these fangames' quality levels are blasting off again
bunken's review was already pretty much perfect, I just wanted to yap
>Bingo
I was so close...
>The Good
This game has a lot of small flourishes and a lot of charm to it, from stuff like the anime Pokemon cries, the multiple levels of HMs that were used surprisingly well (letting you skip trainers or also encouraged backtracking multiple times, etc.). The art for a lot of the new Pokemon isn't the best, but it is something I'm willing to overlook in spite of how the game turned out.
It does feel bad to shit talk something that the creator has evidently put a lot of time into and clearly has a deep level of passion for. I'm not getting the impression of something like Vanguard where the creator clearly is trying to cash in on trends and attention whore, it just feels like this was severely misguided. I didn't particularly like the Galaga minigame or the telescope memory game, but I mean, hey, it's definitely more interesting mechanically than a lot of fangames we've played this year.
Even though this game does overwrite Pokemon's lore to inject in cosmic autism, and there are some...EXTREMELY obvious 'plot twists' that the in-game MC starts frothing at the mouth for, the game's story and the overall 'cosmic' theme was alright. Other than the stuff like people getting murdered or whatever it does tonally feel very much like a gen 4-5 game with some enhancements. I don't think Braydon was supposed to come off nearly as infuriating as he was, but Cosmo more than made up for him writing-wise.
>The Bad
I don't want to say 'everything else' but....yeesh
The game is still in beta, but a lot of the problems here are things that I don't think would be fixed by just patching up bugs or whatever.
The giant raging elephant in the room is the area design. The starting areas of the game are just generic squares, which I think I might've preferred over what it devolved into. You are hit with some stretches of the game that are arguably longer than all of Mt. Coronet before even reaching the third gym (before having access to revives!) and while it doesn't get strictly worse the annoyances do begin to pile up. The third gym forces you to redo the puzzles every time you redo it, the ice gym goes on way too long, the space gym makes you travel across an annoying maze where everything looks the same on top of UFOs that go at like 1 mph even at 3x speed, so on. Both Victory Road and the final evil team base are way too fucking long.
There are so many overworld wild encounters in this game. I'm so sick of this fucking trend, Vanguard did this shit, a recent game we played did it too, and this game gets so obnoxious with this shit. It wouldn't even be so bad if not for the fact the MINUTE you leave the screen, they respawn. In the ghost tower they chase you through walls and dogpile you, in the mega evolution den they punish you for ever having to go back to an earlier room which you do a lot of. God help you if you backtrack or have to go back to heal, through the areas that are already way too long.
You don't get a lot of money for both repels and healing items, either. It's not even like the difficulty even comes from the actual bosses or deliberately hard trainers, it largely comes from dreading being stuck out in the middle of nowhere so you don't have to suffer the annoyance of having to run back and deal with 3000 wild encounters (the encounter rate for this game is absurd, to the point where me turning on a tile without a repel would trigger two wilds instantly, multiple times) or overworld encounters. It just feels like a chore to play. The fact you get barely any experience either feels like the malicious cherry on top, an additional fuck you so you can't even use the spam to your benefit.
I've already commented on some of the side stuff sucking, like the Zygarde analogue, but also yeah most of the sidequests outside maybe the level 2 HM stuff are pretty garbage too. Even most of the level 2 HM stuff is specifically FOR the Zygarde quest which is absolutely pointless to fully complete.
I guess I should also bring up 'Light type' and the battles here, but there's not much to really say. The game isn't that hard and if you do lose it's because you got caught out on having extremely low levels (like I did for the flying leader) or because you can't be assed to remember what Light type does. Despite the dev's comment it never exactly required much 'thought' because bosses use really underbaked teams (find the fact that only the champion and rivals used megas like in Gen 6 which the creator seems to hate pretty funny) and you get a lot of weird broken nonsense like the grass starter getting Spore.
On a meta level, this game felt like the creator took all of the criticisms people have of the Gen 6+ era of Pokemon like ostensibly shallow level design, the Exp All making fights too easy, etc. and then cranked the dial way the fuck further in the other direction when that wasn't even the case of Gen 1-5 games. Sure, Gen 2 had issues with exp, but that was recognized as a mistake that was remedied with Gen 3-5. Sure, Mt. Coronet was a big level, but that wasn't like every single fucking cave you go to in those games.
>Verdict
From the game's version number, and from the feel of the plot, it's clear that we're at some kind of halfway point. I also assume that given the stage of the game the creator would gauge the player's resources at this point as an excuse to throw even longer and more tedious levels at you. Can't really say I'm looking forward to it, whatsoever. Maybe by some miracle the dev will learn that trying to make a fun fangame is a better use of time than trying to make an
authentic one
I'd have to give to give this game a
Brandon saying we/10
>>24143
thanks bro. and yep