Pokemon Sun/Moon Demo Suggests That The Game Is New Nintendo 3DS Enhanced

While the New Nintendo 3DS is a very appreciable step up over the original 3DS, especially as far as the system’s specs go, it’s a sad reality that not many games have utilized that extra power meaningfully. While we have titles like Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, Super Smash Bros., and Xenoblade all leveraging the New 3DS’s power meaningfully, most new 3DS releases ignore the system’s features and power entirely.

That may not be the case with Pokemon Sun/Moon, the upcoming new Pokemon games due to launch this November. A demo for the games released yesterday, and while functionally nothing in the demo is different between 3DS or New 3DS systems, Nintendo Life reports something rather interesting. The Pokemon Sun/Moon demo needs to suspend the entire OS to run on older 3DS systems, which is something that only 3DS Enhanced games do. This is because on the New 3DS, the CPU is more powerful and able to dedicate additional resources to keeping the OS running in the background, while on standard 3DS systems, games have to make use of everything they get, meaning no resources are left for system level features.

This, then, implies that Pokemon Sun/Moon will be New 3DS Enhanced- although what exactly that will entail is unknown as of right now. At the very least, it means that you won’t be able to access the Internet Browser or Miiverse while playing the game on standard 3DS systems. But it also suggests that the game may end up performing at least marginally better on New 3DS than it does on regular 3DS systems.

Pokemon Sun/Moon launch on Nintendo 3DS on November 18 in North America and Japan, and on November 23 in Europe.