodness @_@, thanks for letting me know

 

 

[Pawn]

A new movie trailer is to debut on the show Oha Suta this coming Monday, but what's this? A new Pokémon will appear? What could it possibly be...

 

... Probably Zeraora. Yawn. Good for anyone who does care about distributed Pokémon though.

[Perkilator]

This may sound weird, but…I sort of want Blacephalon-codename UB Burst-as a fighter in the next Smash Bros. game.

 

Intro: Blacephalon jumps out of an Ultra Wormhole and performs his signature pose.

 

Notable Palette Swaps: Pheromosa, Nihilego, Buzzwole, Poipole, Stakataka, Kartana, Guzzlord

 

Special Moves: 

 

B : Mind Blower; Blacephalon takes his head and throws it at the enemy. Holding B will charge it; you can select the distance in which you can throw it.

B + Forwards : Will-O-Wisp; Blacephalon shoots a ring of ghostly fire that hits enemies multiple times.

B + Up : Shadow Claw; Blacephalon thrusts his right arm upward with a shadowy aura, going up a fair distance.

B + Down : Smack Down; Blacephalon brings down a rock out of nowhere and strikes some three feet away from him. This can function as a Meteor Smash, meaning you can launch foes down offscreen with it.

 

Final Smash: Endless Blaze; a combination of the two Z-Moves Never Ending Nightmare and Inferno Overdrive. Arms appear all over Blacephalon, who can use them to attack for ten seconds. After those ten seconds, Blacephalon turns said arms into flames and scatters them around the screen.

 

 

Taunts:

 

1: Blacephalon’s head bobs in all eight directions.

2: Blacephalon juggles his head.

1+2: Blacephalon removes his head and pretends to use it as a bowling ball.

 

Winposes:

 

1: Blacephalon creeps into an Ultra Wormhole, and then abruptly disappears with it.

2: Blacephalon floats in the air with his right leg over his left leg, and then sticks his right arm out.

3: Blacephalon spins around in a circle of flames, them stops in place.

 

Icon: Poké Ball.

 

Victory Music: The Pokémon series music.

 

Kirby Hat: His bomb hat along with Blacephalon’s head. If Kirby uses Mind Blower, he uses an illusion of Blacephalon’s head for a bomb.

 

Stage: N/A

 

Omochao Data: “Be careful! This life form-Blacephalon, code name UB Burst-is an extremely dangerous Pokémon known as an Ultra Beast! Being one of its kind, Blacephalon can use its head as an explosive, and then takes the opportunity to steal one’s vitality while they’re still surprised. It chooses not to in THIS case, but it still packs a mean punch in battle!”

 

Related Music: N/A

[Spin Attaxx]

I remember back when Volcanion was revealed, and I called it the most boring Mythical Pokémon of the lot. Little did I realise Game Freak would one day decide to make Sonichu the Digimon canon:

I'll grab it for completion's sake, but I'm just saying, Raikou did it better.

[Sonictrainer]

• Zeraora
• Category: Thunderclap Pokémon
• Type: Electric
• Height: 4'11"
• Weight: 98.1 lbs.

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The Mythical Pokémon Zeraora appears like a thunderbolt! This Pokémon creates a powerful magnetic field by emitting strong electric currents from the pads on its hands and feet. It can use this magnetic field to levitate and move through the air at high speed. Its max speed is said to be about the same as that of a lightning strike.

Unlike most Electric-type Pokémon, it doesn’t have an organ within its body that can produce electricity. However, it is able to gather and store electricity from outside sources, then use it as its own electric energy. When it uses massive amounts of electricity, its fur stands on end all over its body.

 

[TCB]

Baw gawd it's the lovechild of Lucario and Renamon 

[Harkofthewaa]

58 minutes ago, Sonictrainer said:

Unlike most Electric-type Pokémon, it doesn’t have an organ within its body that can produce electricity.

Which gives us a Mythical Pokemon that can't do what every single Pokemon of it's type does. Might as well make a Water Type that has to go run to the nearest body of water every time it needs to defend itself. GG Game Freak.

[Marcello]

Zeraora only being in the Ultra games is really annoying.