I think these are some of the best entries in the series, and I'm not even nearly finished yet.
While I haven't voiced it much here, those who know me personally of have seen me post on Serebii (my name there is Sαpphire) might know that I consider Sun and Moon to have been the best games in the series so far. They had deeper stories than Pokemon has ever had, they had more spirit, and they were more challenging in most instances than any previous title upon first attempt (without the infernal Experience Share, of course). They had (almost) everything I wanted from this series, and then more. They were perfect introductions to the generation.
The point of Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, then, should have been to build on that formula, and I think they did that really successfully. These weren't sequels, and going into them expecting them to be to their predecessors what Black 2 and White 2 were to Black and White might have ruined the game for some people; expecting sequels was probably not good. If you walked in expecting them to be the Yellow, Crystal, Emerald, or Platinum of the generation, then you probably had a really good time.
These games already get faulted a lot for things like "being too same-y," a criticism I can't consider legitimate given what third versions have tended to be. Having played for sixteen years now, and having experienced three generations with third versions (as well as Gen 1 retroactively), this is what I expect out of a good third version. The story runs along the same thread as the originals, until a key moment when it begins to diverge and become its own thing. The new story, when held to the same standard, is about as good. There's more content post-game, this time in the form of Rainbow Rocket and other things, than there was in the previous titles.
In short, these are good, solid examples of typical third versions.
They're not perfect, which is why I might not call these the absolute best in the series. Sun and Moon exceeded expectations in absolutely every way possible; although these have everything those games had and more, these are held to the "third version" standard rather than the standard of entry titles. In the previous several instances of a third version, including the Gen 5 sequels (which I'll discuss more in a minute), we got the very first Battle Tower; we got the Hoenn Battle Frontier, which to this day is one of the most outstanding pieces of the series; we got a radically changed Battle Frontier with new facilities; and then we got the Pokemon World Tournament. That's where these games miss the mark a bit; there's nothing quite comparable to the scope and scale of the additions those games have established as precedent. We have the Battle Agency, but that's just a revival of one facility, and it's somewhat nerfed to try and force social interaction to get better choices. When you're used to 7 facilities, 5 facilities, and then the massive PWT, this falls pretty flat, all things considered. That, I think, is the most glaring issue. We'll see as I near the end whether the rest of the game makes up, though, because ORAS managed to become my favorite games in the series before Sun and Moon were released, despite not including the Frontier.
What we can't do is compare them to Black 2 and White 2. It seems that every time I revisit those games, they get even better in retrospect, but we have to consider the circumstances under which those were made. They were not the fourth set on their system and second on their engine, but rather the fifth on the DS and the
fifth to use the core engine that powered those games. They had nearly six years to develop and improve between the release of the first games to use the engine and the release of B2W2. As such, they were by then making sure they fit as much as they possibly could into those games. The concept, too, was entirely unique for the series - they were true sequels, something we hadn't seen before and haven't seen since. As such, the story had to be radically different - every single thing that happened in Black and White was taken as having already happened, while for most other later entries in a generation that stayed in the same region, an alternate version of that story is told - as has happened now.
The reason I bring up B2W2 is because I think that they, in a way, ingrained a lot of unfounded expectations into a large portion of the fanbase. It's clear from the debacle with the Japanese Amazon reviews of USUM that people had expected things to be entirely different. The marketing for these games, however, fits a lot more with what we actually got - the only reason to have expected a radically different story or sequel story is if one is unfamiliar with Yellow, Crystal, Emerald, and Platinum, or is only familiar with them in retrospect and didn't experience the marketing and lead-up to those games. A lot of people who are fans now, however, seem to have started the series with Gen 5, and that being the last example of staying in the same region again, they expected something closer to that.
For games that were getting
a lot of unfounded hate before they were even released, these are stellar entries to the series. They do right much or all of what Sun and Moon did right; they then add more things on top of that, with an expanded pseudo-competitive experience and an expanded post-game. They cover all the bases.
These games seem like they're meant to be the definitive 3DS experience for the series, and maybe the definitive experience for the entire DS line since it started over a decade ago; I think that they achieve those ambitions and set us up well to go into a brand new and potentially radically different phase in the series when Gen 8 debuts in (probably) a year or two. For me, Gen 1 through Gen 3 was Part 1 of this series; Gen 4 through these games has been Part 2, and they're a fitting final chapter for it as a new dawn on the Switch is on the horizon.
