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Fangame Meta
Keeping Track and Classifying a Fangame?Wasn't a big fan of relic castle getting sniped out of existence and that was sort of a major shame. The RPG maker games scare me because it’s almost like Pokémon but then you get some insane quality curves with the ones considered the good ones as I’m researching into it. Or you learn that there's some insane behind the scenes stuff that no one else talks about ever. I don’t think I have the time or mind energy to invest in the longer projects (like I hear that reborn and rejuvination are the Huge ones but they're also incredibly HUGE) so I’ll stick to the shorter ones that were made for gamejams or the ones I’ve already started playing and then dropped off the face of the earth (remember when everyone was into playing infinite fusion?)
With a lot of hacks being more about regional enhancements to cover the dex and hard modes, a lot of early fangame stuff has slowly become less noted since a lot of new regional story stuff is mostly done on RPG maker things.
This page isn't redundant since there's still a ton of fangames I haven't gone through though. I miss fakemon hacks a bit, but my favorite types of fan hacks are ones that are absolutely unhinged and just a person playing and having fun.
The argument for both a skip button, and quality over quantity
Note: Can't believe it's almost been 3 years since I wrote this...
Pokemon Platino was abruptly put on halt due to me essentially taking my shuffleboard tactic and applying it to many
Pokémon fangames I had downloaded, the bulk of which were sitting on my hard drive for years due to me essentially finding
a single website centric to them and in a haze downloading basically the entire website. I am not normal.
When I wipe, the intention was to start a new pokemon game or move onto the next one (but not with nuzlocke rules),
but turns out there’s a huge gap in well, everything related to fangames.
Some will be a reskin of Pokémon but replaced with digimon. Some will have maps that are unhinged. Some are broken and unfinished but if you use walk through walls you’ll end up in a bizarro world where they shoved all of the features they wanted to have in but the downside is there is no music and the game crashes randomly so it feels like you’re playing a creepypasta (I’m planning on writing an article on this one in particular.) (this was in reference to Cintrine) Some hit the tier of absurdity, but also unfortunately have severely outdated jokes mixed in with other types. Or the author intended for it to be a figpost but I misread the situation.
Pokemon fangames are also simultaneously a content filter because most of these games go undocumented so the creator’s full intentions are forever unknown. Like sure, they end up posted on pokecommunities but then the thread gets locked or the origin download gets lost or everything is locked behind a discord that can’t be checked.
It seems like people equate “difficulty” sometimes with “completely blindsiding the player with overwhelming them and padding out the runtime.” Like, why are the Pokémon in some of these games so low level and then the trainers levels jumped up so high? Or did I get lost…? If that’s the case, where’s the medium gap? And this applies to a few of them, not all. If the dev really want to just be fire red again, then I really don’t need to play it if its just a 1 to 1 version of it, you feel? And is it okay for me to say “I really wish there were more new reigons and fakemons instead of a game just being firered balanced edition quality of life all 900+ pokemon and EV/IV level training required?” Like, the reason I argue for quantity over quality is for some of those I come across I grow tired of the same pidgeys and rattatas. At least make me go through Kanto backwards or something. And the music department is the same. The way I got across that too, for games that kept the same soundtrack, was that I started playing the original anime’s score. It’s a fun thing to do when not mindlessly grinding because the dev decided to make every single pokemon in the area level 20 but stick you with a level 3 low tier mon.
I definitely started more pokemon games than I finished, judging by the clear parties… but that’s alright.
Let’s me figure out which ones I enjoyed more than others and more importantly, which ones are like 30 minute demos I can toss out.
Something that I need to make awareness of is that most of the time I’m genuinely sincere about enjoying hacks and concepts I should be more critical towards. Like, I know I should make fun of certain things for not being good or question them for being convoluted plot wise or just plain “too dark” for the standards in question of being a “good pokemon game”, which is likely the category of the game I was just checking out . But I’m also a kusoge enjoyer and chuuni at heart that understands some of the things I play outside of the “so good it could be official” standouts are either A. Developed by people who don’t get hacking and balancing or B. Made years ago before CRFU and HexManiac and Disassembly changed the way hacks worked or C. Written by someone who watched a lot of anime and really wanted to write an fanfic for pokemon and wanted to make it playable. I’d rather take something that plays it completely straight and expects you to go along with it rather than something that constantly goes and winks and says “hey, this is really silly, haha!” There’s no fun in that to me.
Pokemon as a world not counting the absurd dex entries and over the top evil teams is literally too nice for the dark interpretations because people will just randomly give you items and teach you moves and there’s free healthcare. The problem is that whenever people try to be dark it becomes far too over the top because subtlety is not a strong suit so I tend to handle things a lot better when out of the gate they're dark as opposed to "woah, that's dark!" and then the game goes back to being regular pokemon. Pick one or the other.
OG Regions
Dreamstone Mysteries:
What a charming game this is, 3 badges in and I’m having a fun time with the game’s sense of humor and intrigue with the plot. I’d say it’s almost official quality but the QOL stuff puts it somewhere a bit below OG game difficulty minus the areas where I was underleveled in spite of having a candy. Fun sidequest stuff, never felt like anything was too tedious aside from the thing I did where I decided to sidetrack the entire cave system of the game.
I was getting so pissed off at that yanmega from the boss fight but turns out that switching out to a type that was faster instantly blew that thing to smithereens
Regional Retakes
this is Probably the most conflicted I've felt about a hack tbh Adventures Red...?
Prelude to Adventures Red:
I’ve always wished there were more fangames/ hacks that covered events in the special manga or made reference to them but it seems like the only one that effectively does this is adventures red to mixed reception? It’s on my backlog but I am nowhere near playing it yet.
So within the game itself, the default name is u. So to me, this is a guy named... Yu.
I needed to post my own screenshot of this moment. Pokemon Adventure Red Chapter is a lot more bearable to me if I just avoid talking to the NPCs (it's weird, I'm quite pedantic about this hack's dialogue in particular and I don't know why.)
Giving Poliwhirl Ice Beam this early in the game has effectively turned this into a poliwhirl solo run because I keep going “I’m gonna freeze this guy” and then I do. I should really train my other mons.
last time I had just started the game and started cleaning house with Poliwhirl since the moveset is busted for early game and then I did not play the game again and started messing around in hexmaniacadvance and that’s as far as I got in general.
adventure red was a lot more bearable to me if i just became a manga purist and ignored every NPC with dialogue so far
because it's the absolute pits where every time the creator tries writing his own thing I go
"what is HE cooking" or “wait…let him cook” with no in between and it's clearly not just pokespe adventures Red,
this is adventures Red with a side of some slapdash fanfiction where anything goes because the game would be incredibly
short if it followed the red part of Pokespe 1 to 1 and there’s a bunch of made up side quests and I hate self aware dialogue
and I hate dialogue that is referencing pop culture media I haven't watched get away from me and my Pokémon game. the tone of the game
is a goddamn rollercoaster whenever it’s not the manga scenes and it's done in the most hamfisted ways possible where even I who have
tolerated far worse go "enough, I get it." Even korosu wasn't that jarringly two toned. Subtlety is not here in the slightest.
One thing that has been bothering me in the back of my head in regards to the references that made me literally slide off is that Red
would not have minecraft on his computer, the entire point of pallet town is that it's the one place that doesn't have rapid technological
expansion, he wouldn't even have a computer, the story takes place in the 90s and making things more modern is missing the purpose oh my god
I am just doing oldmanyellsatcloud.png
it's respectable how much this guy and his team(?) were able to do in the constraints of a GBA game with the unbound engine mechanically
but i'm also here baffled and perplexed by the various subplots especially when the orange islands portion starts which is solely the creator's
original content and he brutally murders one of his OCs to the point that there's a mugshot of her corpse and he makes the ash coma stuff real
while ripping off megaman battle network and carly carmine from yugioh 5Ds is here and trying to date Green and there's some kind of kanto war
reference and the only reason I know about this ahead of my game playing is because again, I was goofing around in HexManiacAdvance trying
to find out where the red portraits were stored in the data for art reference only to see that they weren't even there and I kept getting
snippets of the dialogue and scrolling back up to see what I had read as a double take. I had to scroll past the body portrait multiple times. Here's carly.
this is wild if this is the only way that people have actually been interacting with the pokespe chapters because
they're gonna go out of this somehow thinking that the bonus content and sidequest stuff and OC content is somehow canon
which has happened in youtube and reddit comments I've seen plus I noticed how much of this stuff revolves around cannibalism
due to a reddit comment noting that there's a trend between the sidequests and apparently it continues into the sequel and like... okay...
Is it good though? I mean, ignoring the weird dialogue and wanting to see what the first arc of the manga would be like as a playable game, yeah, can't go wrong with that, unless the game severely difficulty spikes later on which I wouldn’t know right now. The portraits are a nice touch which is why I wanted to see how they were pulled up (apparently they’re map sprites based on the tables I saw, but idk code or anything). The music is just base FRLG though so do what I did and start blasting anime fight music (preferably non Pokémon.) The other far more simple option is just reading the red arc, it’s only three volumes so it’s the shortest of all the arcs in Pokespe.
Everything else is my opinion of “I want to see where he's going with this” out of morbid curiosity since the dev's making a sequel with Orre in PSDK (French rpgmaker essentials alternative) but it really can't be called adventures red at that point.
How in the world is it supposed to loop back into manga canon with all the stuff this guy's added in already because it's gonna be really funny going from red's story about
fighting cults in orre while being like, 12, right into yellow crying over the fact that ratty evolved and is a giant rat now. Ludicrous .
I'm kinda more concerned scope wise because I've read on
the pokecommunity forums that there's a bunch of extra content that's going on like more
playable characters and stories and it's just one guy doing everything, that's nuts.
The thing getting me is the tonal whiplash
I keep swinging from “what the heck” to “this is clearly the greatest thing ever created and I cannot understand the vision”
Like if it was a fangame of just the OC content (which Vol 2 is doing) chances are I’d probably not even care
that much but since it’s sandwiched between Pokespe content which is children’s manga it’s too big of a gap
for me personally when people are getting randomly murdered and stabbed and eaten alive and junk
That would not happen
He would not say that
He would not do that
That’s the problem man
I’m out here and when I see the reference I point And go “oh, final fantasy”, oh, “battle network”, “i see you’ve watched one piece”, “get that movie out of here.”
Only if it’s not a goddamn roadblock, that twilight reference filtered me the first time.
i have a disease called “I don’t like twilight because one of my friends watched all of the movies during the pandemic and refused to shut up about them” and if there’s
anything I hate it’s when there’s a group of people or an individual who aggressively tries to get you into their thing
I think some side quests rely too much on a horror factor but the one that ultimately turns me off aside from the orange islands fest is the old man
murder cannibal horror story where Red is the only survivor.
That should not be a sentence anywhere near the word Pokemon.
Technical skill, incredible, art development, nice, difficulty,
whatever, but why did you think adding in the gratuitous amount of edge next to a children’s manga series alongside the random walk through walls uhhh... "impolite items"
was a good idea knowing the audience that pokemon is for. It’s so out of place. It's kind of funny sometimes but a real headscratcher.
I keep going between "is it good? is it me that has the problem, I can't see the vision? Uncanny?"
This statement will apply to many fangames coming in past, present, and future.
RPGXP Sessions
A slice of life, continued (rpgxp)
The dev is a final fantasy and crono trigger fan
Anyways, I’m continuing this save from god knows when, maybe early game, I’m only in the medieval world.
It feels… floaty.
Like rpgxp games feel like flash games almost in feeling like slightly distinct
You need a different mindset?
It could also be that they’re resource intensive since they aren’t particurarly meant for all of this stuff
The HP bars feel slower than DP.
Like what is the regular FPS for these games? It’s probably set by essentials.
The thing is it’s faster with everything but battles and easier to code and I’m pretty sure those are the main appeals, right?
It could also be slower because I have other stuff open aside from rpgxp.
True!
Infinite fusion, which will be my first hop into RPGXP maker pokemon games.
So far, its been the most unique one for allowing for such team building and versatility. I have no clue if I'll be continuing it all though since there was that huge pullout of artists because of like, AI generated dex entries.
I might not, but I'll find a different RPGXP game to play instead.RPGXP games Session 1
Early Completed Log
Pokemon Aurora (I liked this one even though it was just a demo up to a certain point. However, the map was terrible. Didn’t show me where I was properly at all.) I hate playing through one that’s good and with some potential and then it just… ends.
Re:Verse
Frightening how easily I’m amused by weird ass hacks.
There’s Big Green, alternate wormhole universes, no sense of a map, level balance is nonexistent, I ran into a raikou on route 1 and haven’t been able to replicate how it happened then proceeded to also see a frozen Entei while surfing where it just spawned in frozen.
It’s like the sister to Citrine where I know there’s a fully playable game in here but I have to connect the puzzles of this absolutely god awful map blend between sevii islands and regular ass Kanto where the warps are wrong too.
Dark Realm
Out of all the games so far somehow this one had me genuinely feel bad for the main character despite all of the contrivances of the story solely because they had an implied love interest bit it but everything else is trapped under being a pokemon game where they give you a lot of the resources to sweep the entire game so if the plot is silly then there’s not really a reason to be engaged. Dino Island will remain in my mind forever alongside the daikon radishes because I thought they were funny. It's so weird that the game ends like this because the creator vanished without ever finishing up the plot in the beta because there's a way to save the love interest, it was just never programmed into the game.
playing through the 3 gym demo of the corrupted wishes and only got 1 gym left to do I've never seen a pokemon game outside of emerald rogue EX have a team cap limit which is very fascinating these 3 mons also rotated out but my pikachu froakie pikipek trio fufilled the elements well enough because pikipek coverage goes crazy that things basically the early bird equivalent of a gun like fletchling was for gen 6 but the 1st gym leader whipped out a trevenant the game clearly is setup for you to catch the appropriate pokemon in the area to deal with the gym leader the game's pretty much a "we cut out the fluff of a pokemon game so most NPCs don't have weird dialogue and the game will point out how dumb it is to enter random people's houses" which is a -1 to me. Streamlined the experience and I think the girl rival is supposed to be a major plot thing I guess but this hasn't updated in years which is a trend for hacks where it's either complete but 1 to 1 a revamp with the unbound engine or it's complete and developed in like 2014 so that thing is basically considered unplayable by today's standards. People need to make new GBA hacks and stories because I still have yet to touch an essentials game. I still need to finish ruby destiny rescue rangers. Sorting out the OG 50 GB folder and then finding out there were additional games I added in between after the relic castle shutdown made the number 70 GB but since I also have a bad habit of finding random extra junk it's now 73 GB. That's where the GB for FF14 would've been alloted to if I could still run the game but I can't at all.
What about insert game here?
There's a LOT. I'll find them eventually.
Temporary Holding Spot.
