Pokemon Ultra Sun/Moon comes just under a year from its predecessor Pokemon Sun/Moon. In that one year, Game Freak had a lot to do to push Ultra Sun/Moon out to gamers around.

In an interview with Famitsu and translated by Nintendo Everything, game producer, Shigeru Ohmori, as well as, game director, Kazumasa Iwao, talked about what they set out to achieve with the new game.

Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon are not sequels to Sun/Moon, but it will rather be taking a slightly different branch. The world settings and character personalities are still based on Sun/Moon, but in this game they’re delving deeper into their psychological descriptions and motives.

On the concepts and directions for making these games, the dev team agreed that they must create them in a different way from Sun/Moon, because the latter took over three years with the entire company staff working on it. Meanwhile, Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon only have one year of development time, so they can’t put in the same amount of power and have to think of a different way to evolve things. That’s when they came up with “Deepening”. Then they have to think again what should they do to deepen something in the game, and they came up with the keyword “Kernel”. So thinking about something’s kernel means deepening it. When the dev staff make a new idea or decision, they’re unifying the team’s thoughts by placing this Kernel word. So while being based on Sun/Moon, Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon are being created as different games, while adding more depth to everything and getting closer to the kernel as its theme.

So instead of coming with something too revolutionary, the main aim of Ultra Sun/Moon was to deepen and expand the Alola narrative, which is kind of what they have been doing with every sequel game to be honest, but we will see what they mean this time. You can read more about the interview at Nintendo Everything here.

Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon releases for the Nintendo 3DS on 17 November 2017.