Pokemon Dark Rising opinions

[Jess]

I've been hearing so much praise about the excellent series of Pokemon Dark Rising. So, I decided to check it out. But I'd never dive into it thoughtlessly, so I watched a let's play of Pokemon Dark Rising on youtube and (to my surprise) I genuinely developed suicidal thoughts due to the amount of (stupid) difficulty, bugs and the plot of this game.

 

1) Difficulty: It is just making you grind, grind and grind. You may fight a boss and then have nowhere to heal and another boss comes in your face within 10 steps. Like, calm down. Legendaries are handed out like coins to a beggar. Like 3 people have Reshirams, again, calm down game.

2) Bugs: You defeat a boss. Then you decide to go out, but you know that another boss is probably coming, cause fuck my life, and decide to go back and heal. Hence reentering the area of the previous boss fight. BOSS IS STILL THERE! WANTS TO FIGHT AGAIN! FUCK MY ENTIRE EXISTENCE!

3) Plot: Let's just introduce like 4 rivals, shove in Ash, Brock and Misty, get a storyline based on a mysterious pokemon-entity that just brainwashes EVERYONE for the reason of conquering the world and spreading chaos, for chaos itself and there we go.

 

It feels clumsily made, plot has huge holes and everything seems to be designed to give the feel of a hard game. I don't get why a battle vs a boss would be with level 75 pokemons, while the wild mons of that area are only level 40. How can you even grind up for that.

Let me know what you think, because (imho) either the community's standards about fanmade games are FAR too low, or they see something that I don't in this game...

Edited July 19, 2017 by Jess

[Tacuara]

I think the plot is actually interesting , from what i've played.

The difficulty, well let's say i can live with it, just gotta waste some time training a lot.

But the amount of bugs is absurd, and are the reason i haven't even got to half of the games...

[Zarc]

Well... not kinda my favorite game at all. 

Edited July 19, 2017 by Pμrple

[Yagami]

Honestly I hate this game.I was okay with the grinding.I even bought a magikarp and trained it to gyrados and had a full team from early area.But this game has too many bugs,many abilities don't work.But then I saw youtube video where the player used a full team of legendaries to beat the final boss then I lost all interest in this game.The final boss had a full team of level 100 all mega pokemons and a fake pokemon with a very fake move.That is the one reason I never play rom hack because most of them just increase the levels of the opponent with a weird and bad story.

[HongaarseBeer]

36 minutes ago, Jess said:

2) Bugs: You defeat a boss. Then you decide to go out, but you know that another boss is probably coming, cause fuck my life, and decide to go back and heal. Hence reentering the area of the previous boss fight. BOSS IS STILL THERE! WANTS TO FIGHT AGAIN! FUCK MY ENTIRE EXISTENCE!

Imagine if Reborn had this  

[Zarc]

And when you often play at reborn/rejuvenation/desolation , the texts/graphisms/story/difficulty of dark rising are clearly not on the same level..

[RedAlert]

Unpopular opinion (although a lot of members here might agree), I absolutely despise Dark Rising, for most of the reasons stated above.

[Jess]

3 hours ago, HongaarseBeer said:

Imagine if Reborn had this  

I know people tht actually exploited this bug of Dark Rising TO GRIND UP SO THAT THEY AREN'T UNDERLEVELLED FOR NEXT BOSSES. This game is ridiculous xD  

[Nyarth]

Lol this game brings back tons of memories. So... storytime!

 

I used to be extremely heavily into ROM Hacks, before fangames were in the light, and this was crowned king of all the ROM hacks right next to Light Platinum. Think of Reborn's popularity and overshadowing in the fangame community of today, but multiply that by 5 and you'll have the beautiful hierarchy of ROM hacks in the 2010-ish's.

 

When I first played this thing I was just getting over my misery of having finished the entire Ruby Destiny series. Pokecommunity was buzzing because Dark Rising was currently making a sequel. The title art looked decent, it actually had unique tiles and it was in English. So I was like "why not?", downloaded from a dodgy link (probably getting like 10 viruses at the same time too), got the thing patched and fired it up.

 

Uh... Well, I guess everyone can guess how it went. 8-year old me with low standards was not very impressed.

 

To begin with, it was edgy. Not Reborn edgy, but the bad edgy. I don't know how much of this I'm mixing up with another ROM hack called Fuligin (which I invite everyone to play; it's something that has to be experienced), but I just remember how stupidly ridiculous the edge-lord characters were. There were a lot of text errors (the overlapping glitch), tile errors (which were my fondest memories of walking over cropped mountains), and really awkwardly done cutscenes. The grinding was annoying, so I would just look up Firered Gameshark codes and cheat my way through because I was lazy. I'm not even sure if I finished this game, I might have just quit halfway through.

 

It's not the best. Certainly not the worst (once again, please refer to Fuligin. It will reinvent your purpose to live), but far from being called "good". I'm impressed by the length though and dedication done for it, but the fact that it's a series isn't something new. Ruby Destiny exists after all, and even though that isn't very good at least it's consistent.

 

However, I think it would be unfair to compare it to many modern games today. ROM hacking is much more difficult than making a fangame in my opinion, and in that time there weren't as many resources available for ROM hacking so it was unlikely to see a ROM hack completed, much less being a whole series. Fortunately, we have a ton of projects open for both ROM hacking and fangame creation now.