2521: Super Effective

I’m continuing to enjoy Pokémon Moon. I’ve found myself on more than one occasion being keen to get to the end of my working day and be able to play it some more. I’m getting a feel for the shallow end of the overall metagame — most notably which types of Pokémon and attacks are strong and weak against other types — and I’m also getting curious to see what a Pokémon endgame is like after you’ve finished the story.

Of course, I’m a long way off the latter aspect in particular so far, since I’m still only on the second island in the game, coming up on that island’s second Trial. I am making good progress on the Pokédex, however, being roughly around 30% complete on the first two islands, and I’ve assembled what feels like a solid team of well-leveled Pokémon that feel like they’re pretty good for “general purpose” wandering around.

With the Trials on the second island, types become a lot more important, and the game drops a few hints your way as to which types of Pokémon you might want to make sure you have on hand for the upcoming challenges. The game seems to be well-paced in that the Pokémon you can catch in an area are of a suitable level to be reasonably competitive against both the local wildlife and Trainers, so grinding doesn’t seem to be too necessary unless you want to take a Pokémon you caught much earlier into the Trials. Even then, however, just making sure a low-level Pokémon is in your party while your stronger team members deal with the wild Pokémon of the area allows them to get caught up reasonably quickly, at least across the early levels.

One thing that occurs to me — and I thought this with what little I played of X and Y as well — is that Pokémon has quite a bit in common with MMOs these days. You don’t play in a persistent shared world with other people, but many aspects of the game are similar, particularly with regard to character customisation and competitive play. Of particular note is the “fashion” feature where you can adjust your avatar’s hair, makeup, eye colour and clothing and then share that avatar online through the Festival Plaza system. Your avatar can then be further customised through the text-based words and phrases they say when other players interact with them — asynchronously rather than in real-time, because this is a Nintendo game for kids, after all — and, later, you even get the opportunity to buy clothes that you see other characters wearing.

I haven’t tried the online trading and battling systems yet, but I understand they’re both fairly active. The trading facility in particular is a godsend when I think back to the early games; possibly one of the things that meant I bounced off Red and Gold back in the Game Boy days was because no-one else I knew was playing any of them, and thus I had no-one to trade or battle with. Nowadays, however, trading and battling is a simple case of visiting Festival Plaza and using the appropriate options — or, for someone in the same room as you, using the excellent Quick Link feature to quickly do something together.

Some 15 hours into the game so far, I remain curious as to whether it will hold my attention into its endgame and beyond, but I’m having a blast so far and anticipate I will continue to do so for quite some time yet.