#these games just hit this certain gameplay flow where everything you do looks and feels cool

[deepspaceboytoy]

Think I just found my new favorite shooter of the year

[styrmwb]

I beat Persona 5 Royal

aaaaaaa AAAAAAAA a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a

a

Knocking another game off the list of games I should have played a long time ago, and this one is just... so so so so good. Ever since I booted it up I was absolutely absorbed into the game the entire way through. I don't think I really had Persona in my sight until Joker was announced for Smash a while back, and then this game was always like "I really need to at least interact with it like I have every other character in Smash", but that obviously took a while. I am glad I waited though, cause from what I've heard, Royal is just objectively the better experience. For what is my first entry into the series, it completely hooked me and I am in for the rest (and also SMT but that's later)

Gameplay

Turn! Based! RPG! Of course I'm gonna fucking like it I love turn based RPGs. But like actual shit, there's two aspects to this game and I love them both.

Battling/Hanging out in the Metaverse is very fun. All turn based needs to really pop off in the modern day is fun options, and I feel as though I am given that. Baton passing alone is all I really needed, as it makes me think of the optimal order to take down each enemy for the best result. I absolutely loved the magical elements used. Like yeah you got the classic Fire, Ice, Wind, Electricity, but then you also got fucking Psy, Bless, Curse, and my new favorite of all time Nuke???? I love Nuke so much it's such a cool concept! They each have like, their own unmentioned counters/duos which is super cool! Also Almighty goes incredibly hard. Then you add on the buffs and debuffs. I FREQUENTLY used all of them and felt like they were critical to fights which is awesome. Combine these two for technicals, certain statuses making a weakness when hit with certain elements, it's just such a joy and it makes battles where I can actively use all of these something I look forward to (and then when you have a stupid bullshit fight and your name is Okumura, I hate you forever and I'm going to date your daughter in revenge, FUCK that fight eternally it was the only boss I actively disliked).

The other half of the game is your slice of life student simulator. The other half of the game is also like crack, and I swear they put demons in the game cause something would possess me whenever I got to roam the world. Despite the limited clock, I relished managing my time. I loved thinking of who to spend my time with, when to focus on skills rather than confidants, how to optimize my Mementos trips, knocking out an entire Palace all at once so I could have maximum time for the rest of the month, it was so addictive! It really came to a head in the Royal Third Semester section where I literally created saves and calculated if I had enough time to do everything I wanted to, and finished it on Literally the last free day. Also, when like 75% of your game is writing, it helps when the writing is good, and I absolutely loved reading everything, but maybe I'll talk about that more later.

Last bit that I'm gonna expand on why I love more later, but I was NOT expecting this game to be a monster collector. Regardless, I loved the flow of collecting new guys, then seeing what I could fuse together to obtain.

Characters

I! Love! This! Cast! I love them to the bottom of my heart! The best way to make me love an RPG is by making me care about the core group to the bottom of my heart and I do. When I write these, I mean the tag of game ramblings literally cause this is all just stream of thought, so I have a feeling this is gonna be the longest section. Sorry in advance.

The Phantom Thieves of Hearts is a name that goes incredibly hard (and I wish they didn't make me name the group separately cause I just stuck with the default anyways (I'm a default daniel)), and a group that I hope keeps their group chat open for the rest of their lives and is always friends.

Ryuji is my fucking BOY. I don't care if he's an idiot and needs to keep his damn mouth shut sometimes, I'm ride or die with that dude for life. I thought his backstory as a former track star now dealing with his physical disability and ruined record was really interesting, and added an extra layer to the usual delinquent + stupid best friend energy. In battles, I would bring him in when I needed to smash shit, cause he does that Very well. Captain Kidd is a sick design and namesake, and I really wish I could have kept the basic design.

Morgana :) kitty (despite what he says). I'll admit, he's not my Favorite of the bunch (this does not mean he is bad! B tier is still good, but it is ultimately below A and S!) as his bits of I'm NOT A CAT and Lady Ann~ didn't really hit it for me, and I didn't usually use him in battles, as Joker tended to take over the wind damage role (although I always used him for healing outside, or in harder battles), but I cannot deny that he's a very good companion. It was nice to have your little buddy always by your side. He's with you when you're playing games. He's cheering you on while you eat a big burger. He lays on top of you at night like a cat is best at doing and he confides his secrets in you. I get why he had his moment of weakness and insecurity, but if that was me in there, I'd be giving Morgana as much love and appreciation as I could.

Ann is so strong, both story wise and game wise. Seeing her rise up against the constant bullshit she has to deal with, from the teacher, her best friend's struggles, and other models, was inspiring, and I rooted for her constantly. I essentially always had her in battle, with the magic SP usage down passive, her fire damage being usually relevant, and her buffs/debuffs being Very useful. Ann was the goat in the whole playthrough. I almost chose her as the romance but sadly I held out and was rewarded for doing so. Also, her third awakening Persona SLAPS

Yusuke is... probably my least favorite member of the group. Again, not bad. Not hated. Just least favorite. I rarely ever used him in battle, but his up to evasion did very much come in clutch. I couldn't really mesh with his love for the arts, but that's mainly on me over the actual writing of the character I think. I did, however, really appreciate the fact that he was clearly struggling in life and had a group to back him up. I also quite enjoyed his literal starving artist shtick. Poor guy, let him eat the sushi and have more than sugar water and slice of toast for dinner.

Makoto is amazing. Such a sudden turn around from stuck up student president to the MVP of the group. Her design is so cool, I loved the biker aesthetic, the fist weapons, the fucking motorcycle! Her role as someone to bring thoughts and logic to the group, as well as the connection to an "antagonist" with her relation to Sae was very needed. I wish her confidant storyline focused a little more on her, but that's ok. The girl's an absolute badass, and a joy to have in the group. She was another essential part of the team, usually being my team buffer, but also nuke damage is goated (again it's like, my favorite element in this game). Plus both of her showtimes are amazing lmao

Futaba is my little sister, and deserves a hug. Her palace is absolutely heartbreaking, and it is something that makes me so so glad to see what happens to her afterward. Seeing her grow from a severely traumatized teen wanting to die to someone that enjoys and loves life and her friends makes me so happy. She didn't deserve ANYTHING that happened to her. Gameplay wise, once I started to get her levels up and max her confidant, she absolutely came in clutch, and somehow always consistently gave me whatever support I needed. I also quite enjoyed her constant nerd references that came really close to lawsuits (she straight up said gym leader)

Haru :) <3 I love Haru. The moment I saw her, acting like a dramatic masked hero, and then she fuckin pulls out an axe and grenade launcher, it was over. I've seen a lot of people lamenting her screen time, and while I do wish she got more, it certainly didn't stop me from enjoying her character (although maybe Royal helps that?). She's sweet, silly, caring, soft, and somehow brutal. Like Kirby in human form. I feel like she really got it rough out of the party, her dad getting assassinated, and still having to deal with the burdens of a company, but she still made it through. She's the best. Gameplay, I feel like she very much came in clutch with her Psy affinity constantly comboing for technicals, and her reflect spells protecting Joker from dying. Fuck you Okumura and the stupid fiancee you picked I'M GONNA GIVE HARU THE BEST LIFE EVER TO SPITE YOU

Akechi is interesting. The moment I see this fucker, my brain connects him to Light from Death Note. I'm constantly waiting for him to hit his villain arc. Then he joins the party, and I'm surprised! Oh shit, that's the second big rpg I've played this year that has a surprise party member I didn't know about! How cool :) Then pancakes happen, and I realize the game sucker punched me into forgetting that THE DUDE WAS SUS AS FUCK FROM THE START THE BASTARD! I really enjoyed him in the third semester though. Completely dropping the act, and powering through full of anger and spite regardless of his inevitable fate. Akechi is a cool character. I didn't use him much in battle, but he was great for big physical/gun numbers. Also Loki is a sick ass Persona.

Then the last member, Sumire. i do feel like she felt... a little forced in? Like I could definitely tell she was extra Royal content. I wish she had more scenes with the group, and longer playability. Regardless though, I still enjoyed her character. A story of someone dealing with self-esteem and aspirations of death really hits close to home, and I loved seeing her accept herself, still walk forward in life, and thrive, finding a group she belongs in. I can't say much gameplay wise cause she just wasn't there for long, but her big physical moves were very appreciated in the final battle.

Now everyone else. The other confidants were very enjoyable. Sojiro is like, EASILY the best one out of the whole group. He's my actual literal dad, and I wish Joker could have stayed with him cause fuck his real parents, if no one got me I know Sojiro got me! I also really enjoyed Iwai I'm just a sucker for dad type characters. While I don't really fuck with the whole maid-master shit, I did still really like Kawakami too. The only one I didn't really care for was Ohya. I just like... couldn't lock in with her or her story line (we love Lala though!) Everyone else, even Shinya, I wanted to see through their story, and was excited for each bit I got. (Shoutouts to Yoshida, the ONLY good politician. This is how you can tell this is a fictional game)

The villains as I look back, aren't exactly the peak of characters compared to most of the list, but they were still enjoyable. Kamoshida was the perfect introduction, an absolute scumbag the game made sure you would hate, and someone that set the tone for me of what the rest of the game would look like. Like, once I noticed the middle name of his boss fight being one of the princes of hell, I got really excited. Madarame and Kaneshiro were fine, I more appreciated what they served narratively over their actual characters. Okumura is a piece of shit and I hate him forever (but jokes aside there was something very cathartic about a game presenting a CEO as a cartoonishly evil pile of garbage), and Shido I felt was a nice way to tie everyone together, having connections to everyone from the start. I can't really call Sae a villain per se, but I will put her here anyways. I thought her palace was super cool, and her turn from antagonist to support was appreciated. Yaldabaoth I think was a cool reveal character, and an awesome classic JRPG ending, but overall I think I appreciated Shido more.

Now since this is Royal, the real MVP is Maruki. I love this dude. I appreciated him at the start, a therapist character I feel like, isn't something super common? I loved how much it seemed like he genuinely cared about people. And that was his whole deal, even to the end. He wasn't a bad guy, he honest to god cared about people. Like yeah, he wasn't doing anything the right way, and even his outfit being like a bishop or a pope showed that he was Not there mentally, but he was such a cool character. A hurt and sad man who lost too much, wanting to prevent others from feeling the same way. I think he especially makes me appreciate how the Phantom Thieves' methods don't kill, because it gave him a semi happy ending. Now, I think I've rambled about characters long enough, but again, I did really enjoy this whole cast.

Story

I think the fact that I played this game at this time in my life rather than when it came out is nothing but a benefit, because the story of a group of people hurt by society fighting back against the shitheads and taking down the corrupt really hits different (although it does have a bit of an FFVII effect where the mass popularity and marketing of the game kinda goes against the original message, I can't help but think of the possible Okumura or Kaneshiro in the background). But regardless. I was locked in the whole way through. Most of my love for the writing of this game comes with the characters and their interactions and stories, but that major theming of rebellion, fighting for the people, just sits well in my heart.

Like I mentioned before, this was my first Persona game. It also feels weird to like, Say this, but I am a big fan of Jojo as well, Part 4 being my favorite. Persona hits that same itch, that slice of life setting, a group of high schoolers having fun, enjoying their life, but also fighting against the people harming their city and way of life. It's like, a venn diagram that's a circle (I've heard 4 is even more similar and I'm looking forward to playing that next).

The writing felt very modern, like whoever was behind it was in tune with what they were portraying. The dialogue, the subjects, things that felt real, even if they were caricatured or something like that, I could see that this was a real world, and I really appreciated that.

The Look. The Vibe.

Holy fuck this game is aesthetic incarnate. The style imbued into every single pixel; the menus, the transitions, the bits where the model of like Joker, or Iwai, or Takemi moving around; the ransom letter aesthetic with the flat colors and everything MY GOD it's such a good looking game!

The music is an essential part of this as well. There's a joke I've seen occasionally (it might just be exclusive to a community I'm in but I could be wrong) that Persona 5 invented jazz, and I'd believe it honestly. The soundtrack feels like, perfect background music. It's usually not the Highlight of the scene (save for any vocal track stealing the show), but it's ALWAYS the enhancer of any moment. I can feel the stress of battle, I can feel the chill vibes of a rainy day, I get hyped when we're stealing a treasure, etc.

This game is an A+ class example of style, making any activity you're doing enjoyable.

Hoo Boy.

I mean. Fuck. I don't think I've felt this entranced by a game in a good while. VII Rebirth was up there for sure, but something about Persona just felt addicting.

Something I really really really loved about this game that I couldn't quite fit anywhere else, but makes me super excited to check out the rest of the series, is the usage of mythology. Mythology is sick as fuck. But what really got me hooked, is how EVERY sort of mythology was used. You got your classic Greek and Egyptian. You have plenty of Japanese Yokai, but then you also have gods and monsters from like... things that people still actively worship??? From religions that are in my head as "religion" and not "mythology". Seeing angels and demons from Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even seeing some old Zoroastrianism in there? Also like, to bring it back to the start, using mythical creatures from everywhere! I saw European monsters, Celtic creatures, American cryptids, the whole thing was so cool! This alone is a huge part of what made me addicted to this game. I wanted to keep seeing just where they would pull inspiration from, and I was constantly surprised and overjoyed, reading the backgrounds for everything, and going to look up where some of them came from, trying to guess what else would be next. I genuinely cannot wait to play more Persona and later Shin Megami Tensei to get more of this kind of stuff, but also I think I need to take a break so I don't get burned out hahaha

I loved my time playing this game. I can see why it's so loved. Sure, there were a couple things that I wish hit my heart or I connected to a little more, but overall I am very satisfied with my experience.

9.7/10. Great characters, great concept, amazing style and super cool inspiration. Some things just needed a little extra to really hit home for me for a perfect 10, but still an experience that will stick with me.

[bersergner-blog]

Escape from Tombstone - Beat 'em up Culture (Summary)

So through my research I was able to summarise what the intended core gameplay experience is and what areas need to be paid specific attention to in order for the genre to click.

Primarily the user/users take control of 1-4 characters who progress from left to right across multiple screens, fighting varying amounts and types of enemies in varying locales. Often featuring a grapple, clearout attack, jumping attack, punches and kicks as well as weapons or destructible scenery.

And I have found the main keys to a great classic Beat 'em up are:

It's gotta feel good, look good and sound good. Simple, of course, but here's why it's important:

There is a lot of repetition in Beat em Ups, more so than most genres so it’s important that everything feel absolutely great as you’ll be doing it a lot (Streets of Rage 4 is a good example, things feel meaty and bouncing enemies off walls always feels good). There should also be an emphasis on creativity and optimisation, so while players are repeating the same patterns they can discover new things and optimise the way they play. For example environmental hazards to throw enemies into or ways to use certain combos to set up a juggle or something along those lines (good examples are Urban Reign and MK - Shaolin Monks which allow you to use the environment to your advantage and give you a lot of methods of attack, but even games like the original Double Dragon emphasise using the environment). With the Beat ‘em Up one of the most important aspects is the music. More important than almost any other genre. Since there is a lot of repetition you really need the soundtrack to keep the energy high and keep the player engaged and moving. In fact this concept of forward movement and progression should be present in other aspects too. Some Beat ‘em Ups have level Ups or/and Unlockable moves or characters, but representing progression in terms of the world is also very important. Two great classic examples are Final Fight, which starts during the day, then slowly transitions to night and eventually ends in the morning (similar to the Warriors) and Double Dragon (Arcade) where you simply keep moving right and every stage flows into the next making it feel like a continuous journey and an interconnected world. Interactables are important as well. Things in the world that react to you, breakable objects, things to throw enemies into for extra damage or things to hit that can be used tactically (Double Dragons Conveyor Belt, etc.). While of course you can make a Beat ‘em up for the sake of Nostalgia if you are aiming for a wider appeal you should take inspiration from other genres that similar gameplay loops (for example Devil May Cry, Dynasty Warriors, Batman Arkham series or Soulsborne games, each one of those would give you a very different end result with a more modern feel).

As I discovered Streets of Rage 4 has a great system where there is only one ‘Attack Token’ in play at a time. Whichever enemy is holding the Token will attempt to attack you. Depending on interruption, vicinity to the player, knockdown, having attacked, etc. The Token will be passed along and a different enemy will attack. This stops you from just getting bum-rushed by enemies. Enemies not attacking will ‘wander’ and get into position. A modern solution to a classic problem (getting overwhelmed by enemies with crazy strong attacks was a common leftover from the days when games were designed to draw more quarters from your pocket. This modern approach set me to explore more ways the genre can and has been modernised.

[gargantuan-peepee]

✩..✫..𝙱𝚕𝚘𝚘𝚍 𝙻𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝙿𝚝.2 𝙱𝚞𝚌𝚔𝚎𝚝-𝚘-𝚃𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚜..✫..✰

An oisuga vamp fic ♡︎

This is not a one shot, it is a continuing series.

Warning//Suicide mention, Memory loss, semi angst, Oikawa has a pity party

Also would just like to say that @bictoeia wrote the ENTIRE gameplay scene so credit of that to her <3

Oikawa's head slowly lifted as his alarm rang. Great, another day of hell. As Oikawa started getting ready, shower, clothes, and breakfast. Small spots of vivid memories of the 'dream' he had started to flow back into his mind. He couldn't help it, it all felt too real.

But what if it was?

Nevermind that thought though, he shook his head, ridding the 'dream' from his current state of mind. All he had to do was get through another day, yeah, just as simple as that.

That turned out to be not so simple, With everything that happened yesterday- no, the dream, in his mind, Oikawa totally forgot about the practice match with Karasuno today. He let out a defeated sigh, he had no idea what he was thinking when he offered this idea to his coach and the other team's advisor, Takeda sensei. I guess it was more of a chance to see where his old kohai was at. Oikawa was never a sneaky person, to put it in other words, wasn't stealthy at all, so instead of asking for help to spy on his kohai's process, he arranged a game. Make sense? Probably not, but he didn't care at that time, but he sure as hell does now.

Grabbing a Nutri-grain bar, and his bag, Oikawa was out the door (ha, door).

Oikawa didn't have time for the bridge today, he doesn't know whether he could handle it. Do you ever have two things on your mind at the exact same time? The chaos of mixed thoughts and feelings? That's what was currently clouding the setters mind, you know, instead of paying attention to class or where he was going for that matter.

The end of a long day of procrastination and half-assed apologies, it was finally time for longly dreaded game.

When the sound of shoes squeaking on the other side of the court hit, Oikawa looked up and around the opposing team. Naturally, Kageyama was there, that was no surprise to anyone at all. But there was this feeling, this sinking, unsettling feeling that Oikawa couldn't quite place. Something or someone was off.

Karasuno looked like an incomplete team, with two puzzle pieces missing, no libero and missing last years ace. No, that wasn't it. The feeling wasn't lacking, it was  residing within a familiar presence, like that feeling you get when someone walks into a room and lights it up with nothing but their demeanour, just slightly off.

Simply decided the pitting feeling must've been something he ate, or rather didn't eat, Oikawa ignored the odd familiarity of the grey-haired setter he had asked to be benched for the sake of gaging the hopefully untrained abilities of Kageyama.

Oikawa really needed this game to go smoothly, and the perfect face framed by unkempt grey locks wouldn't be of service to the upcoming match. Not even 'wouldn't be of service' this was a hinderance, a prime example of a hinderance.

The teams were in their positions, practically mirroring each other when the whistle blew, signalling the game start. Oikawa followed routine, throwing the ball in the air and smacking it with all the force he could muster, it would end up on the other side of the court, and everyone would be wildly impressed, the feeling of impressing everyone in the room was one he would never shake. Why would he want to? It was practically the only thing keeping him going at this point.

Serve complete, point retrieved. Rinse and repeat. This was how Oikawa was going to  be the best, this is how he would beat Kageyama, this is how he would beat Ushijima, and this is how he would prove himself to his own deep rooted self loathing.

The game went by quickly. Both stakes and adrenaline were high, so winning wasn't a sweat. But it was concerning. Oikawa was one of those people who could take their biggest accomplishment and nitpick it until it becomes their greatest failure. And that's exactly what he did, every single time.

That's why nothing was felt when the winning point was scored and the game ended. He won, but still nothing. Kageyama was getting better at a rapid rate, there was no way in hell Oikawa could compete with that, so was there even an objective to try for? What was he playing at? All these years he'd spent, perfecting his every play, turning his accomplishments into failures, and nothing to show for it but a kouhai who would beat him in the long run. Maybe not just yet, but soon.

When the teams lined up to shake hands with one another, a symbol of equality no matter who won, Oikawa locked eyes with the perfect face again. On the bench the duration of the game, the familiar boy stole glances at Oikawa every so often. He would've been accustomed to being stared at, if the staring end was from a girl at his school, rather than someone he had forcefully replaced with Kageyama for the sake of nothing.

Still trying to place his face, Oikawa couldn't help but stare at this boy, desperately searching his memory for those eyes, or his lips, or his hair, it was all so familiar.

The dream from the night before.

Suddenly flashes of the dream from the night before flew into Oikawa's train of thought and wouldn't leave, no matter how much he wanted them gone. Everything stuck. Vividly. He wanted it out. But it wouldn't leave and with good reason. This boy, with the pretty hair, and the perfect smile, was good for him, he could feel it. So, Oikawa left his thoughts alone. He let the boy stay. For now, at least.

As much as he wanted to say something to the boy he met that day, or the night before he supposed, nothing but an utterance of "Good game." escaped his mouth.

Oikawa begrudgingly paced into the locker room, collected his things, and left the building. He wished he could say he had no idea where he was headed to next, but the bridge was calling his name and that wasn't a call he could ignore.

He sat down at the bridge, once again, pushing his feelings of the strange boy aside for self pity to settle in. Oikawa was never one to- i guess you could say, feel things. He would feel whatever he had to let go, for about five minutes. Pushing it down always seemed like the number one option, numbing the wound instead of healing it. He would find ways of concealing certain emotions whenever he felt them, sadness, anger, love. But in this situation, there was a problem. He was only ever to push an emotion down if he knew what it was. This puzzled him, he didn't like this, this feeling. The way that bile would rise in his throat with just the thought of his young kohai, though he wasn't disgusted with him. But he hadn't stopped to think yet, what if he was just disgusted with himself. The way that, no matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he pushed himself to the breaking point, and then kept on going, but he could never be able to out wit this ametuer. Who did this kid think he was? Everything was great, Oikawa had everything figured out. He was going to become the best setter there was, he was going to go to nationals and finally beat Shiritorizawa, and earn the permanent title as the best, but then he came. Just the thought of the tower of his work, tumbling with just the slightest touch of this- this- nuessence.

The pure humiliation ate away at him. His eyes grew hot and stung as tears clouded his vision. How could he let himself become so weak. Oikawa let out merciless sobs and small pleas for help, he didn't even know why, he just did. Everything that he had bottled up for years, came flowing back clouding his consciousness, he didn't know why he was even crying at this point, he just couldn't stop. Tears streamed down his face, stinging his bright red checks like acid with the additional wind chill scratching at his raw skin. Oikawa's body began to ache with fatigue. He slowly started to fall asleep in the cold metal of the bridge. He couldn't handle it.

[softcoregamer]

DRAGON QUEST XI S: ECHOES OF AN ELUSIVE AGE - DEFINITIVE EDITION

I've never played a Dragon Quest game before, so all I had to go on with this game was the pretty looking graphics and charming character art by the Dragonball guy, which- combined with having a hankering for a JRPG, a genre I haven't played since probably the Digital Devil Saga games (minus an abandoned most-of-the-way-done playthrough of SMT3 and a partial of one of the Megadimension Neptunias) was enough to sell me on it. I'm having a tough time determining if it was worth it.

(spoilers)

The story starts off very weak. Your glowing hand marks you as the chosen one, you have to collect glowing orbs to defeat the dark lord. It's like the story of a generic videogame you'd see in the background of a movie. They do throw in a little novelty to keep you on your toes- you present yourself to the king and he throws you in the dungeon, you go back to your hometown and travel back in time for some reason- but I really never warmed to the setting. It's just a collection of cliches and cute gimmicks, like the town of people who speak in haikus, the town of people who speak in rhyming couplets (you're stuck with these people for the bulk of the exposition at the start of act 2, which is a nightmare) and the town of- ugh- Italians. There's no sense of these places being places. It's just a nice pleasant fairytale kingdom of the kind that's normally mentioned in Snow White or whatever as the place the handsome prince comes from, except here you spend dozens of hours trudging through it looking for glowing tree roots and orbs. The big problem in Gallopolis is that the sultan's son isn't brave enough for god's sake. Acts 2 and 3 pick things up, and there's some neat reveals- I like that the lil red star you've been seeing in the sky right from the start was the stain of the original hero's failure to slay the villain, literally hanging over the entire setting all this time. Also the annoying act 1 scene where you get handed the name of the villain and an orb quest in an exposition dump is retroactively improved by the fact that the exposition isn't quite correct. Act 3 reintroducing time travel and actually being thoughtful about it was welcome as well, but sadly that has the effect of making you redo story points you already did since, logically, you're back in time to where you haven't done them yet. Sometimes this comes across as getting a do-over to get a more positive outcome for something that previously ended more tragically, in keeping with the way time travel is explained in-universe as essentially reloading an earlier save (and, as revealed in the end, continuing in a separate save slot). The 8th party member's act 3 quest is a standout here. In reading discussion of the game I've seen people insist on referring to this character as 8, presumably to preserve the plot twist of his existence, so I guess I'll do it too. But more often than not, act 3 quests consist of just doing the same stuff as act 2 again, in a somewhat more curt manner. This sticks in the craw after so much of act 2 already consisted of just doing the same stuff as act 1 again. The party members aren't much better, for the most part. The first three people you meet all say "ah, you're the Luminary, I was sent to help you" and there isn't much to them beyond that for a long time. Sylvando has a lot of personality, which is probably partly why he's become the game's big meme character, but it gets grating and he is insanely trite. The Dark Lord takes over the world and purges the unclean, and Sylvando's overriding concern is that he wants people to laugh and smile more. It's like he takes advantage of the fact that I need him for his boat to get my goat by acting like a fucking teletubby. Things pick way up when you meet Rab, and the 8th party member is genuinely really good. Even the early-game party members end up having their moments (Erik's backstory was pretty fun) but the game really doesn't put its best foot forward with these characters. Not that it needs to; for the first few I was just glad to be getting some help in combat. The combat is excellent in this game, when it gets going. I played with the "draconian quest" tougher enemies mode on, and I turned it off right at the act 2 end boss. The difficulty curve flowed really well this way, with act 3 enemies not feeling noticeably less tough than "draconian" act 2 enemies. The abilities and spells you get are carefully balanced so that it's very difficult to put together a perfect 4-person party, you're always missing something. This means the fact that you can change your line-up midfight isn't just a nice quality of life feature, it's a potentially vital mechanic. They tread a fine line where sometimes needing to swap people out during the battle doesn't mean the characters themselves feel useless; everyone is capable of some extremely tough stuff. And on the other end of the scale, enemy damage is heavy enough that buffing your attack and using big-damage abilities vs healing or defending can be a properly difficult choice; a heavy hit or a big heal at the right time can turn the tide of an entire battle, as can your big hitter suddenly getting put to sleep or your healer getting knocked out. Again, this is all with the caveat that I had "draconian quest" on for the first 2/3 of the game, from what I've heard combat without it is insanely easy. My big gripe with the combat is that there's very little in the way of tooltips. What's this enemy's magic resistance? Does my Sap have a better chance of landing if I up my Magical Might, or does that just increase spell damage? Does Oomphle affect Quadraslash? If I increase my agility will it go up by enough that I can take my turn ahead of these enemies? Does agility even do that? Does using abilities and spells mean I go later in the turn order vs generic attacks and defending? You just have to guess at all this; the wiki has some info on enemy stats but I don't know where they're getting it from other than datamining. There's an entire bestiary with almost no useful information which is functionally just a model viewer for all 700+ enemies. The only way to know anything is to experiment, which I guess at least adds some purpose to combat when you've filled out the bestiary for an area but still have to grid encounters- which will be required at some point, because fighting is the only way you get xp and money. There is also too much RNG. Critical hits being rare and certain attacks having a chance to cause Confusion or whatever is fine (although I'd prefer for attacks which are labelled as having a chance to inflict status effects to actually inflict the status effect way more often than they do) but why the fuck does the resurrection spell have a 50% success rate? Under what possible circumstances would I be using that spell other than needing my dead teammate back right now? Same for all the abilities on the skill tree that say "doesn't connect very often, but when it does it can cause a critical hit" OK that "CAN" is telling me that this ability which doesn't often connect won't even necessarily crit if it does. Why would I choose this ability? To handicap myself? How is this going to help me defeat the Timewyrm? All that said, when the combat is good it's really good, and whenever I lose a fight I'm thinking "I can win that next time if I do XYZ". The 2D battles are much less fun because the pace is much slower and there are no cute animations to liven it up, but it's always satisfying when the "flash" of an enemy taking damage becomes the "flash" of them disappearing, and you know you have slayed yet another blob. Non-combat gameplay is a mixed bag. The early-game fun of running around looking for new enemies to fight and fill out the bestiary wears off hard once act 2 begins and everything is either a reskin or a glowing-eyes "vicious" version of something you've already fought, and many maps are fairly sparse with just the odd treasure chest and locked door to liven up your path to the next area. That said, there are also several areas and dungeons which make a minigame out of traversing them; the Eerie Eyrie and the Battleground were standouts for me. Especially the remixed version of Eerie Eyrie you go to later on, where you get a flying mount to ride around. Crafting is surprisingly involved, with a whole minigame around it and hundreds of recipes to find all over the place. In most cases you can just use money in lieu of ingredients, which means minimal farming is required to get a lot out of the system, and the recipes with ingredients that can't be bought feel special instead of bullshit. In terms of items and recipes there really is a deluge of content- there are recipe books all over the place, with new ones available even in the last couple of maps that open up in the entire game, and there's an undeniable cookie-clicker rush you get from getting better at crafting and taking something you could barely get to +1 all the way to +3. I play games like this as a magpie, accumulating items with nice pictures and effects that make me do a 😲 face, and DQ11 certainly delivers. This even extends to character advancement, with Hidden Goodies incentivizing picking skills you might not want otherwise, and entire new skill trees opening up as quest rewards.

Overall, DQ11 is a good combat system with loot and progression systems that are well-executed enough to feel rewarding after 100 hours, all wrapped up in a style and tone that is not up my alley at all. A good litmus test for how much you'd like the game is probably: watch this scene and if you think it's the most epic thing you've ever seen then Dragon Quest 11 is for you.

[wolfewritings]

My Cyberpunk 2077 Hot Takes (Spoilers for first 5ish hours of gameplay)

It was “in development” for 8 years, delayed multiple times in the final release year, and is still so poorly optimized, buggy, janky, and so obviously not fully tested on release that it is so unplayable on consoles that both Sony and Microsoft are offering refunds on digital copies regardless of hours played. And on PC you could have built and updated a desktop just to play only Cyperpunk on as high a setting as possible and you still would have to turn of features to get everything to load in properly. The game needs a full year delay working a standard 40 hour week to be even playable, and that's accounting for the features available as of Dec. 11th 2020 aka launch features. They forced the devs to work 100 hour work weeks just to launch a game that's technically playable in the loosest sense of the phrase.

TLDR: The game in-general needs to be redesigned like the RPG it was initially marketed as instead of a different flavor of near-future Ubi-sandbox. It also should totally embrace the full depth of customization cyberpunk as a genre and transhumanism as an ideology allows and envisions. And bugfixed and optimized, like seriously. There’s also almost no reason for anything to be as remotely bad as it is, if I’m remembering correctly the only “pressure” they had was from “fans” and that’s because they thought Gamers(tm) would be sensible and not send fucking death threats because they thought they had a release date.

This might be a GOG only gripe (or cpu) but that makes it even worse if it is: patching takes literal hours to complete no matter how small the patch is. The only game that might take longer to patch is Baldur’s Gate 3 which is a whole separate fuck-fest but atleast that is early access.

It has less gameplay options than vanilla Skyrim, just in general and in specifics.

Melee combat is clunky as hell and not satisfying.

I think driving is bad, and vehicle combat is god awful with almost no onscreen indicators if your hitting enemies or even correctly aimed at them.

The lifepath opener sucks. It literally ends with a montage of scenes and interactions that should have been playable and greatly added to the dynamic of Jackie and V. It also would have helped established literally every part of gameplay without requiring a literal in-game diegetic tutorial to break the flow of a scene leading into the 2018 gameplay teaser. It also so far only affects dialogue options, no ability increases, no skill increases or passive experience buffs. It doesn’t even effect how V speaks, just what they know prior to meeting Jackie.

Character creation is meh at best. Unless you choose the more techy looking eyes that change everything about the eye, the iris color barely appears to change. Pronouns being tied to voice is a very weird choice, especially when the choices are literally just male or female. Available hair styles are alot right off the bat, especially since you have to remember which numbers you like with no option to preview or change later in anyway aside from apparently forced hair styles hard designed with various head gear, especially apparent on femme V where they grow and fully style their hair on contact with ball caps etc. Tattoo options are generic “nothing or your skin is over 30% tattoos” no pure back or pure limb tattoos. Facial cybernetics are serviceable but there should have also been an option for purely cosmetic body cybernetics. Facial hair is both meh and almost too indepth at the same time. Visually bland but also having too much to customize and compare with each beard selection having seemingly 3 barely different versions and mustaches having essentially every type aside from pencil (i think, i didnt care too much to look at all of them).

In-combat weapon selection is clunky. The lower right icons for unarmed is the exact same as if you were wielding a gun. The only way to know for sure you have only fists is to use the weapon selection wheel and try to get the cursor to show you hovering unarmed even if you have weapons in 2 out of 3 slots. And im fairly certain having no weapon in the first slot breaks hotkey selecting weapons. There have been several times where I pressed 1 to only use fists and it kept my katana or gun out despite them clearly being in the 2 and 3 slots respectively.

Hacking is weird as you need direct line of sight and the game to register you’re actually looking at what you want to hack, meaning you can’t really stealth hack in enclosed areas without almost guaranteeing you’ll be spotted.

Randomized loot doesn’t really make sense, especially when the randomized tier determines if you can install components like scopes, silencers, etc.

Thats all I can remember off of the top of my head as of initial writing.

Now for some praise, but still with some complaints and ideas for improvements.

Gender and sex being separate is a great idea but could have been implemented alot better. Pronouns should have been an actual choice between he/him, she/her, and they/them. In my opinion, voice options should have also been expanded to include masc/fem or masc/fem/”yeah thats a generic ‘X’ voice” for both male-voiced and female-voiced V. Genital selection being both “which do you have?” and “do you go commando?” is just questionable. It should have been genital type as one selection and default underwear as another (maybe some people want schlonged V to wear panties and vagina’d  V to wear men’s boxers or tighty-whities). I personally find the nipple and pubic hair customization almost too much for almost no reason especially since there is no practical way to even be naked to be funny without being one-shot because you have literally zero armor aside from maybe shoes, hats, and face covers.

Tattoos should be broken down into subcategories like limbs (divided into the different parts of each limb/full limb), torso (chest, stomach/full), back (shoulders, mid, lower/full), hands/feet (maybe including fingers/toes) with an extra option to mirror limbs and hands to streamline creation time if the player wants.

Hair should also be broken down between pre-styled, and customizable pieces like top, sides, and back. Hair style should also have custom gradients or full palette selection.

The nail paints were a nice surprise, but again would have been better with color customization (I managed to settle on the one that looked kinda like the demisexual flag, which was nice surprise).

Lifepath selection should have some effect outside of just the occasional dialogue option (so far only on the main story path). At the very least it should offer bonuses to atleast one associated ability (like Nomad offering a +1 to tech and associated skills gaining bonus experience). At the far end it should affect what words or slight accent uses during dialogue and maybe have some NPCs know which lifepath you chose based on that.

Melee combat needs to feel more impactful. From what Ive used so far (katana and fists) the katana barely has any reaction from enemies unless you trigger the passive bleeding skill and fists barely register outside of heavy attacks and guard breaking. Dare I say, Dead fucking Island has more impactful melee combat (probably because it wasn’t seemingly designed as an after-thought outside of skills).

Make it so that once you’ve marked a target you can hack it through walls so you can actually be somewhat stealthy or atleast give you an advantage before combat.

Make the overworld hub-based (like in the 2010s Deus Ex games) but still the same size so that its (theoretically) easier to load while also getting the same amount of detail or even more. 

Add seemingly basic things in open world action-adventure games like toggle walking, keybinding, and maybe more than less than a handful of quick-select slots.

Make sure the game actually runs as it ideally should on the platforms you sell it on. Like that really should be step fucking two after can you launch it without causing a fire.

Enemies (and predetermined killable NPCs) should have set gear that is dropped and gear should have set designs for if they can be customized or just sold for money. Iconic gear should probably be better than just “ ’X’ weapon but named”.

[crystalmaeson]

Official Readme by Maeson

Pokemon Crystal Maeson - Public Version 1.0 - Internal Version 15.0.3

IT IS RECOMMENDED TO READ THIS WITH NOTEPAD++, BUT YOU DO YOU.

o--------o |Sections| o--------o

[1]  Installation [2]  Introduction [3]  General List of Changes [4]  Patch Differences [5]  Pokémon Changes [6]  Type Changes [7]  Move Changes [8]  Stat Experience, Vitamins and Fruits [9]  Mechanic & Gameplay Changes [10] New Kurt Balls, new ways to obtain Apricorns [11] The New and Improved Battle Tower and Trainer House [12] Visual Changes [13] Credits

o-----------------o |[1]  Installation| o-----------------o

Patching a game is usually a very easy process, specially with IPS Patches.

There's a variety of programs that work with IPS files, but the most famous one is named Lunar IPS, also called LIPS.

This hack is to be patched on a Pokémon Crystal 1.1 ROM file.

More specifically, this rom: Pokemon - Crystal Version (UE) (V1.1) [C][!].gbc CRC-32 : 3358E30A

You open your patcher, and then point to it to the IPS patch and the original, unmodded ROM. It will apply it and inform you when it's finished, it should be quick.

Now, there's two versions of this hack, and each one has also two varieties.

CHOOSE ONLY ONE. To know which version you want, check the details at the not-surprisingly-named "Patch Differences" section.

And yes, the patch weights almost 75% of the original game.

o-----------------o |[2]  Introduction| o-----------------o

Hola, welcome to another ridiculously long readme of mine.

I go by the name Maeson and I made other hacks for a handful of other RPGs. For the most part what I usually aim for with these hacks is to create a different experience, tweaking what I can to give games that I've played time and time again a gameplay facelift to keep them fresh for me, sometimes also trying to improve aspects of a game that I think could make it more fun, varied, better paced or just more challenging after many playthroughs and knowing stuff by hand.

These hacks are made for me in first place, so they're shaped in a very personal manner and of course through my own tastes and ideas, but it should goewithout saying, I hope.

But anyway... What can I say about Pokémon?

My feelings toward the main series of Pokémon have changed a lot since its inception. Just like millions of other fans of video games, I lived the Pokémon craze back in the day, and I grew playing most of those games. I was there without fail up until the fifth Generation, then I started to get tired of the series gradually, and I sort of stop caring with time.

Thing is, I really didn't stop liking the Pokémon themselves, and I still enjoy spin-offs like the Trading Card Games or Mystery Dungeon games, and some like Pokémon Conquest and Pokken are quite cool crossovers, so there's still some appeal to me, even if it's waning with each day.

And hey, then you get things like Pokémon Snap, which it's one unique and very memorable game, one of the very, very few games about photography. it's a really chill, fun time overall.

...What it does not appeal to me all that much since a long time, though, is Game Freak and The Pokémon Company. The choices and "philosofies" they've been doing and following for several years now have been some of the most frustrating ones I've seen besides Square Enix, and their interviews equally leave some wonderfully baffling pearls of "wisdom".

They've done a remarkable job at making me wanting to distance myself more and more throughout this last decade, to the point that I lost pretty much all my appreciation for the franchise.

And it's not just with the main games, their choice of pushing aside console spin-offs for more and more mobile based Games As A Service (that usually failed and died quickly) also left us without many interesting games that could at least keep us somewhat happy.

And the less we talk about the lies, misinformation and the worrying use of younger audiences as a shield to deflect criticism from their business decisions, the better.

I... Just can't support or stand that anymore. I feel drained.

And I would have been completely away from this franchise, barring some old games, if not for one day finding that a collective of people were working on disassembly projects of older games.

I found them to be really interesting, and my mind kinda played with the idea of having a version of one of those old games with changes that I've been wanting and waiting to happen for many years. Who knows, I could even *attempt* to improve what was already there and even add more stuff to it.

Checking the available games with disassembly, I chose Pokémon Crystal, as it seemed the most complete and evolved project of all, in combination with also being one of the longer games thanks to the large post-game it originally had, plus being an earlier Generation game also gave me more room to do changes and improvements.

So little by little, with no idea of assembly, I kept hitting walls and messing around for a time, and what you downloaded is the result of spending the free time I had working in it... For quite some time. In fact it has been over 2 years of constant work, this started in 2018.

The aim of this hack is simple:

Create a new "balance", make the game more challenging, and iron out stuff I find could be improved, or I have the ability and knowledge to do while I add more value to certain aspects of the game. Make a version of Pokémon that I'd like to replay and have every monster be a fun addition to the team and a foe I just can't roll over with little to no thought, so I want to try all of them.

If you were expecting a new story, or a new region, or whatever pipe dream that most probably would end up incompleted and not stable, sorry to disappoint, but you won't find it here.

And no, I don't really care if this hack doesn't have an "epic" name. There's so many other more important things to care than that...

o----------------------------o |[3]  General List of Changes| o----------------------------o

Here you have a quick list with some of the biggest changes all around, but there are sections for most of them to talk more in detail.

· Attempt to reach a new balance. This has been said above, but what   it actually means is that elements as Types, Moves, Pokémon Stats and   such have been changed deeply to move away from the conventions of the   original games, making many species feel entirely different gameplay-wise.

  Among other things, this means no more disappointing creatures with bad   typing and many weaknesses, or low Base Stats filler. It also means parity   between the Types, with each one having the same number of Weaknesses and   Resistances. The intent is for every Fully Evolved Pokémon to feel useful   or, at the very, very least, usable in a way where you don't feel handicapping   yourself to the point you ask yourself if it is even worth doing it.

· Moves and TMS have been changed a lot in order to accomodate the Physical & Special Split,   each Type now has both Physical and Special moves of different Power tiers.

  Many old attacks have been removed and many others have been added. What moves each   evolutionary line learns also has been changed, in order to make all Pokémon have   decent movesets depending on what their archtype is.

· DVs (IVs on later generations) No longer matter on Stat Calculations. This means that   every member of the same species will have the same potential. This also means you can   have female Pokémon with good Attack, and Shiny Pokémon with good stats, what a novel concept.

  This way any monster you come across will be equal, so you can focus on having   fun, while still having to care of it by training, feeding him vitamins and fruits,   choosing the best moves for it in a given situation, making a balanced team, and   you know, the actual RPG bits instead of the RNG ones.

  If you liked the eugenics experiment experience the original games give you,   sorry but that's not here. I apologize for nothing.

· Trainers changed all around. Better AI than in the original game, more varied teams,     their Pokémon have Stat Exp, meaning that the further you go, the better trained their   Pokémon are, and better trained your own monsters should be. I also removed several   limitations imposed on NPC trainers to make them factually inferior to you. This is   made trying to make the game more challenging instead of the usual cake-walk.

  There's no ridiculous stuff like giving Hyper Beam to everything or illegal moves   for NPC trainer's Pokémon (although bear in mind, many Pokémon have changed types,   and many have changed movesets so their moves are the new "legal" moves, but   again, nothing impossible for you to have or to add fake difficulty).

  If you're asking yourself this, no, in this hack NPCs do not change Pokémon constantly,   that tends to drag the game too much. They still do it occasionally, but not at every   time Type matchups that go against them.

· Quite a few changes related to Items, from how strong some Healing Items are, to changing   Kurt Balls, changing the effect (or power of the effect) on several Held Items, new   types of berries, and others.

  Healing items are no longer useable in battle, neither for you or the NPC Trainers.   Battles must be won only with your Pokémon, their held items, and strategy.

  ...Or well, over-levelling through mind-numbing grinding.   We can't exactly get rid of that.

· Added a whole LOT of improvements here and there to make the game flow, feel and   play better.

  Things like changing how Item Storage works to have more space overall, much faster   egg hatching speeds, making every monster available in this hack, having the Pokédex   show you a bit of meaningful game information, as now it shows a species Base Stats   and also the Shiny variations, make saving a faster process, making TMs infinite   (but not abusable), improving the scrolling while moving around making the game   feel and look much better, large improvements on the Battle Tower, expanding the   Trainer House to be more interesting end-game stuff, adding Rematches, making   PokeGear rematches better, a way to change PC Boxes remotely, move tutors and   quite a few others.

There's many things more, but that's what the individual sections are for.

o-----------------------o |[4]  Patch Differences | o-----------------------o

Now, there are four patches, so let's explain this quickly.

First, we have the Original versions, and the Alternative versions, these last ones offer a tweaked experience in case you want to play this hack again with some differences.

In which ways it is different?

Well, the Starters have been swapped, so when you begin a new game, you get to choose between Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle.

MUCH bigger difference, though, is that all the Gym trainers, the Leaders, other important NPCS and the Elite Four no longer have their teams limited to following the thematic "Type" standards.

Other trainers such as the Rival also have different teams, (and like the original patch, he develops a different team depending on the starter they steal).

Without that restriction each of those trainers have way more varied teams, making the game less predicable because you can no longer coast on the Type disadvantages most of the Pokémon of a Gym Leader share.

This of course changes how you make your teams. You no longer "have" to bring "this or that Type" because later on the road there's a Gym weak to it. It's more about making a team that you feel it can withstand anything it may come.

The order of certain Ingame Trades have also been changed.

There's other smaller changes to make the bigger ones sit well, such as small text edits or change the order of the Pokédex.

But Original and Alternative are divided in two too, one that I'll call "Intended Versions" and the other two are "Items in Battle" variations.

The "Intended Versions" disables healing Items in battle and it forces Set options, meaning you don't get free switches after knocking out a foe Pokémon. You can't change the option, because it's not even there anymore.

That's how I'd like people to play my hack, but knowing how some people can be, there's an extra patch, "Items in Battle", that gives you the possibility of using Items and to change the battle option, but there's a price to pay.

If you choose to play with enabled Items/Switch in battle, a few Items will be unavailable to you, the price of several Items will increase, and the HP they restore will be lowered. Also, NPC Trainers will also use Items.

That's simply because Items can be easily abused, and that is the opposite of what I wanted in this hack. If you choose the "right" to abuse Items during battle, then I have the right to make adjustments to annoy you with your choice.

It's not like Hyper Potions will heal 1 HP or anything crazy like that, but because in my hack you can't use Items in battles, they're more powerful than the usual vanilla items so you could recover better between battles.

The items you lose access to are all new, by the way. A set of consumable Held Items that raise a stat whenever the holder is attacked or under other circustances, similar to the berries in the Third Generation, albeit they're activated differently.

Another change is limited access to a team-healing item that I made, and restores all your Pokémon to perfect shape. Intended to be used in a pinch, like being lost in a cave, or between hard fights, but you can only have in small amounts. In the Original patch, you can carry 3 of them, but only 1 on the "Items in Battle" versions.

You're free to choose how to play. Of course, you only apply one patch.

If for some reason you started a game with one version, for example, with the patch for Items in Battle, and you later on want to go to the No Items in Battle version, you can actually use that save file and not start again.

But I recommend you to save first in a Pokémon Center before doing so. Once you did that, patch a clean ROM and rename the .SAV file into whatever the new patched rom is. Now you can continue with your game. Remember to always make backups before doing anything of this sort.

I do not recommend changing between the Original and Alternate versions.

Lastly, trading and battling with vanilla Pokémon Crystal is not going to work. Not only many of the fixes made already impossible to be compatible with Vanilla Pokémon Crystal, but the gigantic load of changes I made to the game would render any attempt become a glitchy mess.

But you can trade and battle with other copies of this hack, and the four versions of the patches should be compatible with each other for both trading and battling. I'd recommend using the No Items versions because it gives you access to those extra Held Items, though.

o--------------------o |[5]  Pokémon Changes| o--------------------o

Probably the most obvious and central change, these creatures are the core of the franchise after all.

As you may imagine, there have been changes to most aspects of them. While some of those have their sections to talk about, Base Stats are probably the most important one here.

That is because for the most part there is parity in Base Stat Total for all evolutionary lines in this game.

Pokémon to me has become a rather painful series of games to look back, because there has never been that much of an interest to improve or balance out their creations to make a more varied, balanced and fun experience, and when they try to do something is more on the lines of "adding" to fix instead of improving what's there already.

And don't get me wrong, trying to get "perfect balance" is impossible with such a large amount of creatures, but at the same time, Game Freak has done very, very little in this regard, most other developers would at least try something, specially if they had the decades of game releases Game Freak has had.  

But back on track. This is why in this hack, almost every non-Starter, non-Legendary fully evolved monster has a Base Stat Total of 650, making each all of them feel have the same potential overall.

This means there will be no "early useless Pokémon", nor so called "Filler".

And yes, this means your beloved Tyranitar, Dragonite, and such have the same potential as a Raticate or a Wigglytuff. On the other hand, this also means you don't need to train a Pupitar or Dragonair to ridiculous levels to have them evolve into their final forms.

If you ask yourself "why such high Base Stat Total", well, its simple: The higher the roof, the more space you have to scale stats. The more space you have to scale stats, the better you can "personalize" stats for the different species.

Besides, the Base Stat Total stops being important when everybody is at the same "level".

Now, that's for "normal Pokémon". The first two Generations had two trios of "pseudo-legendary" monsters, those being Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, and Raikou, Entei and Suicune. These critters have 660 Base Stat Total.

Starters also have a total of 660. This is mainly because starters are usually the back bone of most player's teams (although I usually roll without them), and I saw fitting for them to be slightly stronger. But fear not, because those extra points don't really make much difference, as they're used to make them more well rounded instead of just dumping them on their highest stats.

Finally, true Legendary Pokémon keep their 700 Base Stat Total of the original games. To this day I never used legendaries beyond wanting to see their back sprites, never cared about them, so they have the least number of changes, really.

Some other changes are:

·Many Pokémon had their overall archetypes changed besides their Stats improved.  Furret is now a Fast Special Attacker, for example.

·Almost every Pokémon now has a 50% Male/Female Ratio, except for the Nidorans,  Tauros and Miltank. Pokémon like Blissey, Chansey, or the Hitmon-family  now can be both male and female. Magnemite, Voltorb and such are still genderless.

·The two Legendary Trios have genders and can in fact breed, thus they can be  seen almost as normal Pokémon.

·The Pokédex had the entries for each Pokémon modified. This is because now it shows  actually useful information instead of the continuously repeated "scientific" info  that usually is full of lies and ridiculous stuff that could make an Indian Elephant  have a headache, but hey, it may not be the Pokédex info, it may just be a bit too  close to a Magcargo and it's experiencing how one feels being next to the Sun.

 Happens to us all sometimes.

 Now, the first page of each species shows its Weaknesses and Resistances while  the second page of each one now points out the Base Stat spreads it has,  which is a much, much more useful ingame data, specially when this hacks  aims to change heavily most things related to battling and "the RPG elements".

 Oh, and by the way, if you press Select while looking at a Pokémon's Data,  you'll activate "Shiny Mode", and every Pokémon shown will be seen with their  Shiny Colors!

·Talking about Shiny Pokémon, those are far more common. While I personally don't care  too much about them, specially nowadays when they've become so... Uneventful and common,  not to mention how much they've been related with hacking and cheating, Pokémon being  shiny lost appeal to me, yet they're still a big thing for many players, so why not make  them easier to obtain?

 The means for finding a Shiny Pokémon in Generation II were rough. REALLY rough. With  the way it works now, you should find quite a few of them throughout your adventure, and  also finding female shiny Pokémon should also be a more common occurrence than before.

 You're bound to find a fair share of them. This being a modded game, it doesn't really  matter if they're not as rare or hard to find.

 NPC trainers will have Shiny monsters here and there, so you should also have the chance!

·As you already know, wild Pokémon may be holding items. In the original game,  many species had nothing with them. Now, most species have them, and the variety  is much, much bigger. Not only that, the chances for finding Pokémon with items  has increased.

 Now there's a 50% of not having an item, 40% of having a "common" item, and  10% of holding a "rare" item. Better than the 2% on the original.

 Lastly, I've made another improvement in held items. Now, whenever you battle  with a wild monster that has an Item, an little icon (similar to the one in the party menu)  will appear on the enemy's HUD. Specifically between the Pokeball icon that appears  when you fight a monster that you already have in your Pokédex, and the Gender icon.

 Again, only for WILD creatures.  If monsters have items in trainer battles is a secret to everybody!

·A big one, already mentioned in the introduction:  DVs (or IVs, if you rather call them that) NO LONGER FACTOR INTO STAT CALCULATIONS!!

 This means that now only Base Stats and Stat Exp matter in each Pokémon statistics.  Oh, and by the way, the formula to calculate stats has changed very slightly.  Remember that +5 bonus at the end of the calculations? Now it's a 6.  That means that a 100 Base stat (Not HP) of a fully trained monster is 300 and not 299.

 This also means you can now have Female Pokémon with good Attack power, and Shiny  Pokémon no longer are weak, two rather big things for me at least.

 No more you will have to waste hours of your life breeding and abandoning  dozens if not hundreds of Pokémon for good DVs (what a great lesson!).  NPC Trainers also get good Pokémon too, making things better for everybody.

·Evolution has been streamlined and homogenized. This means that Pokémon that  evolved by trades, special events, and such have simpler, more direct ways  to do so now. But also, all Pokémon evolver on similar levels.

 After all, if they are supposed on equal footing in Power, they should  also be on the same level on this matter too.

 Here's a few examples:

 Pokémon with three stages evolve at levels 20 and 32.

 Pidgey evolves to Pidgeotto at level 20, and to Pidgeot at level 32.  Chikorita evolves to Bayleef at level 20, and to Meganium at level 32.  Dratini evolves to Dragonair at level 20, and to Dragonite at level 32.

 Pokémon with two stages evolve between levels 22 and 24.

 Rattata evolves into Raticate at level 23.  Venonat evolves into Venomoth at level 24.  Rhyhorn evolves into Rhydon at level 24.  Hoothoot evolves into Noctowl at level 22.

 Of course, there are a couple of exceptions. Caterpie and Weedle  are still the fastest evolving lines, and of course Pokémon that  evolve through stones can do so anytime you want.

 Oh, and by the way, in this hack, you WANT to evolve when Pokémon want to.  You won't get much from stopping an evolution, and with Pokémon that evolve  through stones and such, you should do it before too late.

 This is because many species learn better techniques at the same level they evolve,  and it would be a waste to not learn them.

 You can find at which levels are recommended Pokémon to evolve through stones in  the specific Pokémon Stat list txt. But if you want to make it easy:

 If the Pokémon has two evolutionary stages > Use the stone at Level 22 or 23.  If the Pokémon has three evolutionary stages > use the stone at level 30 or 32 (to reach the last stage).

 That said, if you feel like not evolving for whatever reason, you've not lost everything.  The game has a Move Reminder, and you'll be able to remember freely any move from a species  learnset.

 Oh, and the Time Capsule seems to work as long as you of course follow the rules.  But a few notes:

 Any Pokémon you bring from Generation 1 may have their moves changed upon  arriving your game. The moves may turn into a very uncharacteristic one for  the Pokémon, because I repurposed many moves into new ones.

 The stats of the Pokémon will change from Gen 1 to Gen 2, and most notably,  the HP of any Pokémon that reaches Gen 2 will not be fully healed, because  of the change in stats, but there's no problem at all as far as functionality,  just heal.  

 That said, have in mind there's NO NEED to use the Time Machine.  You do so under your responsibility.

o-----------------o |[6]  Type Changes| o-----------------o

Yet another big shake to the, in my personal point of view, rather badly balanced formula.

I'm not going to discuss or waste time with this. This is how it works here:

Defensive wise, each type now is weak to two other types, while resistant to three, one of them being itself. There are NO immunities. Every type is equal as far as weaknesses and resistances, except for Normal.

Normal has no weaknesses or resistances, period.

Offensive wise, each Type is effective against two Types, and is resisted by three, one it being itself. Normal does not hit for Super Effective damage nor does it get resisted.

So, among other things, Ghost will get hurt by Normal and Fighting moves, Normal will get hit by Ghost, Dragon is no longer weak to itself, and Ice is not such an awful and pathetic defensive Type that exists to be mocked.

Oh, the Fairy Type has been added too, but how it works doesn't exactly resemble the original game, just like the other Types.

Now, because I know how certain part of the community can act (and let's not kid ourselves pretending it doesn't happen), to make myself clear and blunt:

 I don't care if you think Type X should be weak/resistant to type Y.  I don't care if you don't want to learn new Type Matchups.  I don't care what Game Freak does with types now or in the future.

I'm not Game Freak and I have made this wanting to break away from their norm, I don't have to follow any rules, not theirs, not yours.

Making a more even ground for all types, trying to make each monster good, so I could play with all of them and have fun was one of the important things for me, and to reach that goal I made as many changes as I saw fit.

You're free to stop reading and go look for another hack if this will bother you that much.

End of the "serious" moment. Good? Great, let's continue!

With this change, every Pokémon will always have more good points than bad points, not to mention that the maximum number of weaknesses a Pokémon can have is 4, and if it has 4 weaknesses, to compensate it will have 6 resistances.

Another thing I want to point out is that the number of Normal Type Pokémon has been lowered. While there are still a bunch of them, it's a way lower number, making many of these previously Normal Pokémon have completely different Type Combinations. I mean, I'm sure you won't miss all the Normal/Flying types. I hope so at least.

If you think Normal Type not having weaknesses could be "broken", far from it, specially since, as I said, in this hack having *more good points* is a given for any non-Normal Pokémon. But of course that's just talking. They can make for great members, in one of my several test-playthroughs, a Furret was one of my best Pokémon all thoughout the game.

There is an image in the RAR file with a Type Table to show you how Types work now, but beyond that, in Violet City's Pokémon Academy, there are two books that teach you the differen Types and their strong and weak points.

And then, if you're so lazy to figure it out, the weaknesses and resistances for each individual species is listed on the Stats text file.

And theeen, if you're even lazier than that, you can also check the Pokedex Entry of a given *captured* Pokémon, as it gives you useful info such as this.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that you have a number of ways to find out how types work. Use them to your advantage.

Oh, lastly, in this hack there are NO Pokémon with double weaknesses. I've never liked them to be honest, and to me just show how unappealing some types were designed to be that they make such awful combinations.

I still remember how excited people were for Aurorus until they saw its typing, and then it all turned into either jokes at its weaknesses or pure disapppointment.

No fun.

o-----------------o |[7]  Move Changes| o-----------------o

Alongside the previous two changes, the Moves have been changed A LOT too.

Instead of just "copying" what Game Freak has done in later generations, this hack had in mind to actually modify moves in ways to make them more interesting based on the limitations of the GBC games, and also another little thing:

There is a Physical/Special Split in this hack, so one of the big changes of this hack was to give each Type a number of both, Physical and Special moves to cover different Power levels so Pokémon can have good STAB moves that go along with their stats.

After all, that was probably the best thing Generation IV did for me. While it took some toys from some Pokémon (like Elemental Punches from Alakazam), it really was a big change for the better for most species.

So for example, we have Rock Slide for Rock Pokémon with high Attack, and Rock Launch for Rock Pokémon with high Special Attack. For this, many old moves were removed and reworked into new moves, mostly moves that were redundant and exactly the same as other moves (Like Whirlwind and Roar, or Wrap and Bind, they're the exact same thing).

While this gives every type and every Pokémon solid Stab moves, the limitation of 254 moves makes it so I can't add many "wild" and unique moves, but oh well, it's already much, much better than what it was originally on Generation II.

...No, really, I forgot how rough and unfair the move list was in old Generations, with some Types having almost no good moves at all, or moves that Pokémon couldn't take advantage of because their Stats and their Types didn't match. Hoo boy...  

Another big change is that most attacks now have secondary effects, and very often, the lower the Power of a move, the higher is the chance to inflict those secondary effects.

For example, Fire Breath (New move) has a 15% Chance of causing Burn and 70 Power, but Flamethrower only has 10% chance of causing burn and 95 Power. This makes moves with lower Power a bit more useful.

As you may imagine, Pokémon Movesets have been changed tremendously, not only for those critters that had their Types and Stat distributions changed, but also to accomodate all the modifications related to Moves.

Movesets in this hack are in no way attempting to copy later generations of official games, specially since Generation 2 Movesets were incredibly sad to look back.

Instead, they're focused on attempting to give what that certain species needs. So no Pokémon will be let without good STAB moves, and you also won't see Pokémon that are obviously Physical attackers getting Special moves or viceversa.

A handful of moves also got their priority changed.

Safeguard, Haze, Mist, Transformation and Bide now go before other moves. This change actually shakes up battles a bit, it was fun to see the AI read my moves from time to time and prevent Status, and hey, with Transform having priority now Ditto is more usable too!

A list of the moves, what they do, and their other data is in its own TXT file, although with ingame descriptions, it is not necessary.

As far as TMs and HMs, things also have changed.

TMs no longer get consumed when used, so they have infinite uses. The Moves they teach have also changed for the majority of TMS, with most of them teaching both Physical and Special "end-game" moves. There's also a total of 55 TMS now.

None of them can be found in shops, you must find them by exploring or obtained from an NPC.

HMs have also changed a bit, making them more useful. Cut now is a 70 Power Normal move with a High Critical Ratio, and Fly is a strong move with 110 Power that causes Recoil damage. Flash causes damage and can lower Accuracy. Strength is now is Fighting type and causes Flinch. And Whirlpool is a bit more powerful and now takes more HP at the end of turns, so its a rather cool combo alongside Toxic on bulky Pokémon.

Also, HMs can be forgotten like normal attacks, so you can swap attacks easily in case you want, and unlike in Gen. 1, because you can't drop them, you can't get stuck.

Or rather, you wouldn't get stuck, because there's another change. These moves:

Headbutt Rock Smash Cut         Surf Strength Waterfall Whirlpool

Don't need to be known by a Pokémon to be used in the overworld! You only need a Pokémon capable of learning such move, and the needed Medal in the case of the HMs.

That only leaves Flash and Fly out of that list, right?

About Flash:

I also added an item that will let you light dark caves so you don't need to have a Pokémon with Flash, but you get it quite a bit later than the HM. Just look around Mahogany after things calmed down.

It can be assigned to Select for quick use, too!

About Fly:

There's a small sidequest you can do later in the game that will net you a special object. This item will let you use a different version of Fly. Mechanically, it's the same, you can fly to places you've explored. Animation-wise is different, though.

Because all of this, you no longer need to have any HM on any Pokémon unless you want it (because most of them are actually respectable attacking moves), which gives much more freedom to parties and movesets!

o----------------------------------------o |[8] Stat Experience, Vitamins and Fruits| o----------------------------------------o

TLDR VERSION: Use Vitamins, use Fruits. They improve your Pokemon's stats, and          you need to take care of your team to withstand other trainers          which have properly trained monsters. Use them intelligently,          don't waste them with Pokémon you don't want to have in your team,      at least early on when you have limited resources.

         Vitamins are no longer as limited in effect, or as expensive.          Fruits are new, and are twice as good as Vitamins.

Pokémon games have a system in which, through adquiring certain points through different means, a creature can improve its Stats. In Generations 1 and 2, these are called Stat Experience. This is a system Game Freak has never informed the players about at all, and the games never came even close to mention it in any trully useful detail, so bare with me if this is your first time with this stuff, although I doubt you found this hack knowing nothing about it.

Stat Experience points can range from 0 (Empty) to 65535 (Maximized). Unlike later generations, In Gen. I and II, you can maximize the experience of all the stats.

Stat Experience points are divided and exclusive for each stat. HP, Attack, Defense and Speed have their own Stat Exp Table. Special Attack and Special Defense share the same Stat Exp Table. So reaching 65535 Stat Exp in each Stat will make your Pokémon perfect stat-wise. Even Pokémon at Level 100 can get Stat Experience, but to gain the effects, they need to be stored on the PC so their real Stats can get updated with the current Stat Exp. they have at that moment.

The ways you get Stat Exp are these:

By battling -Each time one of your Pokémon defeats another, the Base Stats of the enemy's species          is added to your Stat Exp in each stat. This is the slowest way, but it's also free,          and will raise your stats by just playing through the game.

     If you defeat, let's say, a Caterpie, it has these Base Stats:

HP 75, Attack 60, Defense 70, Speed 95, Special Attack 90, Special Defense 70.      As I said, Special Attack and Defense use the same Stat Exp Table. The game takes      the Base Stat related to Special Attack, so in this case, your Pokémon will be      awarded 90 Special Stat Exp Points, alongside the rest.      Training only through battles is not only pointless when you have other means,      but also incredibly tedious. While in my hack Pokémon have higher stats that make      training this way faster, battling for Stat Exp should only be relied on when      you've already fed your Pokémon Vitamin and Fruits, to get those last Stat Exp Points      needed for a Perfect Stat.

     But of course, any Stat Exp gained through battles is benefitial, just don't battle      *only* for the Stat Exp unless, as I said it's to finish Stat Exp training!      By the way, there's a special condition named Pokerús, which is a benefitial virus      that will double the amount of Stat Exp you get from battles. This is very rare      to get, and you will be noticed by a PKMN Center Nurse. The games don't tell you  what it does exactly either...

     It can be very useful, and it propagates through your Pokémon team, and disappears      after some time. If you ever get Pokerús, try to keep a Pokémon with active Pokerús      on your PC so you can pass it to other Pokémon. But as I said, it's very rare!

By Vitamins -Vitamins in the original game were pretty useless. They raised very little, and they      could only be used up to some point, which is less than half way the Stat Exp total.

     In this hack, though, they're much better, and even necessary, as the people living      in Johto and Kanto have *actually* trained their Pokémon properly and they have Stat      Exp, so they'll be stronger and more challenging, and after a certain point, all      trainers you'll find will have maximized Pokémon, like any trainer worth their salt      would be doing.

     Each Vitamin gives 10.240 Stat Exp Points per use, and they can be used until the      Stat Exp of the Stat that you want to raise reaches 51.456, at which point, the      Pokémon wont get any benefit from it (it won't be wasted, so don't worry).

     To make it easier to understand, let's put it this way:

     An untrained (either just catched, or just hatched) Pokémon will have 0 Stat Exp on      everything. If you feed it HP UPs, it will be able to eat 6:

     10.240 1 HP Up      20.480 2 HP Up      30.720 3 HP Up      40.960 4 HP Up      51.200 5 HP Up > Doesn't go pass the limit so you can eat another one.      61.440 6 HP Up > Passed the limit, so you can't feed more, but it's almost Maximized!               You can get the rest by battling.

     If you're used to Effort Values from Gen 3 onwards, let's make it even easier:

     The way it works, each modern EV means 256 Stat Exp, so if it's easier for you, just      divide Stat Exp by 256:

     Each Vitamin gives 10.240 Stat Exp, that means 40 EV.      The limit of Stat Exp is 51.456, that means 201 EV.

     So with a Pokémon without EVs, you can go from 0 to 240 EV through vitamins.

     You can obviously give Vitamins to a Pokémon you've been battling with no problem,      but an untrained Pokémon is better to use as an example.

     Their price is much lower so you can keep up with enemy trainers, although they      cost enough to make each purchase a bit of an investment early into the game.

By Fruits   - Fruits are almost exactly the same as Vitamins, but they give twice the Stat Exp.

     Each one gives 20.480 Stat Exp (Or 80 EV if you want it that way), and the limit      is 41.216 Stat Points (or 161 EV). This means that your Pokémon can eat up to      three Fruits in a stat to jump for 0 Stat Exp to 61.440 (or 0 to 240 EV) and      almost maximize it. Let's again use an example of raising HP with Fruit now:

     20.480 1 Salty Fruit      40.960 2 Salty Fruit > Doesn't go pass the limit so you can eat another one      61.440 3 Salty Fruit > Passed the limit, so you can't feed more, but it's almost Maximized!

     Thus, fruits are much better overall than Vitamins, but they're scarce, and should      be better used for Pokémon you know they have little to no training in a certain Stat.

     You can combine Vitamins and Fruit without problem, but if you do, first use your      Fruits, then the Vitamins so you don't waste Fruits unnecessarily.

Why the limit - If you're asking why the limit is 51.456, or 240 EV for Vitamins, and 41.216 or 161 EVs for Fruits, it is simple to answer: If you feed a Vitamin/Fruit to a Pokémon in a way that would go over 65535, a bug would happen and the Stat Exp of that Pokémon would roll back to 0. I think it's obvious why that would suck. So, by putting these limits you're safe from that to happen, but you also get very close to maximize a stat. It's the best balance I could achieve.

o--------------------------------o |[9]  Mechanic & Gameplay Changes| o--------------------------------o

Already said that under the hood, there are many, many other changes. Some (not all of them, not by a long shot) changes are as follows:

· The Clock Reset function now has a much easier button combination to open it.  The combination is like this:

 1: Hold    Select + Down  2: Release Down while holding Reset.  3: With Reset Held, now hold Up too.  4: Release Select. The Reset Clock menu will open.

 It requires less buttons, making it easier to do, or able to do at all  depending where you are playing. You still need to input the password,  though, removing that would let you abuse certain things very easily.

· Prices for several things have been lowered on the "Intended" Versions of this hack.  Because you no longer can abuse Items to progress, I saw no real reason to  make you pay as much as usual. You're still going to need them, because the  need for healing between battles is still a thing.

 Another reason to do this is because you will also spend much more money than  usual on Vitamins and other stuff to properly train and prepare your team.  

· Catching Pokémon grants you Experience now! The Exp. is the same as if it was  defeated, and every Pokémon that fought in said battle will get a share of it.

· The Odd Egg will always give you a Shiny Pokémon between 7 ramdonly selected  species, and both genders. Each Species get a unique move, instead of all of  them getting the same (now non-existing) move.

· Talking about Eggs, Pokémon now hatch much, much faster, so there's less  walking up and down through Goldenrod. Not only that, but Egg Moves also  changed all around. Pokémon also lay Eggs faster, and Nidorina &  Nidoqueen can now breed, alongside both "legendary" trios.

 Now each basic species has between 3 or 4 Egg Moves for the most part  they are different from vanilla, and basic Starter Pokémon have 5 Egg Moves.

· Trainer AI has been much improved. Now they know much better what they do, and they  can priorize stuff like Status Effects, they take better advantage of weaknesses and  resistances.

 They also carry Items with them, if you play with the patch that lets you  items in Battle, of course.

 Trainers also have properly trained monsters, with Stat Exp increasing throughout  the game. Feeding your team vitamins and fruits is now important to stay on toes  with them. Of course, there is more variety in species of monsters used by NPCs,  their levels are higher, and team sizes have increased a bit.

 Making each trainer a full 6 Pokémon team would drag the game, though, and probably  couldn't fit, I already was suffering the lack of space with what I added, because  when adding Stat Exp, custom Movesets, and such the space gets used way too fast.

 Also, the game was very, very unfair to the NPC trainers.  Not only were they hard-coded to fail more often, have mediocre AI, and Low-Level Pokémon,  you also got your Stats and Types boosted as you got Badges, so they became completely  inferior and disappointing... At least, if you want to have any challenge.

 That's why any bonus that Badges give you was stripped down. No Stat Boost, no Type Boost.  This will make the game far more fair and chalenging, in turn making it more enjoyable if  you look for having to think and put a bit of effort, which is, you know, the point of  this entire hack.

 Another thing changed is the money that many types of trainers reward you by beating them.  In this hack you have many more things to buy as mentioned above, from Vitamins, to  Held Items, to Decorations, and more Healing Items because of the higher difficulty,  so a better income was needed.

 On the other hand, if you lose, which is much more plausible now, you won't get your money  halved. Instead, you lose money depending on the number of badges you have, like more recent  games. It's much more fair early on, specially in this hack since it is expected of you to  buy vitamins and held items for your monsters as you go through the game, besides all the  other items.

· Stat increase percentages have been changed.

 Stat-improving moves like Accelerate or Meditate, and Stat-decreasing moves like  Growl or Scary Face can go from Level 0 (normal stat), to Level +6 or -6,  depending if it increases or decreases a stat.

Before o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o |Level -6   -5   -4   -3   -2   -1   0     1     2      3     4     5     6   | |Perc. 25%  28%  35%  45%  50%  66%  100%  150%  200%   250%  300%  350%  400%| o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o Now o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o |Level -6   -5   -4   -3   -2   -1   0     1     2      3     4     5     6   | |Perc. 25%  30%  35%  45%  60%  75%  100%  130%  160%   190%  220%  250%  300%| o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o

 This has been changed for one main reason: to make better balance between critters,  Stats are now higher. With stats being higher, stat-increasing would get too broken,  specially with +1 bonus being a whole 50% increase. So bonuses are softer now, but  so is stat-reducing -1 Level, so it's not too harsh.

· Item Storing Changes

 For starters, there's two new pockets, one for Berries and Fruits in which 13 kinds of items go in it,  the already known berries, plus the new Fruits used for powering up your monsters. Fits all of them.

 The other new pocket is for Battle items, specifically Held Items. There are several dozen of them,  and having such type of items be mixed with consumable and healing items was a bit of a mess,  even more if you have an organization obsession and want everything neatly grouped.

 Every item of this type fits in this pocket, that's over 50 different types of Items!

 Apricorns are now stored in your Ball Pocket, and there's space to have every ball plus Apricorn,  so they will never become a nuissance to you by filling your bag like before.

 Item Pocket now can store 35 different objects instead of 20, and because Berries/Fruits, Apricorns,  and Held Items do not take space in this pocket anymore you have much more freedom.

 There's one catch, though, now you can only store 30 types of items in the PC, instead of 50.  It won't be much of a problem because you don't need to store any Berry, Fruit, Apricorn, Ball,  or Held Item, so I think it's a good compromise.

 Another change is, as mentioned above, about wild Pokémon. Now, many different species will  hold items. These range from Berries and Fruits, to sell-able Items, Apricorns and a few others.

 This not only will make getting new monsters more interesting, but will also make way, way  more useful the move Thief, and also the new Peck, which also has the effect of taking the  item the foe holds.

· The Pokegear Map has seen a huge facelift. Not only is a bit prettier to look at,  it's also more informative, with standout places or landmarks pointed out in the  map. I even added different little icons to quickly see which poblated areas are  Towns or Cities, just because why not.

· A new Building in Goldenrod has been opened. This place will sell to you all  the Decoration items you previously would get through Mystery Gift or through your Mom.

 Some of the dolls also have been changed, to offer something new, because the game  now is not limited to the original Pokémon icons for the Party Menu. This is also  true for the bigger dolls.

 Talking about that, your Mom will no longer buy you Decoration items, and the items  it buys are now much more useful and simply put, better than Super Potions and such.

· A Move Reminder has been added to the game, but unlike how Move Reminders work  in vanilla games, here it will let you remember moves from a species, as many times  as you want, for free.

 This is because this hack, having higher difficulty than your usual Pokémon game, may  require you to reshuffle your Movesets or try different strategies, and I WANT you to  do so, punishing you with constant farming of Items to change Movesets so you can try  different things sounds very counter-intuitive to me.

 To make this even more useful, each fully evolved creature can remember a number  of Moves from prior evolutionary forms too.

 The types of Moves they'll retain from earlier forms are usually moves related to  Stat changes, Status Effects, and Attacks that may have special traits or effects.

 Basically, Pidgeot won't be able to remember Wing Attack, which is a simple, straightforward  Attack move, but it will remember Quick Attack and Peck, the first one having Priority,  and the second one having the new effect of stealing Items from other Pokémon.

 You can find the Move Reminder in both Johto, and Kanto.  In Johto, he lives with the other useful NPCs, Name Rater and Move Deleter in Goldenrod.  In Kanto, you can find a similar group of NPCs in Lavender Town.

· Pokegear Rematches are now much stronger, they have more Pokémon and more varied,  and often enough their Pokémon have nicknames.

 To give you an idea, many Pokegear trainers will end up with teams of Lvl 80 Pokémon!  So be very careful when fighting again these trainers, they may surprise you!

 Also, a big change in how they work: Originally, if you didn't rematch a trainer  and you kept playing, when you came back to it, it would challenge you with a very  outdated team.

 This is because they only get better if you fight them earlier each time.  This is no how it works anymore. They upgrade their teams as you advance through  the game, and you could very well meet them for the first time after battling them  originally and find out they have a full team of very strong Pokémon.

 This makes Pokegear rematches far, far more interesting and better paced.

 Talking about rematches, I added end-game rematches to the game.    Once you beat Red for the first time, a whole bunch of new battles gets unlocked:  The Pokémon League levels get bumped, with some changes on their teams.  Counting your Rival's rematch, levels range from 80 to 85.

 All Gym Leaders end up their training, and they await you to fight in Lvl 100 Rematches.  If they didn't have originally, every Leader will have a full team, and all of them have  some changes to their teams.

 The default trainer in the Trainer's House in Viridian City also goes from Lvl 70, to Lvl 100.  And there's a few extra Lvl 100 battles that I'll let you discover, although they're  not precissely hidden!

 If you ask yourself why Lvl 100, well, that's to make sure you don't win by overlevelling them.  Once you beat Red, you also unlock a way to Level Up your Pokémon much faster.  Just check the Battle Tower once you do so, although be warned, it requires some effort!

· Buena's Password had its rewards changed, now it's more useful overall.

· Ingame Pokémon trades are different, and they ask for hard-to-get monsters, but give you  very nice ones in exchange, I hope you like them.

· Bill's grandfather has seen some neat changes. His time killer of seeing Pokémon you bring  to him stays, but not quite the same as it originally was. Now he'll tell you riddles that  talk about a certain Pokémon, and if you guess them correctly by showing him the right  species, he'll gift you some very neat Held Items for your pals!  He put quite of effort in those riddles, they even rhyme!

· Fishing has been tweaked a bit.

 Now the chances for Pokémon to bit are higher (who wants to press Select several times for nothing?)  and the Pokémon available by fishing are much more varied, yes, even the Old Rod.

 Levels are also higher. Old Rod ~10, Good Rod ~20, Super Rod ~40.  

 Talking about the Old Rod, now you can get it sooner, before even getting the first Medal.  The Fishing Guru has moved to the gate that connectes Route 31 with Violet City.  This expands which Pokémon you can get early on, and more options is better.

 ...Unless you're me, then it just makes it harder to choose which monsters you want to have.

· Fruit Trees now give 2 Berries/Fruits/Apricorns each day!

· On Violet, Azalea and Goldenrod cities you can find the new Berry Scouts.  These green-cladded folks will sell you the basic Status-Healing Berries,  in order to help accomodate you a bit on the higher difficulty of this hack  compared to the usual stuff.

 The price on the "Items in battle available" patches are a bit higher.

· While there's absolutely zero intention of creating a new "story" or "region", there  are new maps here and there. For Example, there's an actual Viridian Forest again,  with trainers, Items and such, even!

 Other maps got extended a bit here and there, maybe to hide something...!  Some areas also have changes made to look or feel better to explore.  Others have been extended to feel more like a full place.

 The Gyms also had changes. It's interesting how... "small", and simple most of them where.  I expanded most, give some light puzzles to most of the ones that didn't have anything  going on (I even rescued unused map movement for one of them!) to make them slightly  more interesting.

 Of course, please don't expect Zelda-level dungeons or anything like that.  ...Although that could be a pretty cool thing as its own game!

· Because I made quite a few changes in the Types of the Pokémon,  I reformatted Bill's PC a bit. Now when browsing around your monsters,  you can see their types on the upper left side of the screen.

· I changed a few textbox frames, some to fix them up a bit,  and two of them are entirely new. I like Frame 5 myself.

· The order of the Pockets in your Bag differs when youre outside  Battle and when you're in middle of one.

 This is to make the Poké Ball pocket right next to the default  Item pocket, instead of being 3 pushes away to the right.

· Status Effects no longer are shown with 3 letter "words".  Now they have their own little Icons, which make things cleaner  both in Battle and specially on the Party menu.

· Of course, I decapitalized all the text I found.  What a tedious thing...

· Smashable Rocks now can give stone-type Items alongside  being a way to find certain Pokémon.

· Once you heal Moo Moo, one of the twins opens up a  little shop!

 She'll be able to make Berry Juice for you, and  you have two ways of doing it, for convenience.

 Talking about Held-healing Items, RageCandyBar have  been also reworked to be eaten during battle.

 They're more powerful than Gold Berries, but less  than Berry Juice.

· Many things have been fixed. For example:

 Daisy's Haircut was buggy and could in fact reduce Happiness, has been fixed.  Magikarps in Lake of Rage were in fact smaller than normal and not bigger,  and other Magikarp related bugs also existed all around. Fixed.  A bug where Defense could be lowered by attacking a Substitute with a -Def move existed, now is fixed.  A bug where Mirror Coat and Counter would damage foe after they used an item existed, now is fixed.  A bug that made supposedly fleeing Pokémon not able to flee is fixed. Now Fast Balls are more useful.  A bug that made a foe under Nightmare's effect still be hurt if it was healed with items is fixed.  A bug where the HP Bar would deplete way slower than intended existed. Yes, you're reading right.  The speed at which the HP Bar emptied, specially at higher levels, was not intentional, making  high level battles way, way slower. This has been fixed and is much better, albeit not Gen. 3 "fast".

 Other bugs and stuff has been fixed too.

There's more things I could put here, but when you spend so long doing something you start to forget each individual thing...

o-------------------------------------------------o |[10] New Kurt Balls, new ways to obtain Apricorns| o-------------------------------------------------o

Yes, every Kurt Ball has been replaced. Why?

Well, actually, for the first year and a half of "development" of this hack, Kurt Balls were pretty much as they were originally, with exception of changing one for more utility, improving their effects to make them overall better and fixing the quite-a-few glitches related to them.

But during the many tests I (and a few friends) did, all the feedback I got is that they did not use them much, if at all, because how situational they are, and because you can only get them in limited amounts.

So I decided to create a new set of Balls with very simple yet very effective effects. Each of these new Poké Balls offer a x3 Catch Multiplier if used on a certain Type of Pokémon, with each new Ball being useful for 3 different Types each.

For example, the Poké Ball made with Red Apricorns (named Red Ball to simplify things), will work best while trying to catch Fire, Fighting or Ground Pokémon! Other example would be the Pink Ball will do so with Poison, Psychic, or Fairy ones.

There's no tricks, nor complexities. If the types match, you get a stronger effect than an Ultra Ball. This makes each one way more versatile, every Apricorn as useful as the rest.

Descriptions of each new Ball points to which types are most effective.

Now, because I want people to use these Balls more often, there are a few more ways to obtain these Items. The first and most simple is getting Apricorns from Trees, from which you get two for every one each day.

Pokémon themselves also carry Apricorns, as many species hold them randomly.

But I also added a new face to Johto, a traveling monk! He's easily recognizable thanks to his sandogasa (a traditional traveling hat). Because he travels around Johto, each day you'll find him in a different spot, and each day will offer to trade 5 Apricorn of a certain color for one specific Item. The Items he ask for can be obtained from wild Pokémon, and sometimes found somewhere lying on the floor.

For Red or Green Apricorns, he asks for a Tiny Mushroom. for Blue, Yellow or Pink Apricorns, he asks for a Pearl. For White or Black Apricorns, he asks for a Stardust.

Tiny Mushrooms can be held by Pokémon such as Paras, Ledyba, Oddish, Vulpix and others. Pearls can be held by Pokémon such as Shellder, Horsea, Seadra, Octillery and Corsola. Stardust can be held by Pokémon such as Geodude, Jigglypuff, Phanpy, Staryu and Tentacool.

Of course those are just a few examples, there are more. I hope with all this, Kurt's custom Poké Balls are more useful all around.

o--------------------------------------------------------o |[11] The New and Improved Battle Tower and Trainer House| o--------------------------------------------------------o

The Battle Tower was the first time Game Freak offered anything sort of similar to a Challenge Mode inside the main games. We got Pokémon Stadium 1 and 2, which were great little things, designed to be a battle simulator, with different rules and difficulties, among other things like mini-games.

But the Battle Tower was a bit... Lacking. And HARD.

This is because, for one, the trainers you met here had a quite low variety of Pokémon, so it kinda became a bit boring (I guess Game Freak knew most Pokémon had middling stats!).

On the other hand, the monsters here sported pretty much PERFECT stats, and with strong moves along with them.

This last sentence is worth noting because in older generations, training your Pokémon to their fullest potential, A.K.A. giving them the max Stat Exp. was a total pain and a ludicriously slow process. And trying to get good DVs (old IVs) was a much, much, much worse process than that.

You couldn't make use of ANY mechanic to get Pokémon with good DVs, they were random, and unlike more recent Generations, you could not improve a Pokémon DVs by using items or such. You had no control besides soft resetting ad nauseam. If it sounds bad it's because it is.

So to have a chance not only you needed High DV monsters (pretty much impossible by normal rules), but also fully trained and with the best moves possible.  And you only got ONE SINGLE TM for many moves, and Pokémon learnsets were for the most party pretty lacking if looking at them from a competitive point of view, so you were screwed there, as you may imagine.

All in all, it was often seen as unfair and just not very fun. And if you wanted to try it anyway, add to that that the rewards were laughable. Vitamins that you could buy, and didn't help you at all because they became useless quickly, they only helped for less than half of the Stat. Exp total!

But here's the thing: I love the concept! The idea of having 3 monsters each, with the same level, where only your strategy, knowdlege and adaptibility can take you out of trouble, sounds great!

Even more, maybe if you got something worth your time as a reward it could be even more fun!

That's why a good chunk of the effort of this hack was about trying to balance types, moves, Pokémon and such. And also why the Battle Tower got so many changes!

So let's list the changes:

For starters, each of the ten Levels of the Tower got their Pokémon changed, both to update the new stats, but also to give much, much needed variety to the types of monsters you would see, as originally the game sported just a small number of different species.

Instead of 7 battles per round, now you have quicker rounds of 3. This makes for a much more brisk pace, a far less frustrating event if you lose, and easier to pick up and play.

About difficulty, it should still be a good challenge, although this time, there is some balance, as now you can properly train your monsters through vitamins and fruits, TMs hold a good selection of high-Power moves and they're infinite and of course DVs/IVs are the same for everybody.

Oh, and you can remember old moves, too!

There's also two Shops available for players, in which you can buy a selection of Held Items so you can prepare yourself to challenge the Tower, or to progress through the game, as trainers will start using Held Items more and more once you reach this point in the game.

Up to that point is the basic stuff... But the Battle Tower has also opened several shops and services, and there's even a bit of a progression system built into it, too!

Whenever you participate in the Battle Tower and come out victorious, you'll be rewarded a new type of Item: Battle Medals!

You get three for each victiorous round (so each three battles).

These objects are, basically, the coin of exchange for almost any service inside the Battle Tower. They are stored in your Item Pocket and can be used in a variety of ways.

For one, they're pricey objects, each one sells for 12.000P, thus they can cover costs for training Pokémon. Selling all 3 you win nets you 36.000P, which is pretty good if you realize you can buy enough Vitamins to fully feed a Pokémon in three different Stats (or four if you use Special Atk/Def Vitamins!).

So two good rounds of Battle Tower lets you set up the Stat Exp. of a Pokémon really, really quickly! Or you can buy other stuff with it, too. But that's just a bonus compared to their real use!

In the Main Hall of the Battle Tower, a new Receptionist hangs out close to the Battle Tower's usual lady that takes you to the battles themselves. This new NPC can reward you with a Silver or Gold Trophy in exchange for a number of Battle Medals. They're shiny decorations for your room... And hold some use.

The Battle Tower has been expanded and now there are new rooms that host several services. One of them, and one I'm rather excited to manage to put in the game is a Reward Shop that exchanges Battle Medals for Special Eggs!

Do you remember the event Pokémon from the Stadium games?

They were gifted to you after accomplishing something, and in Stadium 2, they had moves they couldn't learn normally. It was a nice little thing, and always made me feel curious about Pokémon with Moves that couldn't learn normally. You know, what new strategies could I come up with and such.

This service is located in a room behind the Main Hall. There, a Receptionist will take one of your Battle Medals and will gift you an Egg with a special Pokémon that knows a unique move!

There's a total of 50 different species you can get through these Eggs, and the one you get for each medal is selected at random. And every species has the same chances, no dishonest stuff like 0.0001% to get a certain Pokémon, like a Gatcha game.

Oh, and if you're one of those, don't waste your time resetting trying to get Shiny Pokémon from these Eggs... Believe me, it won't work.

Another service is the inclusion of Move Tutors!

There are two Tutors and each one can teach 4 Moves each. Seven of those are unique to Tutors, with an Eighth Move being Toxic, a TM you get veeery late, so I added it for earlier access, as some Pokémon (like defensive ones) do benefit from it or need it to work well.

Tutor Moves can only be learnt by Fully Evolved Pokémon, and you can do so only in exchange for one Battle Medal.

The move selection is composed of Non-Damaging moves to give more utility and so they can be applied to all Pokémon in one way or another, unlike damaging moves, and I would have liked to have more, but I hit the limit before the entire game gets corrupt, so these will have to do!

Both of these features not only offer much, much better rewards for your victories in the Battle Tower, ones that not only can be enjoyed throughout the rest of the game making it more entertaining, but also give you a chance to get a few monsters earlier and gives new possibilites to make teams to challenge the Battle Tower too.

...And that's not all you can do here now!

Besides normal Move Tutors, the Battle Tower has also hired a very special NPC: The Egg Elder... Or in other words, an Egg Move Tutor!

Basically, in exchange for 3 Battle Medals, this old man can teach a Pokémon an Egg Move that its evolution line can learn through breeding with other Pokémon!

And yes, any member. Pidgeot and Pidgeotto can learn moves that a bred Pidgey could hinerit, so no worries on that front!

This way you won't longer feel like your early-game teammates (or any Pokémon for that matter) feel gimped or "lesser" because don't have this or that move only available through breeding.

In a way it's like every species has its own specific Tutor Moves!

But let's continue.

The receptionist in the main hall (the one who gives trophies) also offers a new Key Item: The Box Changer. It does what it says, it gives you the ability to switch the Box on Bill's PC anywhere you want. Just remember that you still save your game when changing boxes this way.

Once you reach the "endgame", meaning, after defeating Red, two other Receptionists will open up new services. And are neat ones!

The first one is a Rare Candy shop! You will be able to exchange one Battle Medal for 5 Rare Candies. This will let you manage the Levels of your Pokémon faster, either to battle the new Lvl 100 Rematches, or to Level up your monsters to reach the Levels required for Battle Tower Rooms.

The other, it's quite different but way more interesting too.

You see, a new group of candies capable of changing the Level of a Pokémon to a fixed one now exist! There's Candies for Levels 10, 30, 50 and 80!

No matter what Level the monster is, it will change into the Level of the Candy!

If you give a Level 30 Candy to a Level 4 Pokémon, it will become Level 30. And If you give a Level 30 Candy to a Level 82 Pokémon, it will also become Level 30!

This is mostly for a reason: To be able to use your favourite pals in any Level of the Battle Tower!

Once a Pokémon Level goes up, it no longer can access the Battle Rooms of lower Levels, and if you wanted to use a monster of a specific species you already raised, you were forced to train another one. But no longer you will need to do that!

Now any Pokémon can battle in any Battle Room by using these new Candies in combination with Rare Candies, and you can perfectly control the level of your team for this challenge while also needing a bit of a resource (Battle Medals) to make use of it.

Not to mention, Level 80 Candies can make HUGE time savers for training Pokémon for those Level 100 Rematches, specially if we're talking about bred Pokémon, or Pokémon from Battle Tower's Special Eggs!

Now, be warned, you CAN NOT make use of all these features from the beginning!

Remember those Trophies I talked about? Yeah, they do more than look nice in your room. Each one unlocks features of the Tower!

Once you win the Silver Trophy, you unlock: Move Tutors  (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Rare Candy Shop  (You need to beat Red too). Level 30 Candies (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Level 50 Candies (You need beat the Elite Four too).

Once you win the Gold Trophy, you unlock: Egg Move Tutor   (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Level 80 Candy   (You need to beat Red too).

So yeah, you must prove yourself and get the Trophies to use all the Battle Tower has to offer.

But don't fret! There's not really much grinding to do. You'll see that the number of Medals needed to obtain each is pretty reasonable for what they unlock.

The game does not ask for hundreds of them for each, not even close! I know how tedious is to collect Battle Points for an Item or one-time use TM back in Generation IV.

And hey, if for some reason you still need a bit of a push, you can win Battle Medals by participating on Buena's Password.

They cost 2 points, you can get one Medal every two days. It's a much slower pace than actually fighting, but it certainly adds up if you play often.

And you also get a handful of them in Kanto, a certain NPC will gift you a bunch if you manage to do something, and some Gym Leaders will gift you one too.

Lastly, also in Kanto, there's the Trainer House.

Originally it was a cool little feature in which you could battle the Pokémon Team that a friend had when you two did a Mistery Gift.

Because I don't expect people going around doing IR connections with a Romhack, the Trainer House has been changed around.

I really don't want to say much, but here's this:

Normally, you can battle a special Trainer daily in this building. But once you've beaten the strongest trainer in all the land, levels are raised, and you can take Lvl 100 battles... With the difference that the Pokémon used in these new battles change depending on the day of the week!

And if you win, you also obtain Battle Medals!

It's a little extra end-game thing alongside the other end-game additions.

o-------------------o |[12] Visual Changes| o-------------------o

Many, many visual changes have been made throughout the game to make the world a bit more cohesive, to make Pokémon look better, or to simple improve stuff here and there.

Pretty much every Pokémon not named Unown got their colors changed, for ones that look better, closer to the original colors of a particular species, and also got their sprites touched up and cleaned up.

Because the games were originally designed to be displayed on the tiny screen of a GB, the graphic artists would try and take advantage to use the 4 colors available to a Pokémon sprite to give it more details. With the advent of the GBC, now they could use colors too, and because the screen wasn't backlighted, they needed to use stronger, more saturated and often darker colors.

The issue is that nowadays these games are pretty much always played on backlighted screens that are also much, much bigger than the original Game Boy's screen, so these graphics that originally looked fine now I don't find they've aged as well with the ways we play them today.

Now, let's be fair here. This is not a criticism for the sprites or the artists. These sprites were made to be seen under a specific hardware, and they worked with what they had, and the gigantic jump in design quality from Generation 1 to Generation 2 is to be applauded.

But at the same time, I think it's fair to say that there's nothing that says they can not be revised and/or improved. That's why I took the horridly tedious job of cleaning up every single sprite (and each of their animated frames) to make them look more clean when played on bigger screens.

I also took the liberty to tweak many of the colors used for Shiny Pokémon. This is something I've seen many people point out throughout the years, and it's true that the use of color for Shiny palettes leaves quite a bit to be desired, with many Pokémon being painted with what I saw called "Puke Green", and others having really dark and simply not appealing combinations of colors that sometimes would make the sprites look worse.

Several of those examples could be Blastoise, Raichu, Aipom or Golbat, and this last one even gets its shading screwed up. Or something like Rhydon, that looks exactly like the official art, while its normal color is much darker; with Pokémon like Phanpy, Sunkern, Xatu, Scyther and others looking very similar to their default colors.

Just have in mind I'm working with the limitations of the GBC and 4 Colors per sprite, so I do what I can do, although it's surprising what nice colors the GBC can display compared to the ones they used, but of course, I'm not doing this to be seen on real hardware, so I do not have that limitation.

You can check a couple of examples in the pictures inside the RAR file for both, sprite improvements and Shiny changes.

I also improved all the Back Sprites too, to keep consistency. And some Pokémon got entirely different sprites, such as Mr. Mime, or Wigglytuff, as there was better designs elsewhere, like Mr. Mime's Silver sprite. It's so much better in my eyes. And yes, they have animations.

Oh, and a handful of Pokémon got redesigns here and there. Don't panic, the changes where made only to humanoid Pokémon to remove incoherent stuff like Machoke and Machamps' underwear or the boxing gear of Hitmonchan.

This is because as time has passed it "snowballed" into a gigantic ball of nonsense. Now, it's not that I hate Pokémon with human-made things on them, for example we could make logical arguments on why they have them in the first place.

Very early Pokémon (back when it was Capsule Monsters) had a lot of very... morally dubious stuff in it. Trainers had whips, the monsters were sold in cages and there was a pretty clear aura of animal abuse in it all. The artwork was intriguing... And a bit worrying.  

When you find out about that stuff it can make sense that humans would put things to restrict their Pokémon like the "strength-reducing" underwear for the Machop tree. Who knows, maybe that's why Pokémon such as Primeape have what looks like shackles on their limbs too.

And back in generation 1, there was only ONE Hitmonchan, given to you by a human. We can simply think the objects it wears are given to it by that person, and it would make sense. Jynx is also another Pokémon which can only be received once, also given by a human and looks like one, maybe there's something going on too.

And all those examples would be fine but then they're turned into nonsense when you can find these Pokémon living in nature with all that stuff on them, or they magically appear when evolving. It just feels... dumb to me, it is something that I could see other developers adress in different ways, but here they just where completely forgotten.

Because this thing is tailored-made for me, I decided to change it.  

And talking about Jynx, when the beta sprite leaked from Red & Green leaks among others, it was pretty exciting to see that this Pokémon once upon a time was very different, with more of a yeti-like design, which can be traced to  japanese Kaiju tv shows, like many early Pokémon designs such as Nidoking (look up Baragon). It apparently had a name that was a very easy to see nudge at Ultraman.

You can read about it here (and also see a bit of the darker Capsule Monsters stuff I mentioned above, but you can also search for early concept art):

https://helixchamber.com/2019/02/16/what-dreams-may-come/

During the development of the hack I went so far as to create sprites to change Jynx into this Yeti-thing, but as time went on I did not feel very satisfied, it felt like a random addition that felt out of place.

I thought of going back to the original Jynx, but I ended sending the entire evolutionary line away and substituting it with another Ice Pokémon from the third Generation.  

...Anyway, moving on from that, each species has its own unique icon on the menu and the overworld too, which is a great thing to give flavour to the game, and seems like a new standard for Pokémon Crystal hacks (with good reason).

The overworld also got some big changes to improve visually, and sometimes, gameplay wise. Besides visuals, some places also changed in design a bit, for a number of different reasons.

For example some Kanto cities had their design changed to look more on par with Johto, as if you compare maps between places, and Gen. 1 and 2, you'll see they kinda look off and weird, as if it didn't have the same time and effort put into it compared to Johto (they didn't).

Places like Celadon and Fuchsia City for example look rather different, although they keep their overall structure, they just got a bit more going for them.

Also there's a few improvements on sprites. For example, I drew new sprites for when you're surfing, similar to those in Gen 3 with your character over a undefined Pokémon. And yes, they're different for both the male and female player characters.

There's also HUGE CHANGES in how information is displayed in several points, with the biggest improvement being the Pokémon's Stats Page. It took me quite some time to get it to look nicer and more organized / easier to read, and I even expanded it by adding a fourth Stat Screen to show some extra "for fun" info.

The font was also changed for a thin yet wider one, to make it less empty between letters, and also more consistent with the different characters, like numbers.

Also, HUGE, HUGE thanks to HyperDriveGuy's amazing work and effort, a way of improving the scrolling and movement on the overworld to make it much more smooth and, to be blunt, less disgustingly choppy if you're used to smooth scrolls.

This change to me is like magic, it makes the game feel so much better! To be fair, finding this improvement refueled my interest in continuing this hack, so thanks again HyperDriveGuy, your work is not just great, it also really did drive this guy forward, pun no intended... Or maybe a bit.

That said, coding this introduced some bugs, some of them harmless, and others being progress-halting or even game-breaking. But fret not, as I managed to fix them all with a bit of work, some trial and error, an a lot of luck, but it was all worth it because the result is a much more fluid experience that translates into a more fun game.

Overall, the game uses much less aggressive colors too, because 99% of the people that may play this (which that would make a total of 4 to 5 individuals, probably) will do it on a lighted screen. Also there's little touches here and there.

Another tiny change that makes a bit of a difference in the long run is battle effects. Most of them on Gen 2 used the same palette: Gray tones! Well, that's not that way anymore.

Most of the effects now have color added to them, and make battles look a bit more fun. A few effects were changed visually, even. For example, Pokémon no longer see "chickens" when confused. Now Pidgeys fly around their poor heads!

The Trainer's card also got a bit prettier, specially the Badges section. Oh, I also added a third page to your Trainer's Card, showing your progress through Kanto's Gyms. You only need to press Right while on Johto's Badge screen when you get at least one Badge from Kanto!

Asymmetrical Badges also spin correctly. Funny enough, the game has coded that function in, but it is only assigned to a medal that was symetrical (Clair's badge). Sounds silly, but once you start seeing Game Freaks coding it's... Actually par for the course, in a way.

o-----------------------o |[13] Tips and Questions| o-----------------------o

Tips: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What type of beginning you want? Each starter is going to change your early hours.

Taking in mind how things work in the Original version of this hack, Cyndaquil would make your first steps more easy than the other two, as his Fire/Rock typing would make him effective against the first two Gyms, while Chikorita's Grass/Ground typing would make it a bit harder than normal. Totodile, with its Water/Ice typing would be a medium difficulty.

But of course, the point of the game is to make more friends and balance your team! You could also ignore the starters and make your team without them. That's how I usually roll.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ You can get an Exp. Share very early on.

Once you brought the Egg to Prof. Elm, and you're ready to go away on your adventure, go back home and leave 2.000P with your mother. Once you battle once (With Youngster Joey on Route 30), she will call you, telling you she bought something for you. It can come in handy this early!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Talking about saving with your mother, she will buy many useful items, so it's in your best interest to send her money from the beginning!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ During your first few Gyms, look for people in green clothes near the towns and cities' main Sign. These people will sell to you Berries to heal Status Effects!

They will come in handy to prepare against the trainers and leaders there!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't waste your Fruits and Vitamins without having in mind what team you want! This becomes more important the further you go, because NPC trainers will have trained Pokémon either you've raised your own properly or not.

As you get more money, or get more fruits you'll be able to quickly prepare Pokémon, but early on you need to think ahead.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Talking about team, while I tried to make all Pokémon good and be on the same Level, that doesn't change the fact that having a balanced team can make things smoother.

Making a team of only slow, defensive Pokémon, or only quick but frail monsters can make things harder for you at certain points. Although, of course, you could just play with your favourites and tough it up. That's what I usually do.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Take advantage of Pokémon such as Meowth or Spearow, capable of learning stealing moves! They will help you to get ahold of many items, that you can either use or sell to make a profit.

Also, be aware of said Pokémon, as they may steal something you have!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Experiment! Because TMs are infinite, HM moves can be forgotten easily, and you have access to the Move Reminder freely, you're given the chance to try all sorts of combinations for a given species. Not to mention, the further you advance through the Battle Tower, the more options you'll have through Move Tutors and the Egg Elder to teach new moves, thus increasing the number of strategies for each species!

You'll only need to watch out for "Event" moves, such as the Odd Egg Pokémon, or the Special Eggs gifted in the Battle Tower, as each have a unique move and you cannot remind it if forgotten.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check the Game Corner on Goldenrod when you arrive!

They've expanded the number of prices you can get. For one, you can get HP restoring Berries there, with Golden Berries being really useful early on, and they're not that expensive.

Even more, new species of Pokémon have been added, and they're Pokémon hard to come by during the early parts of the adventure! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Can you get every single Pokémon in the game? How can I get Mew?

Yes, of course, what would be the point of a Pokémon Hack if you couldn't get every monster available in it by yourself?

There's a lot more variety early on, both so you can get your team-making juices boil sooner, and because different people like different monsters, and having a bigger variety helps with making more people happy.

Although for Mew, you'll have to buy my exclusive and new Park Ball Plus and send it to your game through my exclusive Park Ball Plus-To-GBC Link Cable(tm), or upload it to my exclusive service PokéMaeson Hostage Holdings, previous payment of course, and then you can connect your game magically to it through Infrared connection.

Really, it just works. Wait, are you going to play this on an emulator? Tough luck then, no Mew for you.

...Nah, it's somewhere in the game, you just have to find it, like the rest.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Are you going to do more Pokémon Hacks?

Niet. Nee. Ahneo. Tidak. Nej. Nope.

...What I mean is, don't count on that. The amount of time I put into this is so big that I could have made several other things, the testing has been killing me the most. I have   reached the point of burnout, I've been working on this almost on a daily basis for years. You can't imagine how many times this thing has been reworked and changed over time. Beyond that, my love for the franchise has pretty much being forced to disappear.

And even if I wanted to do more, I wouldn't be able to use any other disassembly project thanks to current DevkitPro versions being incompatible with 32 Bit systems; I'm not going to get a new computer only to do more of this, and going back to the older "Hacking Tools" is not a very welcoming idea, mostly because they're so much more limited and risky to use.  

So, sorry but no, I have no intention, I have no energy, I have no passion for it anymore. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

o------------o |[13] Credits| o------------o This wouldn't exist without a lot of people involved with the Pokémon Rom hacking community.  

Thanks and Credits to every single person on PRET, a community dealing with disassembly for many Pokémon games. These projects look like THE WAY going forward, how awesome they are.

Check it Here: https://github.com/pret -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to Rangi42, and all people on places like the Skeetendo and Pokecommunity forums, and many others that shared their findings and information about ASM, going so far to make great tutorials to teach stupid people like me how to do do a whole lot of things, fix several of the bugs in the game, and many other things.

Check it here: https://github.com/pret/pokecrystal   https://hax.iimarckus.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oh, and of course, credits and thanks to Rangi42 again for Polished Map, an amazing utility for map editing, very complete and absolutely essential.

Check it here: https://github.com/Rangi42/polished-map -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to the TPP Anniversary Crystal 251 Project to create the code for the Move Reminder, which I adapted to my hack. I couldn't even have known where to start with it, and my hack is only better thanks to it. Also for giving me an idea of how to make Caught Data be shown in the Stats Page. My approach to how the information is displayed is different, but again, without TPP I couldn't have know where to start.

Check it Here: https://github.com/TwitchPlaysPokemon/tppcrystal251pub -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to HyperDriveGuy for its example and implementation of "60 Frames per second" project, which created a new way of programming a Run Button, but even more incredible, it made the scrolling of the game as you walk, run, and ride so, so much more smooth. It's amazing.

Check it here: https://github.com/hyperdriveguy/pokecrystal-60fps-example -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks to Chamber, Soloo993, Blue Emerald, Lake, Neslug and Pikachu25 for their Pokemon Icons. While I did a number of them myself, I also used a good amount made by them, and also remade some of them from their initial work, so they deserve the credits!

You can see their work here: https://github.com/pret/pokecrystal/wiki/screenshots/minidex.gif https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/pret/pokecrystal/screenshots/minidex.png

Also, if you play my hack and find any of the icons or tweaked sprites I made good enough to use it yourself, go right ahead. Just give credit and you're good to go, don't even ask. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits and Special thanks to Vice04 for helping me test my hack over the years. May you never be assaulted by Level 168 Slowbros ever again.  

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music Credits:

Credits to FroggestSpirit for "Hoenn Wild Battle" and  "Hoenn Trainer Battle" themes.

You can find FroggestSpirit music in this Soundcloud link, check it out: https://soundcloud.com/froggestspirit -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits to Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm for "Hoenn Rival Battle", "Route 101", "Cipher Peon Battle", "X/Y Rival", "Hoenn Champion Battle" and "Shoal Cave" themes.

You can find Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm music in this Soundcloud link, check it out: https://soundcloud.com/mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits to TriteHexagon for his Night Theme music for cities and his tutorial on how to implement them in the game. His ASM files and his Soundcloud can be found here:

https://pastebin.com/u/TriteHexagon https://soundcloud.com/user-930339535 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope I'm not forgetting anyone, it's way too much people hacking around the world!

[crystalelemental]

sirbartonslady replied to your post “Someone opened a bunch of polls on the forums, asking about “Best...”

Genealogy is great for the crowd who believes games should be smarter than you and should be ball-crushingly hard. People who think playing on easy so you can enjoy the story is being a pussy and you shouldn't be allowed to play any games at all. That elitist mindset that wants a game that punishes you if you're not Really Good already, rather than teaching you how to get good at it.

For the rest of us, Genealogy and Thracia are far too difficult to enjoy because the games punish you for not Being Godly Good Already

On the one hand, you’re right and should say it.  I feel like there is a lot of the mentality that difficulty is what makes these games good, even if the difficulty is obnoxious and not fun in the slightest.

On the other...okay there’s a lot here so I’ll put the rest under the cut.

My main issue with Genealogy is that it feels really uninspired gameplay wise.  If you look through the maps, every single encounter with enemies is a block of the same exact units with almost all the same exact weapons and stats, just charging at you.  While that’s probably a more accurate representation of war-based formations, it does not a fun gameplay experience make, because it’s just throwing your characters at the blocks of enemies until something breaks.  There’s really not a ton of strategy to the game, I feel, because there’s seldom a time where thinking about placement and weapon triangle and shit matters.  It’s just “Here is our squad of 10-16 cavalry units” followed by the next castle going “Aha, but how will you handle MY squad of 10-16 cavalry units?!” until you clear the 5 hour map.  At a certain point you add in specific skills that are just infuriating to deal with, like god forbid an enemy has Miracle, and the game just becomes annoying more than anything else.

There’s also an issue I’m going to bring up from a video that I kinda liked, at least in terms of what it was expressing.  They talked about Three Houses and the turnwheel system, and how being able to recover from death removes an aspect of strategy between pressing forward when a character dies to avoid losing progress, or resetting and losing your good growths etc, when you can just turn back time a bit.  Genealogy...does the same exact thing.  Having a save every single turn means you’re never in any real danger of failure or losing much if a character dies.  Unfortunately, it does the same thing as Three Houses because of that: we can make encounters super hard because the heavy punishment is pointless.  Jack up the crit and avoid rates, who cares, you’ll just reset the turn anyway if it plays out wrong.  But I hate that aspect, because it’s an absolute disaster of trying to find exactly the right combination of actions to get through something.  It’s tedious puzzle solving with randomized solutions more than a strategic endeavor.

I’d also argue that the huge map sizes are massively to the game’s detriment.  Having routine checkpoints wasn’t just good for breaking up the flow of the game, but to give us story elements between major bouts.  I get that there are some who think there’s too much talking in recent games, but like...compare Genealogy with the GBA era, and I think it becomes clear what I’m talking about.  We barely know a single thing about anyone in Genealogy, compared to how connected we can get with a character like Roy or Eliwood.  Because Roy and Eliwood have constant development between the chapters, while Sigurd and Seliph have far less time interacting with others or the world around them, and most of their screentime is dedicated to worldbuilding and lore.  So yeah, Jugdral seems super developed and interesting conceptually, but you wind up not giving a shit about most characters in it, because no one’s all that interesting.  They’re not given time to be interesting.

Thracia just takes all of that and somehow makes it worse.  While it’s closer to the GBA format of having more interesting enemy placements and map designs, the problem is that it’s just a disaster to experience.  I think it was SpeedyHawk who recently made the statement “Thracia feels like a fan game where they didn’t actually know how to develop it properly so they made things way too ridiculous and difficult.”  And god did that resonate.  Because it does feel like that.  Who the fuck designed half of this shit?  Thank god capture never came back.  Thank god we realized that having one (1) random child in the map being super critical to obtaining a super important item was a stupid idea.  Thank god we never had a recruitment condition anywhere near as stupid as “get all eight of these children to talk to their seemingly random enemy unit without anyone dying or being captured, then let them escape before talking to their boss, who will join you.  Also everyone and everything can be hit with Sleep staves, which are many, and if you don’t have a Restore staff still on hand then you can never, ever recover from that status, so better hope that Leif doesn’t get hit ever.

Like...I do think Genealogy and Thracia have a ton of good qualities.  But gameplay is definitely not one of them.  It’s why I want a remake for both of them so bad.  Being able to play them with improved gameplay that’s not as blindingly obnoxious would be wonderful, and if we can get some more dialogue and interactions with characters that fleshes them out, even better.  I just hope that one character having their translated name changes means the next game is a Genealogy remake, because I am so ready for Brave Seliph and Brave Julia to dominate.

[myfriendpokey]

GARBAGE DAY!

a bunch of scrappy shorter pieces to clean out my drafts folder for the new year!

***

A videogame will tend towards exhausting every possible variation of a design space whether anyone wants it to or not.

Videogames and duration - if something is good it should continue being good however long you extend it. You don't really encounter the idea that something can be good for a little while and then be evil.

***

Works of art are "in conversation" with their audience, with materials, with history, with each other. The aim of an artwork is to start, or add to, "the conversation". "Conversation" sort of edges out the older tic whereby art "examines" or "explores" something, which always made me think of a big magnifying glass being propped up for the benefit of some eerily calm 1950s scientist. But now that sounds too chilly, and perhaps sort of sketchy in the power dynamics it implies. "Conversation" is much warmer, informal and more fluid - "conversation" is the assurance that any given power dynamic can be dissolved away in the warm glow of basic, mutual humanity. Let's talk it through! My door is always open! Whenever there's a complaint over labour conditions or harassment it's nearly de rigueur to also quote the wounded-sounding HR lackey, upset that people didn't talk to them about it before going public. Why would anybody deny the friendly, outstretched hand of the respected opponent and their entirely in-good-faith quibbling about word meanings, personality and tone? Why don't we have an honest conversation about the "honest conversation", that numbing discourse cloud sprayed out like formic acid to neutralize a threat, to melt any unsettling edges or contraries back into the familiar gloop of the private and the personal.

***

One of the pleasures of videogames is that of an infinitely repeatable, always identical procedure. Pressing the button makes something happen, and by pressing it again it will happen again in the same way. So there's a kind of abundance or excess built into the system - like partaking of a fruit which will never be depleted, and in the process taking on in your own actions something of that same infinity. You can temporarily identify with the self-identical, eternally reproducing action that you are performing. I think one of the difficulties of videogames is that as you get (slightly!) older, that immortal quality becomes more visibly alien, harder to align to your sense of self. That these mechanics act like black holes, able to absorb any amount of your life without ever being satiated, becomes a terrible curse rather than an unexpected gift. That endlessness now seems eerie and artificial, a horrible parody of life rather than the highest version of it. 

The dadification of vgames has gone much remarked. But as well as a demographic shift I think this reflects a certain anxiety about the centrality of these immortal entities, these endless loops, within the culture. As reward for your fealty to the Mario brand you get even more Mario games, which by now you may not have time or energy to actually play. The VG dad (or even the buff, single pseudo-dads of the superhero movies) is eternally exhausted with the genre that he’s trapped in. We hear him groan and complain as he painfully slogs through the motions. The gratuitous loop is redeemed by the finite human suffering of the dad, as he manfully does what it takes to keep these things going forwards to the next generation, so that the next set of children may be able to actually take pleasure in them again. But the attempt to symbolically re-integrate these things into human life by casting them as a family drama never quite works: their ultimate indifference to that life shines through. A blind, eerie deathlessness is both their charm and their authority.

***

That saying that when all you have is a hammer everything else looks like a nail - similarly, when all you have is willpower, everything looks like an obstacle to be pounded into submission by that same willpower. 

Laziness is a good thing in that it means stepping back from this idiot insatiability of the will. If you're lazy you have to pay more attention, because you're more aware of both your own limits and the limits of your material. 

I think there can be value in suspending a formal problem rather than building an exhaustive system to solve it forever. That way it's still something you have to think about, something that still throws off and reroutes the normal workings of your awful private fantasy machine. Dropping text strings into the game as elements to spatially encounter is not ideal technically but does force you to be more responsive and exploratory with how you use that text. Robust systems can be cool, but can also really homogenize everything - now "text" is just the miscellaneous stuff within the all-purpose "textbox" at the bottom of the screen, cementing its role as filler content.

The funny thing about really systemic, open-world type games is that their very robustness tends to suffocate exprience before it happens. We know nothing will happen which will significantly impact this camera POV, this dialogue system.. anything can happen except for anything which would require a fundamental change to the underlying inventory system. But maybe the whole pleasure of the open world game is just being able to hold those experiences in suspense.

***

Mostly the characters voicing my own opinions in my videogames are explicitly malign and sinister - which is a corny device for me to vent without worrying as much about browbeating people with my opinions. But it's also a way of having those opinions without allowing them to overdetermine the rest of the game, or be fully in control over the more ambivalent and drifting work of "putting together different pieces on a screen to make interesting spaces". So in that sense my own ideas really are the enemies, and any plot role they serve in the game is a dramatisation of the effort to create a space where they lack controlling power.

***

RPG Maker is a collage machine, you get a set of pictures and start placing them around until they start to form some kind of charged and interesting space.

I think the collage aspect is a lot of what I enjoy about making these things, which is why games with more polished or consistent art styles frequently leave me cold. For me the greater the discrepancy between different objects on screen means a greater effect when they're combined. 

How does gameplay etc tie in? For me gameplay can divert the interest but never truly capture it. For decades games have had the problem of effectively being able to train you to do something, but having no idea what that thing should be or why it would matter. They effectively move your attention around without being able to settle it because their inner logic is basically always the same ahistorical, mechanistic void. But this can be a good thing - the permanently restless and unsettled nature of videogame attention can't illuminate itself, but can do so to other things in passing. 

Distraction becomes a way to examine surfaces, rather than being sucked into depths or settled to one fixed meaning. And the drift of unsettled consciousness is ultimately what animates game collages, the spaces that shift and react as attention plays across them, revealing or withholding. And so from this perspective, the answer to why I make videogames is: because I don't trust myself to look after an aquarium.

***

Design is managerial aesthetics - a mode of expertise framed as meta-expertise specifically because it scales up so well to systems of mass organisation and production. It's a universal discipline insofar as the task of removing any obstacles to the frictionless flow of attention and of capital is now also a universal chore. In this context a designer is like the MBA who can be dropped into any business to improve it, without ever having to know just what product they make – because the ultimate goal is always the same, the same tools can always be used. 

The cutesy books about the design of everyday life and so forth exist in the same vein as the ones that tell us there's nothing wrong with marketing because ultimately isn't all human discourse and activity some form of marketing? Isn't everything "design"? The strange top-heaviness with which these things outgrow their host categories parallels the unstoppable expansion of executive salaries within the businesses themselves. The task of managing other people's labour becomes ever more grandoise, ineffable, cosmic and well-paid as that labour in turn is framed as a kind of undifferentiated slop which exists for the sake of being shaped by creatives.

***

tragedy / comedy:

Generalizing hugely I feel like tragedy is about an event or experience so powerful it changes everything - for the characters involved, for the people in that world, for the audience watching - while conversely comedy is the idea that no event or experience can change anything. Oedipus dies and there's a big announcement and everyone has to sit through the awkward two-minute silence before getting back to work, while trying not to fart or itch too noticeably, and the next day somebody's selling Oedipus commemorative pens which run out of ink five minutes after opening, and the pen cap gets lost and the cat starts playing with it. 

In comedy the tragic can still happen, it’s just never strong enough to escape the constraints of the inert material universe which we find ourselves in – all that which remains so stubbornly intractable towards the higher instincts. I can talk about the dignity of man but there's still a risk that my pants will fall down or that someone will hit me with a ladder, causing my head to get stuck inside a bucket of paint, etc. Or my voice might be ridiculous or I might have a stutter (old comedy standbys!), or someone might hear part of my words out of context and assign them a different and unintended meaning. Comedy is consciousness imprisoned within a cumbersome matter which it can't completely do anything with, but also can't exist without. 

Taken as a worldview, this sort of risks congealing into the kneejerk reactionary things-can-never-change, whatever-moment-of-human-history-i-was-reared-in-is-eternal-and-inviolate radio DJ / South Park mindset. And of course somebody's view of what constitutes a tragic, life-changing event depends greatly on whether it's happening to them or someone else. But as exaggeration, in its neurotic overemphasis of the inescapable material, i think this approach still has interest and use. Many of my favourite writers have a kind of comic understanding of consciousness: consciousness becomes a churning material process with its own independent momentum which has to be examined and accounted for as part of any real reckoning with the world. In this light comedy becomes a way to think about opacity and limitation, both in physical matter and in our own selves.

I think many people have made the point that vgames are generally comic, intentionally or unintentionally. The rhetoric around them still tends towards the tragic: make the choice which changes everything! Deal with the consequences, accept your fate! But in practice those moments feel less visible than the clumsy material layer of GUIs, inputs, mechanics and representations that contain and constrain them. The opacity of the black box is one inhibition: was that meant to happen? Was it scripted or a glitch? Maybe I should reload my save and try again. Another is the inertia of the various game systems and loops themselves - [x] character may have died but you still need to collect those chocobo racing feathers if you want the Gold Sword. The numbers in a videogame "want" to keep going up, whatever happens: there's an affordance there which exists independently to any merely human wants and needs, and so tends to act as a gravity well for distracted consciousness as it wanders around. When people talk about tragedy in videogames it's usually with the implicit rider that it's within a game, or set of game conventions, which have become naturalised enough to become invisible. Which also tends to mean the naturalisation of a form, of inputs, of technology, of distribution mechanisms and assumptions, which however arty we can get are still inherently tied to the tech industry. Every art game is to some extent an invitation to spend more time internalising the vocab of your windows computer.

I've mentioned that the materialism of comedy can tend towards unthinking reaction. But the insistence on certain limits inherent to the human body – requirements like clean water and clean air, food and shelter, actual bathroom breaks and not piss jugs and also not having to live six feet beneath a rising sea level - can be helpful at a point when all these things are regarded as negotiable impediments to the pursuit of future profit. Maybe it’s a good thing that some materials can still be so insistent about refusing to be absorbed into the will.

***

I think what I most enjoy about art is the sense of a game with moveable stakes: where you never quite know the value of what you're playing for, which now appears absolutely trivial, and now appears to stand in judgement of the whole world, etc. I think this is also the Adorno idea of the aesthetic as really the extra-aesthetic, that which can step outside or threaten to step outside the limits of the merely aesthetic. It's why "just make a good game / pop song / comic / etc" never quite works, in rhetoric or in practice: the really good pop song is never that which just gives the enjoyable three minutes of listening we might consciously assign to be its remit, it's what overflows or undercuts that category, that which however briefly seems at risk of stepping outside it and into the realm of everyday life.

I grew up on pop culture so I don't have to feel positively towards it. Who am I meant to be defending it from? The handful of surviving WASPs reared on Brahms who get the ostentatiously-fussy-culture-review posts at print newspapers looking to pick up a slightly higher quality of margarine advertisement? The best thing pop culture ever gave me was its own critique: that of containing artists and moments which couldn't be squared with what the rest of it was saying, which seemed  to call the whole enterprise into question and in doing so broadened the sense of what was possible. Pop culture was never quite identified with itself, the value it has is in containing elements which make that self-identification impossible. So it always throws me off to see people celebrating "pop culture", like it's a self-produced totality, when that totality was only ever good for kicking.

Pop culture survives through a negativity it can never properly acknowledge.

[images: Tower of Druaga, Detana!! TwinBee, True Golf Classics: Wicked 18, Microsurgeon, Dark Edge]

[strigital]

The Elder Scrolls VI wish list:

In-depth character customization with tons of options: everything from colors of both inner and outer iris to height and voice.

Player character origins. I want a choice between having completely blank origins, so that I can create my own backstory, or choose between a couple of existing ones, which will affect the gameplay in the long run. Like if I choose to be an Outlaw at some point a team of bandits instead of attacking me will give me a quest, or if I decide that I want to be a Noble, then aristocratic NPCs will recognize me as one of their own and as such I’ll have easier time gaining their trust.

A well working physics engine, so that we can have realistic flowing hair, clothes that move in the wind, horse’s mane and tail that swish realistically when it gallops, etc.

At least some environmental objects being destructible: rocks falling to pieces after getting hit by a stray fireball, enemies getting thrown at certain walls, that crumble and crush said enemies, bridges that can be brought down to cut off the path, locked doors that can be destroyed with a few swings of a maul. Just let me annihilate piles of crates and barrels like other games do, damnit!

Player character being a physical presence recognized by the game world, such as grass swaying when I walk through it, my feet leaving footprints on snow and sand that look different depending on whether I’m barefoot or not, seeing all the little rocks being kicked about as I run on gravel, and piles of dead leaves doing the same when I run through them, dust and small debris falling from old wooden structures as I step on them, etc. Basically, feeling like my body isn’t just a ghost running through the lands without leaving a trace.

Ability to combine spells with each other or the environment for various effects, like they did it in Divinity Original Sin 2. I want to be able to throw a lightning bolt into a puddle and electrocute all the enemies stood in the water, or throw a fireball at a barrel of oil and cause a platform to collapse under the force of an explosion and kill the archers that were on said platform (again about the destructible objects), or cast an ice spell on water, so that the enemies slip, fall and get stunned. If such a mechanic is not full of potential for some ridiculous and hilarious situations, then I don’t know what is.

Unique companions with backstories and personalities, likes and dislikes, goals and agendas. They can also be romanced by ANY player character, no matter their sex/race/other traits and the romance progression is close to a real life relationship, with ups and downs, jokes and arguments, sexy times and break ups.

Let me have a squad of my own. Two or maybe even three companions at once. They also have their own relationships and opinions about each other. They chat, they argue, they flirt, they rant about being forced to travel with that jerk, they get overprotective towards the player if they’re romanced and hear the other one catcalling the player, they share their opinions, give the player advice on the current situation, they each have their own comments about places and other NPCs and they may or may not see eye to eye on those opinions. Let there be drama in true “party of DnD adventurers” fashion!

Also Dogmeat-like animal companion, who can travel alongside other companions and do stuff like sniff out enemies, find goodies, do tricks, duplicate items, grab items from containers with master locks on them... You know, the usual Dogmeat stuff.

Mounts other than horses. I want to see Redguards riding their camels, Khajiiti caravans with senches, Nords putting bears under the saddle. If horses are still the only rideable animal, then I want variety and customization: lots of breeds to choose from, individual armor, saddlebags and cosmetic items, ability to name a horse and have it come to the player at a single whistle. Also, Shadowmere. TES 6 won’t be the same without that demonic horse.

At least one friendly dragon. Because I need more of Paarthurnax.

More active Divines. Daedric quests are fun, no arguing there, but I’d also like to go on a holy quest bestowed upon me by, say, Akatosh himself, not some old prophecy. Also Divine relics to counterbalance Daedric artifacts.

More stuff to kill your time with. Games at taverns, visiting brothels, betting on horse racing or participating yourself, watching street performers and so on. I want to take part in the same entertainment the inhabitants of Tamriel do, damnit!

More alive, realistic world. If there’s a war I want to see hanged deserters on a tree, if it’s autumn I want to see people throwing harvest festival parties in their towns and cities, if it’s a plague outbreak I want to see corpses, sick people and hear church bells... Again, the Witcher 3 did it, now I want all of this grungy, dirty, realistic shit in the next TES game!

Tons of dialogue choices based on the player character’s skills, traits, race, sex, affiliation with factions, etc. I want NPCs to react to the character in a dynamic way, so that each new playthrough with a new character is fresh and inexperienced before. Let them Nords throw sexist comments at my Dunmer lady, let the Khajiits deny information to any other character that is not a Khajiit, let my bulky Nord fellow get discounts at the bar and my Imperial guy in fancy clothes get into the royal palace way easier that an Argonian in a hood would. I want to feel, see and hear that NPCs know and react to my character in a realistic way, so there are more challenges, interesting moments, secret dialogues and hidden quests only available for a certain character that made certain choices. Let the next game be the true definition of RPG!

Khajiits and Argonians having animal-like legs that they had back in TES III Morrowind. Please.

Longer and more complicated guild quests, so that even joining the guild requires time and skill, let alone progressing through ranks. And don’t make me a leader of each and every faction! Make me a second in command or a high ranking official with new perks and armor as a reward. Don’t make me the most overpowered mortal in Tamriel again, because it’s getting old fashioned.

Some sort of an ability tree, which allows you to tinker and make bombs, traps, contraptions and other awesome goodies that’ll make any combat a wild party.

Good third person animations. C’mon, Bethany Esda, I know you can do it.

Voiced protagonist. If not fully, then on the Divinity Original Sin 2′s level, where the player character does not speak in dialogues, but has voiced comments when interacting with certain objects or entering a location, etc. Or just add an option in the Settings menu to turn on or off player character’s voice.

Ability to hide that ugly ass helmet with a single click of a button, without being forced to choose between showing my awesome hairdo to the world and +5 to Armor Rating.

Ability to equip multiple weapons at once and also being able to see them on my character, i. e. a bow on my back, and axe on my right hip, a dagger on my left hip and a staff alongside the bow. Also they jiggle according to physics.

Big cities. No, I mean, like, really, truly BIG cities. I mean some Novigrad from the Witcher 3 type of big cities. I want to get lost in them. I want to find all the secrets, hidden in dark alleys and on the rooftops. I want countless quests within the city itself. Just let me enjoy some fantasy medieval city life, okay?

Animated activities. When I click to skin a dead deer I want to see my character sit down and do some work with a knife. When I go to a spot where fish is abundant I want to see a fishing rod being thrown into the water. That sorta thing.

Detailed crafting system. I. e. you could choose to make a handle of a sword and its blade from different materials and have different effects on them that combine once you put the sword together. Or whilst making armor you could pick between different textures, materials, colors and such.  Basically, what they did in Dragon Age Inquisition. That was a fun system to play around with.

Also more subcategories for crafting, like if you are a high level smith you could craft some horseshoes for your mount that’ll increase its galloping speed, or if you’re a skilled alchemist you could make a throwable potion which will harm the enemies in a certain way (like a jar of bees or something). And, of course, accompanying animations are welcome. I’d die to see my character put some horseshoes on their steed.

A loveable villain, who could be “persuaded” to abandon his goals, join your squad and become your new LI. Basically, Miraak 2.0, but with a happily ever after ending.

Dwemer prosthetics. Sotha Sil thinks he’s so hip with his metallic arm, doesn’t he? Well I too want to have a metallic arm, damnit!

Ability to furnish your house however you like. When you buy a house there could be a choice between a fully furnished version and an unfurnished version of your house. After that you could either re-arrange the furniture in your abode or buy new furniture that suits your tastes. Then you could enter furnishing mode and have a blast decorating your dream house to your heart’s content. Basically, what we saw in Fallout 4′s Homeplate and Fizztop Grille.

Outposts, keeps or anything like that. They could be like small bases that you take control of once you slaughter its previous owners, where you and your squad of companions could rest, talk, repair broken armor and weapons or buy new ones, stock up on potions and bandages, that sort of thing. There also could be a special object that will allow you to instantly switch between the companions and/or choose a different mount from a collection of those that you own. Also there could be a badass custom flag of yours marking that place as your own.

i’ll proly add some more later, but rn i’m out of ideas xD

[zephthekid]

"that was a mistake."

2030 words. names uncensored.

Night 3 of Perjin’s wedding festivities. Hundreds of humanoids from all across Wildemount are gathered under one roof, in celebration of the nuptials of one very lucky noble. Raucous laughter fills the halls as the drinks flow freely between. If one thing’s for certain, the Menagerie Coast really knows how to party.

At the center of it all lies the happy couple, the eye of the proverbial storm. The “pomp and circumstance” of it all led you and Zippy to follow the overflow into a smaller banquet room, where most “commoner” attendees drifted off to. The hall, set up much like a mini-tavern, is a nice respite. Much less courtly, much more relaxed.

You catch Zippy’s eye from across the square table. He makes a face at you; you make one right back. Solemnly he tips his tankard towards yours, throwing back another drink.

No matter how many ales he downs tonight, it doesn’t change the fact Jin is a married woman now — to both his and your dismay.

It’s not that you wish she hadn’t found love! Au contraire! Jin deserves every bit of happiness coming her way. Can you honestly blame her if she loves him that much?

At least — she’d better love him. She should be head-over-heels if she’s willing to leave your family behind like that. To leave her blood brother behind like that.

The look Zip and you share says it all. He and you both know after this week, it’s likely you won’t see Perjin again for a long time. She’s retiring from the...industry, so professionally, her persona is as good as dead.

You and Zeph aren’t retiring with her though. You won’t leave...you can’t leave. The traveling forger life means everything to you, and it means everything to Zippy too.

Guess you’re gonna need to get used to being a duo.

“Groom’s side?” someone jostles your shoulder. He giggles; this man must be sloshed out of his mind.

“Bride’s,” you look over, meeting the gaze of a rosy-cheeked human. Apparently the alcohol coursing through his veins has emboldened him. Not many approach an air genasi on their own accord.

Zippy rolls his eyes. You shoot a smirk at the human tomato. “I assume you know the groom?”

He hiccups. “Y-ya would be right…” The sound is so tiny you and Zip have to smother your laughter. “Haven’t met many on the bride’s side yet, very cool...cool, cool, cool...”

“Are you not gonna give us a name?” you don’t bother hiding your appraisal of him. The tomato isn’t half-bad-looking, but in his current state? To go farther than flirtation would be a mistake.

“Oh! Yeah...um, it’s...” his words trail off into an incomprehensible murmur.

...Okay then, Tomato Boy.

You see his eyes droop closed, and for a second you think he fell asleep on his feet! Hastily you slide your drink away from him, lest it becomes a casualty. Thankfully, he perks up again, just in time before he slams his face into something.

“So!” he slurs, the alcohol really hitting him full-force. “Who’re you...and your boyfriend?” his index finger languorously points between you and Zip.

Now, you outright laugh. Zippy’s only a split second behind. “What is that, the tenth time tonight?” Z clicks his tongue.

“Twelfth. Twelfth assumption.”

Tomato Boy sways, befuddled. “...Are you...not?”

“Kiddo here is like my sister,” Zeph swings a leg onto the table, leaning back into his chair. Tomato doesn’t buy it.

“...but you don’t look anything like her! Stop pulling m’ leg, man--”

“You don’t need a bloodline to be family,” you coolly interject.

“Huh,” the man grunts, sort of pensively. His attention swivels to you after a beat. “...well, okay then, beautiful, would you like to--”

A dismissive wave of your hand cuts him off. “Sober up, honey, then we can talk,” your tone is determined and even. Surprisingly the man doesn’t put up a fight; he meanders away, while you watch in amusement.

“Twelfth, huh?” Zippy remarks once the other guy is gone. “That’s nearly twice as many as yesterday.”

“Three straight days of drinking makes people bold, I guess.”

“Crazy.” He hums, fishing out a deck of cards from one of his many pockets. “Let’s play blackjack, you game? Loser per round has to get up and serve drinks.”

“To the winner or to the whole room?”

“Depends on how bad she loses.”

“He loses, you mean.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.” Zippy shuffles the cards with ease, eyes twinkling.

“You won’t,” a spark of challenge glimmers in your own. You won’t lose to the old man.

“Insolent child,” Zeph smirks.

“Idiot prune.” Zephaniah, you’re going down.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Four rounds later, you and Zeph have been pretty evenly matched up so far (say hello, hangover). The conditions of your gameplay have not gone unnoticed, and they’ve caused a small crowd to gather around the table. People are placing bets. You know you have at least 3gp and a nice silk cape riding on you right now.

“Let’s make it funnnnn,” one elven spectator approaches. You recognize them as Assumer #8, from a couple hours ago. They’d spoken briefly with you by the door. “Deal me in. If I beat both your asses, you both do a dare. Mmkay?”

You size Assumer #8 up, and Zippy does the same. They look dazed and unsteady, but then again the same can be said of you. What’s the worst that could happen?

“As long as I don’t have to kill anyone,” you shrug.

The assumer chuckles. “‘Course not. All in good fun.”

“Pull a chair,” Zip sets the next round up, for 3.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Not too long after, your drunken haze finds itself rudely sobered...by both you and Zip’s resounding losses.

Zippy is dumbstruck. Assumer #8’s triumphant grin splits their face open. The crowd mirrors Assumer #8’s sentiments, eagerly awaiting the promised dares. You don’t think Assumer’s gonna go easy. You can tell they have something...juicy in mind.

“...Well?” No sense in prolonging it, you think. “You win, my friend. What’s the dare?”

Zeph’s not thrilled at having a stranger decide his fate. He shifts uncomfortably.

Assumer’s gaze flickers to the crowd, who burst into excited murmurs. You think you hear the word “kiss” thrown around. The air surrounding you suddenly drops a few degrees.

“Ah, we should give the people what they want,” Assumer feigns resignation, but the mischief in their eyes says otherwise. “Give us a kiss, you two.”

Your eyes snap to Zeph, whose grimace does not go missed. “...Alright. One of you step up to the ‘kissing booth,’ then,” he pushes himself up out of his seat, his wrist flicking inward in a beckoning motion. His eyes scan the crowd for volunteers.

You do the same. You catch Tomato Boy from across the room openly staring. Tonight must be his lucky night, you figure. “Come on over,” you shrug. Quickly Assumer stands, shaking his head.

“No, no, no -- you misunderstand,” they place one hand on both you and Zippy’s shoulders. You trade weird looks with Zip. “The people want you two to kiss.” To make it extra clear, Assumer emphatically pats you guys’ shoulders.

Your pupils grow to the size of saucers. Zeph goes into a coughing fit.

“Come on, man, don’t pretend you haven’t thought about it,” they move to slap Zippy on the back goodnaturedly. Zip’s only response is an anxious nape scratch.

You take a deep breath. “You’ve got our dynamic entirely wrong,” you frown. “He and I--”

“Let’s just do it,” Zeph’s abrupt words catch you off-guard. “How bad could it be.”

“Uh...what?” you try not to gape. “Are you...sure about that?”

You can’t speak for Zip, but Assumer #8 was right about you; you have thought about kissing Zippy--Zephaniah-- before, but that was a long time ago and you’re wiser now and he never really seemed interested in anything remotely like--

“Sure; I mean, more for your benefit than mine, but,” Zeph’s lips twist into a smug little smirk, and whatever ~feelings~ were stirring up within you are quickly doused.

“Excuse me?” you snort.

“I can’t help that I’m attractive, kid,” Zippy runs a casual hand through his hair, obviously peacocking.

You roll your eyes. “Whatever helps you sleep at night, Zippy.”

“It’s not your fault you’re in love with me,” he slides a step closer.

You don’t back down. “Okay.” you reply, eerily deadpan. Zippy wasn’t expecting that. He looks momentarily shaken. Got ‘em.

“Oh, honey, did I hurt your feelings?” you croon. Your eyelids flutter, mockingly. “I didn’t realize you cared so much about me.”

“Of course I do,” Zip scoffs. Oh no. His tone is at best half-sarcastic, you sense. Zeph’s not usually the sentimental kind, but right then there was an earnest quality to his voice. It’s veiled just enough so your audience doesn’t catch it...but you do. You catch it.

“Please don’t make this a moment.” you quench...whatever that was with a narrow-eyed smirk, resting a light hand on his chest. With your stare you dare him to meet your eyes; you’re no coward.

In one swift motion Zeph grasps the fronts of your vest, pulling you in until you’re nearly flush against him. He’s so close now the perpetual breeze surrounding you blows around him too. “Why?” he taunts. “Chicken?”

“Never.”

You hear the room collectively hold their breath as Zeph presses his lips to yours.

Only a second ticks by before you retract. You two stare at each other, unblinking, until—

You both sputter at the same time.

“That...that was a mistake,” you choke as Zippy’s laughter rings loud.

“You’re telling me!” his shoulders shake, but he tries to steady himself.

“Sorry to disappoint, everyone,” you turn to the gathered group, who look thoroughly unsatisfied by the lack of chemistry. They disperse.

You move to lean against the table. “Yikes.” you wince. That kiss felt so...unnatural; no lie, it was kind of gross. 3/10, would not recommend.

Zippy, calmer now, wraps an arm around your shoulders. “Let’s...never let drunks peer-pressure us again, okay?”

“Deal.” You agree readily. “I like how we are, Zip.”

Zippy reaches a hand up to ruffle your hair. “Me too, bro.”

“Bro...”

“Shut up.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The funny thing is, I ended up dating Assumer #8,” you shrug. The wedding is now a five-year-old memory. You reach past your relatively new travel buddy — dare you say, friend — to grab your cider, leaning against the bar of some random tavern in Wildemount. “9 months.”

“And?”

“It was a good 9 months. Sort of off-and-on, given how often Zeph and I moved around. Wyatt was great; it was just—” you hesitate, “well, you know, 9 months in, we find out they’d actually conceived a child during Wedding Week, with one of the barkeeps.”

“They what?”

You laugh. “Yeah, so they never cheated on me,” you clarify, “it’s just that their fling right before was...fruitful.” one brow of yours arches meaningfully. Your friend nods in dismayed understanding.

Sometimes you surprise yourself by how easily you take that in stride. “Obviously I told them to go and be a parent to their new baby,” you exhale. “They didn’t want to leave me at first, so I told them ‘it wasn’t really working out anyway.’”

Your friend doesn’t seem convinced by the last sentence. You wouldn’t have believed yourself either, but Wyatt...poor Wyatt was always too ingenuous. “Lies, clearly, but I couldn’t settle down with them. Too soon,” you admit, sheepish.

Immediately you straighten in your seat, cracking a more playful grin. “And I’m glad I didn’t, because how else would I be here with you?” Your arms sweep open in a grand gesture to the rest of the tavern.

Your friend’s expression warms. You take it as a good sign. “Last I heard, Wyatt’s married to her now. They manage an inn somewhere…” you fail to stop yourself from divulging as you down your cider. “Somewhere in Western Wynandir. I’m fuzzy on the details.”

You allow yourself one reflective moment before you shake all thoughts of Wyatt and weddings off. That’s enough reminiscing for now. Looking back gets you nowhere.

You breathe. “All behind me now — hey, you wanna dance?”

[unboundedworlds]

-Persona 5- [11.10.17]

Also currently playing: Stardew Valley, Dragon Quest VIII, Destiny 2

[For the most part this will be spoiler free, though I will be talking a little about the end-game and ending but I’ll make sure to stick up a spoiler warning in advance.]

It took me way too long but I finally got around to finishing this game, and I’m so glad I did. I’m a huge fan of the Persona series (from 3 onward - I’m yet to play SMT Persona or fully complete Innocent Sin), first playing Persona 4 Golden in 2014 before going back and playing Persona 3 Portable, and now Persona 5. While I’ve played a fair share of them now, I’m still reasonably new to JRPGs so I’m by no means good at the games, but even so I was able to beat and get an incredible amount of enjoyment out of all three entries. This wont be a review of the game, just a basic overview and my thoughts and feelings about my time with the game. 

Persona 5′s fundamental mechanics are similar to what you’d be used to from Persona 3 and 4. Like the previous two games, you’ll be spending half your time in modern day reality, meeting new people and forming bonds, working part-time jobs and attending school etc., and the other half of your time you’ll spend raiding Palaces (this game’s dungeons) where you’ll need to fight Shadows and levelling up your party members and Personas. That’s a very (very) basic summary of the gameplay. One of the biggest reasons you’ll pick up a Persona game is for it’s story and the connections you as the player/protagonist make with the people you meet in this world.

I absolutely loved this game’s world and all of the characters you get to meet and bond with throughout the game. All the characters are unique, interesting, memorable and all have very distinct personalities, storylines and troubles that the player can assist them in overcoming should you choose to. This game took me roughly 131 hours on a completely blind playthrough to reach the true ending, and in that time you find yourself truly connecting with these characters and genuinely caring about them and how their stories are going to turn out. As with all Persona games, there’s degree of sadness to be had from finishing the games as you’ll no longer be able to go into that world and continue bonding with and helping these characters you’d spent so long getting to know. However, since it’s very tricky to max out all Confidants (known as Social-Links in the previous games) in your first blind run, this adds a lot of replayability to the game as in a second or third playthrough you can spend time with people you perhaps didn’t have time to in your first playthrough.

I wont talk too much about the gameplay as I’ve already briefly covered how the game plays, but I have to mention about how polished and great the game feels to play, both in the RPG parts and the real world parts. Navigating the real world has convenient ways of quickly getting to all the various locations, while exploring dungeons both in and out of combat feels smooth and brilliantly made. Movement, the (simple but effective) stealth system and combat all feel better than they ever have before, and flow seamlessly between one-another, making both dungeon exploration and fighting Shadows extremely enjoyable. I can’t talk for the prior games, but combat from Persona 3 onward has always been extremely satisfying, intense and just damn fun, and that doesn’t change here. In fact it’s only enhanced with the addition of the newly introduced Gun, Psychic and Nuclear damage types, alongside a vast new selection of moves and skills your Personas can learn, and the reintroduced Demon/Shadow negotiation system from Persona 2 (and possibly 1?). All in all, Persona 5′s gameplay is seriously incredible and such a blast to play. I never once found myself getting burnt out from playing this game, and that has a tendency to happen to me with RPGs.

This is getting pretty long so I’ll quickly cover just a couple more areas. I especially want to talk about Persona 5′s presentation because, even after finishing the game and putting 131 hours into it, everything about it still blows me away. The 3D modelling, animations and locations all look incredible, the game’s art style is (in my opinion) damn near flawless, and following the Persona trend it has an absolutely wonderful soundtrack. While in general I think I still prefer P4′s OST, this game’s soundtrack definitely comes very close, especially with certain tracks. (That final boss theme though. ‘Rivers in the Desert’, if you’re interested in giving it a listen.)

[This paragraph will contain brief spoilers] I wont talk about this game’s story itself as it’s huge and long and great but I’m v lazy. I did really, really enjoy the story of this game though, and as you approach the end it only gets better and better. A slight worry I had for the first portion of the game was that I didn’t feel like a whole lot was at stake, unlike in Persona 3 and 4. It didn’t feel like the work the Phantom Thieves (your team) were doing really had any large scale impact. That worry subsided the more I played the game though. As you progress the team will start to tackle bigger and bigger tasks, and start making much more of an impact to society and the world around them. ESPECIALLY at the end. While your first job is to tackle a corrupt teacher, the finalé has you fight through a twisted, distorted reality in which you end up fighting a literal God. And it was SO great. So yeah, I think my early game worries definitely got resolved. Also, some of the scenes after the final boss had me crying my eyes out for hours, so if you get emotional over fictional stories like me then be prepared. (Still not quite as bad as Persona 3′s ending hit me, though. *tears up*) [Spoilers stop here]

I’ve gone on way long enough already so I’ll wrap up here.

This and the previous two Persona games are very, very special to me for many reasons, and I’m so glad Persona 5 was able to live up to the incredibly high standards Persona 3 and especially 4 had set. I’m yet to grab the platinum trophy for Persona 4 Golden, but I have full intentions to go back to Persona 5 one day for another playthough or two to see if I can get myself this game’s platinum too. I’d recommend this game to anyone, it’s such a blast to experience. This isn’t something I’d usually do or plan to continue doing, but if I had to give Persona 5 a rating it would definitely hit 9.5/10, as with Persona 3 and 4. These games are great. Real great.

[lonesomealley]

A Short Hike - In Depth Analysis and Review WRITE UP

DISCLAIMER: If you haven't seen the video that this write up is based on, I highly recommend you watch that before reading onwards.

This is a video project that, frankly, I didn’t expect to take so long. And I can’t really go into details as to why it did outside of just immense family issues taking place. Sprinkle in a little procrastination, school work, and a part time job, and it’s kind of a miracle I had the space and time to finally put this together. But it’s here, I’m alive, and I can finally do this write up to give a little more insight into the design philosophy of this video.

I stumbled upon A Short Hike sometime back in June or July when I saw that it was in Humble Bundle’s humble trove that you gain access to when subscribing to their humble monthly service. We had subscribed to this service for my girlfriend’s birthday just as a way to give her a large library of games that she can sit down and slowly churn through, while I was all about playing this game. So I sat down and played it, and played it, and played it. This was one of those games that would cause me to zone out and just put all of my focus towards the game while I’m playing it. That sounds like an odd statement to say considering it should be your goal, as the player, to be fully immersed in whatever you’re playing. However that’s more of a fantasy than a reality, at least with me, because I find myself taking many notes or going between tasks while playing video games.

A Short Hike is also just one of those games that really hits you right in the feels with its message. Now I’m not one to be very receptive to emotional ploys or to be hit by the sad music that plays whenever a character dies in a media piece, but this game somehow nailed it. It’s kinda weird, especially given my videos, that the only two games I would attribute with legitimately evoking an emotional response from me are A Short Hike and The Beginner’s Guide. So given all of the blog posts and video ideas that I had failed to really kick off so far, I decided to write up a 3700 word review for the game and put it into full production.

And that brings us to the release of the video, which took about 4 or 5 months to produce. . . Now I have an excuse for this that I stated previously. And ummm, I was hungry? That’ll do it. BUT, it’s here now, and I can write this paper.

This video was relatively simple, and honestly I could’ve (and probably should’ve) completed this a lot faster than I did. During the production of this video, I played A Short Hike 3 times, and 100%’d it. I feel that playing through games multiple times, and 100%ing them when reasonable, is necessary to understanding the more complex or abstract design of the game I’m playing. Hence, this allows my reviews to become in depth and hopefully more worthwhile than the standard review videos.

When it came to writing the script, I was primarily interested in the narrative design and atmospheric setting of the game, because the way the game goes about doing this was quite interesting. As noted in the video, the game puts its purpose right at the end, no hints, no anything, just a big twist right at the end of the game. And that’s a very unique way to design a video game’s story because it breaks typical writing norms. Usually you’d include tid bits here and there of where the game is going or what the underlying tone is, but nope. A Short Hike says, “fuck it,” and gives you a game that is unapologetically and completely invested in itself. And that’s something that deserves to be documented, which is ultimately the point of my channel: To highlight things that deserve to be talked about, that no one else is really covering.

After I had come to a satisfactory amount of thorough analysis with the writing, I decided to write a review for the entire game. This was because the amount of information I had on the relatively simple plot of A Short Hike didn’t make for a long enough video. Something like this may ultimately drown out the point of the video, which was to highlight the anomaly of ASH’s design, however through this medium I was actually able to also convey other points like the effective world design and gameplay.

If you haven’t read through the script yet, you can do it HERE!

Going into the editing, my project folder will often start out as just some footage files of me playing through the game, and as I begin putting stuff together and deciding on what pace I want the video to be, I’ll go out and collect other resources. My final video project folder ended up being about 67 gigabytes (including the files used for this write up.)

I unfortunately don’t have too much to write about with my editing, because it’s super basic. It’s a lot of cross fades, cuts, and key framing. If you know even the most basic stuff about Premiere Pro you can decipher how I did a lot of my edits with ease, so instead of going in depth about them, I’ll just show you how I put together the video and my workflow.

The first screenshot is how my secondary desktop typically looked while I was working, and the second is my primary desktop which features the default look and layout for Adobe Premiere.

I don’t have any real specialized work flow or editing process for how to put a video together, I just linearly piece the video together until I get a finished project. Going into the script I’ll come up with several ideas for how I want certain bits of the video to work, and will either keep a mental note of it or put some [brackets] in the script to signify what I want down there visually. This keeps the pacing of the video somewhat in check, but a lot of it ultimately comes down to whether or not I want to put in the effort to make a video that’s super stylized. I already tried this once with a previously cancelled project and it turned out horribly. So the editing for this video was a lot of just cuts to different gameplay pieces.

My general philosophy when it comes to editing is that I want exactly what I’m talking about to be on the screen whenever applicable and present visual information in a way that will back up the audio. So while my editing style and workflow are pretty free form and otherwise unfocused, I do try to at least have a reason for why I edited something the way I did. As I’ve said this video was designed to be straight to the point and contain just enough information to make a very snappy video. And the goal of these write ups is to explain a lot of the decisions made during the video editing process and things that influenced the video to get made the way that it did. As I continue making these videos, I hope to improve the conveyance of information over time so that what you’re being told is much more concise and comprehensible for many different audiences.

That isn’t to say my design philosophy is flawless though. One major problem with this format comes down to not having the right footage for a certain thing, or not having enough time to properly show it off. There’s one part where I briefly mention the direct shortcuts you can use on A Short Hike’s island and I couldn’t use a piece of footage of me using it because I simply didn’t have enough time. So I compromised with just a brief close up shot of one of the shortcut entrances, this was the best I could do to convey that this was what I was talking about.

I think in many instances the pacing of the cuts is done effectively enough that you can pick up on all of the information I’m trying to portray, but in some others it may fall flat or be convoluted by the use of filler footage. Filler footage is, and will always be, a problem in the medium of video essay because you aren’t going to have an example for everything you’re talking about from gameplay alone, especially if you like discussing hypotheticals. Of course, you can spend a lot of time developing those concepts in your own mediums such as through a game’s development tools, but that takes a lot of extra time and effort that I simply couldn’t afford to put into this video. On this note, let’s talk about the audio quality. This has been something that primarily just comes down to not having the proper equipment to really make my audio sound good. And I can really only subsidize this so much through the use of audio editing to the point where the effort that I put in just isn’t worth it in my opinion. That’s why there’s several moments in the video where my audio cuts out or goes a bit wonky. I want to clarify that in these moments that isn’t me just being terrible at audio editing like my Beginner’s Guide video, that’s actually my microphone just randomly refusing to pick up audio information. This can be worked around if I really sought to, but that would take too much time and effort on my part when I could purchase new audio equipment.

My overall goal with this video was to construct a snappy, well paced video that put all of the game into one convenient roll up. It might be a little strange for a review video to have massive game spoilers (as the point of reviews is to inform customers who haven’t played the game yet) but I feel it was necessary to be able to explain what exactly this game does.

A lot of my external resources and information either came from Adam and Mark, or were just some google images regarding what I was talking about. You may notice that in my video I use screenshots of DMs from Mark but not Adam, this is because Adam said that while I could talk about the information he gave me, I was not to screenshot it. I guess you’ll just have to take my word on that.

The final thing that I’ll really talk about video wise is the part where I play my own remix of a rock song to demonstrate how music affects video games.

This is basically a vaporwave version of an alternative rock song called “Black Domino” created by the band Ozma. And trust me, I really have no rhyme or reason for making this outside of just pure boredom. I loaded this song into Audacity, threw a bunch of effects on top of it like phasers and slow pitching, and it turned into this monstrosity(?). I figured since some people might want to listen to the full thing that I’d include it here. This song is technically part of a full album that I’m working on, that’ll feature a bunch of vaporwave or just weird songs constructed very shottily in Audacity or whatever I feel like working in. If a blog post ever appears about the album, now you know ahead of time.

Next I want to talk about the artwork that I commissioned for the video thumbnail. For this I went and picked out an artist that I already knew somewhat. That artist is Kagu, aka NeroNero, aka Totoaba. . . She really needs to decide on a name. But anyhow, she has fairly exceptional design skills and I saw the potential in her making a good, catchy, and flashy thumbnail that would show another level of effort and philosophy when it came to YouTube thumbnails.

So we started by discussing what I was expecting and how much I was going to pay. That went along the lines of, “Hey I need a thumbnail for a YouTube video and I will pay you at most $50 to make it.” Fortunately for me, she said yes. There was just one issue, however. Kagu was all about character design, and I mean that. There are next to no scenic pieces of art on the entirety of her twitter. Although considering I wasn’t sure how much scenery was really going to be needed for the composition, I went with the most comfortable option and pressed on. For reference, here’s a couple pieces of her art.

Again, please visit her twitter!: https://twitter.com/neru_nero_/

Having to go out and commission art was a really interesting process that I documented as it went along. Going into the commission I didn’t really know what I wanted (don’t be me), but not wanting to be that commissioner who just says, “Surprise me,” I had to quickly assemble a basic composition. However the only drawing program, and access to actual drawing tools, was Microsoft Word on my laptop. What resulted was the below abomination.

However, I feel like I should carry you, the reader, through the commission process so I want you to take a close look at that first sketch and this finished product:

After this first sketch was sent to her she immediately went to work and came back to me with this:

It’s not great, but it’s definitely a start. What may stick out to you immediately is that Claire, a big focal point of the composition, is pretty stiff and otherwise blocky. So she went through a redesign.

And then, deciding there wasn’t enough in the composition, we added a waterfall.

Once we had finalized the composition sketch, the next thing was to make a nice outline for it all so we could start coloring.

I knew from the get go that the background was just going to be some gradient that would mirror the colors and tones from A Short Hike. We used several official art resources and in game screenshots to come to the conclusion of what this gradient looked like.

Now given my standards, that’s about where the thumbnail would’ve ended. Just slap a logo on there and I would’ve been like, “Alright cool here’s some money thanks.” But she didn’t stop here.

I feel the need to point out that Kagu was entirely gracious in trying her own thing and putting her own spin on the rather simple ideas that I gave her. She wouldn’t just stop at adding basic shadows to something, she really went the extra mile to make sure that things aligned and matched. And while she had some communication issues where some of my feedback she would seemingly ignore, we did eventually work through those to produce something that looked better each and she was always willing to adjust something even without my input. An example of this is the clouds.

Initially, I had no idea what I wanted these clouds to look like and how that process of describing it to someone else would go. All I knew was that I wanted the clouds to appear like how they do at the end of the game with their odd flat appearance blended with the use of gradients. (The screenshot was rendered in high resolution for clarity.)

When I sent her that, she took a good amount of time to just experiment and figure out what she was doing. She then came back with clouds that were way above my expectations. And even as we adjusted the background gradient, she was happy to change the tone of the clouds along with it.

And speaking of that background gradient, I believe we spent a good hour making sure that the gradient in the background was just right, and she did it joyfully and productively.

And so we eventually came down to the final product.

This piece was well smoothed out, and I used my eye as an observer to catch all of the little details and errors that she made along the way, and she was entirely happy to clean them up. In the end we settled on $50 for me to own the rights to the art, and the money was promptly sent through PayPal.

Something that my brain didn’t quite register in time is that I’d possibly want to have a logo-less version of this piece polished and available to be put up here. So unfortunately I don’t have the most polished logo-less piece in the world, and I deeply apologize for this. However if you’re able to look over some of the rough edges that the logo was previously covering up, then you are entirely free to download and use this however you please.

I have a download link to the full resolution (1920x1080) pictures (plus some little bonuses) HERE!

In retrospect this video write up wasn’t as impressive and as grandiose as I had previously hoped for, and this will hopefully resolve itself with time as I build up a fan base and figure out more things to talk about with these write ups. But hopefully what I’ve put out so far gives you a little bit of insight into how I develop my videos and I plan on continuing these for every single essay video that I put out there. If you have anything you want me to talk about in the next video write up, please send me an email at countunderscore@gmail.com.

-Count_

[gamerszone2019-blog]

Kill la Kill The Game: IF Review

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/kill-la-kill-the-game-if-review/

Kill la Kill The Game: IF Review

At first glance, Kill la Kill The Game: IF passes the fighting game smell test. With sharp cel-shaded cutscenes, including loving recreations of critical moments from the beloved Hiroyuki Imaishi anime series and the endorsement of its animation studio Trigger, developer APlus and publisher Arc System Works want you to see and get excited about the prospect of an authentic, official Kill la Kill game. Unfortunately, authenticity isn’t everything. Kill la Kill The Game: IF feels like a stripped-down version of the prototypical 3D anime fighter. Its loose, mashy fighting fails to create the opportunities for strategic depth I’ve come to expect in great fighting games. Meanwhile, its story and single-player modes feel less than substantial.

Kill la Kill The Game: IF is a fairly basic version of what we’ve seen in other 3D anime fighting games like Jump Force or the Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm series. Unlike those games, Kill la Kill’s matches are one-on-one duels, and take place on dull, flat arenas. The fighting is very simple, with each character using his or her own versions of the same three attacks: a close-range punch or strike, a chargeable long-distance projectile or dash attack, and a slow-moving heavy hit that breaks your opponent’s guard. Fighters also have flashy, powerful versions of each attack called deathblows, which are limited by a special meter. They do more damage, though not so much that pulling one off feels particularly satisfying, even if they come with a short cutscene intro to make them feel more epic.

Though the controls are simple, the characters attack styles are not completely identical. Certain characters have variations that may push you to approach a fight in specific, sometimes unintuitive ways. For example, Ira Gamagoori, a BDSM-inspired character who whips himself to build up power, takes a very small amount of damage when he blocks to build up his strength, which then makes his attacks more powerful. Other character’s eccentricities are much smaller – Uzu Sanageyama, the oversized, armored fighter with a wooden sword, has a charged version of his heavy attack that teleports directly behind his opponent. Unfortunately, there are no character-specific tutorials to help you learn each of their variations, so you will need to figure out how each character works through trial and error.

Though the attacks and fighting styles distinguish one character from another, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that you’re just mashing your way to victory.

“

Though the attacks and fighting styles distinguish one character from another, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that you’re just mashing your way to victory. There’s a system in place where blocks beat attacks, guard breaks beat guards, and dodges beat guard breaks, but with an air dash that can reach your opponent from any distance and a lot of single-button combos, it still feels like just rushing in and mashing an attack button is the optimal strategy. You can spend half your special meter to burst out of combos using the Bloody Valor system, a mid-match minigame-style mechanic, but it doesn’t do a great job of teaching you this. If you don’t know it, or recently used Bloody Valor already, then trading strings of hits doesn’t feel particularly enthralling when dishing it out, and can be exasperating when you have to take it.

Bloody Valor is ostensibly a “comeback” tool, offering some recourse when you’re in a one-sided fight, but it does more harm than good. It’s a rock-paper-scissors-style power-up mechanic, letting you spend half of your special meter to gamble for a battlefield advantage (such as healing your wounds or recharging your super meter) and raise your Ketsui level, which makes you generally more powerful. If you initiate Bloody Valor and win, you do it again to gain an even larger advantage. If you can win multiple challenges in a row, you’ll charge up a match-ending super move called a Lost Fiber Secret Art.

And if you start a Bloody Valor and lose? You lose a little health. There’s little incentive not to try it as often as possible, especially if you’re outmatched, which breaks up the flow of the fight in an unwelcome way. I’m not a fan of injecting random, tide-turning game mechanics into fighting games. Putting stat boosts and a match-winning attack at the end of a minigame separates the prospect of winning from your skill in combat, and undermines the fight as a whole.

The best defense may be Kill la Kill The Game: IF’s incomprehensible camera. Rather than following your character, the camera floats freely around the arena allowing your fighter to move out of focus or even all the way to the background, making it difficult to keep track of what you’re doing. There were times, particularly while playing the story mode, when I lost track of my fighter because the camera didn’t move as anticipated. There’s no auto-center button or way to turn the seemingly randomized camera off. You have to learn to go with the flow, which… I’d rather not. Fighting games are intense enough when you can keep track of the action.

Once upon a time at Honnouji Academy…

Despite being a fighting game, and therefore inherently multiplayer-focused, Kill la Kill The Game: IF puts single-player first. Its primary mode is its story-driven campaigns, a pair of abridged retellings of the original anime series’ final two-thirds -with some key differences that bring the playable fighters to blows in ways the original story wouldn’t allow. You should know right from the get-go: It’s all fan service, and you’re expected to know the whole Kill la Kill saga before you start, which makes sense for a tie-in game but feels limiting.

Though the campaigns are short – each one takes about three hours to complete – both feel like they drag on for far too long. The campaigns follow Satsuki Kiryuin and Ryuko Matoi, respectively, and are only ten fights apiece, including a mix of standard one-on-one matches, three-way duels, and brawler-esque engagements with dozens of generic “cover” opponents. The multi-character fights and brawls add some variety, but all three types are used repeatedly so they don’t feel especially refreshing by the end. Plus, that wayward camera has a tendency to make some of the fights borderline unreadable.

Long cutscenes separate each match, full of expository dialogue that rushes you through the plot.

“

The real issue with the campaigns are the wait times between each fight. Long cutscenes separate each match, full of expository dialogue that rushes you through the plot. Though the cutscenes look good and are well shot, it doesn’t feel like much is happening if you know major plot points already, and isn’t effective storytelling if it’s new to you. Instead, the changes sprinkled throughout feel like they exist to facilitate fights, rather than make the story interesting in a new way.

The poor balance of cutscene to combat also seems to be in service of the story. During the campaigns, you’re restricted to the protagonists’ perspectives, to the point where you wind up watching fights take place in cutscenes rather than playing them yourself. In some cases, you watch multiple scenes and progress through entire chapters of the story without fighting at all.

Even if it weren’t mostly recounting events fans already know – key moments from the anime like the Naturals Election and the Great Culture and Sports Festival take up multiple chapters – the perpetual wait to pick up your controller and start playing tested my patience to the point where I wasn’t particularly interested in watching.

While I didn’t love how long and redundant the cutscenes were, I will say there were very well made. Kill la Kill The Game: IF employs an elegant cel-shaded art style both in gameplay and cutscenes. It isn’t as inventive as the multi-faceted art style of the anime, but it’s clean, looks good, and really does feel like watching an anime in its rare, exciting moments. In cutscenes, the art gets an aesthetic boost from strong cinematography, which makes many sequences, especially action scenes, look striking.

But the story fails to give you additional insight into the characters or world of the anime series. Despite the fact that it was “supervised” by the Kill la Kill anime scriptwriter Kazuki Nakashima, giving it an air of canonical importance, IF’s story bends over backwards to make sure you know that what happens is of absolutely no consequence to the story you already know.

The story is clearly the centerpiece of Kill la Kill The Game: IF, so much so that you are required to play at least some of it before doing anything else – the training and local versus modes only unlock after completing the first chapter. Online play isn’t available until after chapter six. I, and I think most fighting game fans would agree, that this is a cardinal sin. There will always be people who just want to jump into fighting with friends or simply don’t care about the campaign. Forcing you to consume even a small part of it feels, quite frankly, out of touch.

A Note On Online Play

Kill la Kill The Game: IF offers sturdy but sparse online support. Players have access to casual unranked play, which relies primarily on lobbies and trading codes to sync up with specific players. There’s also a ranked mode that uses more traditional matchmaking where your wins and losses get recorded on global leaderboards. Separating the different types of matchmaking feels needlessly restrictive and may make it harder for players to find matches one way or the other. On the plus side, in the five matches I was able to play on PlayStation 4 ahead of launch I experienced no serious lag or connection issues.

You’ll also unlock new modes, various collectibles, and other characters as you progress, growing the paltry starting roster of six fighters to a still meager ten, including secondary versions of the two story protagonists. Two more characters are coming as free DLC later “this summer,” but even 12 characters feels light when the anime is jam-packed with weird, wonderful supporting characters who could add variety and personality to the lineup.

In addition to the story mode, Kill la Kill The Game: IF has a few extra single-player modes, including a training room, a single-player Survival Challenge mode where you continue fighting opponents until you die, and Covers Challenge, which is a wave-based brawler mode where you fight groups of generic enemies similar to some of the fights from the story campaigns. Though these modes present options to play solo using any fighter, including the more interesting characters not usable in the main campaigns, they lose their luster quickly with such a small roster.

Source : IGN

[nachiroux]

so i wrote up a review/rambling about persona 5

you can either read it [here on twitlonger] or you can read it placed underneath the read more cause its super long and i dont want to make your dashboards gigantic

Persona 5: My Thoughts since it has been consuming my soul for the past few weeks, I thought it was about time I wrote up my thoughts proper on Persona 5 and not just some weird half sentence that I garbled at the bottom of the ocean. i'm not really formatting this much it's gonna be a lot of rambling and a bit scattershot but please bear with me. lets do this in categories and then an overall, shall we GAMEPLAY, THE BATTLE PART: How You Gonna Shoot With A Toy Gun the gameplay of Persona 5 is, well, incredible. it takes the one more system used since Persona 3 and refines it to an absurd degree. while the weaknesses of shadows still kind of don't make sense at all and the guessing game aspect of battles remains, everything else has been improved. battles are really, really fast and super satisfying. attacks look good and snappy, and nothing feels like it's dragging too long. but what Persona 5 adds to this mix that really puts it over the edge is demon negotiation. not only does it bring some of the most interesting aspects from Shin Megami Tensei proper into Persona (using your enemies as your new strength), it also gives a lot more value and strategy to knocking dudes down. in P3 and P4 your party members would ask "hey we gonna all out attack fam" and there was never really a time you would say no because, why? but in P5, a full knockdown results in a holdup, where you can extract money, items, or the demon itself as a persona out of the mix, as well as being able to just do an all out attack. this is F A N T A S T I C. it enhances a lot of aspects of the battle system, and really makes hitting weaknesses and figuring out what to do more satisfying. and as the icing on the cake, P5 added the baton pass system to battles, making them even more fluid and satisfying. in short, it lets one character, after hitting a weakness, pass their extra turn to another character, while boosting their stats for that attack. it allows for a lot more strategy and creativity, where your whole team can contribute. some of the most fun I've had with turn based battles. GAMEPLAY, THE RUNNING PART: I Gotta Have Me A Good Steal one of the more lackluster portions of Persona games was wandering around in dungeons, whether it be a giant tower to the moon or some bathhouse. outside of visual elements, they all bled together. floors were randomly generated to some extent, and you just wandered around, grabbing some items and fighting shadows that randomly spawn. it was serviceable, but nothing spectacular. P5 takes this and cranks everything up to 11 million. proper dungeons are now actually designed experiences, with shadows and layouts specifically made for each dungeon. every dungeon has its own mechanics and style that plays up the unique aspects of the person whose heart you're traipsing around on. but the biggest change is the way your character moves. with a full stealth system that's a blast to use, jumping from hiding spot to hiding spot, a lot of P5's dungeons are somewhat stealth oriented. being seen by shadows raises security and makes things harder, and if you're seen too much you gotta bail. but through ambushing enemies, you can undo the security raises of your mistakes, while also getting the huge advantages of an ambush. as well, being able to climb around the environment, jumping up walls and flipping around just feels and looks great. god damn. and just in case you really miss those randomized dungeons, don't worry! there's a fun and not too long randomized dungeon a la tartarus/midnight channel in the game too! GAMEPLAY, EVERYWHERE ELSE: I Can't Believe This Is Three Parts. Jeez here's where persona 5 doesn't make astronomical leaps and bounds forwards, but just some nice improvements. outside of dungeons/battle P5 follows the Persona formula. everything's on a timetable, and you can do one (1) thing in the day and one (1) thing in the evening, except if you A: are in a story event where for some reason your free time goes missing B: go to a dungeon and can't hire your teacher to give you a massage C: your cat says you're sleepy the overworld of P5 and the various locales in it are pretty interesting and fun to walk around in, but there's a lot of areas that exist solely for hanging out with confidants. if you just play properly though you really don't get much to any use out of them, and that's kind of disappointing for me. I wanted to visit more zones but what we have is very memorable. what P5 adds to the formula is the various boons granted by confidants, most notably Temperance (which you should really max ASAP that's a pro-tip) that will change certain things in daily life and in dungeons, but we'll get to that part later. from giving you access to more jobs, to allowing you more free time in class, to unlocking more fortune telling options, there's a lot of stuff to do. P5 also has a small selection of minigames to pass the time, from B A S E B A L L to F I S H I N G to C R O S S W O R D S and more. what's nifty is each minigame also can serve a practical purpose and raise social stats but we'll get there. the map showing you if confidants will rank up or not is nice, and fast travel is very generous in this game. not much else to say here. I don't get lost so that's nice SOCIALIZING: Who Taught You ___, Nasty Crime Boy ah.... confidants. aka social links, they're the meat of the non-dungeon crawling experience of P5. like in previous games, most major story characters that aren't complete scum or trying to kill you will have confidants, with ranks 1-10. this is where the visual novel/dating sim components show up, and there's not a ton to say here so i'll keep my rambling down to a minimum. each confidant has their own little side story that you partake in when they're free, where you read and then give answers when prompted. it can go as menial as "hey wanna go eat ramen" to "please come with me to help me save a little girl's life." based on your answers, you get points towards the next link. this game does something nifty where when you get points (1-3 notes) there will be a little additional uh, graphic and sound that plays that's kinda subtle but tells you that you have enough points to immediately rank them up again. that's a really good addition. you can romance people too, and you can romance EVERY girl in the game. who cares how much older than you they are just do it loser (don't actually) but here's where confidants change a lot in p5 from past things. in P3 they kinda were just to fuse hot personas, while in P4 they were mainly for that but also unlocked some abilities, but not a ton. mainly party members. in P5, every confidant gives several abilities that will greatly enhance your experience with the game and make your character grow a lot stronger. from giving party members the ability to endure blows and baton pass, as well as recover from ailments, to the even more absurd non party member abilities. some confidants let you swap party members in battle, allow you to breeze through negotiation, get double money, reduce security levels, buy and modify weapons, get free time in class, read fortunes and get bonuses based on that, and so on. this makes (nearly) every confidant not just useful on a "hey man i wanna fuse a good persona" level, it makes them invaluable to your characters growth. it makes the visual novel part much more important, and more enjoyable. plus they're (nearly) all fantastic little stories that flesh out each character and the world around you. lastly and real fast, most confidants will give you a mission to go complete in the other dungeon, mementos, in order to help them through their struggles and advance their story. these minibosses give out a lot of good money, items, and exp, as well as being a fun part of the story and something else to do in mementos. it's neat. oh yeah and confidants are now no longer on such a rigorous schedule like previous games, and a lot more accessible and free flowing. its nice SOCIAL STATS: Eating A Burger Made Me The Perfect Man i'm devoting a whole section to this. buckle up kids. P5 has 5 social stats, knowledge, guts, proficiency, kindness, and charm. each of them has 5 levels of progression. (you start at 1). some stats, like proficiency, give tangible boosts. however, almost all social stats are progressed solely for the sake of starting and advancing confidants. you need X level knowledge to start Y confidant, you need X level proficency to advance Y confidant at rank Z, and so on. raising social stats is accomplished through various overworld activities and whatever, and take up time. however, in order to max all confidants, and most of them honestly, you're going to need rank 5 in every social stat. sure, fine, its a conscious design decision. here are my complaints, notarized 1: first time through, it's not communicated well what activity boosts what, but more importantly how MUCH each activity boosts a stat. 2: while you can check what stage each social stat is at, there is no way to tell how much you've progressed to the next rank. just pour it in and pray. 3: some stats (KINDNESS) are very difficult to raise optimally as they may require rng events to give you the full 3 note boost as opposed to 2 notes. 4: some confidants give you social stats which WOULD be good but they only give you them on rank up. outta here w/that without prior knowledge, your first month or two of P5 is gonna be filled with poor scheduling decisions because how could you know that X activity is actually terrible for raising the stat you want? and since it takes up time (usually an evening slot), it really hurts your confidants overall. with good decisions and scheduling, you can actually max confidant (minus autos that will just progress through plot) with nearly a month to spare, but that waste and sufffering of the start may make you miss out on several confidants. it's a good idea, but still needs work and feels really cheap sometimes. (WHY DO I NEED 5 PROFICIENCY TO HELP A GIRL GARDEN WHAT THE FU) PLOT: Ya'll Wanna Read Some Anime this will be much lighter than the rest because I don't wanna spoil the plot so here's very broad strokes. the plot of Persona 5, overall, is very compelling and enjoyable. it's not perfect by any means, and has its dips in quality (anyone want a burger), but I enjoyed pretty much the whole thing. we'll get into characters separately BUT i found the narrative to be much more engaging than Persona 4 and as compelling as Persona 3. it's much darker than P4, but still maintains moments of levity and fun, even when dealing with serious issues. its take on rebellion, the subconscious, and shadows are all very enjoyable. it does suffer from a few frankly stupid conflicts between party members to build ~drama,~ but 99% of the time interactions between the characters and the world around them are wonderful. a real sense of camaraderie and friendship between the cast is evident and helps shape the narrative. it does suffer from a bit of "wow some of these kids are stupid/lack common sense" but its nowhere to the severity of Persona 4's "gee who is that on the tv gotta wait a week to find out" style stupidity to keep the plot rolling and not solve things instantly, but it will occasionally hit that type of thing. but that's a nitpick as it happens infrequently. to try and not spoil anything, the ending arc does suffer from a bit of P4 syndrome too wherein the last and true conflict kind of comes out of nowhere, but less so this time. it's still something I'll say is a minor problem, but the actual writing and gameplay/moments of the final arc ultimately redeem that. on replay you can see SOME hints but it's not built up enough In My Onion. hope i didnt spoil anything lets move on CHARACTERS: I Was Gonna Type Waifu Wars And Then Jesus Wept again, I will attempt to dance around spoilers here. I feel like the characters of P5, with how much emphasis is placed upon your bonds with them and the existence of the confidant system, deserve their own little writeup. with two exceptions I love every single major character/confidant in the game. one of them has their character arc go up in flames for a bit to stir up ~drama~ but ultimately regains its footing by the end, while the other just sucks. some confidants may be a bit slow to start (DEVIL) but by the end of each confidant i was very attached to each character, and was utterly charmed by them. the main cast are all extremely charming with full-ish character arcs approaching p3 level. in fact, one of my favorite smaller details in the game is the small conversations characters have while driving around in mementos. the writing and character banter is well written and charming, with characters all having their own distinct personality and vibe. this helps the school life portions of the game a LOT, as now school trips and various other events where in other games I cursed them for stealing my free time (mainly p4 but p3 has a few), they're snappy and fun. there's some anime thrown in there so if you can't stand a bit of melodrama and long winded rambling, then some things might not land as much for you as they did for me, but I feel that P5's characters have something for everyone. no matter who you are, you're going to love at least ONE of the many confidants available. ART/SOUND: I Have Listened To Whims Of Fate Over 100 Times And Don't Plan To Stop I'm no art critic and I'm not gonna pretend to be one so I'll keep this short. the art design in P5 is some of the best, if not the best I've ever seen, at least for my tastes. every little aspect of this game is incredibly stylized, from the more dramatic like all out attack finishers, to even the simple things like menus. everything is positively BURSTING with style and personality, all while functioning as a slick and fun interface. and I mean everything. even the text boxes. if you haven't played it, just look up the all out attack compilation. or look at screenshots of the menus. it's really hard to put into words just how happy it makes me. the color scheme of red, black, and white also reminds me a lot of persona 2 and i love you p2 please remake p2 as one complete game package atlus finally, the music. every single persona game (and nearly every megaten game) has a fantastic soundtrack, and this one is no exception. honestly? just go listen to it and see for yourself. the vibe/aesthetic they chose for P5 is one that I don't really have the ability to describe for I am an uncultured fool who plays games all the time, but it is SO good. while I still prefer the P3 soundtrack mainly due to bias, the p5 soundtrack is one of the most solid overall soundtracks in any game. to add to this, the sound DESIGN of p5 is also phenomenal. music changing with the weather, small details of adding instrumentation to a song over time and progression, and the use of leitmotif all really sell the game. the vocals still have a bit of "yeah thats a non native speaker singing english" but the songs are so good and the singing is so good anyways that it doesn't really matter. because its fun here's my p5 song ranking 1: whims of fate 2: with the stars and us 3: nothingness...? 4: days when my mother was there 5: life goes on/rivers in the desert 6: theyre all so good help OVERALL: I Am Erect in summation, this game is really, really, REALLY good. i'll wait for the dust to settle in my soul to rank it properly, but this is easily one of the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had in a video game. the best Persona game easily, and possibly the best SMT/Megaten game as well. this may sound like hyperbole but this game is genuinely everything I've wanted out of an RPG. atlus is really knocking it out of the park lately with SMT4: Apocalypse being one of the best RPGs ever made and now this. i cannot recommend it enough. even if you usually don't enjoy turn based RPGs I still recommend giving it a try. I usually hate visual novels, and I enjoyed every second of my tons of reading. just be warned, this is a longass game. my first playthrough took around 70 hours, and I generally get through games faster than most. ng+ is fun too to send this ridiculously long thing off, I will now proceed to list my top 10 characters of P5 because I love lists. 0-BIAS: Takemi 1: Futaba 2: Sae 3: Sojiro 4: Makoto 5: Yusuke 6: Iwai 7: Chihaya 8: Morgana 9: Hifumi 10: Kawakami GORO AKECHI: Goro Akechi THE WORST ONE: Shinya tl;dr: Persona 5 is one of the greatest games ever made and it made me feel alive thanks for reading everyone, and as a sinful man once said; "Please don't troll me online."

[snowtoroislord]

List 93: Top Ten Anime I want to make a Game for

I love video games. I would easily say it is my favorite hobby I do. Usually it takes a backseat nowadays to me doing other things in my life but it is truly the one I find the most passion in. That got me to thinking what anime would I want to turn into games? I started visualizing genres and unique ways to turn them into games and my imagination went wild with the idea. It really was one of the most fun ideas I’ve come up with in a while. I ordered these in less of quality and more of how proud I was of each idea I came up with for them. I also put genre and studio making it to make it really feel more alive to me. Game on!

10: Kids on the Slope

Genre: Rhythm    Company: Nintendo

This was a given with the show in question. I sat for a while thinking over whether it or Your Lie in April deserved this spot and settled on Kids for a few reasons. I figured a time piece of music would be very neat to see in gaming. We always get certain series or styles but never one time period aside from like when Rockband did stuff for Kiss. You can play one of 4 instruments: piano, drums, trumpet, and double bass. The music selection would all be songs from the anime and time period. A jazz based rhythm game made by men in Nintendo who grew up in that time period. The would for sure connect with the title and bring out the music quality to the highest standard. 

9: Gurren Lagann

Genre: Mech Open World Adventure   Company: Monolith Soft

This one would have you building your own mech form the start and working through the story of Gurren Lagann with it as a part of Team Dai Gurren. Once the 7 year gap happens you would have tons of side quests and ways to upgrade and remodel your mech while taking on tons of challenges. Monolith loves mechs to death so I figure who better to display Mechs at the most over the top in gaming form. References to other famous Mech anime would be nice too as a way to make it feel special. Unlockable mechs for certain Gundams and the Evas from Neon Genesis would be a true delight. 

8: Rurouni Kenshin

Genre: Action  Company:  Rocksteady Studios

Following the story of Kenshin beat for beat is what I want here. The game would be split into 3 parts. The first would be a section in Tokyo where basic missions and gameplay is taught while getting through the start of the story. Then you would get to Kyoto and have a much larger area to see and the story would build up to the Shishio arc. Then you would end off with Kenshin’s backstory and Enishi’s arc with a Tokyo filled with tons more to do. You would have also side unlockable stories playable with Sanosuke, Yahiko, Kaoru, and Saito. I chose Rocksteady for it’s great open world design, and combat flow in the Batman games. I think bringing that to a Kenshin game would be fantastic. Mix their love to drop hidden facts about the city and characters with obtainable secrets and this game would be a love letter to Kenshin fans. Telling the story from start to finish and constantly giving you new abilities as you work through the story. 

7:Kill la Kill

Genre: Beat’em Up   Company: Platinum Games

Name a company that makes better crazy action games then Platinum? With Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising alone I’m convinced they could make a wonderful adaptation of the Kill la Kill world and make the action feel like the anime did. I’m undecided if I want the actual story to be the focus or just let them make an original plot within the world. I’d rather like to play Ryuko though and kick ass with my scissor blades. So I think I lean more towards that for sure. 

6:Fullmetal Alchemist

Genre: Action Adventure    Company: Bandai Namco

Haha Looks like I forgot to type something here the first time!

FMA’s game would follow the story of the series of course(brotherhood), and you would play everyone from Ed to Mustang to Winry. Varieties of gameplay styles and modes to keep it fresh while hitting the player hard with the feels of the story itself. It would hit all the marks and try to be a little bit of everything just like the actual series. Bandai makes tons of great titles like the Tales series so I trust them to figure out a way to make it all come to life with a perfect equivalent exchange. 

5: Fate Series

Genre: Open World Action-RPG    Company: From Software

Fate is a pretty dark world and the set up of the Holy Grail War is fantastic. Give players the option to choose from almost a hundred options of heroes of the past, present, and future and let them take part in the war. Letting you improve as you battle and explore trying to find intel on the other competitors would allow you a ton of freedom while playing. Mix all the options and each playthrough would be unique as well. I think a risk/reward battle system like From Software is known for would work here. You are rewarded for being more risky but at the same time show all your skills and you could be at a disadvantage when trying to fight future heroes. I think it would be a very challenging battle of wits and reflexes at least. 

4: Kuroko no Basuke

Genre: Sports    Company: 2K Games

Anyone remember NBA Jam and NBA Showtime? The hilarious bombastic basketball video games that would let you dunk from almost anywhere on the court. Imagine the basically superpower of the Kuroko cast in video game glory. Let people play through the story or exhibition matches and let them go crazy with every character’s special traits. Heck you could even make a few fake new character with weird abilities just to spice it up a bit. I’ll let a sports series expert handle this one and make it crazy as can be. 

3: Magic Kaito

Genre: Heist Stealth    Company: Level-5 

With Persona 5 on the cusp on being released world wide it made me think, why not a Kaito game in a similar vein? You could play through a multitude of scenarios made for the game including all sorts of characters from Aoko to Conan. Be Kaito Kid and use what the game gives you to make it through the police, other adversaries, and of course Conan again to best them all as the phantom thief! I think this game would be full of laughs and creative level design open to player to explore. Think like a funny Hitman game, where you steal instead of kill. Any fan would be in for a treat and I think Level-5 has a huge track record that would reassure me. 

2: Spice & Wolf

Genre: Economics/Dating Sim   Company: MPS Labs

From the creators of Civ. I want a fantastic simulation title. You play through the world of Spice & Wolf as Kraft Lawrence and try to get Holo to her home. The game would have travel segments like Oregon trail, a romance meter to build with Holo, and a very complex world economics system to learn and master. If you are able to be the best at all of them you will get the best and true ending of the game. Anything from death to Holo leaving you can happen, its up to you to master the market and your heart to get the true end! 

1: The Girl Who Leapt Through TIme

Genre: Choice Based Adventure    Company: Naughty Dog

So, I was thinking lets have a new character that you play in the same world as the Girl Who Leapt Through Time. You are given 100 jumps to make. And the game takes place over the course of 3 months. So around 90 days. Every day you play through like a simulation game building relationships, leveling up certain personality and knowledge stats and overall learning about the world. At any time over the 3 months you can jump back in time after completing any new task. Which ones are important and which ones are truly unimportant in the grand scheme? Maybe they are all important. Work your way to a happy ending and not the bad one you see in your dreams on day 1 of the story. It would make players really try their hardest to appreciate every little decision and I think I want the perfect graphics of realism from Naughty Dog and their little touches to make this a true classic through time. 

Disclaimer: I do not own or claim to own any of the above pictures. The credit goes to the original creators of each and thus will be considered theirs. Enjoy the pics!

What anime would you make a game out of? I tried to use a variety of genres and ideas but I’m sure there are tons more out there! Tell me somewhere on the net!

See ya Space Corgis!