Ya Gorl

Ayo so I mentioned about how I was gonna do a series of reviews - That obviously never ended up happening lmao I ended up getting caught up with uni and other life stuff, and I ended up not having time to do anything except coursework and study. That kinda stopped me from playing any pokemon games, which kinda sucked, but I'm back now! I might continue this if I feel like getting back into pokemon at all, but here's the thing: I'm really burned out on mainline pokemon games. Sword and Shield left a sour taste in my mouth, and Scarlet and Violet seem to be a waste of £40 in all honesty. It's kinda hard to enjoy the older games when you can't stop thinking about the newer ones being so deeply terrible. That's not to say I'm not enjoying the fan-games though! I absolutely loved Reborn, and Rejuvenation v13.5 has a real breath of fresh air so far. I'm gonna put out a review of the latter once I've finished it, and if I'm bored then I might go play Reborn again so I can review it. Until then though, sorry for the lack of anything from here (I know that there was probably only like 1 or two people expecting anything but still), I look forward to doing more stuff in future ^_^ Hope y'all have a nice evening :3

Lin is your mummy uwu

CHOO CHOO MFS

Hey there! You might recognize me from some fangame reviews over in the fangame expose and in the Rejuvenation forum itself! Pls go read my Rejuvenation review I spent so long on that ;_; I decided that I wanted to take a crack at reviewing one of the official games this time, since Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl released earlier this year. Just be warned, this is in no way a concise review and I'm probably gonna skip over a lot of stuff for the sake of simplicity. I don't want this one to drag on too much, because Spoiler Alert I really don't have many strong feelings about the game. I'm gonna start with the positives, since it won't take me long to get through them. First: Faithfulness to the originals. Everybody knows that Ilca have essentially done a copy-paste of the originals and just gone over it with a sponge. It's not a bad thing, per se, it certainly helps with nostalgia, giving you that feeling that you're 12 years old holding your very first Nintendo DS. That and the art style itself is generally pretty nice in my opinion, even if it does make Cyrus completely non-threatening, and I like how the world has been nicely touched up. Second: Balancing and QOL. There's a decent amount of balancing done to help with the weird level growth going on thanks to the shitey EXP-share. Gym-leaders are generally harder than before and trainers manage to keep up with your skill. Also, even though I called it shitey two sentences ago, I do like the the EXP-Share helps remove a lot of the grinding from the game, which is always my least favourite part of RPGs. I quite like that TMs are now given to you in batches, meaning you don't have to be so careful about using them. Third: The Grand Underground. It's cool, I guess? I had some fun with it, it's pretty cool going around finding overleveled mons, and it's just generally very expansive and looks really cool. And honestly, that's kind of it. I really can't think of much that I can say is super great about this game. Now, the negatives (AKA the stuff you came here to see because everyone is a pessimistic ass these days): Numero Uno: Lack of originality. This kinda relates to my first positive; Team Ilca have essentially just copied the originals directly in terms of game design. There's no experience in the game you can't get from the originals, and they're inferior to Platinum anyway, so you may as well just emulate that instead of giving money to Nintendo or whatever retailer is trying to charge £50 for a nearly 14 year old game. It's depressing, in all honesty. We all hoped for a Heart Gold/Soul Silver style of remake, but what we got was a fresh coat of paint. Nombre Deux: A soulless feeling. In all honesty, these games just feel like an obligation. Their development was out of obligation, the advertising was out of obligation, and the online support so far has been out of obligation. GameFreak didn't seem to have much intention of remaking these games for the longest time, and in all honesty I can't blame them. Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum are fan favourites, and just doing them again would just be too easy. However, fans wanted them to be remade, so GameFreak caved and took the easiest option possible: They handed it over to some tiny company that nobody has ever heard of, and just let them do whatever. And you know what happened? Ilca took the easy route. Ilca took the originals, said "Yeah these are good, let's do this" and now we have copy-pasted games that disappointed everyone. But hey, GameFreak made money off of it, so it's all worth it for them I guess. Three: The Grand Underground. It kinda fucks with how fast you level-up, and the base building has no real fun or spark to it any more. The original base building was genuinely fun and had so many options, but now we have a load of statues I guess. Disappointing and uninspired. And that's the review, I guess. Like I said, I've not got many strong feelings either way, so I'll sum up what feelings I do have here. Is BDSP good? Eh, I guess. Should you buy it? Fuck no, that's a waste of money. As I said, there's no experience in the game that you can't get from the originals. It's a generally disappointing game that just doesn't really do anything particularly interesting or new. It is still fun, but that's honestly not by much merit of its own. But hey! Since you're here, I may as well tell you about my plans for the near future! I'm gonna be making a series of reviews of every mainline pokemon game that I've ever played, starting with Pokemon Heart Gold! I dunno when I'm gonna release it, but if you liked this and my other reviews, then maybe check it out when I get around to it! :) And now, I'd like to say thanks for giving this a read, and until next time, I wish you a good night.

Disclaimer: There are gonna be spoilers for episode 15, as well as subjective opinions and maybe some hot takes. I dunno, I've not even started writing the review lmao. Also I think I wrote half of this whilst half drunk, so don’t come here expecting a really in-depth analysis of the game. I’m gonna talk mostly about the story, but I might make an addendum covering the difficulty and other aspects of the game some time in the future. However, please don't expect one, because I'm not a game design expert. Hell, I'm not even a story design expert lmao. Regardless, I hope you have a good time reading this. I've wanted to review this game for quite a long time, since it's one of my favourite games ever made in all honesty. There's attention to detail on-par with, and even sometimes exceeding, that of Triple A games, and playing it has been a journey. I think I started playing around the release of V9, just before we were allowed to enter Grand Dream City. It was a really amazing experience for me, since my only other experience with Pokemon fan-games was some debatably good projects COUGH COUGH INSURGENCE COUGH COUGH (I put out a review of that one too, go find it somewhere in the Fan-Game Expose if you want more shitty rambling from some Bri'ish Girl). This game made me realise that fans can put in just as much effort and love into a game as a full-time big-budget game developer. Jan and the team have shown incredible determination, talent, and sheer fuckin willpower creating this game, and for that I must applaud everyone that has spent even a minute working on this game. I think I'll have to start this by talking about the story as a whole, given that it's one of the strongest aspects of the game. If you're reading this, you know how the game starts. You know what's happened so far, and I'm not gonna waste time going back over it (partially because I honestly don't remember some chunks of it lmao). With that out of the way, I'll say this: The story is fucking great. There's just the right amount of mystery, just the right amount of intrigue, and just the right amount of answers given to make you want to just keep on playing, purely to see what happens next. Some fan-games will have you going to places not to advance the story, but because you just kinda gotta go to a place. For example, in Pokemon Insurgence there are a number of times where you have virtually no story taking place between gym battles. If I remember correctly, this happens for the first time after the Auger reveal, at which point the pacing takes a nosedive all the way off a cliff. The way that Rejuvenation avoids this is by having each route be both challenging and useful for telling character's stories, such as Amethyst Cave being used to show us both Keta's introduction, and also for Melia's """"Death"""", or even the route after Sheridan1 being used for building character relation with Aelita and eventually Ren. However, this could also be seen as a downside to the game-play structure, given that the cut-scenes used for these plot moments generally take some time and can be tedious to get all the way through. They do make up for it by generally being entertaining or interesting, or both, and they almost always serve to further both the plot and the relations and stories of characters, giving a more dynamic feeling to the game world. The main problem I have with the story though has more to do with the characters. Throughout the game, you may notice that a lot of introduced characters seem to be Special in some way. Take Alice and Allen for example; They're introduced as some weird quirky kids from another dimension but turn out to be part of the Archetype. The same could be said about Melia, just with a different beginning. The problem that I feel this creates is that it takes away some level of accomplishment or achievement from the characters; When a character pulls through a struggle, it sometimes feels as if they've done it not because they've worked hard to accomplish a goal, but because they're Special and Created For Greatness. It's just a thing that nags at me a bit, and I do hope that Jan tones it down a bit with all the new characters being so Important. Then there's the sheer amount of characters involved with the story; As we progress, we keep on making more and more friends, and the cast keeps on expanding. This generally happens in games, but here the number of main/side characters is kind of bewildering. At the moment, the primary cast of characters includes: You, Melia, Ren, Venam, Alexandra, Damien, Aelita, and Erin (and you could maybe include Delpha, Reina, and Huey in that list, though Huey and Reina seem to primarily comic relief2), and this is without even thinking about all the villains too. Personally, I feel that this number of characters being involved so heavily in the story is pretty difficult to keep up with, given that each of them have their own stories, personalities, goals, and significance to the plot. This has been an issue steadily getting bigger as the game progressed, starting all the way back in Blacksteeple Castle with the Leaders+Braixen/Delpha group joining the main cast. What I feel this causes is something like Scope-Creep in that the story has too many characters and not enough reason to justify them all being there for the very end of the story. Jan has however corrected this somewhat by writing Saki, Adam, and Valarie out of the Xenpurgis plot, reducing the number of active characters a little, which I feel will put less strain on the story as a whole. Please bear in mind that this is primarily a personal issue, and it's not something that kills my enjoyment of the story as a whole. I do quite enjoy seeing the characters grow and help the story unfold, but the sheer quantity of them does get a little overwhelming at times. What does help is the constantly changing cast of characters; the Leader+Braixen gang do disappear for a while, only returning properly in V11, 12, and 13. Also I know that this probably comes across as more of a problem with the characters, but I feel like this is more on the side of the story since it’s primarily affecting the enjoyment of the story rather than the writing of the characters. Next up is game-play, which I slightly touched on in the story section. Like I said, story is very heavily interspersed throughout the game, with most areas being host to story events and important character interactions. Because of the design of many of the areas, the story serves more to support the feel of any specific place, rather than only to continue the story, such as the route after Sheridan3 being a place to connect further with Ren and Aelita. Instances like this make the region feel more like it’s actually got some life in it (given that characters actually acknowledge their surroundings in more than 2 lines per area), and that the world is dynamic without forcing too much down our throats. On top of that, area design in Rejuvenation has a distinct feel to it that no other fan-game has ever really captured; From the beginning of the game, every single place you visit feels like an actual place that could theoretically exist in the world, from the golden woods of Goldenleaf town to the dirty streets of East Gearen, all the way to the chilly shores of Akuwa town. This is all thanks to the amazing attention to detail in both the art and the area design, which I must congratulate all the artists of the game on. It does help that the layout is always creative, instead just the straight paths you often find in other games. Unfortunately, the throat forcing comes when we reach towns. A trend that may be noticed is that towns have significantly more dialogue than anywhere else, which is to be expected, but still may get on some people’s nerves. The issue isn’t that every town has dialogue, but that every town has A LOT OF DIALOGUE. If it were reeled in or dispersed a little more, then it may come across as a little less egregious. However, as it is, it sometimes comes across as feeling like towns are areas for exposition dumping. Of course, there are areas where this is important, such as in the League Administration Office and Goldenleaf Town. The problem though is balancing how much exposition is put throughout the story; nobody wants to play a game that’s 90% cutscenes of everyone explaining what everything means, otherwise we'd just be watching movies. This, however, is more likely a story issue, and should go in that part of the review, but I feel like it’s specific enough to towns that it warrants being in this section. Finally: Characters. This is probably the hardest part of the game to talk about, for two reasons. The first reason is, as I’ve complained about mentioned earlier, the number of characters in the story. First, I want to say that the fact that Jan has written the story around so many characters with interpersonal stories and relationships is honestly just incredible. So far, there’s 76 characters listed in the wiki. The only thing I can really say about that is HOLY FUCK JAN PLEASE TELL ME YOU’VE BEEN SLEEPING AND EATING PROPERLY- As I mentioned earlier, almost every cut-scene is used to service both character relations and stories, which is just such a nice change of pace from a lot of other games, even those big-budget Triple-A games. Something I really like about this is that characters are very rarely forgotten or left behind, though some tend to be written out of the story for a while. This is generally done to balance out their screen-time, and is actually handled fairly well, though does come across a little heavy-handed in places. The most recent example of this is the Leader Trio being written out of possibly the next few chapters, with them being gone so their memories can be returned. Whilst it's explained decently well enough, it’s the second time the whole group has been removed from the overarching story. Hell, Valarie’s return was barely explained at all, making her lack of appearance after her first disappearance feel kinda like character hate. Maybe if the three had returned a bit more gradually, like how we had Adam for a whole 2 chapters without most of his memories, it would have felt a bit better. Honestly though, I feel like there’s no other really major issues with having such a large character base. The second thing that makes talking about the characters difficult is because of how realistically they’re written. There are moments in the story where characters react to events in sometimes terrifyingly real ways, such as Melia’s breakdown when Venam is turned to stone, but also in very comfortingly real ways, like Aelita giving Melia some comfort in the Terajuma Jungle bridge cutscene. Each of these are written as if these characters are real people, and there’s nothing in them that you wouldn’t expect to happen if a normal person were put in their shoes. It's a very humanizing way to treat characters, and I gotta give mad props to Jan for his skill in writing them all so well. Hell, my absolute favourite cut-scene in the game is Saki being traumatized by Kieran and Clear4, purely because it’s so real and has a deeply horrifying feeling to it, thanks to both the dialogue, the pacing, and the art. Every second of that scene made me feel kinda sick to be honest, and that’s just brilliant to me. There are, however, some problems with character writing in this game; Most issues I have can be traced back to the fact that because the cast is so huge, there are some characters that just have less realistic writing. For example, Alexandra and Damien. I have a lot to say about these two, but I think I’ve been rambling about this game for long enough and aimlessly enough as it is. To put it shortly, I feel like these two are just kinda flat at the moment. Yes, I know that they’re new characters. Yes, I know they still have development to go through. But in all honesty, I’m worried that because they're so Important, they're gonna suffer a lack of depth and realism to them, which is the strong point of most of the characters. As it stands, they feel like a build up to more interesting characters, and I do see a lot of potential in them. I do hope that they get a bit more of a character arc later on, but as they are, they’re not the most interesting characters out there. You can also make similar contextualized points for other characters in their situation but these two are the ones that bothered me the most, likely because of their position in the story. Regardless, I do enjoy what presence and development these characters have, and I don’t think they bring down the story overall. So, to wrap it all up. Rejuvenation is a really great game with somewhat annoying issues that get in the way of some of the game’s enjoyment. However, the amount of polish, love, and genuine desire to write a compelling and enjoyable story more than make up for it in my eyes. Rejuvenation is the perfect expression of love for a series and the want to create something out of that love. Rejuvenation is a story about people in supremely unfair situations, where their lives have been set up like dominoes for higher powers, and their struggles and their triumphs are some of the most enjoyable writing in any game I’ve ever played. Is it perfect in every single place? Hell no, there’s shit loads of weird moments and some characters just aren’t that enjoyable. Do I still love the game? Absolutely. I'd have to give this game an 8/10. Not perfect, but fairly close to it. Thanks for sitting through whatever the hell this was, and I wish you all the best. If there's anything you think I could have worded better or should have talked about more, feel free to reply to this thread or dm me, I'm always open to learning how better to write <3 P.S. To Jan and the team, If you're reading this, please tell me- is Madame X just a shiny Leavanny somehow pretending to be a human? It'd explain why she's so physically strong, since pokemon are generally just much stronger than humans, and shiny leavanny looks like her anyway!! I know we saw some of her face from a Clear illusion, but that's an illusion, so~ Also fr thank you so much for making this game, everything you've done so far is a blessing and I would kiss you all gently on the lips if you wanted me to. Footnotes: 1 – I can never keep track of which route is which tbh, please don’t bully me ;_; 2 – I know that Huey gets some character building with all the Rune/Puppet Master stuff, but personally I feel like too much of his development is built around other characters. Most of his scenes have him paired with Reina, which kinda makes them feel like just one character. I will however acknowledge and congratulate on how well they’ve been written to work off of one another in terms of both comedy and personality. 3 – Again, I can’t remember which one it is, please don’t crucify me for this 4 – This probably makes me sound like a total sicko but you just gotta listen to me

Fr this looks absolutely gorgeous, props to everyone that designed and built all this.

The overall aesthetic of the game kinda reminds me of Phoenix Rising, which I really enjoyed Let's just hope that it takes less than 3 years for another update for this game to come out lmao

I can't be the only one that thinks Cassandra looks like Asami from Legend Of Korra

When I say "the reveal", I'm talking about how it's fully revealed to the characters themselves, and how the whole situation that plays out. Build-up plays a big part in that- it's boring to have a reveal that doesn't make sense at all because of too little build-up, like with Nyx as the true main antagonist or Reukra as the champion. Or Palpatine in Rise Of Skywalker (His best scene was when he said "Everything", the rest of the movie was a massive let-down) For me, pokemon fangames are often held up entirely by their stories. Sure, you can have interesting gimmicks and nice graphics, but if the game doesn't have an entertaining/interesting story, then it's hard to get much enjoyment out of playing it. I had this same issue with Pokemon Empyrean; the story just gets too weird and quirky at some point, and it just doesn't live up to the expectations set up previously. But that's just me, I understand that there are things in pokemon games that other people enjoy, like difficult battles and whatnot, and I respect that people can find enjoyment in those kinds of things.

So y'all might have seen that a long time ago I made a review of Pokemon Empyrean. People seemed to like it, and I played through Insurgence again recently, so I thought I'd review it too. To start off, I wanna say that I don't dislike this game. It's fun, decently challenging, and feels pretty fresh compared to some other games. The game has a very strong start with a well set-up premise: you are an amnesiac being prepared for sacrifice by a Darkrai-worshipping cult, but you end up being saved by Mew and a mysterious benefactor. You then make your way to Telnor town and make friends with a young boy named Damien, who helps you get your own starter pokemon. The starters themselves are quite different from the normal kinds of Pokemon you find; This game introduces a variant of Pokemon called Delta Pokemon, which are essentially just redesigned and different typed to their normal counterparts. For example, the starters you are given the choice between are delta variants of the Kanto starters. You can also choose an Eevee but I don't know anyone that actually did that tbh. The experience starts to fall apart when the Augur, the leader of the region, is revealed to be a villain. Don't get me wrong, the reveal is very well done, and he manages to keep the same energy he had before, but just in a different way. However, after this event, the actual gameplay becomes very very slow for a long time. It took me about 3 weeks to work up the motivation to go to the next town, purely because I felt that there wasn't really much I was playing for after that. After that, the game doesn't live up to any of the expectations set by the Augur reveal. The story itself doesn't even get much better; everything in it seems to have been written to be "cool" and "grown-up", but a lot of it just comes across as teenage angst and overly edgy. For example, late into the game, you find out that many League Champions are actually part of some kind of secret order that fights to protect the region from an otherworldly threat, which comes in the form of people from Girantina's Distortion Realm. The first issue I have with this is that their reveal just doesn't feel earned. There was no major build-up to the reveal of the Distortion People, and whatever there was felt unmemorable. I think it would have worked better if they were built up earlier in the story as the true antagonists of the game, rather than 3/4 of the way through. As for the graphics and visual style of the game, I'd have to give them an 8/10. The world has a cartoony look to it, like that of Gen 7, but it manages to keep it consistent and nothing ever feels out of place. All this being said, the game is still being worked on, and apparently a Version 1.3 will hopefully be released within the next nine years, so maybe this review will become outdated. But for now, I'm gonna have to give this game a 4/10. It had potential, and there's clearly a lot of time and passion put into it, but overall, it fails to live up to the expectations it sets for players. Edit: Looking back on this, I feel there's something I have to talk about: The Delta Pokemon. Whilst the concept isn't all too unique today, it was a pretty interesting idea when the game was first being developed. It was really fun to see all the different delta pokemon that the devs could come up with, and all of them felt fresh and unique. However, their implementation was where it all went awry. There's about 200 of them, and whilst you are able to obtain every single one at some point, the majority of them can only be obtained during the post-game, in the Holon Region. The main problem with this is that after beating the elite four and champion, there's really not much reason to continue playing, other than to try to get 100% completion, which isn't a massive draw for everyone. You could argue that there's the battle frontier, but pretty much everyone agrees that it's just not that great at the moment. Another problem with them is the balancing. As someone else in this thread said, a majority of players had D. Gardevoir, D. Bisharp, or D.Scizor on their teams when they beat the champion. I think it goes without saying that that shows a little bit of unbalance. Overall, I give Delta Pokemon a 5.5/10. Great concept, but pretty poor execution.

Toxicroak: Attack buffed by 1.25x and all moves that make contact with the target inflict poison. Goomy: Sets HP to 1500, doubles special defense, increases defense by 75%, lowers attack, special attack, and speed by 40%. Bisharp: When HP falls below 10%, attack is raised by 200%. When hit by any physical attack, enemy will take 15% of the damage dealt to it. Centiskorch: Opponents switching in will be burned. If hit by a flying type move, will faint immediately. Arceus: All stats set to 1, but immune to all non damaging moves and non normal-type moves. Damage dealt to it must exceed 10 in order to KO it.

These all look gorgeous Jan! Remember, don't force yourself to work too hard on this, we all understand how difficult it is and you don't have to worry about us

Couldn't think of anything except this song when I read the title lmao But honestly all this art is so friccin gorgeous, thank you so much for all the hard work Zumi!!!!!!

Hey all, I decided to make a review of this game because there's just a lot I wanna say about it. Hope you enjoy! Recently I tried to play through the fan game Pokemon Empyrean. Tried being the operative word here. The game itself was fine, I enjoyed it and all, I got quite far into it, but I couldn't bring myself to finish it. And that is a major problem. But I suppose I should start from the beginning. Empyrean follows the story of a child who's father works for a kind of international agency, and you set out on a quest after finding out that daddio got kidnapped. Simple enough premise, right? Well, you eventually run into some kind of berserk mutant pokemon, which leads you to believe that there's some bigger scheme, and that you gotta find the truth and save the day. But it's not that interesting. The mutant pokemon aren't really explained that well. In fact, all I can remember is that they were the product of some psycho lady trying to achieve pokemon fusion, and this is just used to sorta explain away this whole plot point. Think that's weird? Oh boy, it's gonna get weirder! You later learn from some guy from the future that Bill, the scientist from Kanto, joined a cult worshipping some all powerful alien race from the future, and he turns some kid into a some kinda god-like creature from this alien race by fusing him with his kirlia. Why, you may ask??? Again, it was because he wanted to "unlock the power of Pokemon Fusion". See, this whole idea isn't usually the kind of out-there concept that you'd imagine to be a bad one. However, my problem with it is that all this pokemon fusion and alien worship stuff is just weirdness thrown in for the sake of weirdness. THAT IS THE WORST KIND OF WEIRDNESS YOU CAN HAVE. But hold on, it gets a bit stranger. For some reason, there are 2 new types in the game: Light and Data. This wouldn't be so bad if a) Fairy is essentially the type the made to represent light, and b) data type was something that wasn't restricted to like 10 pokemon. It's just not good execution. I'm not gonna be a whiney ass for the whole review though, so now I'll take about some positives. Firstly, the rivals are great. Blitz is a riot to mess with, and although he is just an archetype, his dialogue makes him really fun to interact with. Unfortunately, I can't quite say the same about the second rival, given that she's really not that memorable. I do remember that she had a really nice arc, and that her character development was fun to see, up until she was suddenly some angry biker lady, which was just sorta out of the blue, but it was funny nonetheless. Secondly, the fakemon/alternate forms. Christ they did these well. About 99% of the fakemon and alternate forms are dope as fricc; the Wiseraph line is awesome, and I feel like it really is the best example of what you can do with a fakemon line. It does, however, feel like they created the light type just for this line, but we're not gonna talk about that. I really loved seeing some of the alternate forms of really underrated pokemon, such as the Tailow and Zubat lines, which are really well designed and feel like they're quite balanced. Finally, the card and generation points system. If there was one word I could use to describe this system, it would be dope. Using this system, we get to see what kinda whack ass overpowered shit we can pull off. I remember a member of the discord showed me their 5 gen point platinum carded platinum Sylveon(?), and it had over 1000 in every stat. This is, obviously, extremely op, and getting this kinda stuff is quite difficult. However, it is definitely worth it in the postgame, or so I've been told. So, to conclude. Empyrean is a really fun game, with unique and well balanced mechanics that give really good flavour to the game. However, the overall experience is brought down massively by the lackluster story and some strange design choices. Thank you very much for reading, and I hope you all enjoyed

These be looking hella dope uwu