What are your favorite fan games? I'm quite partial to reborn for the field system, genuinely a really interesting inclusion to the formula. It's also quite difficult and paces the power of the mons available to you well which forces you to use some shitmons you normally wouldn't early on in the game.Perhaps a little edgy story wise but the production value is high enough that it comes off charming in a sense.
>>57104721havent played many but Reborn by far. i thought it was pretty clearly selfaware and decided to do the edge shtick anyway, which i have endless respect for. thats not easy online. im not good at battling but i still felt legitimately motivated to do shit like Glass Workstation and Samson who was pretty bad for me, and that hasnt happened in a game outside of like Dark Souls stuff and Doom Eternal. where its really tough but i actually do want to complete the challenges for some reason and not give up. might sound delusionally generous but its one of my favorite games ever just because i have a hard time finding media with love put into it even if in this case its in a very niche/weird place
>>57104721Desolation and black cinder. Desolation had a pretty fucking good, tone, pacing, character writing... Gameplay is not bad either, feels like it cleaned up a lot of the bullshit from games like rejuv.Black cincer is a trainwreck of a game but I found the jokes funny and had me hooked from beggining to end. Then again, it's the first pokemon fangame I played so maybe it doesn't hold up.
At the moment, either Pokémon Clover or PokéClicker (Crobat) because I've played those the most. I'm optimistic that there might be a better fangame or an update to something like PokéWilds in the future that could change my mind.
>>57104721>I'm quite partial to reborn for the field systemyeah you've outed yourself as someone who hasn't played past the fifth gym
>>57104721Unbreakable ties is my current favorite, it's all around a good experience. I like reborn and especially rejuv for gameplay ONLY. Abso-fucking-lutely not for story, reborn's is just decent despite its edginess and rejuvenation's story is actually very good for gyms 1-8, then quickly becomes a total slog to get through.
>>57106661rejuvenation drinking game/suicide instructions:take a sip every time something bad happens that could be avoidable if the people involved weren't idiots (take 2 sips if the problem in question could be avoided if people remembered they had pokemon)
>>57106661>>57106672Isn't rejuv the spiritual successor to reborn? How did they do a worse job the second time around?
>>57108359It's better in all regards, until you beat the 8th gym. Everything else is still high quality but the story becomes shit. They just add so much shit to the story to the point where something happens you're just like 'okay man' and move on This is at its worst at Chapter 15 where it's gotten kind of a notorious reputation. I'm on a 3rd playthrough and I'm at the newest chapter (.Karma files) and I know it's 95% uninteresting story I don't care about and 5% fights so I didn't even bother completing it this time around and just dropped it.I still think it's a recommend though, if the story was good I think it could easily be the best fangame of all time since everything else is so good (the story is actually good until after the 8th gym), I just don't like the storyTLDR Rejuv is better than reborn in all regards until the story becomes abyss fiction 1/3 of the game through
>>57104721>ULTRALITE is a good Roguelite>Xenoverse is the most fun with difficulty>Pokemon Sage is unreleased, but feels like the most true to god Pokemon fangame>Infinite Fusion is the best reimagining of a region
nothing is ever going to feel as good as clover again
>>57108745honestly xenoverse is kinda mid nowadays,it doesn't hold up for me when I compare it to newer games that have come out>>57108760maybe I should finally get around to playing clover...
>>57108441karma files was a fucking waste of timethe gameplay was fucking boring (hours of cutscene hallways and very little of its playtime is actual battles, exploration, or getting new mons that actually matter)the v13.5 update would be 10x better if it focused on refurbishing existing content instead of wasting time and effort on its just outright bad story stuffand the whole story route system is stupid and a waste of development time and resources that could be spent on fixing existing problems and expanding upon actually good stuffwith how the trainwreck of a story is going the routeshit pretty much boils down to>paragon route, which has an idiot plot where everyone you like is likely going to suffer/die due to cutscene retardation/diabolus ex machinas (paragon)>renegade route, which has an idiot plot where everyone you like is going to suffer/die due to cutscene retardation/the player becoming evil for uuuuuuuh no gameplay or in-universe benefit (fights are harder (at least from what the announcement said) and you destroy the world so no postgame; keep in mind that this was stated in the blogpost announcing that v13.5 would have separate story routes which just makes you wonder what the fuck is the point of investing so much into the route only to tell people reasons not to play it)of course we all know the real purpose of pointless route shit: stalling out development for patreon moneygenuinely the only way to salvage the story is to just pretty much entirely replace the second act (chapter 9 onwards)sure the gameplay could be improved but that's easier to both criticize and fix: nerf fieldshit, and improve mon availabilityat least the maps, regional forms, and most characters are decent enough. maybe combining that with a remade plot where the cast's average IQ is 100 instead of 60 could result in an actually pretty good game instead of the laughing stock of the reborn/rejuv/desolation trilogy
>>57105393desolation update when
>>57108842>genuinely the only way to salvage the story is to just pretty much entirely replace the second act (chapter 9 onwards)Bingo, hit the nail on the head. It's honestly kinda crazy that the best story content post chapter 9 are the side quest since 1) there are only a few characters to focus on 2) because there are few characters and the story is generally self contained, the writers easily make them actually likable3) most side characters actually have an IQ of 100 instead of whatever is going on with MQ charactersAlthough I heard that the reason they're using for the route split is that the renegade MC is destroying the world is to save another (likely paragon route). Still don't like it though.Honestly they toned down the difficulty enough (fuck you V13 Intense) but I can still name some fights where I don't like how OP the field is (mainly later fights). And they definitely carried over the boner Reborn has by making some mons less available because using shitmons 75% of the game is difficulty. It's the same bullshit of making nearly every pseudo available right before legends are available. A clear cut example of this is how they added every Hisuian mon EXCEPT Ursaluna
>>57108879>Although I heard that the reason they're using for the route split is that the renegade MC is destroying the world is to save another (likely paragon route). Still don't like it though.it's because of reddit karma or whatever that's making everything predetermined (even though everything's clearly being made up on the fly)>I can still name some fights where I don't like how OP the field is (mainly later fights)99% of rejuvenation's difficulty comes from the fields
>>57108879some of the sidequest characters are pretty well written but they're usually held hostage behind some of the shittiest sidequest designing imaginablegood luck starting/completing half the sidequests without a guide, especially when a good chunk of them are missable and most of them don't actually notify you when they unlock or expireand if they're that easy to miss, then they might as well not exist
fuck it i'll just give a TL;DR of this whole discussionrejuvenation is an inconsistent mess that's pretty decent during the first act but a total trainwreck afterwardsit has so much potential to be great but also so much potential to become terribleand with its current lead developer it's only gonna get worse from hereonly hope is modding to turn things around but with the effort that'd require you're not getting a "fix everything" mod anytime soonyou know i find that kinda funny with v13.5's theme of one person (the player) having the power to either save the world or destroy italso totally unrelated, in a Q&A (I don't have it saved and I'm not scrolling through his tumblr) Jan said that his favorite story route was the one where you destroy everything like a nigger
>>57108930I mostly agree, but I found terajuma pretty fucking painful to play through until the climax with xen and worse than anything in act 2 maybe. I didn't hate the plot with bladestar in act 2 even if it felt so fucking rushed, it was still way more fun than motherfucking terajuma.
>>57108945let me guess the worst offending parts of the terajuma section were the water/ice gyms (which had nigh unchangeable fields that super buff the type in question while nerfing counter types) and just the ice dungeon shit in generalalso valor mountain being near completely unchanged despite the supposed huge terajuma revamp was disappointingyou're still forced to do an effective 6v12 at the top because your partner's team is shit on the field compared to the opponents (no you will NOT question why you couldn't have a partner whose team actually benefits from the volcanic top field; because that cute girl with a lot of flying types is in a plot coma due to lazy writing, and the fire type gym leader who you helped save an hour ago is nowhere to be found despite her being thirsty for team xen blood while also having a prime opportunity to kick their ass on a field her team will excel on), and you're still going to get shoved into a volcano even after you win because one of the few consistent things about rejuvenation is that you're not allowed to have anything good without any strings attachedi think it's easy to say that the volcano shitshow only unfolds the way it does because jan got lazy and decided to just plagiarize rebornexcept instead of some throwaway character's medicham, it's the player character (who has reverse plot armor; instead of constantly coming out on top in extremely unfavorable situations, you constantly somehow lose almost every time anyways or have your victories stolen, no matter how implausible they'd be)i'm gonna can this rant before i run out of ways to say "this game needs serious rewriting"
>>57109004what I really hated the most about terajuma was the fucking pacing. NOTHING fucking happens until you get to the climax. you just dick around in some generic tropical island with some much filler, xen's ultimatum is a joke. then at the end suddenly fucking angie comes out of nowhere ??? like who the fuck even is this character??. it's a shame because the game did seem to have good pacing until terajuma. there were places to discover, blacksteeple castle was tense and full of suspense, akuwa town was interesting and exploring the eastern island of aevium, goldenleaf or whatever was actually interesting so what the fuck happened that the game became a glorified tropical resort that just. never. fucking. ENDS.and don't get me started on the fucking sidequests. team AA is so fucking boring and so out of place with the tone of the game it makes you wonder who thought this shit was a good idea?? fucking why?????
>>57109004like, at least when you get to the volcano you are out of budget alola and some god forsaken trial about getting some mcguffins I couldn't care less about and melia never shutting the hell up
>>57109029>blacksteeple castle was tense and full of suspenseare we even playing the same gameit’s literally just a fucking cutscene hallwayits entire “gameplay” is just going from room to room for cutscenes with absolutely zero decisions or interesting fights until the very end of that sectionand the story side of it is just “there’s magic handwave bullshit sigil stuff preventing you from using your pokemon to attack guards or just fly/swim away so you gotta sit through over an hour of filler cutscenes”
>>57109057dunno, maybe you're right, I have to put my bar for storytelling real low to enjoy rejuvenation but blacksteeple sold me more on its hallway simulator than terajuma did on its own filler. the stakes felt more credible somehow.
>>57109072>the stakes felt more credible somehowoh boy it’s chapter 5 of 15 wow the stakes are really high i sure do wonder if we’ll ever get out of this bad situation
>>57109088yeah, you're right.
>picking anything other than wack
>>57104721>Tranny game>Muh forced level caps>Muh forced obedience>Muh 2006 emo characters>Muh reskin of actual characters like that one gay chick is literally a rainbow Whitney>Muh 13 year old edgelord "story">GoodKek no
>>57108760Clover has a lot of good, but they made it way too fucking hard
>>57110464wack would be better if the maingame had more shit to try out all the fakemons/fakeforms onor at least an option for those who find the normal game too easy but don’t want the overworld fuckery and extreme difficulty of insanity mode
>>57111202>or at least an option for those who find the normal game too easy but don’t want the overworld fuckery and extreme difficulty of insanity modethere is one, it's called using weaker pokemon
>blah blah blah Reborn blah blah blah RebornOkay fine! I'll try out this stupid game!It better not being the gayest thing I have ever seen like Rejuvenation.
it's still not finished(getting close apparently) but coral by a pretty significant margin. no crazy story with a bajillion OCs, no overarching political narrative, no bullshit difficulty/mechanics just because ZOMG WE NEED OUR GAME TO BE HARD!!!, no random fakemon/forms, just a really well tight-knit and polished experience that, dare i say it, genuinely feels like a pokemon game(outside of a couple instances that'll be fixed, although spiritomb was cool af for other reasons). definitely recommend it even though save files from the demo aren't going to be transferable to the final build.of course, i do see the value in a lot of those things in other fangames and i get why most fangames are the way they are, but coral is just everything i'm looking for in a pokemon fan game.realidea comes in close second for me, it certainly has its issues and has a few "wow i'm self-aware and breaking the fourth wall isn't this so cool what i'm doing" but it still felt like a solid, mostly complete game that was enjoyable start to end.
>>57112246>just use shitmonsif i wanted to do that i'd go on showdown and play one of the ZU/PU formats
>>57112246>there is one, it's called using weaker pokemonThat doesn't work for every Pokemon gameUSUM receives the greatest difficulty increase. But the difficulty doesn't change too much for a lot of games, most notably XY, which is still on babymode.In order to make that game challenging you would have to do something like>use a single shitmon>Don't use O powers>Don't use items in battle>Don't use the Lucky EggThen the game would give you a challenge, but who really wants to limit themself that much.I did a struggle only run of Colosseum a few months ago and it was definitely harder but also way less fun due to having pretty much no options, it was just playing a slot machine. They really just need to put in multiple difficulties in Pokemon. The franchise has a fanbase with a large range in age and skill/knowledge. Adding an option that would appeal to older fans while still keeping baby mode for babies would be profitable for GameFreak. A lot of people really don't like the idea of making a game harder by putting self-imposed limits on yourself.
>>57112396Lookung forward to Coral!
>>57112649Kys wignat
>>57112665>no argument>one digit away from getting tripsMan if you actually tried making a response, you would have probably gotten trips. How sad!
>>57112649>expecting fangame devs to let people alter the difficulty on their own if they're finding things too easy or hardhahahahahahhahahahaahhahahaha silliest shit i've read all dayon a serious note anything more than just a nuzlocke or monotype challenge is just gonna get frustrating after some pointif your game needs self imposed challenges which requires more rules than can be fit on an index card just to be remotely challenging, then it's too easythe example this discussion started over, wack, was pretty easy if you have a full team of 6 because apart from a handful of lategame fights no trainer worth mentioning has 6 pokemon (and most of them have questionable sets, and ZERO EVs/IVs so you'll always be at a statistical advantage)the difficulty only becomes challenging with all the stuff you're given access to at the pokemon league, mostly due to full restore spam and the champion's team having mons that either hit really hard or resist most of the types in the gamestill, having the game be a pushover for 99% of the main campaign before suddenly spiking to be hard at the very end isn't exactly what i'd call a good difficulty curvebut yeah clearly as that other idiot said there's absolutely nothing wrong with the difficulty of wack and that i just need to use shitmons instead of wanting something inbetween wack's piss easy normal mode campaign and its kaizohell insanity mode campaign
>>57112714>>expecting fangame devs to let people alter the difficulty on their own if they're finding things too easy or hardI was talking about mainline games. I know you were talking about wack, but I was using examples of mainline games to prove a point of how using bad Pokemon doesn't often make a Pokemon game harder. This is true for certain fangames too, Pokemon Snakewood is aids no matter what Pokemon you use. But to play devil's advocate plenty of fangames actually have difficulty settings so Idk what you are on about. >on a serious note anything more than just a nuzlocke or monotype challenge is just gonna get frustrating after some pointyeah pretty much, restricting the players options is usually frustrating, only sometimes it makes the game more fun.>having the game be a pushover for 99% of the main campaign before suddenly spiking to be hard at the very end isn't exactly what i'd call a good difficulty curveYep, alot of fangames have this problem, even the ones with difficulty options. Pokemon Insurgence has three standard difficulties but each one has the same difficulty spikes and valleys, it just makes the game overall harder/easier.Personally I kind of like games with a fluctuating difficulty curve because it keeps you engaged by being harder to predict what kind of challenge the game is going to throw at you.
>>57112791>Personally I kind of like games with a fluctuating difficulty curve because it keeps you engaged by being harder to predict what kind of challenge the game is going to throw at you.i personally disagreeit's kinda annoying to waste time preparing for fights that end up being underwhelming, or when you're breezing through something only to get hit hard by a difficulty spike you weren't expecting and get your momentum killed
>>57104721Reborn by a large margin, its such a nice and massive game with tons of effort and care put into it. The field system makes the gameplay so much fun and there's tons of qol and I enjoyed (most of) the story and characters. >Rejuv on the other handLegitimately speaking I'm thinking of waiting like 5 years for it to be fully finished because for as much as there is to like about it, there's seemingly an equal amount that feels like a slog to get through, or maybe I'll set the difficulty to the easier mode they added for 13.5 because the game's difficulty (normal mode) has always felt like Reborn but more tedious which is just enough to push it over the edge from something fun to strategize team setups on to absurd and arduous to deal with.
Playing Reborn for the first timeJust got my typeThis game is definitely going to be gay, /vp/ why are you like this?
>>57112895The aggressively gay femboy you meet first thing didn't clue you in?
>>57113307somehow cain's only scratching the surface of annoying characters
>>57113389True. He isn't even that bad compared to other characters and he doesn't show up often if you can't stand his presence
>>57113818plus his teams are pretty easy to beat so you can pwn him easily as revenge for shitty innuendos
>>57110464As someone who would immediately pick Wack, its main issue (you know if you can set aside the mspaint sprites or the retarded nature of its pokedex or the uncommon glitches that might get in the way of your fun) is the difficulty. Just in the opposite way someone might take issue with Reborn or Rebornlikes, it was something I was thinking about before really. Wack is a super casual friendly game where you pick up your favorite 6 mons and run through the campaign with them, you don't really have to think about team composition even at a level of having a more defensive mon, let alone type coverage due to how pointless the type chart makes that idea. You could take 6 special attackers and win. You can probably take 5 jobbers and Neonee, a route 1 mon, and win because Neonazi is actually really good. You might rarely lose a battle here and there to randomness but you can go back in and probably win right away. It doesn't push you to go back and look through all of these Pokemon you were expected to catch and try something new to overcome a boss.In Wack's case, that's fine, because the game has like 50 fucking types and you'd have to crawl the wiki or the PBS files to know what to do or what a given Pokemon is good at. It would be pretty asinine if it was balanced too far in the other direction, so it's probably better that it's not balanced like that at all since I trust fangame/romhack devs about as far as I can throw a fucking car when it comes to balancing shit properly (and not just in Pokemon). And in my case that's fine, because that's not really what I want to do in a Pokemon game. Some people find new favorites or just enjoy themselves more doing that though.
>>57113818I'd say he shows up rather often until you get fly, still much better than a walking collection of stale memes narrating an entire tournament.
sorry if this is slightly off topic but i cant remember the name of a fangame i played a few years ago all i remember about it is it started with (you) getting a message from an old friendone of the first mons you came across was a sheep of some sort (i dont think mareep)and it had following pokemon i was just wondering if anyone remembered what it was
>>57114483Jesus christ, I forgot about Terra. She has WAY too much screen time for what she is.
>>57115299>I forgot about TerraGood, you should. Fuck that 2006 Gaia Online capsule, those memes were supposed to be inner jokes, never spread publicly!
Pathways is decently fun. It does something genuinely different from other pokemon games by having the entire game take place in one location and the persona vibes are on point. The role system is pretty neat and a great way to incentivize the player to build monotype/themed teams like the NPC's.A bit skeletal though, the story is barely there and they really need to add some more events for your mentor and/or the students you build relationship with. The difficulty also isn't really there because the AI is kind of retarded. I swear it just picks its moves randomly.
All battles, no bullshit. I'm not a fan of the fanficky elements like your rival getting a shiny Rayquaza lategame ahahahah fuck off but the core gameplay scratches my itch for a new Stadium game so I roll with the punches.Emerald Rogue is cool but I can do without the gutted versions of gen 3 maps
>>57115439I mean, considering the 'narrative' of the game it's not exactly egregious that your rival would have some outlandish like that.
GOOD:>Clover (looking forward to 2.0.)>Xenoverse (I have a soft spot after translation released here and we had a spree of threads with some anons tossing my pastebin and screenshots)>Quarantine Crystal v0.8 (shame it died)>BW3 Genesis>Peridot (at least now)>Prism>Blazing Emerald>Sage / Ethereal Gates(never ever)MID:>Fool's Gold> <Your unfinished good premise fangame that will never actually come out>>Unbound>Brown (old, have to replay it)BAD:>Reborn and Returd>Vega without extra changes>Snakewoodany suggestions other than commiting suicide given my dangerous taste?
>>57115615>>Peridot (at least now)Are you the guy from last night? Did the level curve catch back up to you?
>>57115624Nope, not him, but after seeing the exchange I just downloaded it back again and seeing it improve made me want to mention it. I'm usually more used to titles getting worse and worse with every update, with devs focusing on something really irrelevant, contrasting with me wanting more content.
>>57115653I've been around enough fan communities to know how bad feature creep can hit a project, and wanted to avoid that.
>>57104721I love reborn despite its flaws like tedious puzzles and obnoxious dialogue like that lolsorandum shit in that tournament place. Never been this addicted to a video game since gta San Andrea's, 10/10 ost and I like how it encourages you to build an army of pokemon instead of simply raising 6 so you're prepared for certain boss battles
>>57116186>10/10 ostReal, the music is aces and the music of the city itself taking on a lighter, happier leitmotif when you come back to it being 'reborn' was a 10/10 moment. The huge length of the game lent itself to a unique moment in that the dreary music, constant rain and general shittiness of the city really made me internalize it so that when it was fixed it felt like a mental weight had been taken off that I didn't even know was there.Plus the city being broken and awkward to traerse played super well into not only structuring the early challenges around HM progression but also genuinely added to the sense of happiness and ease once they were gone. It felt great not having to take awkward round about routes anymore to avoid obstacles.
