This is good news. I was genuinely worried the Sun boxart would be bright pink and the Moon boxart camoflague, so it's good to get some confirmation that they will indeed be yellow and purple respectively.
Joking aside, I think my main line of thought with this leads me to ask
why they are taking this route of silence for such a long time. I get the logic behind an almost obligatory reveal during the month of the franchise's 20th anniversary, which could in turn lead to a period with no news if they had intended for the announcements to begin in May regardless. But that still doesn't change the fact that they'd be condensing the news into 6-7 months if they began in May and released in October or November.
X & Y had 9 months of build-up that began with solid information on the starters and mascots. I can't remember ORAS's off the top of my head, but aside from the new Megas, all our information wasn't completely "new," it was revamped from the originals that we already knew. Remakes and third versions tend to have shorter pre-release periods because there isn't as much new information to show, considering the main bulk of the games are already known. But the press release claimed that Sun & Moon are a new generation, so theoretically there should be at least a sizable amount of new content to show.
Not that I think they should reveal everything and leave nothing to the players' discovery, but rather they need to show us some significant features, Pokémon, NPCs, locations, and other details that will secure peoples' pre-orders. I can actually come up with a 9-month schedule that doesn't reveal everything but just enough to keep people interested:
- Starters
- Mascots
- Protagonists and rival(s) and general region reveal
- A few more Pokémon
- A few more Pokémon and two Gym Leaders
- Villain info and location info
- Info on some major gameplay feature
- A few more Pokémon and two more Gym Leaders
- Another major gameplay feature, a few new Pokémon, and some significant NPCs
This list doesn't even reveal the last four Gym Leaders, that's how secretive it is. So it's definitely possible to have a 9-month pre-release period without spoiling the entire game, which brings me back to
why TPC(i) is choosing to take this route. They could be planning on revealing a lot of information at once--it could work. They may be choosing to leave a
lot of information secret--certainly a possibility, but one I don't find as likely because they'd want their potential customers to see what the games have to offer in order to, again, secure their pre-order(s). I don't want to think it's because there isn't a lot of new info to show, but I'll throw it out there too because it is just as much of a possibility as any other.
This brings me to an interesting point. Although many fans value the story and NPCs of the Pokémon world, obviously (and for good, understandable reason) the main focus is the Pokémon. In this day and age, where the games are released almost simultaneously worldwide, it leaves me to wonder--why would they save the reveal of Pokémon so significant as the starters for CoroCoro, a magazine available only in Japan? I can only begin to imagine when it would happen, but I wouldn't be surprised if we got some sort of Pokémon YouTube Channel reveal of the starters and maybe the boxart with the mascots before the next issue of CoroCoro. That seems like the kind of news they would reveal to everyone at the same time. Information about the protagonists and NPCs, and maybe even some locations, would probably be left to CoroCoro for TPCi to report on not much later.
