
I immediately traded over only a perfectly bred newborn Gible into Ultra Sun, and am very glad some of my time in the story was actually well spent leveling up a competitively viable Pokemon (once I reset its EVs, of course). Because of this, you can get very creative with your main story team, breeding Pokemon in Sun and Moon in preparation for the new version. Plus, Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon allow trading directly from Sun and Moon as soon as the first Pokemon Center is found. (I chose Ultra Sun, as I played Moon last year.) That meant that I got to capture the Pokemon I didn’t get to on my first playthrough on Moon. The version exclusives are the same, so Pokemon only available in Sun are also only available in Ultra Sun.

“The larger variety of Pokemon – there are more than a hundred new to the Alola region – contributed along with the new features to making my playthrough feel different even when the story hadn’t changed much. This currency isn’t as important as the BP Mantine Surf grants, but still allowed me to purchase healing items cheaply at any time I wanted in the Festival Plaza. My first win afforded me a whopping 200 Festival Points (FP). The Battle Agency, a new counter in the Festival Plaza, is a more traditional Pokemon side-activity which allowed me to play with battle-ready Pokemon I would have never raised and used on my own in a short-form tournament setting. I always found it a bit annoying I couldn’t tackle the Battle Tree with a fully realized team until after I had already conquered some of it, and in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon I won’t have to. It’s a much easier and guaranteed way to earn these items, which are mostly important to competitors and those who want to clear difficult endgame content like the Battle Tree, so I welcome it wholeheartedly. Usually, you earn about 1 BP from each battle won, but I was reliably earning 10 BP every time I played a five-minute mini-game with Mantine Surf.

Mantine Surf lets you earn Beach Points (BP), also known as and entirely interchangeable with Battle Points, which can be traded in for rare held items and other desirables.
