Still Playing Pokémon

Alola is what happens when the Pokémon franchise goes on vacation—sun, surf, Hawaiian shirts on NPCs, island trials instead of gyms, and a villain team that dresses like they’re in a music video. It works better than it has any right to.

Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon came out for the Nintendo 3DS in November 2016, and the games relocate everything to a Hawaii-inspired island chain. The usual gym circuit is replaced by a series of island trials and Island Kahuna battles, which is either a meaningful structural change or just different window dressing over the same bones, depending on how generous you’re feeling. I’m moderately generous.

The regional variants are better than I expected—familiar Pokémon redesigned for the Alola environment, given new types and appearances. An Alolan Vulpix is Ice-type. An Alolan Marowak carries a flaming bone and is part Ghost-type, which is one of those small details that suggests someone on the design team was actually thinking rather than just meeting a content quota. Team Skull, the villain faction, leans into hip-hop aesthetics in a way the series hadn’t really attempted before. Charming or cringeworthy depending on how you receive that kind of thing. For me, mostly charming.

There’s a playground logic to Pokémon I’ve never fully grown out of—the collection compulsion, the battle system’s paper-rock-scissors depth that reveals itself slowly across dozens of hours. The Battle Tree, the endgame gauntlet where the difficulty finally stops pretending, is where I always end up sinking the most time. Post-credits, post-story, just grinding through increasingly punishing opponents at midnight like I’m seventeen again sitting cross-legged on a bedroom floor. That’s still there. That never goes away.