It has been announced that Pokémon Sun & Moon will be release here in Europe 23 November 2016. I have been very impressed with the more recent entries but I hope that the game mechanics will continue to grow more child friendly. Whilst building a competitve team will likley remain outside the abilites of the youngest players, I do beleive the game needs to be more discoverable for kids and not rely on parents looking stuff up.
Having watched our nine year old play his game and having caught all the legends myself I still think Pokémon Omega Ruby & Alpha Saphire is far too hard for kids. He has struggled with the Pokémon cobminations required to activate all the hidden locations and relied on me to show him where they are. I had to make heavy use of Serebii to find them so I wonder how are children are expected to figure these out on their own?
Collecting all the Pokémon is one one the foremost tasks and one that will grow harder as more and more are added to the pantheon each generation. There are currently 721 to catch but our child was only able get 60 or so by the time he has gone through the game. That leaves hundreds (661, in this instance) to grind through the game for outside the main narrative. That’s a lot of work for a young child. The recent games do help by providing a completion gauge for each area but instead of having more variety, many of the areas continue to repeat the same Pokémon. That leaves the remainder down to leveling up and breading. These aspects have not been a main part of the narative and there has been no in-game guide to help with the basics of breeding.
Pokémon Sun & Moon could help by giving the player side quests, such as collect a male and female Pikach and bring them to the Daycare. Another way to help younger players is to change the caught Pokémon indicator should the opposing gender appear.
As leveling up still needs some work, I would like to see more trainer battles available after the completion of the main narrative. Presently you have to use the one of the games many menus to dig down and search for replayable trainers. Perhaps having all the non-player characters’ offer to rematch on encounter with their Pokémon always be a couple of levels higher than your own would help. I really enjoyed the sports stadiums of Pokémon Black & White and hope they make a return.
The game mechanics for effort value training have been great on recent games thourgh the super training sub menu but it is not immediatly obvious what this is for within the game. Perhaps this was intentional to leave the more detailed aspects of battling to one side. However I believe there is room post-game to have some narrative to explain this and offer a side quest to intigrate this in more.
As for getting and passing on individual values, that reamains a dark art even for me after playing all these years.
I have enjoyed the main series of Pokémon games and look forward to what is to come in November.