The Pokemon series has come quite a long way. From the very first games for the Game Boy, all through the many sequels and spin-offs, the world of Pokemon has grown exponentially and touched many, many lives. I’ve been a huge Pokemon guy ever since the first games, and whenever a new one is announced, I’m always nothing less than enthralled.

They’ve been with me through it all, man. When I was learning to read? There’s a lot of reading in Pokemon. When I was learning to make friends? Pokemon was what brought us together. And when I started touching myself for the first time? Yeah, I busted some fat nuts on Pokemon.

And then Pokemon Sun and Moon came along. I followed the news all the way up until release. I reported it all, right here on WWW Dot Lord Waffle King Dot Com. The designs looked great. The game looked perfect. I was sure this would be the greatest one yet, beating out my previous favorite that was Black and White.

I was very, very wrong.

Pokemon Sun and Moon have to be the greatest train-wreck of a Pokemon game I’ve ever played. To simply call the game “bad” wouldn’t quite explain the situation well enough, but I wouldn’t hesitate to call it my least favorite Pokemon game. And it really breaks my heart.

In my time playing Sun and Moon, I lost interest several times. Something that’s never happened to me before in a Pokemon game. I had to force myself to complete it, and only because I wanted to know who all the characters were so I could jerk off to hentai of them.

I mean, you can’t just whack it to a girl you don’t know. What kind of animal does that? Someone that doesn’t respect women, that’s who.

Pokemon games have slowly become more and more bloated over the years, but Sun and Moon are the first to ever truly be weighed down by it. Sun and Moon doesn’t know who it’s catering to anymore, and in an attempt to please everyone, they’ve really only succeeded in providing a clusterfuck of things that really don’t mesh well.

It’s an incredibly ambitious game, don’t get me wrong. Graphics are great for a 3DS game, and the presentation is phenomenal. A great soundtrack like always, and the Alola region has to be one of the best out of all of them. The Pokemon designs are fucking fantastic, all of the characters are likeable and well-developed. And surprisingly, even the story is great. The writing potentially rivals Black and White, actually. There’s real character development and everything. Not just a fat kid that likes to dance. In that sense, I’d actually rank it as one of the best Pokemon games. Possibly the best.

And yet the promising plot and world-building is held back by what I can only assume was corporate meddling on the Pokemon Company’s part to try and make the game appeal to the little shits sucking their glue through a straw because their negligent moms let them play Pokemon Go in the fucking street. Maybe they felt like they had to compete with Yo-Kai Watch and try to make the whole game into one long cartoon episode.

Fuck that shit though.

I wanted to explore Alola. I wanted to catch Pokemon and immerse myself in this world. I wanted a grand adventure. What I got was a special ed class Easter egg hunt. Getting lead by the hand to all the conspicuously placed Easter eggs, and having them all pointed out to me and placed gently in my basket by an adult so that I wouldn’t accidentally shove them up my ass by mistake.

It’s like going to Disney World with gassy Uncle Boris. No, don’t go on ride. Uncle Boris no feel good. Uncle Boris eat too much asparagus. Please, keep walking. We walk around park and go home.

Elsa and Snow White could be flashing their tits and beckoning you to join them on the fucking tea cup ride, but no. Keep walking. Look, there’s Mickey Mouse over there. No, you can’t go say hi to him. That’s not a part of the fucking tour. Keep walking.

The entire first half of the game feels like one long tutorial. It doesn’t at any point let you go to explore on your own time. You go where it tells you, you explore the way it wants you to. Read all of the dialogue, do the battles it presents to you, watch all of the completely unnecessary cutscenes. Why so many cutscenes? Pokemon doesn’t need that many. The cutscenes are done very well, yes. They help to build up the characters and make the emotional impact they deliver in the end that much more powerful. Sure. But the same was accomplished with N in Pokemon Black and White, and it didn’t require stagnating the whole fucking game.

When the action does open up, during that entire first half of the game that spans two of the region’s four islands, it hardly even makes a difference. The islands are designed in such a linear fashion, there really isn’t even a need for the map that takes up the bottom half of the screen. It’s a straight, Point A to Point B map. There are no “dungeons” in the same sense that older Pokemon games have had. Caves, forests, and other places to explore are kept to a minimum, and when there are some, they’re usually presented as part of the game’s “trials” which replace the gyms from older games.

Which would be fine, if it didn’t hold your hand through trials just in case battling a singular wild “Totem” Pokemon with slightly higher stats than usual was too hard for you. It tells you very clearly where to go, what to do, and how to do it. The mini-map on the bottom screen, which is an unfortunate waste of UI space, always has a very clear marker point of where you’re supposed to go. It’ll even offer you little hints. Say, didn’t the professor go that way, you know, where the little red flag is? Gosh, there might be something important there. Let’s go there.

There’s genuinely a point in the game where the map will present a goal for you, and then instead of just letting you go there, you’ll walk out and find that an NPC was out there waiting for you with a brief cutscene telling you which way the mini-map, that’s always on the bottom pointing you in the right direction, wanted you to go. And then it’ll proceed to lead you there, having you follow the NPC all the way to the trial site. You know, in case a giant red flag on the bottom screen was too hard to find.

And that’s after the fucking two island-long tutorial.

This was a big step in making the game autism-proof, I get it. It was to make sure that the generation of kids raised on Angry Birds and fidget spinners could play the game just like everyone else. But there’s no way to turn it the fuck off? I wanna play Pokemon games too. Come on.

Pretty much every older DS Pokemon game used the bottom screen in a better way. Even Pokemon Ranger. I’d rather draw fucking circles than put up with this bullshit. Sure, make the completely redundant mini-map the default. But there’s so much more you could’ve put there.

The incredibly promising Poke Pelago, a touch screen-based way to interact with your Pokemon, is locked away in menus when it could’ve easily been at your fingertips at all times. And on top of that, every time you want to use it, you need to watch an unskippable cutscene of your trainer traveling to the fucking Poke Pelago just to use it.

The touch controls are also fairly sloppy with Poke Pelago, something surprising considering Pokemon’s years of slowly perfecting its touch screen UI. There’s so many tiny sprites on the bottom screen moving around, it’s easy to accidentally tap the wrong thing when you’re just trying to collect some God damned beans.

So many strides have been made in eliminating annoying quirks that the games have had for ages, and yet all the tiny steps towards progress are fucked up by glaring bad design choices.

It’s really sad, it really is. It’s like a Miss America pageant contestant in Pokemon game form. It’s really fucking gorgeous. I’d fuck it. And the script, clearly, had had a lot of work put into it. But in the end, it’s just really fucking stupid. If you asked Sun and Moon what it meant to them to be a Pokemon game, they would ramble on incoherently about Pokemon games bringing people together for ten minutes, and then point to an Alolan form Pokemon and say “Kanto, remember?” You can get your favorite Pokemon from the first games, but now they have a much more exotic penis.

And yet even with the shitty execution, I still felt the emotional climax at the end of the game. Which made it so hard for me to accept how much I hated it. By the end of the game, I wanted to love it, I really did. But now all I feel is the disappointment of how much better it could’ve been if they didn’t butcher it.

A Pokemon Sun and Moon where I get to explore all of the islands without cutscenes every couple steps. Where there aren’t ten different forms of point markers to tell you where you’re supposed to go at any given point, and I can play the game to its fullest without worrying about accidentally overpowering myself. Almost every cutscene ends with someone giving you ten Max Revives. And they heal your Pokemon for you on top of it. There was really no reason to ever use healing items or Pokemon Centers, which are now conveniently located on almost every route now instead of only towns, because everyone would heal you before every major battle anyway. There was a time where I actually used healing items, because I was towards the end of the game. But no, they were wasted. As soon as I approach this powerful, endgame trainer, someone steps in and pitches me an entire medicine cabinet and heals my Pokemon for me.

There’s a difference between “Oh, just turn the Exp. Share off, then it won’t be too easy” and “Oh, just don’t talk to anyone, don’t buy anything, don’t battle too much, don’t explore the miscellaneous side-quests on each route, don’t use the Poke Pelago, turn Exp. Share off, don’t look at your bottom screen, ignore all of the cutscene dialogue, and don’t do any of the StreetPass Festival Plaza shit or whatever. Come on, it’s not too easy”.

It’s like if they made a reality TV show where you have to live in the same house as 8 different grandmas, but try not to get fat from them stuffing you full of food. You can refuse all you want, but they’re gonna get you. Even if you eat only three times a day, you’re gonna die of cardiac arrest. And you’re only allowed to murder one, the rest have to go from natural causes. There’s no way you’ll take home the million-dollar prize. You have better chances of beating the robot from Jeopardy.

Even the obnoxious feature where Pokemon call for help doesn’t do anything to balance the game, it just makes it more of a drag.

“Too easy” or “for casuals” would be the cop out verdict. The truth is that the game is just miserably balanced, relying on an instant gratification-style of gameplay and a slow-paced narrative that makes the game intolerable. The point where things start actually getting good is the brief half hour before it cuts to the credits, and then the game is over before it even starts.

It’s like not being able to get your peepee up and then when it’s finally up you blast your load immediately.

I think a lot of people did not actually like Sun or Moon, despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews. I don’t think a lot of people played it all the way through, actually. It’s a lot like when No Man’s Sky launched, and everyone was pretending to love it until someone said something about it. Several people told me Sun and Moon was just fantastic, and then they’d say “yeah, I’m on the second island now” and then they’d just leave the game for something else.

I think a lot of people just watched all the leaks and then beat off to hentai of the new characters and then just pretended like they finished the game. Not saying that no one at all enjoyed the game, I’m sure a lot of people did. A lot of people could’ve looked past the glaring flaws and loved it for what it was.

That doesn’t stop the fact that it’s still the only Pokemon game I’ve ever played that I didn’t have fun with. And that will be a mark of shame that the game has to wear. I almost wish that all I did was watch the leaks and never play the game. I could’ve lived with the illusion that Pokemon could do no wrong.

But no. I had to be a gentleman and learn the names of all the trainers before looking up hentai of them.

This is why chivalry is fucking dead.