Pokémon Sun and Moon/YMMV

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Lusamine: an innocent victim of circumstance, the series' most vile villain to date, or a deeply flawed and awful, yet tragic individual?
  • Related to that, the fact that Nihlego's venom causes people to lose their inhibitions, stimulates excitement within their natural emotions (thus accelerating every personality trait up to their most extreme possible state and leading to impulsive, even violent behavior), enhances their native skills and allows them to act on their base desires without any filter or conscience, leaves a lot of questions as to what kind of person Lusamine truly is at her core. Was she a fundamentally good woman with disturbing, dark thoughts and character flaws that never would have materialized the way they did without the Ultra Beast's influence? Or was she always a warped, psychopathic monster whose evil ambitions were only sped along by the venom? Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon seems to clear it up with how it's story depicts Lusamine, as it strongly suggests the former.
  • On a more amusing note, the game's smattering of horrifying Pokedex entries in both the main games and their sequels have led many to believe that as opposed to being factual, it's the Rotom Dex trying to freak out the player with larger-than-life exaggerations.
• Base Breaker: The Rotom Dex has a lot of people who don't like it, mainly due to perceiving the Dex as an annoying chatterbox who doesn't really anything interesting. That being said, it has just as many fans who like the concept of a sentient Pokedex and find its chatter amusing and inoffensive, if nothing else.
  • The game's Big Bad Lusamine is, as far as villains go, one of the series' best-received antagonists to date, but as a character she's rather divisive, especially the way her character's arc ends with the possibility of her redeeming herself being left up in the air that's torn the fanbase in two. Some believe that she's ultimately a Tragic Villain who lost sight of her good qualities due to Nihlego's influence and deserves a second chance, while others view her as an irredeemable monster for how she treated the likes of Lillie, Gladion, Type:Null, and Nebby, and wish she died or was abandoned in Ultra Space.
  • Alolan Forms in general. Are they a cool addition to the series that allows old Pokemon to feel fresh due to receiving total revamps in designs, typings, stats, and abilities? Or an unnecessary addition that wastes space that could have been used for full-fledged new Pokemon? And that's not even going into personal taste as far as designs go.
• Complete Monster: In Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, Ghetsis from an Alternate Reality is made to join Team Rainbow Rocket, but he soon desires to use Giovanni as a pawn so that he can have trainers and Pokemon separated from each other in all worlds of all realities, all to consolidate more power for himself so that he may become supreme ruler above all of existence. Refusing to accept defeat when he's beaten in battle, Ghetsis backhands Lillie and threatens to murder her by his own hand if the Player Character doesn't drop their Poke' Balls and surrender to him, again showing what a dangerous individual he is and just how low he's willing to stoop in order to get what he wants. It's telling that in a game where all the Big Bads from the past 20 years of the core games series' history are featured, Ghetsis is the only one to display no redeeming qualities. the only one to not accept defeat after losing a battle to The Hero, the only one to bluntly attempt homicide on an innocent child, and the only one to be purely self-serving in his lust for power.
• Demonic Spiders: Thanks to the S.O.S mechanic, just about any wild Pokemon has the potential to become this: at any point in a battle, a Pokemon that has not been knocked out can call an ally Pokemon for help, which leaves your Pokemon on the field to fend for itself against two Pokemon at once. Even worse is that it's all too common for the survivor of the pair to summon another ally as soon as their backup dies, leading to what can be a cycle of frustration and annoyance to those looking to catch a tough rare Pokemon. And may god have mercy on any Nuzlockers who run afoul of this mechanic.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Despite her minor role in the grand scheme of things, Wicke of the Aether Foundation received an explosion of fanart from the fans who loved her for being simultaneously adorable and attractive. It helps that in the game proper, she's basically the Aether Foundation's Token Good Teammate.
  • Kahunas Olivia and Nanu were huge hits with the fanbase: Olivia for being cool and drop dead gorgeous, and the latter for his hilariously blunt and depressed attitude coupled with his love of cats. The fact that the former is the series' first Rock-type Elite Four member and the latter is technically the series' equivalent to its first Dark-type Gym leader probably added to their status.
  • As far as Trial Captains go, Lana and Acerola get this for being adorable and quirky (and in Lana's case, hilariously unnerving).
  • Hiker David's hilarious photobombing during Kiawe's trial helped an otherwise run-of-the-mill generic trainer stand out as one of the funniest characters in the game.
  • As far as Pokemon go, Mimikyu proved to be a massive hit with the fans thanks to its creepy yet adorable design, surprisingly woobielicious backstory. And once fans realized that it was crazy useful in battle, this status skyrocketed.
  • Despite being a bit divisive due to being a final stage evolution that looks nothing like its preceding forms, Toucannon ended up proving to be one of the series' best received early game birds mainly due to its hilariously pissed off design being a hit among fans.
  • The Rockruff line in general, due to Rockruff itself being an adorable little puppy, and its evolutions being a badass wolf and badass werewolf respectively.
  • As far as Alolan forms go, Alolan Raichu, Alolan Marowak, Alolan Ninetales, Alolan Exeggutor, and Alolan Dugtrio are probably the biggest hits. Alolan Marowak has an awesome fire-dancer inspired design and proves to be amazing in competitive play. Alolan Raichu is not only adorable, but has an interesting typing and is pretty much a living incarnation of Gamefreak giving the often-neglected Raichu some much needed love. Alolan Ninetales is breathtakingly beautiful, and Alolan Exeggutor and Dugtrio manage to be so ridiculous-looking that they loop around to being hilariously awesome in the fandom's eyes.
  • Mudbray and its evolution Mudsdale were huge hits: Mudbray for being Ugly Cute, Mudsdale for being a huge Badass horse, and both for being insanely good in battle.
  • Salazzle was a huge hit among furries in the fandom. Can't imagine why. Tsareena attracts legions of fans for similar reasons.
• Evil Is Cool: Despite being the leader of a bunch of thugs who do little more than annoy and frustrate Alola's residence, Guzma manages to be among the series' best-received villains to date due to his larger-than-life personality, hilariously blunt dialogue, and surprisingly tragic backstory and sympathetic qualities.
  • Similarly, Guzma's fellow villain Lusamine of the Aether Foundation is praised for her downright chilling portrayal as a legitimately insane and unhinged individual, whose twisted views of love and actions that are counterproductive to her stated intentions manage to make her creepy as hell, yet oh-so-fun to watch.
• Evil Is Sexy: Plumeria of Team Skull. Her skimpy attire and attention-grabbing tattoo do a lot to make her the sexiest admin this side of ORAS Shelly.
  • The same goes with Lusamine, who manages to look inhumanly gorgeous and youthful for a woman in her forties and a mother of two kids to boot. This look is used to create an Uncanny Valley effect when Lusamine's madness gets revealed and her pretty face starts contorting with Slasher Smiles and deranged looks of rage.
• Jerkass Woobie: Under his hard, violent street thug persona, Guzma is a surprisingly vulnerable individual. During his childhood he failed his Island Challenge, and that, combined with living with a violently abusive father and an inability to ever truly excel on a competitive front led to Guzma developing a sense of self hatred and obsessive desire to assert some form of greatness and obtain an adult's approval. It's quite telling that when he loses a battle, he viciously tears into himself for his failure.
  • And underneath the self-absorbed narcissism, cold-blooded sadism, and psychotic, abusive mentality, Lusamine is a broken individual who due to losing her beloved husband, being unable to come to terms with her grief properly or endure the stress of having to raise a family all on her own, obsessing over the Ultra Beasts and Ultra Wormholes, and even exposing herself to the dangerously potent toxins of an Ultra Beast, fell into a self-destructive spiral that warped her from a caring mother into an evil, selfish, abusive maniac who's single-mindedly obsessed with living in Ultra Space and showering the Beasts who dwell there with her "love", consequences to all others, even her own children, be damned. She initially truly did love her children but ended up driving them both away from her due to her own terrible decisions and poor treatment of them and others, and rather than see her own failings and take responsibility, she feels betrayed, abandoned, increasingly alone, and spiraling further into madness.
    • Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon removes the part about her being intoxicated by Nihilego, thus her motives are completely different, as she wants to go through the Ultra Wormhole to capture or defeat Necrozma and save the light of Alola for all the Pokemon and people she cares about, even the two children she'd coldly disowned. She becomes even more of this trope here when considering that she shoulders so much responsibility upon herself as a protector and "mother" to all of Alola's Pokemon due to feeling she has to live up to the expectations of her put upon her by her father's legacy, and her desire to brave the Ultra Wormhole and face Necrozma comes from her grief over her lost husband. She's projecting all of her issues onto the Necrozma situation and hopes that by conquering and mastering Necrozma, she can conquer and master her own grief and can finally have peace of mind. The worst part? She still ends up failing.
• Magnificent Bastard: The Big Bad, Lusamine, may be among the most (if not the most) successful and manipulative villains in the main series. Despite being completely insane, she still manages to successfully run the Aether Foundation by putting on the charade of still being a loving and caring person, and has the entirety of it at her fingertips, the majority of whom do not even know her true intentions. Meanwhile, she secretly freezes dozens of rescued Pokémon and keeps them in her hidden chamber as decorations, and manipulates Guzma and the rest of Team Skull into doing her bidding (meaning that she controls two different organizations at once). She oversaw the project to create Type: Full, a Pokémon intended to emulate Arceus itself, and even though her children successfully managed to escape her, she still indirectly controlled their lives to such an extent that they were in no position to stop her. She nearly kills Nebby in order to open the wormholes, successfully releases at least ten dangerous Ultra Beasts all over Alola, brings Guzma into the wormhole along with herself in order to escape this world, and now that she has what she wants, discards him like a used toy once they arrive in Ultra Space, trapping him for an indefinite time. Virtually the only reason that she managed to be defeated is due to Lillie's newfound determination and your prowess as a trainer, and even when you both confront her, she makes her last stand by fusing with a Nihilego and attempting to kill her own daughter.
  • In Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, Lusamine does everything she did in Sun and Moon up to the point of finally capturing Cosmog when she has Lillie abducted, only this time she does it all for the ends of opening a single Ultra Wormhole so that she can capture/defeat Necrozma in Ultra Space and save Alola's light, and she takes advantage of the Ultra Recon Squad by making them believe that she's going to use a different means to stop Necrozma when she actually intends on dealing with the beast all by herself for her own personal, more self-centered reasons. Even when she loses a battle to the Player Character, thus failing to prove that she has the strength to handle Necrozma and Ultra Beasts on her own, she says that since she has Guzma with her, she's not on her own before using Cosmog to open the Wormhole to Ultra Space anyway. Her only failure was overestimating her and Guzma's ability to neutralize Necrozma as a threat once it starts flying into a rage.
  • Giovanni in the postgame RR Episode of USUM. He bands together other evil team leaders from other realities all under the banner of Team Rainbow Rocket, successfully has his team take over Aether Paradise, transforms it into his team's new base, and opens up an extra large Ultra Wormhole in hopes of bringing out Ultra Beasts that he can use to invade and conquer all other worlds. He even abducts Lusamine and knocks her unconscious for the duration of the takeover. When battled, it's revealed that this version of Giovanni managed to succeed in controlling Mewtwo and keeping it in a Master Ball, and he proves to be a Graceful Loser while also managing to escape, still plotting to commit more evil in some other unsuspecting world.
  • Ghetsis makes an admirable attempt at being this once more, planning to manipulate Giovanni into being his "king" front-man just like he did with N, and be the power behind the throne in all universes. The fact that Giovanni is now using a castle motif for his base shows that Ghetsis may have already begun to influence him. But Ghetsis can't quite reach the finish line due to having the Villainous Breakdown he avoided having in the reality from which he hails from, and for promptly being outdone by Colress in magnificence.
• Moral Event Horizon: Lusamine crosses this when she violently tortures the adorable Cosmog Nebby to a state of near-death by charging the crate it's in with electricity volts and using it's entire body to open up several Ultra Wormholes, complete with a psychotic grin on her face.
  • This one gets lessened in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, in which Lusamine charges the crate only with enough voltage to use Nebby's body for opening up one single Ultra Wormhole to Ultra Space, which she opens in order to go face Necrozma and save Alola's light and doesn't do it in a cruel, sadistic fashion. It still ends up triggering a pain-stricken evolution for Cosmog into Cosmoem, but the damage is less critical and the rest of Lusamine's original Moral Event Horizon (opening up wormholes all over Alola to let out Ultra Beasts) is given to Necrozma later on in the game.
  • In the eyes of a good number of fans though, Lusamine's treatment of Lillie and Gladion tends to be viewed as this due to its disturbingly realistic portrayal of emotional and mental abuse that can hit home for those abused as children. It was meant to be a major Kick the Dog to demonstrate how warped and severely disengaged with reality Lusamine was, but it might have worked a little too well. See Unintentionally Unsympathetic.
  • In USUM's post-game RR Episode, Lysandre has the Ultimate Weapon reconstructed inside of Aether Paradise and is fully intending on using it to wipe out all life in the world this game is set in unless you defeat him in battle, following a rigged Sadistic Choice that makes you activate it.
  • Ghetsis crosses it in the same event when he, being a Sore Loser about his defeat, physically strikes Lillie down onto the floor and outright threatens to murder her if the Player Character doesn't surrender to him. It's made worse by the fact that since all his Pokémon have been knocked out, he's threatening to kill her with his own hands.
  • Faba crosses it when he sells out the Aether Foundation to Team Rainbow Rocket whose main goal is to conquer all worlds with the Ultra Beasts. Faba's reasoning for why he did this is so he could further his career.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Despite all the hype they got during the pre-release period, Alolan Forms weren't utilized to anywhere near the extent they could have been: with only a handful of Pokemon families getting Alolan variations that were relegated solely to Kanto Pokemon to boot. Considering the huge amount of of fan-made Alolan forms for all sorts of Pokemon, there's a ton of potential that Gamefreak could have tapped into considering all the old Pokemon that returned. But tragically, nothing much was done with it and in Ultra Sun and Moon, absolutely no new Alolan Forms were added.
  • Among the Elite Four, Kahili is the only character among them who the player never interacted with beforehand, leading to her feeling a lot less developed than the others.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: According to some fans, Pokémon Sun and Moon and its sequels are regarded as having "too much handholding," just like the newer entries, i.e. Pokémon Let's Go: Pikachu and Pokémon Let's Go: Eevee. Unlike the older games, that give Poketrainers the challenge, like not showing which types are effective and the Ex. Share is regulated to only that one mon that's wearing the Ex. Share helmet.
• Tier-Induced Scrappy: Crabrawler and its evolution Crabominable catch a lot of flack for being what are widely considered to be among the worst Pokemon to use in-game. While not terrible, they suffer from two major drawbacks: one being that Crabrawler cannot evolve until it reaches Mt. Lanakila... which is at the very end of the game, meaning that you have to lug around an unevolved Pokemon with middling stats through all of the game, where it has a really hard time keeping up with all the powerful Pokemon that pop up near the end. And the other drawback is that as a Crabominable, its slow speed and partial Ice typing do it no favors on a defensive front, and the only major opponents it can fight (The Elite Four and Champion) will, more often than not, have Pokemon that it's either weak to, or otherwise is disadvantaged against.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Considering her tragic backstory of having gone mad with grief due to losing her husband and being exposed to Nihilego's toxins, as well as a hinted-at possible redemption, it's clear that Game Freak intended Lusamine to come off as a disturbing and contemptible, yet ultimately sympathetic villain who still has a shot at being a good person. However, a lot of fans felt that the attempts at making her sympathetic fell flat due to the ridiculously cruel and sociopathic extremes she took her villainy to, and how she always maintained a It's All About Me and Never My Fault attitude even while claiming to be acting out of "love." Not helping matters at all is her chillingly realistic portrayal of an abusive parent, her more sympathetic traits being relegated to post-game backstory, and the revelation that Nihilego venom doesn't brainwash so much as it amplifies and enhances the natural traits of the venom's host.
  • It seems that Game Freak themselves are aware of this, since in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, those games' incarnation of Lusamine is far less reprehensible and vile, with her sympathetic traits being heavily expanded on while her villainy is toned down by several notches in order to make her post-game redemption feel a lot more believable.