Pokemon Rejuvenation V13 Review

[Ya Gorl]

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