What Interviews Sun And Moon Classics Actually Is
It is a collection of developer interviews and behind-the-scenes content tied to the Pokémon Sun and Moon games. The term has been used by fans to group together various video interviews, written Q&A sessions, and commentary that came out around the 2016–2017 release window. Nothing official from Nintendo or Game Freak uses "Sun And Moon Classics" as a formal title — it is a fan-organized term for archiving that material. The most reliable place to find this material is through archived Pokémon USA YouTube uploads, the old Pokémon Company news pages, and fan-run archives like Serebii or Bulbapedia. The main channels to check are: Game Freak's official interviews, often republished through Pokémon USA.
Director Junichi Masuda and producer Satoshi Tajiri commentary pieces. Character and region design interviews that broke down Alola's inspiration. I spent some time tracking down the full set a couple of years ago when I was putting together a reference document. What I found was scattered. Some interviews exist only in Japanese and were translated by volunteers. Others were removed from official channels but cached on Wayback Machine. The trick is knowing which source to trust.
How to Compile Your Own Archive
Start with the Pokémon News website and search for "Sun" and "Moon" individually. Cross-reference those results with Serebii's interview section. From there, you can piece together a rough timeline of what was released when and what still exists in English. One thing people miss: the regional format interviews. Several dev comments about the day/night cycle and Ultra Beasts were embedded in regional press events in Japan that never got a full English translation. If you want completeness, you need to account for those gaps. Here is a problem I ran into myself. I had compiled a working list of about forty interview sources and was building a master index when I discovered that the Pokémon USA YouTube channel had deleted several videos in a bulk cleanup around 2021. Videos that had been accessible for years just disappeared. I had to go back to archived versions and sometimes to secondary sources that had quoted the deleted material verbatim. It took me about three hours to reconstruct what was lost, and even then two of the recordings are only partially recoverable.
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What the Interviews Actually Cover
The core topics break down into a few buckets: Alola region design philosophy — how the open-world structure differed from previous entries. The Z-move and Dynamax-adjacent mechanics — though Dynamax came later, Sun and Moon established the high-impact move system.
Ultra Beast lore — creature design and how they fit into the story without being traditional Pokémon. Accessibility changes — the removal of HM machines, the rotation system, and route redesign. Local and multiplayer features — trading, battling, and the overall social loop.
A counter-intuitive detail most people overlook: several interview statements contradict each other when taken across different languages and dates. Masuda gave one answer about the rotating routes in a Japanese interview and a different explanation in the English press kit. Neither is wrong — they are just different angles on the same design decision. If you are citing these sources, always note which version you are using.
Practical Tips for Using This Material
If you are writing about Sun and Moon development, the most useful sources are the ones that came out during the six months before release. Post-launch interviews tend to rehash the same points. Pre-release pieces contain actual design reasoning. Watch out for paraphrased quotes. Many fan sites summarize interview content rather than quoting directly. I learned this the hard way when I cited a Bulbapedia summary as a direct quote and someone pointed out the wording had been altered from the original. Always go to the primary source if you can. The Japanese-language material is worth your time even if your Japanese is limited. Machine translation has improved enough that you can get the gist, and the untranslated interviews contain details you will not find anywhere else. I use a combination of DeepL and manual cross-referencing, and it usually takes me about twenty minutes per interview to verify the meaning.
What This Collection Cannot Give You
It will not give you early concept art, unused dialogue, or internal development documentation. The interviews are surface-level by design — they explain what was done, not the full process of how it was done. If you need deeper technical details, you are looking at the wrong sources. There are ROM hacking communities and data miners who have extracted that level of information directly from the game files, but that is a completely different research path. If your goal is just to understand the creative intent behind Sun and Moon, the archived interviews will get you most of the way there. You just need to be careful about missing translations, deleted videos, and the occasional contradiction between sources.
