FA+
Shop
Pokemon Sun and Moon Review
9 years ago
-- Probably the most important journal about me --
-- OPEN FOR COMMISSIONS!! --
-- Groups I Like --
Hoooly crap where do I start. I just finished beating the elite four and hitting the end credits of this game and my god do I hate it now, I spent a few minutes trying to think if I liked any main series pokemon game less than this, and the answer came up no. This is the worst pokemon generation ever.
NOW, that's not to say I'm not at least somewhat glad I bought and played through the game! It is a pokemon game after all, with the core mechanics of a pokemon game we all know and love intact. Get a starter pokemon, go through the world battling other trainrs and battling/catching other wild pokemon until you've got a well trained and strong team of pokemon that you like. That will ALWAYS result in a decent game. But every change they made to this over X/Y, the last proper pokemon generation, was for the worse. I'm going to go through and try to list my gripes in order of when I realized them as I played through.
- Firstly, and these might seem like minor gripes, but they make this game completely feel not like a pokemon game anymore, there is no more grid based movement, and you have to press A to go through a door as opposed to just walking into the door. Those two things had remained intact since the very first games, and to change them now, make the game feel absolutely ALIEN.
- Next, there are no traditional Gyms in the game, where you beat trainers then the leader to gain a badge which you need all 8 of to get to the elite four. In it's place are "island challenges" and the "Island Kahunas", which are infinitely inferior. The island challenges usually have nothing to do with battling or how well you are at training your pokemon, ranging from a fucking scavenger hunt in the forest to a fucking spot the differences game that any 2 year old could pass on their first try. What the fucking shit... I literally don't even remember half of them cause they were so unimaginative and awful. OH! and by the way, while on these "Island Trials" you're essentially in a wild area for pokemon, battling eventually against a "totem pokemon" which is basically a fully evolved form of one of the mon in that area that happens to be a bit more powerful, AND YOU'RE POKE-BALLS ARE DISABLED SO YOU CAN'T CATCH ANYTHING UNTIL THE TRIAL IS COMPLETE.
- The fucking Z power shit. This is the main push feature of the game, that when you gain the "Z Chrystal" of whatever pokemon type, you can attach it to a pokemon to turn it's moves of that type to a super move. Basically it's Mega Evolution, except instead ofupgrading your pokemon temporarily, it upgrades one of your pokemon's MOVES temporarily. Who the hell thought this was a good idea again?....
- The goddamn CHARACTERS and STORY of this game are SHIT SHIT AND MORE SHIT. Your main "rival" of the series you barely ever encounter in battle, never team up with in battle, and whenever you see him is always apologetically excited and happy to the point of jumping in the air and fist pumping, then going and running off to get smoothies or whatever the fuck this Malasada shit is the game seems to have invented as a food item he's obsessed with, which BTW is a healing food item for your pokemon. What the fuck was wrong with potions? Which are still IN the game, and available for sale at all poke-marts, thereby rendering the malaladasada's useless. Then your OTHER "rival", isn't even a pokemon trainer! But some ditzy idiot girl, who for SOME reason has been left in charge of the lower evolved form of the game's legendary pokemon, which keeps escaping from the duffel bag she's carrying it in and getting captured by the bad guys or attacked by wild pokemon that they YOU need to go and save it from. WHAT THE FUCKING HELL?! OH! And her story arc is all about gathering the strength to stand up to her mother, who to put this mercifully short, ends up being half-posessed by these legendary other-dimensional pokemon after being obsessed with them in the first place to the point of disowning her daughter for being weak (which in all honesty, I kinda don't blame her.) All the rest of the time, the bitch is just all "I'M GONNA TRY MY BEST BECAUSE YOU ARE AN INSPIRATION TO ME PLAYER1" then proceeds runs off and NEVER DO ANYTHING, or at worst, run off and get captured or into some other form of trouble which WE have to then save her from! I mean for FUCKS SAKE. 1, Put that fucking pokemon in a fucking POKE BALL so it'll stop escaping you at every turn, 2, GIVE THE FUCKING POKEMON TO A FUCKING TRAINER THAT CAN ACTUALLY FUCKING PROTECT IT, 3, BE A FUCKING POKEMON TRAINER YOU DIMWIT! Man, I spent a lot of time there on the characters and story, and I could sure go on about that, but there's much more for me to gripe about, so I'll skip ahead.
- The goddamn elite four in this game are beyond pushovers. I didn't even feel the need to save inbetween cause they didn't even use all 6 pokemon slots. And the levels were inadequate as well. Granted, I did a lot of grinding right before the elite four cause I realized I was about to hit them and still hadn't gotten any pokemon I really LIKED through the game, so through online trades I got myself pokemon I liked, hatched new eggs from them, and leveled them up to around 50 or so, which meant my main 2 fighters were over 70 when I finally went to the four, but even then I blasted through their level 50 somethings without even having to use my level 70's all that often, and only for one pokemon did I actually have to use a number of items to recover on.
- The new pokemon designs in this game are good enough as are the mon themselves, for the most part. Alolan forms of things are the STUPEDEST things ever though. Oh really? SO you couldn't just come up with a NEW pokemon, you take a Golem, redesign it as a rock-electric type, and push THAT in front of us so that now the global pokedex is forever muddled by having to clarify that there are in fact now, 2 TYPES of the geodude/meowth/sandshrew/vulpix/ratatta/grimer lines along with a special Exeggutor/Riachu/Marowak?! and for literally JUST those pokemon?! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING?! WHAT DO YOU GAIN BY MAKING THINGS MORE MUDDLED AND LESS CLEAR RATHER THAN, OH I DON'T KNOW, CREATING BRAND NEW FUCKING ORIGINAL POKEMON INSTEAD?!?!?!
- SPEAKING of troubles with the pokemon themselves, some of the pokemon in this version are like I said well designed and fine as pokemon, but have some REALLY stupid shit attached to them, for example, Salandit. This is a very well designed new original pokemon! One I liked the hell out of! Including it's evolved form Salazzle. SO I went and caught one and trained it to where it would be at a level that it would evolve to Salazzle. The problem? It was a male. Now, if you haven't heard yet, you're saying to yourself "Soooooo, what's the problem?"....... ONLY THE FUCKING FEMALES OF THE SPECIES CAN EVOLVE INTO SALAZZLE!!!!! AND THE FEMALES ARE RARE TOO. WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA AND WHY?! The only thing you've done is piss us off for wasting our time cause we didn't know any better, which by the way, WE DON'T BECAUSE THIS FACT WAS NEVER MENTIONED IN GAME OR IN THE POKEDEX. I ONLY FOUND OUT WHY MY SALANDIT WASN'T EVOLVING AFTER GOING TO BULBAPEDIA!
- OH! And ANOTHER fucking problem with the pokemon in this game is the limited fucking roster. Hey! Remember how in X/Y you could get any pokemon you wanted from any previous game version, so you could have a team with a Goodra, a Charizard, a Sharpedo, a Wailord, a Lugia, and idk, whatever the hell else you wanted? Well, YOU CAN'T IN MOON! And I don't just mean you can't CATCH them, I mean to say you can't GET them. The GTS will not allow me to put in "charmander" and get any actual search results to trade. This DESPITE there being a CHARIZARD in game that you can RIDE outside of your team. I'm not gonna go through and list all my favorites that I couldn't get becaus they were disabed, but again I will say, WHY THE FUCK IS THIS EVEN A THING?! WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA AND WHY WEREN'T THEY FIRED HALFWAY THROUGH DEVELOPMENT?!
- Another issue I saw throughout the game but I REALLY noticed during the end credits was the character animation. OH MY GOD. This is 2017 assholes, you cannot simply have 5 ANIMATIONS TO USE ON A PERSONS CHARACTER MODEL. Literally, there is Shake your head no, Nod your head yes, laugh, jump for joy fist pumping the air, and shocked arms up expression. OH! and there's technically the "handing you an item" animation as well, but who cares, because literally the same animation is used across character models throughout the whole game, and during the end credits you can see it just all over the place and it's the biggest annoyance ever. They try to cover it up with different facial expressions but those hardly have any variety to them either, and when combined with the 1 dimensional characters of the game it really makes me just go "THEY JUST DIDN'T CARE!" I Mean I KNOW this is a goddamn POKEMON Game, where the story is one step up from just being there to check off the fact that the game has a story, but goddamnit there is NO conflict, the villains are idiots, the biggest world-threat in the game basically resolves itself and you just fight one pokemon out of the supposedly dozens or hundreds that are out there and SOMEHOW the rest of them are defeated by other trainers out there, and there's just no sort of journey any character goes on that means anything except for that bitch I mentioned earlier stands up to her mom after getting a haircut. woooooow..... big character arc...
- Oh and SPEAKING of the villains in this game, my GOD are they stupid. But honestly, they are the best part of the game too, unfortunately in the "so bad it's good" kind of way, and only regarding to how they act. Which is like white boy fans of gangsta rap of the early 2000's, wth wacky arm movements and all sorts of macho posturing with sayings like "Yo what's with that?" among other kind of hilariously bad dialogue. I'm sure you've seen the memes around of them, and I will say it's well deserved. But aside from that, and the cool fact that in game, they've taken over a town "Escape from NY" style, where the police and such have just walled the town off and let the street gang have it, which leads to graffiti and trash everywhere, and a group of Team Skull thugs running the pokemon center, asking for $10 to revive your pokemon so they can pay the electric bill, the team's agenda is basically non existent, and they have no real goal in the game at all. Sure in the beginning it's that they are stealing pokemon, but halfway through the game you just kinda forget that fact, and they don't DO anything from there on it seems. You don't break up the team like you did with Rocket, they don't learn anything, or change, they are just THERE.
- One last gripe before I go, and that is they've made changes to other things in the game as well such as Amie and the online interactions menu's and stuff. Firstly, there's no more Amie as it's known, oh it's still Amie, where you get to pet your mon and such, but no longer do they act playful nor are there mini-games to play to raise affection up, now you have but one option, feed them beans, which are all the same, and pet them. Oh and post-battle you have the option to immediately go into amie to either use free medicine on them to cure a status ailment they got in battle, which is good (the only good change though), or brush them with brushes and sponges and such to make them feel better and remove dirt and dust off them. Basically they redesigned Amie and made it worse except for one change. And then the menu's for online interactions like trading and battling online, no longer is a simple easy to use menu always available on the lower screen, nooo no no no. Now it's a fuckin HUB WORLD type thing that I never explored more than once just to see what the hell it was all about before just jumping through it to the menus to get to the GTS I needed to. Since when did making things more convoluted and complex make for a better experience? SIMPLIFY.
In summation, FUCK SUN AND MOON. This is the worst generation I've ever played, every change they made was for the worse, the story/characters/animation/mechanics are steps back from the previous game/games, and ever decision they made in this generation was WRONG. That said, it' still a pokemon game, and I still love raising up my team members through battles to get the ultimate team and the ultimate satisfaction of knowing I brought these world beaters up from nothing to what they are now, but overall, FUCK SUN AND MOON. Oh, but the exp-all being an early item now and no longer dividing the exp earned from a defeated/captured mon among your team, but rather duplicating exp from a defeated mon to all the rest of your team, is a very nice change which makes it way easier to develop your whole team instead of just your #1 mon.
One caveat, I haven't done any post-game stuff yet, and as I'm watching a few youtube reviews to see if anyone online agrees with me, I do think I might enjoy the post-elite four game, so I guess I'll do a follow up later on, but this review was just my experience of the game up to and including the end credits.
NOW, that's not to say I'm not at least somewhat glad I bought and played through the game! It is a pokemon game after all, with the core mechanics of a pokemon game we all know and love intact. Get a starter pokemon, go through the world battling other trainrs and battling/catching other wild pokemon until you've got a well trained and strong team of pokemon that you like. That will ALWAYS result in a decent game. But every change they made to this over X/Y, the last proper pokemon generation, was for the worse. I'm going to go through and try to list my gripes in order of when I realized them as I played through.
- Firstly, and these might seem like minor gripes, but they make this game completely feel not like a pokemon game anymore, there is no more grid based movement, and you have to press A to go through a door as opposed to just walking into the door. Those two things had remained intact since the very first games, and to change them now, make the game feel absolutely ALIEN.
- Next, there are no traditional Gyms in the game, where you beat trainers then the leader to gain a badge which you need all 8 of to get to the elite four. In it's place are "island challenges" and the "Island Kahunas", which are infinitely inferior. The island challenges usually have nothing to do with battling or how well you are at training your pokemon, ranging from a fucking scavenger hunt in the forest to a fucking spot the differences game that any 2 year old could pass on their first try. What the fucking shit... I literally don't even remember half of them cause they were so unimaginative and awful. OH! and by the way, while on these "Island Trials" you're essentially in a wild area for pokemon, battling eventually against a "totem pokemon" which is basically a fully evolved form of one of the mon in that area that happens to be a bit more powerful, AND YOU'RE POKE-BALLS ARE DISABLED SO YOU CAN'T CATCH ANYTHING UNTIL THE TRIAL IS COMPLETE.
- The fucking Z power shit. This is the main push feature of the game, that when you gain the "Z Chrystal" of whatever pokemon type, you can attach it to a pokemon to turn it's moves of that type to a super move. Basically it's Mega Evolution, except instead ofupgrading your pokemon temporarily, it upgrades one of your pokemon's MOVES temporarily. Who the hell thought this was a good idea again?....
- The goddamn CHARACTERS and STORY of this game are SHIT SHIT AND MORE SHIT. Your main "rival" of the series you barely ever encounter in battle, never team up with in battle, and whenever you see him is always apologetically excited and happy to the point of jumping in the air and fist pumping, then going and running off to get smoothies or whatever the fuck this Malasada shit is the game seems to have invented as a food item he's obsessed with, which BTW is a healing food item for your pokemon. What the fuck was wrong with potions? Which are still IN the game, and available for sale at all poke-marts, thereby rendering the malaladasada's useless. Then your OTHER "rival", isn't even a pokemon trainer! But some ditzy idiot girl, who for SOME reason has been left in charge of the lower evolved form of the game's legendary pokemon, which keeps escaping from the duffel bag she's carrying it in and getting captured by the bad guys or attacked by wild pokemon that they YOU need to go and save it from. WHAT THE FUCKING HELL?! OH! And her story arc is all about gathering the strength to stand up to her mother, who to put this mercifully short, ends up being half-posessed by these legendary other-dimensional pokemon after being obsessed with them in the first place to the point of disowning her daughter for being weak (which in all honesty, I kinda don't blame her.) All the rest of the time, the bitch is just all "I'M GONNA TRY MY BEST BECAUSE YOU ARE AN INSPIRATION TO ME PLAYER1" then proceeds runs off and NEVER DO ANYTHING, or at worst, run off and get captured or into some other form of trouble which WE have to then save her from! I mean for FUCKS SAKE. 1, Put that fucking pokemon in a fucking POKE BALL so it'll stop escaping you at every turn, 2, GIVE THE FUCKING POKEMON TO A FUCKING TRAINER THAT CAN ACTUALLY FUCKING PROTECT IT, 3, BE A FUCKING POKEMON TRAINER YOU DIMWIT! Man, I spent a lot of time there on the characters and story, and I could sure go on about that, but there's much more for me to gripe about, so I'll skip ahead.
- The goddamn elite four in this game are beyond pushovers. I didn't even feel the need to save inbetween cause they didn't even use all 6 pokemon slots. And the levels were inadequate as well. Granted, I did a lot of grinding right before the elite four cause I realized I was about to hit them and still hadn't gotten any pokemon I really LIKED through the game, so through online trades I got myself pokemon I liked, hatched new eggs from them, and leveled them up to around 50 or so, which meant my main 2 fighters were over 70 when I finally went to the four, but even then I blasted through their level 50 somethings without even having to use my level 70's all that often, and only for one pokemon did I actually have to use a number of items to recover on.
- The new pokemon designs in this game are good enough as are the mon themselves, for the most part. Alolan forms of things are the STUPEDEST things ever though. Oh really? SO you couldn't just come up with a NEW pokemon, you take a Golem, redesign it as a rock-electric type, and push THAT in front of us so that now the global pokedex is forever muddled by having to clarify that there are in fact now, 2 TYPES of the geodude/meowth/sandshrew/vulpix/ratatta/grimer lines along with a special Exeggutor/Riachu/Marowak?! and for literally JUST those pokemon?! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING?! WHAT DO YOU GAIN BY MAKING THINGS MORE MUDDLED AND LESS CLEAR RATHER THAN, OH I DON'T KNOW, CREATING BRAND NEW FUCKING ORIGINAL POKEMON INSTEAD?!?!?!
- SPEAKING of troubles with the pokemon themselves, some of the pokemon in this version are like I said well designed and fine as pokemon, but have some REALLY stupid shit attached to them, for example, Salandit. This is a very well designed new original pokemon! One I liked the hell out of! Including it's evolved form Salazzle. SO I went and caught one and trained it to where it would be at a level that it would evolve to Salazzle. The problem? It was a male. Now, if you haven't heard yet, you're saying to yourself "Soooooo, what's the problem?"....... ONLY THE FUCKING FEMALES OF THE SPECIES CAN EVOLVE INTO SALAZZLE!!!!! AND THE FEMALES ARE RARE TOO. WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA AND WHY?! The only thing you've done is piss us off for wasting our time cause we didn't know any better, which by the way, WE DON'T BECAUSE THIS FACT WAS NEVER MENTIONED IN GAME OR IN THE POKEDEX. I ONLY FOUND OUT WHY MY SALANDIT WASN'T EVOLVING AFTER GOING TO BULBAPEDIA!
- OH! And ANOTHER fucking problem with the pokemon in this game is the limited fucking roster. Hey! Remember how in X/Y you could get any pokemon you wanted from any previous game version, so you could have a team with a Goodra, a Charizard, a Sharpedo, a Wailord, a Lugia, and idk, whatever the hell else you wanted? Well, YOU CAN'T IN MOON! And I don't just mean you can't CATCH them, I mean to say you can't GET them. The GTS will not allow me to put in "charmander" and get any actual search results to trade. This DESPITE there being a CHARIZARD in game that you can RIDE outside of your team. I'm not gonna go through and list all my favorites that I couldn't get becaus they were disabed, but again I will say, WHY THE FUCK IS THIS EVEN A THING?! WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA AND WHY WEREN'T THEY FIRED HALFWAY THROUGH DEVELOPMENT?!
- Another issue I saw throughout the game but I REALLY noticed during the end credits was the character animation. OH MY GOD. This is 2017 assholes, you cannot simply have 5 ANIMATIONS TO USE ON A PERSONS CHARACTER MODEL. Literally, there is Shake your head no, Nod your head yes, laugh, jump for joy fist pumping the air, and shocked arms up expression. OH! and there's technically the "handing you an item" animation as well, but who cares, because literally the same animation is used across character models throughout the whole game, and during the end credits you can see it just all over the place and it's the biggest annoyance ever. They try to cover it up with different facial expressions but those hardly have any variety to them either, and when combined with the 1 dimensional characters of the game it really makes me just go "THEY JUST DIDN'T CARE!" I Mean I KNOW this is a goddamn POKEMON Game, where the story is one step up from just being there to check off the fact that the game has a story, but goddamnit there is NO conflict, the villains are idiots, the biggest world-threat in the game basically resolves itself and you just fight one pokemon out of the supposedly dozens or hundreds that are out there and SOMEHOW the rest of them are defeated by other trainers out there, and there's just no sort of journey any character goes on that means anything except for that bitch I mentioned earlier stands up to her mom after getting a haircut. woooooow..... big character arc...
- Oh and SPEAKING of the villains in this game, my GOD are they stupid. But honestly, they are the best part of the game too, unfortunately in the "so bad it's good" kind of way, and only regarding to how they act. Which is like white boy fans of gangsta rap of the early 2000's, wth wacky arm movements and all sorts of macho posturing with sayings like "Yo what's with that?" among other kind of hilariously bad dialogue. I'm sure you've seen the memes around of them, and I will say it's well deserved. But aside from that, and the cool fact that in game, they've taken over a town "Escape from NY" style, where the police and such have just walled the town off and let the street gang have it, which leads to graffiti and trash everywhere, and a group of Team Skull thugs running the pokemon center, asking for $10 to revive your pokemon so they can pay the electric bill, the team's agenda is basically non existent, and they have no real goal in the game at all. Sure in the beginning it's that they are stealing pokemon, but halfway through the game you just kinda forget that fact, and they don't DO anything from there on it seems. You don't break up the team like you did with Rocket, they don't learn anything, or change, they are just THERE.
- One last gripe before I go, and that is they've made changes to other things in the game as well such as Amie and the online interactions menu's and stuff. Firstly, there's no more Amie as it's known, oh it's still Amie, where you get to pet your mon and such, but no longer do they act playful nor are there mini-games to play to raise affection up, now you have but one option, feed them beans, which are all the same, and pet them. Oh and post-battle you have the option to immediately go into amie to either use free medicine on them to cure a status ailment they got in battle, which is good (the only good change though), or brush them with brushes and sponges and such to make them feel better and remove dirt and dust off them. Basically they redesigned Amie and made it worse except for one change. And then the menu's for online interactions like trading and battling online, no longer is a simple easy to use menu always available on the lower screen, nooo no no no. Now it's a fuckin HUB WORLD type thing that I never explored more than once just to see what the hell it was all about before just jumping through it to the menus to get to the GTS I needed to. Since when did making things more convoluted and complex make for a better experience? SIMPLIFY.
In summation, FUCK SUN AND MOON. This is the worst generation I've ever played, every change they made was for the worse, the story/characters/animation/mechanics are steps back from the previous game/games, and ever decision they made in this generation was WRONG. That said, it' still a pokemon game, and I still love raising up my team members through battles to get the ultimate team and the ultimate satisfaction of knowing I brought these world beaters up from nothing to what they are now, but overall, FUCK SUN AND MOON. Oh, but the exp-all being an early item now and no longer dividing the exp earned from a defeated/captured mon among your team, but rather duplicating exp from a defeated mon to all the rest of your team, is a very nice change which makes it way easier to develop your whole team instead of just your #1 mon.
One caveat, I haven't done any post-game stuff yet, and as I'm watching a few youtube reviews to see if anyone online agrees with me, I do think I might enjoy the post-elite four game, so I guess I'll do a follow up later on, but this review was just my experience of the game up to and including the end credits.
1. Changing from grid to open movement and pressing A to open doors are really trivial compared to the overall. Personal preference really, but is such a minor thing. That would be like complaining GTA 1 & 2 were overhead view, but GTA 3 sucks cause it changed to the 3rd person view we now all enjoy. You make it sound like any kind of change, however small, is bad because it's different from "normal".
2. GET IN THE FUCKING BACK NEBBY! Totally agree with that. Soooo many memes came out of this game.
3. While the game has no direct connectivity to XY/ORAS, you should be able to obtain all previous starters via "island scans". And while I haven't tried it personally yet, the GTS generally looks the same as before. You should be able to search for anything and obtain anything as long as it's out there and people are willing to trade. I got every Eeveelution before completing my first grand challenge, as well as all the new starters, through GTS easily.
4. Not all pokeballs are created equal, and as a result of actually exploring the various aspects of the game, can obtain special beans easily that can fully fill your "hearts" in the Amie in record time, far faster than any of the mini games could. Your "Festival Plaza" Internet hub can also provide you with free rare items such as PP Max, Max Revives, Masterballs, and more. You can also put your boxed pokemon in a day care to level them up easily at any time without having to travel to a specific spot where a daycare is housed. I believe up to 12 pokemon at a time even. It's just a matter of exploring extra aspects of the game, which honestly your post sounds like you ignored...
1: Team Skull was never really intended to be a major threat; I personally found them rather endearing in their ineptitude, especially after the last couple of games' teams were about as far from that as possible. Skull's basically a team full of 'misfits and failures', you could say. Their main goal was basically just to survive.
2: I... kinda feel like you missed the point of Lillie and Gladion's story; a huge part of their story, Lillie's especially, was about overcoming a childhood full of abuse. Lusamine had been being influenced by Nihilego for quite some time and that played a factor. Lillie had Nebby with her because she stole it from Aether's labs; it was more-or-less her taking the first step towards overcoming what she'd gone through.
3: On the Salandit thing; it's not the first time they've done it; Combee could only become Vespiquen in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum if it was a female, and you could only encounter those through using the Honey trees, which was, imo, an even more annoying mechanic (and yes, they had the 1/8 female rate as well, just like Salandit). An easier way to get a female Salandit is by using a male Pokemon with Cute Charm, like a Sylveon; that gives you a 2/3 chance to encounter a wild Pokemon of the opposite gender.
4: The main reason for not being able to get some Pokemon was because until very recently, Pokebank hadn't been updated, so there was no way to get Pokemon from other games into Sun/Moon; now that we have the National Dex available, it should be possible to do so.
5: The Z-Crystals actually do have some good uses, but it's mostly, from what I've seen, in regard to the status moves, instead of attacks. Z-move versions of status moves boost the Pokemon's stats or heal besides doing their normal effect. Good example: The move Parting Shot, which lowers the opponent's Attack and Special Attack, then switches out the user; Z-Parting Shot will also fully heal the switched-in Pokemon. I've even seen some people keep Splash on their Gyarados because Z-Splash raises Attack by three stages.
I personally liked the Alola Forms, simply because I did think it was an interesting example of divergent evolution and variance in old species; I might be slightly biased on that note because I really like Alolan Marowak and the Alolan Vulpix and Ninetales, but that's just my two cents on that.
I... don't know if I had trained hard enough, if you didn't have any issue with the Elite Four; I had quite a bit of difficulty with a few of them, and especially the last battle; I very nearly lost there. And on the Refresh thing, yeah, what the person above me said; there's different types of beans; the Rainbow Beans you can get on Poke Pelago will max out affection with just two of them; I kind of liked that simply because while I did like Amie's features, I did sometimes feel like it was a bit of a hassle to max out Affection in that game.
I dunno; I personally heavily disagree with what you said here; I had more fun with Sun and Moon than I did with X and Y overall, and I really enjoyed the story, both main-game and post-game. Maybe you'll like the Ultra Beast storyline more.
The constant need of an HM-slave in your six-mon team has been a constant sore spot for me throughout the series. I would have preferred if they'd just loosened the restrictions on HMs -- allowed you to still teach them as battle moves but for the only requirement for use on the map be to have a Pokemon capable of using it, not to devote 1/4 of their moveset to it, but I still consider it a worthy substitute for a system in dire need of an update.
But other than that, the only things I have to appreciate Sun/Moon for were some new Pokemon species and one particularly inspiring Pokedex entry. Everything else new in the game, I identify as one of two things:
#1: A really stupid idea.
#2: A byproduct of a really stupid idea from a previous generation.
My first thought when I read your gripes about the limited roster was that maybe they were trying to cover up some of the shit they pulled in X/Y.
One thing that used to separate Game Freak from the rest was their refusal to ever go back and change anything -- only to add to their already existing formulas. Which were a real boon to them as Pokemon was expanding because it allowed a sense of familiarity -- you could skip entire generations, then pick up the latest and still feel immediately familiar and like you know what you are doing (I can attest to this when I started with Pokemon Red and didn't get the opportunity to pick up another until Pokemon Diamond).
But it's since become a real problem when they try to add new stuff and then try to explain away why it was not available before (why couldn't you hatch a Mantyke before? Umm. . . Because it wasn't equipped with this special incense! That's why.). And, more recently, they've finally started to show signs of regretting decisions made in the past, but are being outright cowardly in the way they try to phase them out.
They didn't do it this generation, but I do predict, for example, that there will eventually be a generation where "Oh, no, sorry, you can't import Pokemon with held items" and that will be how they eliminate the flaming awfulness that were the "mega" forms.
Game Freak can't just say "Yeah, that was a stupid idea and we're discontinuing it." They have to come up with some convoluted explanation for why that shit still exists but is unavailable, just in case even one person out there actually liked that shit. And I would be willing to bet Charizard being unavailable for trade even though it appears in the game is part of their cowardly plot to eliminate stupid shit from the previous generations without acknowledging that it was stupid shit.
So yeah, if it isn't obvious already, I'm strictly a spectator fan of Pokemon now. Screw alt-forms and mega-evolutions; call me when they finally have it so all 802 species are available without any of the shit they regret being attached to them.