Because whoever you are, you sure play Pokemon for vastly different reasons than me. I just beat Pokemon Sun, and I was simply baffled at the abundance of cutscenes. It's been well documented on how the tutorial lasts for far too long, but I was really shocked at how many times the game would take control away from you and show you yet another cutscene throughout the entire game. Far too much it felt like I was tapping A to skim the dialogue as quickly as I could just so I can get a move on.

Now, it's one thing if the story and characters were any good, but to me, it was basically the same cookie-cutter plot from every other Pokemon game: new kid comes into town, you stop the evil corporation from using Pokemon for nefarious reasons, you become champion, the end. It just did nothing for me.

I've played every main entry in the Pokemon series, and this is the first time in which I've actively disliked a Pokemon game. The over abundance of story, the performance issues, and the heavy reliance on old Pokemon (if I wanted to fight that many Raticates and Golbats I would've popped in Pokemon Red) really bummed me out.

On some level it was kind of laughable that each new game in the series still had more or less the same story as Red/Blue, except that the legendaries started to have a bigger story presence than simply some lore in the Pokedex. It's sad to hear that instead of changing up the story, they just added more cutscenes to what is still the same basic story. At least they changed up the gameplay structure a bit with the lack of formal gyms, and the removal of HMs as an overworld mechanic.

At least it's a lot more entertaining than the insufferable story in X/Y, in my opinion. The slightly bizarre tone of writing and change in structure elevates it somewhat from the usual. I actually kinda care about the characters this time around. I stopped playing Y because I just could not care about any of it.

It's pretty annoying, particularly once you get to Poni Island and every 5 steps there's a new cutscene which doesn't really add much.

Thankfully the new environments are mostly great and the villain is interesting this time but yeah... It's great but probably the worst entry because of the cutscenes :\

Wait, theres story in a Pokemon game?

I'm with you on this one. The game started out so good with all the quality of life features it added. Then the cut scenes came and didn't stop and the incessant story that you have zero agency in. Lillie could literally just watch some trainer on YouTube and have the same story arc. What's worse is that all the animation they did for Z-moves doesn't show up in any of the cutscenes. You just stand there arms 30 degrees from your side and have a stupid look on your face. As things you have no effect on go by. None of the new Pokemon are doing anything for me. Team Skull is the best Team since Rocket I do love them.

I prefer this game's story to pretty much any other games story. This is the first time the characters felt did more than just throw exposition at you, and the world felt more lived in. X/Y was much more of a slog. I know lots of people thought it was pretty handhold-y, but I expect that with all pokemon games tbh.

I've actually never really played a Pokemon game before this one, except for one weekend in elementary school where I borrowed some kid's Pokemon Red or Blue cartridge and played it for a weekend straight. The amount of story hasn't started to bother me, although I will admit that I went into this expecting a game that would go long stretches without story beats happening.

But since you mentioned performance issues...

That framerate is smooth half of the time, but there are times where this game tanks into the teens. One of the early trial battles in a cave has you fight some big angry mongoose thing with an aura around it and something about that aura makes the game very, very sluggish - like, Blighttown on consoles sluggish. Also, most of the random encounters actually stutter for the first few seconds, the menu takes longer than it should to pop up, etc. The turn-based nature of this game means that the performance issues don't matter all that much, but I'm surprised Nintendo let this game out of the gate without making Game Freak tweak this game's performance. On an original 3DS Xl, by the way.

@justin258: I was actually kind of stunned at the performance issues to be honest. Pokemon Sun actually hard locked on me once. That is the first time a Pokemon game has EVER frozen on me, and I've played every main line entry. In fact, that might have been the first time a game on a Nintendo handheld has ever locked up on me.

What kind of 3DS are you playing on? I wonder if New 3DS games have this issue at all.

I haven't had it hard lock on me or anything like that, but any major fight in the game is accompanied by extreme stuttering and slowdown at this point. As I said above, this isn't a huge deal since it's a turn based game that requires no reaction time whatsoever, but sometimes I have to wait for the next menu to show up. That should have been unacceptable to the people who OK'd this game for release, buuuuuuuuut then again, I'm primarily a snobby PC gamer with a penchant for sixty plus frames per second and for some reason it's not really dragging my enjoyment of the game down.

The writing in SuMo was a little too meme-y for me, but it's hard to tell how much of that was the localization team and how much was in the original script.

@freedom4556: Yeah, when a localized game has a certain meme or reference or even just very American or Western style of joke, I always wonder if that joke (and similar jokes across the game) are the closest localized analog to whatever the Japanese joke was, or if the original was just so not going to culturally translate at all that the running gag for a certain character is wholly original to the localized version.

Haven't played Pokemon, but there are a few things in Fire Emblem and Phoenix Wright recently that are kinda memey and I'm curious whether the Japanese version is similarly memey.