It's a bit difficult to write this review because it's like, you have eyes, right? You can just go read the threads where I played this game and basically get the gist of everything obviously wrong with it in a way that doesn't need to be spelled out. That's true to some extent of other games, but the problems here are so overwhelmingly and glaringly present that I could just say 'look at it' and that could cover everything. Sort of in the same vein as Virtualization or Soulstones 1 where I said 'yeah these are some of the worst shit ever'.
But I guess because, why not, I'll break down everything. I'm just going to type and finish when I finish kek
The Presentation
>Spriting
Not much to remark here. This game uses primarily Gen 4 tilesets with some mix and match and mixels and half pixels, the works, but the most jarring clash of sprites is the frequent usage of ugly stock RPGMaker assets that are over every map. In some cases it's done for deliberate uncanny valley (such as the demons in the Eclipse ending of the game) but most of the time it just looks bad.
I have little to remark on the trainer side of things either. It's obvious most are pulled from DeviantArt when they're not spliced/edited sprites of other Rebornian characters, which is why I assume there's also a lot of just basic maingame characters. It is what it is. I'm not autistic enough to be that bothered by artistic consistency, so I'll move on.
>Mapping
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't think any creator should be bullied or forced off a site because they take assets from another fangame in a community that is centralized around taking assets without permission from Gamefreak.
But as I've also said: on the other hand, it comes across as extremely lazy and classless when it is done. As with Full Moon, you also run into the issue where this already extremely long game is being bloated even further because you're padding it with maps from other games. Like fuck off dude, you don't need to add Axis High or Zone Zero (the latter being a plot-relevant area in this game and is fucking name dropped exactly) to convey what should be your personal vision.
The tilesets used ranged from 'whatever' to 'man you can sure tell why the games they were taken from didn't use big maps with these'. A LOT of maps, especially towards the tail end of the game are filled with the usual pitfalls of one tile gaps where trainers and Pokemon would get stuck in them (a shame, as I think the Pokemon added to maps was a nice aesthetic touch), tiles that were not obviously walkable, etc. The most prominent example was the final town of the 4th region, Myrefall, which uses Neo Sylen's tileset from Empyrean, a town which was already annoying to navigate and Myrefall was at least 5 times it's size.
Because of work and social obligations I've had to play this game at night, where even at max brightness most of the outside maps were way too dark to navigate. And if there was a sandstorm, holy fuck just forget it. Even without speedup, any desert map in this game completely fucks your visuals, and there's at least 5 or 6.
I do at least appreciate that the maps, for the most part, were better designed and more visually interesting as the game went on, even if I wouldn't necessarily call them more fun to actually play.
The Gameplay
where to even begin kek
>The Progression
When you download the game you get a readme that states this game was only intended for it's creator and was only shared later for the community.
And it REALLY shows. This is by far the worst aspect of this entire game. I don't expect, or even want my hand to be held at every single junction, but man. When nearly 90% of my time playing this shit was spent going "What am I supposed to do next?" "Where do I go?" "The fuck do you want me to do?", even when interacting with basic obstacles that should've been intuitive, I think you have a problem. There are so many times in this game where they expect you to retalk to everyone in a town after doing a specific event, or clicking on some random wall or rock, or multiple times when an exit to another area is not marked at all, or an NPC halfway across the world map suddenly moving after an event that didn't logically lead to them moving, or god knows what else.
This game feels like the worst of Empire's secret quests and EoE's postgame, except arguably more obtuse as even those games operated on specific but still somewhat consistent schizo logic with strange hints. This game gives you
nothing a huge chunk of the time. It's actually more comparable to pixel hunts from old adventure games like King's Quest where you're expected to literally read the creator's mind and figure out what you're supposed to do next.
This naturally extends to the puzzles, which, as you can already see from what I played in this thread run the gamut from
>>16286 to
>>16220. Others are directly lifted from Silent Hill but incorrectly implemented into the game, some have no clear instructions on how to start or what's expected of you at a baseline, and many times you're expected to do it in areas with a billion trainers or NPCs that instantly cause a game over when they spot you. If you ever wanted to play a game where it felt like a slightly lesser version of Empire's Molten Core was a solid fifth of the maps, this is the game for you. I do at the very least applaud the effort that went into making the visuals for some of the puzzles, especially the piano and coin puzzles early on, but that's it.
And I need to stress:
this is part of mandatory progression for the main game. These aren't for hidden powerful, optional rewards like Empire/Empyrean, this is shit you are expected to do constantly as part of the
main fucking story. Keep this in mind for everything else I'll talk about during this part.
>The Resource Management
This game was obviously inspired by Silent Hill, and wanted to adapt some gameplay conventions. I've talked about how I would like more fangames to utilize something like resource management over 'fake difficulty' like Moto/Demice kaizo shit where the AI is so retardedly stacked with PULSE3 or free Life Orb boosts but you're given so many resources and teambuilding options you just gradually counterteam, but I don't think this is the way to do it.
You get pitifully small amounts of money from battles, mostly 100$ and maybe 1000$ from 'lategame' trainers in each region. And that's pretty much it. This means you can barely afford repels, so prepare to run across massive maps full of wild encounters and trainers. You also get no healing items, and starting with the second region you only get paid healing (which outpaces the money you get from fights), so if you want free healing you need to do a long walk of shame back to the first region constantly. TMs are single use, tutor moves are hopelessly unaffordable, EV training is also too expensive, the 'crafting system' I never bothered with was similarly out of reach. There's ways to game the system, but at that point you might as well just open debug and fix your money/EVs, which is what I eventually did.
The fourth region also deserves a shoutout as it locks you out of the first three regions, so I suppose if you were stuck on a fight - and it should be noted most trainer fights from the second region onward game over you if you lose, so you cannot grind on them - you would be reduced to slowly grinding off wild mons and be stuck at 0$ the entire time once your healing money ran out. If, of course, you weren't just straight up softlocked.
>The Levels
Maybe I just hate grinding in Pokemon now, but man
Basically, the level caps in this game jump way too much and you're given too few trainers to compensate. A lot of the early game of each region goes from like '25 -> 35 -> 45' but then there will only be like 10-12 trainers between each raise. Then towards the backhalf of each region you're given massive Virtualization-tier 100+ trainer gauntlets when you've already hit the highest level cap and don't need the experience. Common Candies which would let you maybe use your strong mons just leveled down also become way too expensive after the first region.
As said above, you get game overed for losing most fights, which means the optimal way to play is to slowly grind to each successive cap while not exceeding it in the rebattleable trainer gauntlets only in the first region which are so unbelievably fucking slow and give barely any experience. You can also refight route trainers in this game after a cooldown of 12 hours, that's also awful.
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Once again I do need to stress that there are four regions in this shit, and you need to do the frustrating song and dance four separate times. Five, actually, if you want to do the postgame content which also requires specifically leveled teams so as to not exceed caps in certain areas. If it was just tedious grinding autism for one or two regions, that's one thing, but it's four or five. I cannot recommend playing this game without Debug.
>The Battles/Anything Else
I've yapped enough during this section, so I'll wrap it up. I don't have much to say on the battles. Starting with the second region they do account for you having access to more resources and 'early' trainers start abusing later game strategies and movesets, but it's easy enough to exploit. The AI is bad, but whatever. Some items and abilities have weirdly coded interactions like Assault Vest being a straight up +3 to SpDef on entry in battle, but again it's whatever. The only real issue with the fights is that they have minmaxed EVs whereas a player who isn't cheating or using an infinite money trick will likely not.
Field effects exist. Outside of the very annoying sky field that nulls electric moves or the electric one that nulls ground moves, I can't remember any that had much impact at all on fights. You can tell the first region's gyms were more balanced and focused around field effects and then a lot of boss fights from the second region on don't even bother to use them. None of the final bosses of each region do.
I guess this is also the place to go over the game over mechanic, but I don't have much to say about it other than it just sucks and adds nothing. Even in Apex or Saiph 2 which game overed you for losing any fight it felt less oppressive and consistently annoying than this game, probably because this game is more difficult than either of them, but I suppose I never lost that much progress over it.
To sum it up: if played as intended, you must play through four separate regions with a limited set of TMs, very poor grinding opportunity, huge level jumps, which take you through increasingly long areas that spam wild encounters at you, and then you must deal with retarded puzzles and progression where you're not even sure what you're doing more than half the time, and often you're wondering if you've accidentally softlocked yourself, and then if at any point you've forgotten to save every other step you might get thrown into a battle against an overleveled EV'd opponent who kills you and deletes your progress, if a random NPC wandering around the map doesn't do so first. That is the Dark Light experience.