This was my first mainline pokemon game, and I do like it quite a lot. There's a great variety of Pokemon available to catch and the region overall feels the most like a coherent and natural setting out of any game in the series. In terms of difficulty, it's a consistently challenging experience, with quite a few battles that require careful strategy and consideration if you want to beat them without using healing items. The soundtrack is also excellent, a lot of really memorable tracks here.

The reason I don't rate it higher is that it's just... so painful to replay. There's an endless amount of cutscenes and moments where all your agency is taken away. The routes are overall very linear and there's not much in the way of interesting exploration.

Opinions on gen 7 tend to be pretty mixed but I would recommend it if you want a more story focused Pokemon game, since there is genuinely a lot to love about these characters and the journey they go through. Team skull is also funny as fuck, so it might be worth it for that alone.

It took me six years, about 130 total hours of play time, and three different save files to finally finish Ultra Sun. The first two times I tried playing it, I ended up dropping the game around the end of Akala Island. I honestly can't even say why, since I like Alola and the new additions like the sticker hunt and mantine surfing are fun, even if I don't really care for the story changes and think that the Rainbow Rocket stuff was pretty underwhelming. Maybe it's because it just feels too similar to the original Sun and Moon and I put way too much time into Moon when it came out. Maybe it's because it was a 3DS game released in the fall of 2017, and by the time I got around to wanting to finish it my 2DS XL's battery was so bad that I could barely play for an hour before needing to charge it (I actually ended up replacing the battery because of this and it made the last third of the game way more enjoyable). I really can't say. Regardless, I had a pretty good time with Ultra Sun.

The second itteration of Alola Pokémon Games marks the final entries on the 3DS, serving as a duo of enhanced versions of Sun and Moon the Ultra games are somewhat controvercial for being essentially a big update sold for retail price, alongside the very long introductive sequence, from the start of the game to around the first trial, which is a common turn-off for many players and fans of the series. I too have often started replays of these games only to be discouraged from toughing out the slow start. This time around I went at it with the goal to take my time, see how much of the pokédex I can complete and what Pokémon surprise me during usage. I also wanted to explore Alola again, especially now that it's getting quite cold again.

First off, I have to voice my amazement at how alive Alola is in this game, there's so many short side quests that either serve to make the world feel more alive, lived in, or to expand some lore like, apparently Dittos can mimic people quite well and that's fun :))))

The music is beautiful which is honestly a given for every Pokémon game, the hawaiian influence on this soundtrack makes it feel perfect for alola and I at times stopped in place to just listen to battle themes, location themes and so on.

My team this time around consisted of Incineroar, Alolan Raichu, Araquanid, Trevenant, Alolan Ninetails and Kommo-o. I've never used Trevenant and Kommo-o in a playthrough before and I must say I was blown away by Trevenant's performance. I dedicated myself to shiny hunt a Phantump through SOS-Chaining and got one at only 69 encounters. Its white and red color scheme is beautiful and thus I used it a lot during battle. My team struggled somewhat against fairy type enemies and against Ultra Necrozma, but, like, who doesn't lol

The story of Ultra sun is very interesting, multidimensional travelling, the very fate of alola and the wider world resting on my character's shoulders, Lusamine's personal struggle with being "the mommy" of everyone except her literal children, those childrens defiance of their mother and Guzma's struggle with accepting his short-comings all really appeal to me.

Mantine surf 10/10