Wicke is still in Secret Lab B in the far basements of Aether Paradise. I guess this is the safest and most secure room to discuss classified Interpol missions.

It was... certainly more difficult than usual, given the relative strength of the Ultra Beasts, but not impossibly so. Having a large supply of Beast Balls was also very helpful. Hopefully you won’t be wanting these back, because I don’t intend to relinquish the approximately 3 dozen balls I have left.

Yeah, you better not forget Looker! It’s due to him that Anabel is even alive right now, despite his lack of any partner Pokemon to help him out.

Speaking of, the man is late for our meeting. I wonder if he got caught up in a line at a restaurant while trying to schedule our feast?

Oh, come on! We’d just finished with the mission; did more Ultra Beasts show up or something?!

Well, that would certainly be an interesting phenomenon. But the more important question is, is it an Ultra Beast? Wicke says it’s not, and although taking Interpol at their word is perhaps not such a good idea anymore, given their penchant for withholding information, if they say it’s not a problem, then we don’t have to worry about it.

And now for the good news: with the Ultra Beast conservation project completed, Anabel and Looker get to take a proper vacation! And to be frank, there’s probably nowhere better to vacation than Alola in the Pokemon world.

This marks the end of our meeting as well. Anabel leaves first, since she has a meeting with Nanu scheduled. Hopefully she’s going down with the intention of learning more about the shady Interpol dealings he and Looker told me about, because otherwise she may end up paying for her ignorance one day.

And that’s the last we see of Anabel - the only other way to see her in vanilla Sun is to randomly encounter her in the Battle Tree, which is something I won’t be going over in this series.

Looker hangs around a little longer; it seems that he believes that hard work should be well-rewarded, so he arranged for a little stipend to be given to us from Interpol:

Oh SNAP!

Well, that should take care of anything I need to buy for the foreseeable future! Thanks, Looker!

Looker does indeed take up residence in the Melemele motel. Amusingly, his dialog options are the same as they were during the UB conservation project missions. If you ask him about the “Ultra Beast” he saw most recently, however, he just laughs and writes of his vision of the shiny black refractor as his overactive imagination.

Now, I don’t know how you would know where to go to actually find it, but it is possible to hunt down the object of Looker’s imagination. To find it, you have to go to the Farthest Hollow of Ten Carat Hill, and wander around in the tall grass there for a while. Use a Repel to drive away the weak indigenous Pokemon, and you’ll find this guy!

Necrozma is Lv75, the highest-leveled wild Pokemon you can find in the game. Although Looker may have confused Necrozma for an Ultra Beast, this Pokemon is in fact just a regular Legendary, and thus Beast Balls are extremely bad when used against him. He has a Psychic-type Hyper Beam as one of his moves, so it may help to bring a Dark-type if you plan to catch it normally. Otherwise, this is probably the best candidate for the Master Ball in this game, since there aren’t any “runners” in this generation you’d otherwise want to save it for.

After catching Necrozma, you can bring its Pokedex data to Looker to show him that the thing he saw really does exist, and you’ll be rewarded with a little bit more dialog.

Unintentional foreshadowing! In vanilla Sun, Necrozma is just a random legend you can catch, which is “reminiscent of the Ultra Beasts” without itself being one. But in Ultra Sun, it gets a major story upgrade to being basically a god of Light. “Remarkable” is thus a horrendous understatement!

One thing I do wonder is whether or not the Necrozma we find just waking up in Ten Carat Hill is supposed to be the same character as the Necrozma that the UR Squad imprisoned in Megalo Tower. The Ultra Sun Necrozma was apparently capable of switching back and forth between Alola’s world and the world of Ultra Megalpolis, and did so regularly until the Megalopolitans broke him with their greedy experiments, whereas vanilla Sun Necrozma was apparently just asleep for a long time and apparently didn’t need to be confined anywhere. Maybe in vanilla Sun, Necrozma, while unable to take its Ultra form, nonetheless did not suffer from a maddening hunger for Light due to sleeping in the tropical paradise of Alola, whereas it had already consumed the light of Ultra Megalopolis and was basically catatonic rather than merely asleep.

We won’t get any further answers on these mysteries from vanilla Sun, though - we’ve cleared the postgame proper! Next time, we begin Ultra Sun’s postgame and prepare to segue into the Rainbow Rocket takeover!

After catching four Kartanas in the previous episode, Nanu stopped by to update us on the history of Interpol’s interactions with the Ultra Beasts in the past. We didn’t quite get to the end of the story before Anabel got back to the motel, though.

Humorously, our final meetup location for this project, since Poni Island doesn’t have any motels, is at the floating restaurant on the west side of the Seafolk Village. Looks like Looker will finally get his long-delayed feast after all!

That’s a relief to hear! We already know that Anabel is so tired that she feels a need to hide it, so if she goes somewhere where the Ultra Beast isn’t, then we won’t have to worry about it eating her.

And the other shoe finally drops. So Interpol agent Anabel is a Faller, a human from another world.

Actually, this isn’t the first time Pokemon has touched upon the idea of other worlds. I believe there was some discussion of them during parts of XY and ORAS, particularly during the Delta Episode of the latter games, during which the governing bodies decide that the correct approach to dealing with an approaching Meteor of Destruction is to warp it into another world. I also remember that there was some discussion about XY being a sort of ‘soft reboot’, with the events of the previous three generations taking place in a different dimension. The breakpoint between regular RSE and ORAS, as I recall, was that Mega Evolution was discovered in ORAS-land but not in vanilla RSE.

Anabel being a Faller does kinda tie into the above theories, though:

One of the few things Anabel remembered, albeit only vaguely and not in so many words, was that she used to be Salon Maiden of the Hoenn Battle Tower. No such position exists in the ORAS tower, which points to her ‘home’ dimension being that of original Emerald.

(Another brief aside: Looker’s postgame cameo in ORAS is basically limited to you finding him washed up on a beach, also amnesic. Does that mean he too is a Faller???) (if so that explains why the pairing Looker x Anabel is called “Fallershipping”)

Of course, Anabel having been found unconscious raises a whole bunch of other questions. Does prolonged exposure to Ultra Wormhole energy have a debilitating effect on humans who fall into the cracks between dimensions? Remember, we are also technically a Faller by dint of having visited Ultra Space briefly - yet we still have all our memories. Was it that we didn’t spend long enough in the other world, the fact we had Nebby to protect us, or something else that makes our situation different from Anabel?

As we learned in the previous episode, Interpol apparently takes the “resources” in “human resources” pretty seriously when it comes to their use of Fallers in their ranks. Nanu clearly has not gotten over the loss of his former partner. Nor has Looker, for that matter, but the two of them deal with their loss very differently. Nanu basically just gave up and retired, whereas Looker threw himself into his work with reckless abandon.

It is strange that Anabel was promoted up in the ranks of Interpol so quickly, though. Usually the more senior members get first shot at promotions. Thus, either Interpol thinks Looker is still incompetent, or they had another reason to pull Anabel up - in this case, because they wanted to make sure Anabel had the rank necessary to justify sending her on this mission.

But if Anabel volunteered for this role, as Looker tells us, what does that mean?

Ultra Beasts and Fallers... Both come from other worlds by chance, rather than by choice.

Oh, right, this. Ultra Beasts confuse the residual radiation carried by Fallers by the radiation emitted by proper Ultra Wormholes, so they are both drawn to and incensed by them.

Looker must have done some research prior to taking on the Ultra Beast mission - probably enough to know about Anabel’s backstory, but not enough to figure out all the ins and outs of what it meant. Nonetheless, it was enough for him to know that two people (one Trainer and one without a team) would be insufficient manpower to deal with the Ultra Beasts. And who better than the Champion, the strongest Trainer in Alola (who coincidentally also happens to be a second Faller) to join their team?

With the whole story out in the open, there’s just one small matter left to take care of before we take on the last Ultra Beast: a battle with Nanu, ostensibly to make the passing of the torch official.

I had Silvally set to Fairy-type before this battle, so it was absolutely no trouble to sweep Nanu’s team.

Our win gets a rare smile from Nanu, who then leaves to go secure the actual perimeter of the last Ultra Beast’s hidey-hole.

Anyway, enough gabbling on about the past - we have a job to do! Namely, we need to go catch UB-05 Glutton, also known as Guzzlord.

Resolution Cave is a place we have not yet been to. It’s a cave in the heart of Poni Island, in a part of the island you can’t go to before becoming Champion. So if you jump into the UB conservation project right away without going there yourself first, you’ll have to battle your way through a number of Trainers before you get to Guzzlord’s room. I’d already taken care of that stuff, though, which gave me access to a more convenient Fly point than the entrance to Vast Poni Canyon - specifically, it’s possible to Fly to the entrance of Poni Grove.

Guzzlord will only show up in the bottom-most floor of Resolution Cave:

Guzzlord is Lv70, another 5 levels over the rest of the Ultra Beasts we’ve been fighting. Fortunately, his major stat is HP, which means that although he can take hits quite well, he doesn’t hit nearly as hard, even with a +2 Attack aura. That said, it took me two tries to catch him, because I accidentally one-shotted him with Fairy!Silvally’s Multi-Attack on the first try.

With Guzzlord captured, we can return to the restaurant we were using as a base. Anabel, thankfully, seems to be in better spirits - perhaps Looker’s bit of misdirection was sufficient to let her recover some of her strength. The two don’t discuss that particular tactic, however - at least, not in front of me, anyway.

Although, if you read into this line and Anabel’s previous one, you might get the impression that Anabel is trying to obliquely thank Looker for his actions, without coming out and saying that she wasn’t up to the last task at the end.

Oops! I completely forgot that Wicke was in on this project too, despite being told after every step that we could talk to her to learn more about the Ultra Beasts we’d captured to date. I guess we’d better go down to her lab and properly thank her for her role in all of this.

After catching the Nihilego floating around in Wela Park, Anabel called us down to Melemele Island for the next assignment.

Inside their Melemele motel room, Anabel stands waiting for us; Looker is apparently off doing the recon work at the moment. Anabel doesn’t feel right having Looker “do all the work”, given his track record as an Interpol agent - as well she shouldn’t! Looker has, at the very least, been personally involved in the takedown of the infrastructure of both Team Galactic and Team Plasma, plus some shenanigans in Lumiose City I’m less familiar with.

That said, it turns out we’re actually waiting on someone else to show up:

And that someone turns out to be Nanu, kahuna of Ula’ula Island!

Nanu tries to play off his involvement in the Ultra Beast caper as just another moment in a string of inconveniences created by his choice of profession, but he lets slip some information that indicates he’s more involved in it than it first appears.

Nanu, everyone wants to hear about that! And somehow, I get the feeling that we’ll be finding out more about him later.

The information he brought with him, however, is quite useful: namely, that the next Ultra Beast on our checklist is UB-02 Absorption. Moreover, instead of the single specimen we found of Nihilego, there are two UB-02s running around Melemele.

And there’s Looker right on cue with yet another way to say “It’s a disaster!” in another language. Conveniently, the information he found corroborates with the tip we just got from Nanu, which means we now have enough info to go after the Ultra Beasts and catch them.

Looker makes an attempt at entering the field himself, but Anabel won’t have any of it. I imagine we’re meant to assume, based on her conversation with us right before Nanu showed up, that she’s trying to keep Looker from working himself too hard. That said, didn’t he used to have a Croagunk? I distinctly remember him using it for a couple of things during Platinum at the very least. Unfortunately, I also have a vague recollection of him mentioning having lost his partner Pokémon; perhaps he mentioned it during the XY postgame?

Of course, with no Pokémon, Looker can hardly be expected to fend off a rampaging Ultra Beast, if one should stumble across his path, so he does eventually agree that playing the role of backup is all he can do. Anabel and I, by contrast, each have close to a full team of Pokémon capable of, at the very least, holding off an Ultra Beast for a while.

With Anabel gone and Looker situated, it’s time for me to get to work. The Ultra Beasts can be found in Melemele Meadow, so that’s where I’m headed.

It doesn’t take too long to get one to pop up:

This guy looks more than a little intimidating!

More to the point, it’s also level 65 - a full 10 levels over the Lv55 Nihilego we found previously. The first one I found got a +2 Attack aura, while the second had a +2 Defense aura - I imagine the difference was based on how their stats were rolled, rather than having been programmed that way. I managed to catch the first one right away, but had to retreat for a healing before engaging the second, as it managed to KO three of my fighting team members, plus the Synchronize Espeon I led with.

Incidentally, my Type: Null evolved into Silvally just before this battle. I set it to Flying type to resist both of Buzzwole’s types - but unfortunately, with enough Beast Boosts, the ++Attack one still managed to one-shot it. It did better against the one with the Defense aura, however, managing to avoid being 2-shotted with plenty of health to spare.

Back at the motel, Anabel apparently had a rougher time of it than I did. I suppose that makes some sense; she’s defending a specific spot, so she can’t run off the a Pokemon Center to get a healing if one of the Ultra Beasts roughs up her team, since it could easily come back and start terrorizing the people while she’s indisposed. Still, one would think she could catch a break after I caught the first Buzzwole, since then there would be only one left.

Thankfully, Looker had enough time to look into the restaurants on Melemele, so perhaps we’ll have a chance to recuperate over a delicious meal.

While he’s out getting a reservation, Anabel reminisces a little bit on Looker and Nanu. While we’ve already heard about Looker’s history, we learn here that Nanu was also an Interpol member once upon a time - and not just a member, but an elite at that!

Unfortunately, Looker comes back with more bad news:

Gladion’s “family drama” is basically the catalyst for this entire game. Lusamine’s husband disappeared into an Ultra Wormhole, which contributed to her emotional deterioration. Lillie and Gladion, in turn, each fled from the Paradise with one of their experimental Pokemon, which led to the conflict we just went through. “For Want of a Nail” is definitely in full effect, if nothing else!

I’ve read some opinions that think the changes to Lusamine’s character in Ultra Sun water her down as an effective antagonist. I suppose they’d rather have her as a full-blown monster (which in vanilla Sun culminates in her transformation into an actual monster) than a well-intentioned extremist. I don’t think these two sides of Lusamine necessarily have to be mutually exclusive, though! As I mentioned in the previous part, Lusamine is still fairly intimidating even without the boost in craziness from Nihilego. The “ripple point” for the divergence of the two games’ Lusamines appears to be the appearance of the Ultra Recon Squad.

Ultra Sun also features a proper reconciliation between Lillie and Gladion at this point. We’ve seen both of them multiple times throughout the story so far, but this is the first time they’re both in the same place together; they’ve been practically estranged for the last few years! I like how Gladion offers something close to an actual apology for running off on his own without taking Lillie with him, rather than just mumbling something about Type: Null.

And of course I would be remiss if I did not touch upon Lillie here, as the next part of the game is basically “Lillie’s Quest: Featuring You”. The phrase “Z-powered form” is super cheesy, but it’s the good kind of cheesy that brings a dumb, goofy smile to your face. And why shouldn’t it?

Much like how Gladion proclaims himself to be cut from the same cloth as Type: Null, Lillie and Nebby are the same as well. Their initial forms are cheerful, but small and ineffective; it is only after undergoing a personal metamorphosis that they emerge from their shells, their full potential realized.

Once we arrive on Poni Island, we find Trial Captain Mina on one of the docks! As I recall, Mina’s only appearance in vanilla Sun is on one of the bridges in Vast Poni Canyon, where she gives us a Fairium Z and promptly skedaddles. Looks like this Mina will be taking a slightly more active role in our game’s proceedings.

Poni is a quiet island - no words, just moving forward:

and finally, Hapu’s PRRRRRRRROMOTION to Kahuna

They say pictures are worth a thousand words, after all. In both vanilla and Ultra Sun, Poni Island was the part I played through as an experience. It leads itself to be taken in and reflected on, rather than pushed ahead at your usual pace. This makes sense even in-game, because as I mentioned above, the adventure on Poni is Lillie’s quest, and we’re just along for the ride.

The Altar of the Sunne is right on the other side of the Dragon trial site. We have to climb well over 100 stairs to get to the altar itself, but that’s nothing.

Lillie seems to already know what to do at the altar. It’s likely she read about the particular ritual we’re invoking while she was holed up in the Malie Library, but since the flutes themselves are magical, it could also be their power working through their bearers. I’m not sure which interpretation of the events I prefer.

We get into position, wait for the sun to rise, and sound our flutes!

Wait, hold on, that’s not the right whistle! Let me try that again...

There we go! Much better.

So, lo and behold, Nebby was our legendary Pokemon the whole time! As a Solgaleo, he’ll have the power to open Ultra Wormholes. Time to chase down Lusamine, right?

Not quite. Instead, it looks like Necrozma brought Lusamine to us! I have to admit, I was more satisfied than I probably should have been to see her pride get stomped flat here. Dealing with Lusamine and Guzma can wait, though - Necrozma and Nebby are about to go at it hammer and tongs!

I didn’t get any screenshots of the actual battle between the two legends, although it did look pretty cool. However, Necrozma managed to beat Nebby, and then assimilated with it, producing Dusk Mane Necrozma: also known as “the guy from the box art!”.

And then we have to fight it. Dusk Mane isn’t all that difficult to beat, though, even with a legend’s BST of 680.

(also, yes, my Starmie’s nickname is “Asterisk”)

Unfortunately, beating Necrozma here only causes it to retreat through an Ultra Wormhole, which has the side effect of plunging Alola into darkness!

Actually, how does that even work? Necrozma did a hit and run on Nebby, who was, up until about 15 minutes ago, relatively small and powerless. Maybe the ritual we invoked to evolve it into Solgaleo also linked its powers to the light of Alola? In that case, we might have dun goofed ourselves - although, without a guardian to fight against it, Necrozma may have simply eaten the world’s light and fled anyway, which would leave us in exactly the same position.

Anyway, with the light gone, the UR Squad show up. They are, understandably, mad at Lusamine, not only for her deception earlier but also because she didn’t even succeed at quieting Necrozma. However, they decide to set aside that particular bit of animosity for the sake of their mission.

It doesn’t make any difference right now whether we’re fighting or saving Necrozma, though - either way, we’re going to have to take a ride to his home turf on the back of the UR Squad’s Lunala, the counterpart to our own Solgaleo Nebby.

OK, a brief aside here: for all that Nintendo likes their motions controls, I find them entirely too wobbly and gimmicky. Anyone who has seen my playthrough of Wario Land: Shake It! would remember all the similar comments I made against the Unibuckets. Fortunately, reaching the white warp hole is fairly simple, even with a janky control setup.

Thus we arrive at Ultra Megalopolis. The other half of the UR Squad is there to greet us - Phyco and Soliera, whom we would have encountered if I was playing Ultra Moon instead.

What did Lusamine really expect would happen when she came down from on high? You can’t bully Necrozma; he’ll bully you!

Phyco’s explanation on how Necrozma came to be in the broken form it currently inhabits is interesting, although he doesn’t say anything we didn’t already know. Whenever scientists think they can control ancient powers, they inevitably screw something up and piss of said ancient powers. Gotta believe in Fortune Cookie Nonsense, after all!

One thing he says does stand out, however: Necrozma’s black crystal body is not actually its true form. What would that look like then?

Ah. That’s cool. And slightly intimidating. And now we do battle!

Full disclosure: I got 6-0ed by this guy on my first try. Ultra Necrozma has a 754 BST and a +1 totem aura; outspeeding him is basically impossible, and he hits hard enough to oneshot basically everything. Of course, my team is composed of glass cannons, so there was basically no chance of any of them living through even a neutral hit. I ended up beating him on my second try with a combination of Refresh luck and Hail damage (my Alolan Ninetales has Snow Warning). I had hoped to drop a Stoked Surgesurfer on him for the Paralysis hax, but my Raichu didn’t roll high enough on the hax table itself to live a hit.

After beating Ultra Necrozma, it separates from Nebby and flees back to Alola, and we use Nebby to ride back to Alola ourselves, which leads into the denouement of both the UR Squad and the Aether family’s story arcs. The Squad, of course, are thoroughly pleased that we were able to do for them what they could not do themselves: defeat Necrozma and calm it down from its rampageous nature. With that need taken care of, the Squad decides to take up residence in Alola and do some science on their own into the nature of Necrozma and the world’s light. Can’t fault them for that; being proactive is good practice for anyone. They do share one thing in passing, however, which is the connection between Totem Pokemon, Z-Crystals and Necrozma - apparently all of those types of energy are caused by leftover radiation from Necrozma, back when it was still whole. That’s a fairly useful bit of lore for worldbuilding purposes!

On the other hand we have Lillie’s reconciliation with Lusamine. ...Well, “reconciliation” might be too strong a word. For all that she holds herself up tall here, though, Lusamine definitely seems to have been humbled a fair bit by her experience (and her failure to defeat Necrozma on her own terms). Even in declaring her intention to have Nebby cared for at Aether Paradise, the camera stops short of showing her eyes, which I think is significant. And for her part, Lillie acknowledges her own weakness, and the fact she had to rely on us for everything.

I should point out that what happens in this scene is not a simple “forgive-and-forget” moment. Although Lillie does accompany her mother back to Paradise, she remains free of Lusamine’s control; the relationship between the two has clearly changed.

I still have a few more things to say about how Ultra Sun wrapped up its climactic battle sequence, but those can wait for another time. Now that Lillie and Nebby are safe and sound, it’s time we got back to our own island challenge!

The first and most obvious of the loose ends is that I completely skipped over the Hapu grand trial. Instead of fighting her at the entrance of the Vast Poni Canyon, we take the fight to the grotto on Exeggutor Island where the Sun Flute sat before we took it for ourselves. Given that Exeggutor Island was apparently a trial site itself some time ago, this is a fitting location for the battle.

With Poni’s grand trial complete, next we return to Tapu Village. The construction workers at the base of Mt. Lanakila are gone, so we can take the lift up. But first, we have to fight Gladion, who rides down on the lift to meet us!

His Type: Null has evolved into Silvally, which is basically just Type: Null sans mask, with higher Speed and the ability to change its type by equipping various Memory items. Silvally’s type is always the one with a type advantage over your starter among the Grass/Fire/Water trio. This doesn’t make him any harder to beat, though!

After Gladion goes down, he shares two things with us. The first is his smile:

And the second is information:

Last time we saw Lillie, she was headed to Aether Paradise to help take care of Nebby. If she’s left the Paradise, then that means Solgaleo must be feeling better now. To Mahalo Trail!

Bye Gladion! We’ll see you again someday, I’m sure.

At Mahalo Trail, we see that Lillie has brought Nebby back to the Plank Bridge outside the Ruins of Conflict, the place we first met the both of them. As it turns out, she came here to say goodbye to her companion:

Lillie spent some time thinking about Necrozma, the broken god of light, and about Nebby, who as a Solgaleo is itself a being of light. The conclusion she came to was that if Solgaleo and Necrozma stay together, then the residual light from Nebby will keep Necrozma from going mad with hunger.

I’m actually not sold on the idea that Nebby’s fate should be to act as a living battery for another legend’s sake. It feels a little like they grafted Necrozma onto as many parts of the story as possible, but they rushed the process and left a number of inconsistencies lying around.

That said, at least Lillie has a better reason for having us catch Solgaleo this time around than in vanilla Sun, where she just sort of gives up on the whole idea due to “not being a Trainer”. Here it feels more like we’re being entrusted with care of Nebby - as though to say Lillie isn’t ready to be Nebby’s Trainer, but hopes to eventually grow into that capability.

And of course, I still can’t give it any other nickname.

...

There’s another Aether lean-to on the northern shores past Tapu Village, which i where the Zygarde combining machine is. I’d forgotten about it entirely, actually. However, since we’re collecting Totem stickers instead of Zygarde cells, the machine is useless to us for now. At least it looks pretty cool~!

Faba is skulking around in the Ula’ula Meadow. Although he’s still an ass, at least he’s attempting to be productive with his time by thinking over the Necrozma problem. I’d lay even money he’s up to no good though.

Also in the meadow is the entrance to the Lake of the Moone. I stopped here very briefly, not only for the Psyshock TM and the easy access as a Fly point, but also because I enjoy the feeling of mystery and reverence the lake evokes.

Po Town is just a little further north after passing the Lake. There’s a lot of Team Skull Grunts wandering around the premises of the town’s giant steel walls. Maybe the original owners of the town should have built a roof over their heads too, since it’s always raining there?

The grunts directly outside of the one door to the place won’t let me in even though I beat them down, which makes a lot of sense, even if most other Teams in previous games don’t try anything of the sort.

I actually really like Kahuna Nanu. He acts like he doesn’t care about anything anymore, which is a front he puts up to hide what I can only assume is crippling depression. Vanilla Sun’s postgame goes into his background in more detail, and I do intend to cover that after Ultra Sun’s main story is done, as (as far as I am aware) there are a number of plot points in vanilla Sun’s postgame that didn’t make the jump into Ultra Sun.

That being said, although we don’t learn much about Nanu here, we do learn that he commands the respect of Team Skull. I’m not sure why that would be; maybe Guzma secretly looks up to the man and can’t bring himself to shut him out entirely?

These two clowns running the Pokemon Center cross so far over the stupid line that they loop back around into hilarious. I was fully prepared to rage at them for daring to charge for the healing services a Center normally provides for free, but when I found out that they only want 10 P, I laughed instead. Note how much money I have already (granted, most of that is from selling shit my B team found in the Poke Pelago, but still). Like seriously, 10 P is probably the equivalent of maybe 3 cents USD, if we assume the Pokedollar is based more on the Yen than the dollar. When was the last time you could buy anything for 3 cents?!

The affection some of these Grunts display for their boss Guzma is downright paternal. It’s really sad when you think about it: Team Skull is basically a giant family of misfits, led by a guy who doesn’t have his act together himself but has to play the ‘tough guy’ to garner as much respect for his underlings as possible. No wonder Guzma lets Nanu come and go as he pleases; hell, the man probably helps out with their grocery shopping! (well, probably not, actually, but it’s a nice thought nonetheless)

As for Guzma himself, he’s slightly harder to beat in the second fight than he was in Malie Garden, as he’s improved his team to three members, up from two. This did not save him from getting toasted by Lycanroc again, however.

Outside the Shady House, a quick chat with Nanu and Acerola ensues. Nanu’s final line about Pokemon being confined in their Poke Balls says a lot about him, but given various Pokemon’s propensity to pop out of their Balls on their own, it’s probably not as big a concern as he makes it out to be.

Specifically, I was not prepared for a Pokemon game to have a supporting cast of characters I would feel emotionally invested in. Pokemon games just don’t have that kind of depth. Sure, the lore behind the regions and the legends is pretty good, but Pokemon game characters are generally fairly one-dimensional. I’ll give GameFreak some credit for its cast in Gen V (Black and White), but although I enjoyed the characters of Cheren, Bianca and N, at the end of the day they were just another set of rivals.

And then I bought Pokemon Sun, and I met Lillie. I admit that my first impression of her was overshadowed by the more immediately-impressive event instigated by Nebby, the mischievous Pokemon she never quite manages to keep inside her bag. I’m not even ten minutes into the game and I’ve already been thrust into a near-death experience courtesy of the purple fluffball breaking a rickety rope bridge suspended over a giant chasm, sending me plummeting to my death! Gee, thanks, Nebby, now get back in the bag.

Anyway, after that bit of drama subsides, it turns out Lillie is the local Professor’s assistant, and since this Professor intends to more or less follow us around as my rival and I complete the island challenges, Lillie comes along for the ride. Lillie’s not a Trainer, though, despite her taking care of Nebby, so she spends much of the first half of the game either following Kukui around or holed up in one of the many hotels and other public amenities available in Alola.

Now, if this were one of the previous generations of Pokemon, it would probably be fair to expect Lillie to sort of fade out of the story as the game shifts its focus to the machinations of whatever local Team is operating in the region. But instead of disappearing, Lillie ends up taking more and more of the center stage as the story unfolds, each new twist tying her further into the plot. And because she’s not a Trainer, it falls to me to act as her part-time chauffeur as I move from location to location.

And then a funny thing started to happen: As I progressed through the game, I started to look forward to each new story event with Lillie. Despite having to step in and save her from Team Skull (and, later, the Aether Foundation) more than once, doing so never felt like a burden. Of course, it turns out that neither group was ever interested in Lillie for herself - rather, they wanted Nebby so as to use its powers to open rifts to the outer dimensions. But instead of being crushed by her inability to protect Nebby, or indeed to do much of anything else without having myself or another Trainer around to protect and guide her, she takes the opportunity to reinvent herself, visually depicted by her “Z-powered form”.

For the rest of the game after that, rather than watch Lillie follow me around, I found myself having to chase after her as she pursues her own goals (saving Nebby and reaching her mother). She takes the courage she learned from her experiences with me and my rivals and uses it to clear her own “trials”, and is rewarded at the summit of the mountain by the discovery that the legendary Pokemon she sought to help Nebby was none other than Nebby himself, courtesy of a melody she plays on a magical pair of flutes. Nebby then returns the favor by opening the gateway into Ultra Space where her mother disappeared into. And for a brief moment atop the Altar of the Sunne, all is well.

And then the game proceeds to drop a bombshell on me. For all her newfound strength and courage, Lillie is still not a Trainer, so she asks me to take care of Nebby in her stead. This was probably the first time in the entire series I didn’t want to catch a Legendary Pokemon; why couldn’t Lillie herself keep Nebby, after taking care of it for the entire game? But I did as the game required of me. (for those curious, I made damn sure to catch Nebby in one of the Luxury Balls I had received from Lillie as a gift earlier in the game)

There’s actually not much left to do in the main game after you descend from the Altar of the Sunne with Legendary Pokemon in tow; all that stands between you and the credits is a single, relatively-short dungeon, followed by the traditional final-boss gauntlet known in Pokemon parlance as the Elite Four and Champion match. For all the grandeur of the Pokemon League, however, the more important scenes were the ones immediately following my victory there. I followed Lillie out the back way to the bridge where we first met, newly repaired by the kahuna, and crossed it to pay respects to Tapu Koko for saving Nebby and myself from the deadly fall into the pit at the beginning of the game. (and by pay respects, I mean I two-shotted him with my Incineroar. i’m not trying to get a good nature on a legend during the damn end credits)

After that, there was only one scene left to watch. In a culmination of her journey with us throughout the game, Lillie decides to leave for Kanto on the first ferry of the following morning, so that she can finally become a Trainer herself. I was not prepared for how sad I’d be to watch her leave. The goodbye scene felt far too final, even though Lillie’s own journey was just beginning. The picture montage at the end of the credits just threw more wood onto that fire.

Having taken a few days to process the whole thing, however, I think part of the reason Lillie’s departure hit so hard was because of a perceived lack of closure. By playing the game through, I’d effectively watched her grow from an quiet, powerless girl living out of Kukui’s loft into someone who could almost be the player character of another story. And because I’d seen that development for myself, rather than having to infer it as with other, previous rivals and supporting characters, watching the story play out hit me that much more powerfully.

Anyway, I hear Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon have an expanded postgame; hopefully we’ll get to see a little more Lillie when that comes out this Friday.