Other additions are less obvious but tie the games' existing fan service into meaningful mechanics. That gives the heavily sci-fi story time to breathe and lends weight to moments like when I traveled to another dimension myself. These two offer Ultra's more out-of-left-field plot points earlier than in the previous versions. Anyone who played the previous games will notice immediate differences, like a mysterious alien duo called the Ultra Recon Squad following you throughout the games. Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon double down on both the charm and the weirdness from the jump. Since the Pokémon games have become so predictable over the years, these breaks with convention (and any shred of self-seriousness) made Sun and Moon stand out.

Then there's this whole invasion by inter-dimensional monsters and an evil mom. Dugtrios have Fabio hair, and Persian has a Garfield face. The Team Rocket stand-in is a gang of lovably useless hip-hop poseurs.

Pokémon has gotten progressively weirder over the years ( just ask anyone who saw the latest movie), but Sun and Moon lean into that goofiness tenfold. What really set Sun and Moon apart from the rest of the series was their charm. These replace Gym battles from the last two-plus decades' worth of Pokémon games and shake things up considerably but not so much that fans won't recognize the trials for what they are. You start as a child newly moved to the islands of Alola, Pokémon's equivalent of Hawaii, and set off on an adventure to best each landmass' Pokémon-centric trials. They have a whole heaping helping of new stuff, to be fair, but, foundationally, the games are the same as their predecessors. You'd think Ultra would be a better fit because not only is its new content new, but its old content is new as well.Īnd make no mistake: Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon are one-year-old games with some new stuff thrown in. That's not to mention that Nintendo has a perfectly good, new game system without any traditional Pokémon games that could have hosted a remake. The series is no stranger to remakes, but these new ones come just one year after vanilla Sun and Moon graced the same hardware, not the more standard two, or three, or even 10 years apart. That's why Pokémon Ultra Sun and Pokémon Ultra Moon feel so odd. Pokémon, the international catch-and-battle craze that solely justified my owning three different Game Boys as a child, isn't far behind (especially if you count spinoffs). The Switch is far from a complete failure, at least for the time being, and Nintendo has already begun to push its biggest and brightest franchises onto the new hardware.

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