Man, it’s been a real busy day. Work on the Daily Titan kept me busy after my classes between an enterprise story we had about graduation rates on campus and our breaking news coverage of a suspicious package bomb threat on campus. Though the bomb threat turned out to be nothing, and I’m grateful for that, it was a little unfortunate that I lost so much time.
Because it took time away from thinking about Pokémon.
Now, you may remember I made a post on April 13th where I essentially complained about Sun and Moon news that was scheduled to be announced getting pushed off until May. I take my Pokémon news very seriously after all, and felt cheated that I’d have to wait another month to hear more about the new games.
Well, time flew by, and it’s time. Boy oh boy was it worth the wait. The first informational trailer for Pokémon Sun and Moon has been released. And I want to talk about it.
So, where to begin. There’s plenty of great things out of this to address between the starters, the legendary Pokémon and the new region.
Actually, that sounds like a pretty good order, let’s tackle it like that!
The Starters
IT SHOULD NOT BE LEGAL FOR A COLLECTION OF STARTERS TO BE SO CUTE.
Now that that’s out of the way, if you haven’t seen them yet, here are the three starters for Pokémon Sun and Moon:
All Images Courtesy of Serebii.net
So personally, I always go with fire type starters – at least for my first play through of a Pokémon game. Ever since my first game, Pokémon Crystal, I’ve gone the same route. Cyndaquil, Torchic, Chimchar, Tepig and Fennekin. Oh and Charmander in Firered of course, but that’s a little but out of the general chronology.
I had the same intention walking into Sun and Moon even before the starters were announced, just out of tradition if nothing else. Plus, look at Litten, it’s so adorable even if I’m more of a dog person. Its design is also pretty clever as far as the description we have of it goes, describing its fireballs as flaming hairballs that it spits up from highly flammable fur.
But Rowlet.
Rowlet throws me off. I literally have not loved a grass type starter so immensely when first seeing it since Treecko in Ruby and Sapphire. The fact that it turns its head around to look at you when you give it commands, according to the description we have of it at least, is also so adorable that I can’t stand it.
Unfortunately… Poppelio sort of falls behind on the starter scale for me. I do like it don’t get me wrong, but the whole clown sea lion thing just doesn’t really do it for me personally. I’m sure it’ll get better upon its first and second stage evolutions getting released, but for now I’m not so interested.
Litten and Rowlet are still going to be highly debated, however, at least until I can see which of them looks cooler when they evolve. At the very least, my friends are diverse in which starters they like, so I guess I can always trade to get them all.
The Legendaries
I talked in my “The Hype” Pokémon Sun and Moon post about different mega evolutions I’d like to see in the new games (Also, in case it were the subject of curiosity, “The Hype” was meant to be a recurring thing I did about a bunch of announced games that just wound up taking too much time to put together… So I may return to it in the future but for now it shall remain an idea in purgatory).
Ironically, two of the Pokémon announced so far are really impressive mega evolutions that I never considered.
Images Courtesy of Serebii.net
Say hello to Mega Pyroar and Mega Noivern, everybody.
While we don’t know their names just yet, I like to think these are incredibly justified and affectionate pet names to give the two legendaries for now.
Personally, I am all over Mega Noivern. I love both of the legendaries, sure, but something about Mega Pyroar seems a little… Overdone. Sure, there are plenty of Pokémon based on bats, but none of them to the same scale as the Moon cover legendary. As far as fire type looking lion Pokémon, we have Pyroar, Arcanine (who I know isn’t technically a lion) and Entei (He’s like a cat I guess?) all taking up slots that remind me of the Sun cover legendary.
It’s not that it’s a bad thing, I just find myself way more drawn to Mega Noivern, and to Pokémon Moon version as a result. Plus I can continue to rehash that Despicable Me joke if I stick with Moon in the long run.
Besides how they look we don’t know a lot about the new legendaries so far, so there’s not a lot to say. I could potentially speculate on their typings… Fire/Psychic and Dark/Psychic perhaps? Maybe we’ll be seeing a new typing to fit the both of them, a Cosmic type of sorts in fitting with a speculation I heard from TheKingNappy on YouTube. At this point I don’t really know, but I also don’t believe the typing will affect my choice in the end.
The Region
Okay so I don’t know if you’ve all seen the trailer… But I’m going to assume you all have because you’re reading this post and I linked it up above in case you hadn’t…
But this region looks gorgeous.
Seriously, just from the scenes that we could see of the new trainer running around Alola, it honestly looks like the Pokémon Company took what they had in X and Y with the Kalos Region and upscaled it by about a billion percent. To be completely honest with you, after seeing the trailer, I was convinced that they remade Ruby and Sapphire not to appease the fanbase that wanted Gen 3 remakes, but to practice making tropical areas in the engine as preparation for this project.
Part of the reason the region looks so gorgeous has to be its basis in the real world. Hawaii, as it would seem! To be fair, I was all about the headcanon that this game would be set in the Pokémon world equivalent of Spain, which would give us a close enough proximity to France in real world geography to justify a Gen 2 styled revisit to Kalos in game… But now that I’ve seen the images of Alola, it’s definitely going to be a worthwhile choice.
It’s not a totally lost opportunity, though. I mean, I know I would certainly love to see an underwater tunnel from France to Hawaii exist.
Beyond having a name slightly similar to another Pokémon not a lot of people pay much attention to, there are other ways I can think of this game connecting to other games as well. Remember Phoebe? The Hoenn Elite Four member? It’d probably be hard not to with ORAS so recently in the public consciousness. Well, she had a very Hawaiian reminiscent design in general thanks to Hoenn also being a pretty tropical region. I’d love to see her making an appearance in the new games, like how Jasmine appeared in Sunyshore City in the Sinnoh Region.
Then again I also just really loved Phoebe, so I’d take any excuse to see her get more screen time.
That’s about all I have as far as first impressions go for this video. It’s a lot of great stuff to be sure, but I’m still craving more honestly! It’s gunna be fun seeing just what else we get to hear about leading up to the game’s release on November 18th (or 23rd if you’re in Europe… Sorry Europe).
I’d love to hear about any impressions, theories or speculations you all in the Internet aether might have about the new trailer or just Sun and Moon in general, feel free to talk about it in the comments below!
Work in Progress 
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