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

Up until this point, every Pokemon game has asked you to beat eight gym leaders to challenge the Elite Four and the champion, thus completing the player’s journey. It’s probably some kind of parable for maturity that Nintendo have decided to abandon any subtleties of by introducing the Alola exclusive Island Challenge. Trainers partake in this rite of passage and travel across the four major islands of Alola to eventually come into their own as the island challenge champion.

Rather than gym leaders, you face trial captains with challenges that range beyond battles, culminating in an SOS Battle with a Totem Pokemon. When all other trials on an island are cleared, players compete in the grand trial against the Island Kahuna.

While this doesn’t completely rewrite the structure of the games, it provides a welcome and refreshed approach to them whilst really adding to Alolan culture. The wild, varied and unknown nature of the trials, as well as the presence of Totem Pokemon and Kahunas, should make the challenge far less paint-by-numbers than gym battles were.

It also seems like there could be a bit of story significance to the challenge we don’t actually know about yet, such as ties to the four Guardian Pokemon and the Ultra Beasts. But that’s going to be half the fun; a new kind of journey where we don’t know what the end looks like!