Pokémon Sun & Moon: 10 Exciting New Things You Can Do

Praise Helix, it’s been a good year to be a Pokemon fan, hasn’t it?

Not content with concentrating all the 20th anniversary celebrations to one day, Nintendo have made 2016 a smorgasbord of Poké-goodness, including monthly Mythical Pokemon distributions, classic games returning on current generation consoles and even the return of the original trading cards that tore apart your friendships in primary school just for a shiny Charizard card.

But even with all this, the Pokemon Generations specials, and new games like the delightful Pokken Tournament, the focus since February 27th has always been on the release of Pokemon Sun and Pokemon Moon. Barely a fortnight seems to have gone by without a leak from CoroCoro or an official release of new game footage.

It might seem like a detail heavy approach to building anticipation, but the selection has been carefully cultivated; the details exposed to us have never overindulged us in what’s to come, but shown us enough to want to pick up a copy to find out for ourselves.

With the advent of the series’ seventh generation upon us, it’s time to look at what’s new in the world of Pokemon. We’ve got a living Pokedex, Professor Oak’s palette swapped cousin, quite possibly the most vibrant and culturally rich region we’ve seen yet, and a whole host of new and madcap Pokemon.

But even with all that, here are the ten things heralded in Pokemon Sun and Pokemon Moon that you should be getting really excited for right about now.

Let’s kick things off with a smaller addition you may have forgotten about, and that’s how Pokemon Bank is going to make bringing up Pokemon from past generations easier than stealing the nose of a small child. In games gone by, we had to use increasingly contrived methods to transfer Pokemon, often in a very slow plodding manner that was saddled with a poor, gimmicked mechanic (looking at you, Pal Park).

Coming in to X & Y we saw the chains start to slip off, and with Pokemon Bank in full effect, we’ll now be able to send any Pokemon we currently have up to Sun & Moon with no delay or faffing about, and see some lightning fast completions of the Pokedex.

More importantly is that the 3DS editions of Red, Blue & Yellow will be able to communicate with the new titles, and any Pokemon you have from those first generation games can now hop into the fully rendered three dimensional action. Okay, so it’s not the same as having your very original GameBoy team brought up to realise your squad goals, but think about how different a set of games Red, Blue & Yellow are in terms of ways to build teams and the moves they can learn.

Once modern mechanics are melded in, we could see members of the original 151 shoot up the competitive ladder, and some old favourites might find a spot on your team once again.

Or they might fail and flop horribly and none of them will make an iota of difference. Either or.