Next month, The Pokémon Company will celebrate 20 years of success with the release of Pokemon Sun & Moon. This version is special for a couple of reasons. First, many speculated that we might get Pokemon Z, a continuation of X & Y. Instead, the Pokémon Company decided to bring in a new generation of Pokémon with Sun & Moon. Second, in order to pay homage to the first generation, the developers have added something called alola forms to some of the first generation monsters (Grimer, Sandshrew, Vulpix etc). Last week, The Pokémon Company and Nintendo blessed us with a short demo to give us a taste of what we’re in store for come next month. Let’s jump in:

One of my beefs with the demo off top is that it’s short and it definitely caters more to the younger audience. The demo starts off slow, introducing the player to a couple of new elements to the game. Now the homie Ira already came through and talked about some of it, but getting my hands on the demo reassured my hype for this game.

HMs are gone.

Yup. I never thought I’d live long enough to see the day where hidden machines were taken out of the game. No longer do we have to sacrifice a Pokémon just to teach them a weak move to advance the story through the game. They tested this with the Eon Flute in ORAS (Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire), but now they’ve replaced all HMs with Ride Pokémon. In the demo, we get Tauros Charge, which also you to ride the Pokemon and smash rock obstacles that obstruct your way.

Movement is more fluid.

Remember Pokémon (or really any roleplayer game) back in the day, and how movement was done through a grid-based system? This made sense in the 2D games, but once they stepped up the graphics in X & Y and ORAS, we were hoping to have free range of motion. They’ve done this with Sun & Moon. The character models are upgraded, and we’re no longer restricted to a grid-based movement.

Pokémon Snap is back…kinda.

On one hand yes, photography is back in Pokémon. I have no idea why it took Nintendo this long (three pieces of hardware to be exact) to re-implement photography, but here we are. It’s a little different than Pokémon Snap, given the graphics and animation of the Pokémon. In one of the trials in the demo, they let you mess around with the mechanics. While the picture taking is a bit forced and unnecessary, it works and it’ll be nostalgic for people who remember playing Pokémon Snap on the Nintendo 64.

The battle animations haven’t changed much.

This isn’t the biggest deal, because Lord knows I’m going to be the first in line come November. But with a new generation of monsters to battle with, I was expecting some new battle animations. It was confirmed that we’re getting over 100 new moves, however it would’ve been really nice to see some of the old moves get new animations over its ORAS counterparts.

Believe it or not, what I’ve given you here is just a sample of all the information we got from the demo. If you look around, you can actually find leaks of the entire Pokédex with alolan forms and all.

What did you think of the demo? Are you still going to pick up Sun & Moon when it drops November 18th? Let us know in the comments.

HMs are gone.

Movement is more fluid.

Pokémon Snap is back…kinda.

The battle animations haven’t changed much.

Want more Blerd content? Sign up for our newsletter!

Pokemon Snap

Get relevant content delivered to you once a week