Played another fangame. This time, I played Phoenix Rising (thread here)

It's got all the usual conceits: new Megas, regional variants, and some other things. In terms of plot it seems fairly typical from what I've played so far: go on a journey through Hawthorne. The plot is apparently just "get to Hawthorne University". No League as far as I know, which means no Gyms.

I feel like it has to be said: This game is super pretty. Like whoah. It looks amazing. The maps are all elaborate, each town has its completely own tileset, etc. It all looks good, and there's clearly been a lot of effort put into graphical design of the region, the Pokemon, and more.

But it also tends to lag pretty badly for me. Might just be my trashpile laptop, but the devs moved from Pokemon Essentials (RPGMaker XP(?) package which most fangames are made in) to something else explicitly to avoid Essentials' issues, but I've had far less problem with Essentials games. This other engine does have the additional effect of letting you press "Z" to double or even triple battle speed, but honestly, I'd rather that button not have to be there at all. Also it doesn't remember your speed across battles, which is really a shame.

Another downside is the fact that the game is as wordy as it is pretty. It opens with a long intro of talking to an old "soothsayer", having to find his tea so he can continue rambling at you about random stuff, finding your mother to have her give you the tea leaves which results in her rambling at you about her ex-husband inviting you to come live with him at the University blah blah blah. It takes like half an hour (if you don't start clicking past the dialogue) before you finally get to choose a fucking Pokemon. It's way too much. Just let me play already, like damn.

Also, I'm not much of a fan of what's actually done with those words. There's a whole quest where a girl whose sister was lost in the spooooky woods as a kid and never found gets a Phantump. It could be handled much more subtly: the game's beating you over the head with it, even though the character herself doesn't seem to know. It's not as outright edgy as Reborn (hooooo boy, the stories I could tell) or even Insurgence, but it still took me out of it.

tl;dr: On one hand, pretty as hell. On the other, way too wordy and laggy. Can't really recommend.

 

Stopped playing after Gen III, but I did get back into Pokemon and played a few hacks over the last ten years or so, but only sporadically.

I tried Zeta/Omicron and dropped it quickly in favour of Insurgence, which was a real blast. Most of the Pokemon were absolute unknowns to me, and I've since spent an inordinate amount of time on Bulbapedia and Smogon.

Over the past few days, I've started and finished what's available of Pokemon Gaia. Beat the E4 with Azumarill, Infernape, Gengar and Jolteon.

I never put too much thought into my teams, often playing with what I thought to be strong/cool Pokemon, and would sweep through FR/LG with Charizard and Gyarados, and add on Aerodactyl, Zapdos and maybe Alakazam before the E4. So, this run-through Gaia was a lot of fun, but it got a bit too easy too quick.

The idea of having a lead PKMN setup with spikes or calm mind and baton pass had never occurred to me. While I see the appeal, I still have a preference for fast attackers and potentially a tank. I'm simple like that.

@Seratin

It's been a few months. Thoughts on Renegade Platinum?

I've heard it's the most polished of Drayano's hacks, and as such, I'm starting with Storm Silver. I haven't wrapped my head around the 3D yet, and I've spent the past few hours being indecisive about what kind of team to go for. I don't think I've been this neurotic about anything in months. So far, I've narrowed my choices down to Houndour, Flareon, Espeon, Natu, Murkrow, Spiritomb and Swablu, all of which are available rather early. Not keen on Ralts at all, as I've used it a lot in RSE and most recently in Insurgence, and besides, there's no fairy type.

 

I'm a huge fan of all of Drayano's hacks. There's nothing too weird added in, the stat changes he employs for pokemon are balanced to each other and make most pokemon worth using, and I like the difficulty curves of them. I'm playing Renegade Platinum right now and I have games progressing in Storm Silver, Blaze Black 2, and Volt White. Monotype runs are fun - it lets me pretend to be a Tamerverse character

 

If I want to try these Drayano hacks, what programs do I need?

 

An emulator to run the DS programs:

http://desmume.org/

or GBA:

http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/gba/vboyadvance.html

A ROM of the game which is found easily on google (not sure what DLP's policy is on direct ROM links - no bueno for a lot of sites)

And the mod game itself. Drayano's hacks come with a built in program that patches the ROM you downloaded earlier.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B-zmEVN0Mas6Q3lLbDJDaWNyaVU

 

My computer works fine for word processing and browsing, but DeSmuME lags a fair bit. Tried to Drastic on my phone on a whim, and it works surprisingly well. I've been playing Sacred Gold/Storm Silver on it, and while my hand cramps every now and then from the awkward positioning (...), it gets the job done.

There's even a speed boost option.

It's insane that DS emulation works better on my shitty Chinese phone than on my computer. I'm so behind with the times.

 

Tamerverse? That sounds like it could be interesting. Is there any good fanfiction involved?

 

Does anyone know any way to download the roms onto a DS? Or somehow access it’s memory? I’ve got my Pokémon 20th anniversary edition DS that I only ever use to play heart gold and the original Red version that came loaded on it.

 

IIRC you have to have a flash card for it. Acekard 2 is a great one for the standard DS. I loved mine back in the day - the nintendo DS games are so tiny you can just get a 32gb microSD for the card and just have a shit ton of games.

 

Has anyone tried Pokemon Empyrean?

It's rather good, reminds me of Insurgence. At the moment, there's about 50-ish hours of gameplay and access to the first eight gyms. It reminds me a bit of Insurgence, in that there are "delta" pokemon and there's a plot beyond collecting badges. There are lots of mini sidequests that are actually interesting, like controlling a lost Ratata and having it find its way towards its owner. There's nifty little features like item crafting (egg yolk + egg shell = lucky egg), a Safari Zone for EV training and lots of new items.

The stand-out Delta so far has been an electric/flying type Tailow/Swellow.

 

I've been playing 4chan's Pokemon Clover. Muchly fun, with pokemon resembling a drop of cum, terrorist bomb, and KFC showing up so far.

 

Just beat Pokemon Empyrean, an RPGMaker game set in an original region. It's a dumpsterfire that's occasionally fun.

The storyline is, simply put, ass. The "empyrean" in the title refers to psychic super-aliens who went against Arceus, were incinerated by divine judgement, and the survivors came to the Pokemon world. Time travel is involved, more than just as a side thing: after beating the 8th Gym you head out to tackle one of these Empyreans yourself by heading into the desolate future of 3023, where half of the population is cyborgs and the other half is people fused with their Pokemans. There's lots of OCs and timeline fuckery so there's more than one of some OCs and god they all suck.

Onto the gameplay. It's the usual Pokemon stuff, with some additional mechanics:

• Generation Power ("GP") is a hereditary measure of how superperfect your mons are. I'm not certain what it actually does but apparently the more GP the better your mon. You get GP by breeding and luck - except for Genderless mons, which can just be fused and are therefore probably easier to maximize. But then there's plenty of mons that you get only one of, so they can't ever reach the heights the others do.
• There's big boss monsters with 3000 HP and beyond. They're immune to statuses but not to Leech Seed, mostly, so Venusaur fucks their shit right up no questions asked. They're annoying, mostly, and it was only super late game that they got challenging.
• Cards are something you can equip to your 'mon, in addition to a regular item. Each card is for a specific species, and boosts that mon's stats by 1.25x/1.5x/2x, depending on the card's rarity. This means that your stats go through the roof if you've got the right card, but getting that right card is grindy as fuck. Booster Packs can only be bought right before the 7th Gym and have an 1% chance to drop in the wild, so good luck getting the ones you want before that. Even then they cost $400,000 in Pokebucks, so best get grinding money. And those Booster Packs contain only three cards, which depend on your savefile. At least cards sell for a shitload. In-game card trading is worthless.
• Having said that, money can actually be gotten pretty easily with "Apriplums", which are like berries that just heal HP. More importantly, if you use an Apriplum it gives you a seed, which you can then plant and water. Apriplums, once planted, can offer new flavours (depending on original) and so if you consult a growing guide you'll be raking in the cash in no time. But that still takes 3000 steps at a time, and occasional wandering to get Fresh Waters to water your cashplant. Decent idea, bad execution.
• There's new Mega Evolutions, which are mostly just recolors of existing mons, and which are given out slapdash. Typhlosion gets a Fusion version which looks ugly as sin but has 970 BST. Feraligatr gets told to fuck off, as does Meganium.
• Fusion Evolutions are Megas but they also get a 1-PP unique move which deals mucho damage. And, as mentioned, insane BSTs. Downside: if that mon faint while fused, you also faint, so the battle's over. I wouldn't really call it "strategic", though.
• Some things just aren't in the game. I tried to get a Mamoswine but he couldn't get Ice Shard, so I had to scrap those plans. There's no Return TM in the game, as far as I know, and half of the Mega stones are missing. No Z-moves, no Dynamax.
• Shinies get 1.1x stats, but later you can shinify your mons for a million pokebucks, so whatever. There's also "double shinies" which are called Platinums, but they looking boring as sin, even if they get an additional stat boost. Shinies are also sometimes original, meaning my Kingdra, Thetis, looks dope as hell.
• There's a dating sidequest which just kinda ends. Either go full hog or don't go, writers.
• The Data-type suuuuuucks. It's immune to a shitload of types - Grass, Poison, Steel, Fighting, Rock, Ground, Dragon, and more - and if it gets hit with an Electric attack its SpA is going to go through the fucking roof. Porygons are somehow deadly beasts that can sweep an entire team if you're not careful.
• There's also a new Light type, which is rare enough that it doesn't matter, and one mon gets an original Electrolight type for some reason.
• There's other mechanics which I could discuss: crafting (mostly useless), Poke-Kata which let you beat up trainers who challenged you and escape their clutches (discarded now?), all HMs being replaced entirely with items...

So yeah. A lot of new mechanics, most of which require grinding on your part to use but not on the computer's part, leading to more and more inequality in what you've got available as the game goes along. I had to switch to Easy on the near-final boss because it drained 50% HP automatically of every mon before the battle even started and then blocked off items on Normal Mode. Miss me with that shit, please.

Only really recommended if you've got time to waste and no strong feelings about RPGM and the things mentioned above.

 

Been enjoying the heck out of Pokémon Insurgence. The Dark storyline is actually half decent and they've got the bugs down to a bare minimum.

It's been a great time waster during long boring conference calls. The music slaps too.

 

Time for another fangame report. This week, I played Pokemon Xenoverse: Ad Aspera Per Astra. My verdict: kinda neutral.

The good:

• Typical fangame stuff. Trade evolutions are retooled to work with a specific kind of item instead, HMs are replaced with items, move reminders are free and widely available, you can look at EVs and IVs if you want to (I don't really care).
• Every sprite is animated, even the fakemon and whatnot. Opinion on this may vary from person to person. I found the animations to be a bit obnoxious in that they're mostly twitching from side to side constantly during battles, but I do have an immense amount of respect for how much effort this has to have taken.
• The engine isn't RPGMaker + Pokemon Essentials. It seems to be some French thing made in Ruby instead? The upside is that it isn't as stupidly prone to crashing, and it's also a lot less demanding on the computer.

The bad:

• The game's made by a bunch of Italian dudes. That's not a problem in and of itself, but you can tell that the writers are ESLs and some lines were left untranslated. What's worse though is that for much of the information on the game you either have to rely on scattered reddit posts or the wiki, which is in Italian. It's not ideal, to say the least.
• The storyline is a bit bland at the best of times and a bit shit at the worst of times. Your dad is a canon character that's also a spoiler blah blah goes missing when confronted with the big bad blah go look for him and do some badges along the way blah some people die blah face God But Evil and murder them because actually catching them isn't possible. It's Empyrean but far less retarded. The lore doesn't really make any sense with canon Pokemon in terms of tone or in terms of facts but that's about the usual for fangames, frankly.
• They introduce a new type: Sound. Sound is basically Electric Plus: super effective against Water, Flying, and Fairy, not very effective against Psychic, Electric, and Dragon. One of the starters is a Fire/Sound type which means it's totally able to fuck up Water types with absurd ease.
• As an example of how the writing quality isn't great, the names for the Pokemon aren't puns of the necessary quality? The Fire/Sound starter is named Trishout. It includes the word "shout", I guess? What's the pun here, exactly? Put some effort in. Get a native speaker to work on it, I dunno.

In the category of "interesting decisions":

• Starters (btw the ingame Starter Pokemon created the universe together with God's Good Half, it's why they got the name starter Pokemon) don't evolve, as such. Instead at plot-mandated points you randomly get items that make your starter change form, which is functionally exactly the same shit as evolving but you can't hold an item anymore and the type remains the exact same. The final form is basically a constant Mega Evolution in terms of stats though so I guess there's that.
• Local variants of Pokemon are mostly "X Pokemon from another dimension". This means that you mostly get them during plot moments or you have to know where they are through the Google-translated wikia and hope that something like a 4% chance triggers for the encounter. Lame, to say the least. At least catching them is super easy thanks to Xeno balls.
• The evil team is gratuitously used to block off you progressing past where the plot is. Anyone who is not the protagonist rarely ever talks to, or even mentions, them. Shit's weird.
• There's a bunch of neat Pokemon that I don't think you can actually get. The legendaries, for one. You also randomly get a level 5 Pokemon that's meant to become a starter for the next generation of trainers or whatever, but I cleared the game with level 70 mons and I'm not throwing an inflatable elephant in there.

tl;dr Decent effort, but lacks the immensity of Insurgence or Infinite Fusion, the fun-to-laugh at stupidity and edge of Reborn or Empyrean, or the passion of Sage. 6/10.

 

Time for my (yearly? wild) Fangame Findings. (Romhack Report?)

First off, tomorrow (26th of March, 2022 AD) Drayano or a team which Drayano is involved in will be releasing Blaze Black 2 Redux & Volt White 2 Redux, updates of his decade-old hacks of Black 2 and White 2 to meet the standards of his most famous hack, Renegade Platinum. For those not in the know, Drayano is the progenitor of the "difficulty romhack" genre, which largely revolves around making every Pokemon available and somewhat viable, as well as increasing the difficulty of the games. There's a list of changes hanging around somewhere, I'm sure.

Second, I played Pokemon Radical Red, a Fire Red romhack.

• The core gameplay's been revamped to now have a Dexnav and IVs visible, several mons have had small type changes or stat changes or new or different abilities, and the difficulty's been cranked up somewhat. In other words, it's a typical difficulty hack.
• It feels like a tech demo for the engine used to overhaul Fire Red to this degree. It doesn't feel like particularly heavy thought was put into distribution of the 'new' mons, there appears to be no cohesive approach to what changed and why. We could, therefore we did, seems to be the premier design philosophy.
• As per usual documentation is contained in a bunch of Google Sheets and there's probably a Discord floating around.
• I have to praise the game for its somewhat modular difficulty options. There's an option at the start of the game to just give everything you catch 6 IVs free of charge, which is actually kinda important in this kind of game. This, combined with several other options, means the difficulty is somewhat up to you. Personally I put on Minimal Grinding Mode without a second's hesitation.
• Even so, with Minimal Grinding Mode activated the game very quickly devolved into Rocket Tag: either you OHKO/2HKO me or I get your health halfway down, the enemy switches, I switch, repeat until either I or the enemy thinks we can line up a shot. As a matter of subjective fact, the AI's kinda wonky. They know your entire team, their movesets and their items. As such they're far more likely to switch than real opponents ever would, so the game becomes more prediction-heavy (much as a real match would be? Dunno, I'm not into competitive Pokemon.)
• There's little bits of new story grafted onto the original Kantooooooooo. They're stupid and best ignored, but not horribly offensive or anything.

Third, I played Pokemon Unbound, another Fire Red romhack. Version 2.0.3.2.

• It's set in an original region and stuff. It fits model #1 of my world-renowned Pokemon Fangame Plot Classification in that it's just KANTOOOOOOO but different. Different maps, different characters, different team. It occasionally drifts into #3 territory in that there's drama about side characters that I'll never bring myself to give even a tenth of a shit about, but it snaps back into a safe zone before the true edge that is a hallmark of a #3-style Attack And Dethrone Arceus edgefest comes about, like Reborn or Empyrean. (#2 is just Mystery Dungeon.)
• Gameplay's like Radical Red but polished and playtested by people who actually wanted to make a decent game on its own merits, not staple fifteen features on top of an existing one. As a result it feels more cohesive, there's better pacing in when you get the new features instead of them just being thrown at you randomly, and you get something closer to the Gaia experience than Radical Red, which I consider to be a good thing.
• Similar issues to the Rocket Tag of Radical Red are present, though. I got a Hoopa in a big (but not amazingly written) story moment and it got utterly destroyed one turn into the ensuing battle. Whoops.
• Maps are heavy on re-exploring once you get the necessary TMs later. Every map has a Rock Climb spot somewhere, a bit of water to surf around on... That sort of thing. It's never really forced on you and while I did it it was never a huge advantage or anything so whatever.
• The mission system is interesting enough. I stopped playing with fifteen of the things left to go though because most are kinda grindy (save 100 times pls!) and I don't think whatever reward they offer would be worth it.
• New region but no new mons. I do like to see new mons, honestly, or local variants on old mons, but I realize that can be a divisive opinion.

I think Unbound's worth recommending. As far as Fire Red hacks go it's very definitely near the top, which considering the insane quantity of the things available is saying something.

 

Radical Red is freaking great but a bit too much IV grinding to beat some of the gyms and elite four. I've been playing a crap ton of PokeMMO.

https://pokemmo.eu/

Stays very true to the actual games but have buffed a lot of pokemon movesets. Game includes Gen 1-5 and you can go to each region but 2. They even have a discord and they do a bunch of events.

 

See, I tried it, and I couldn't get past the fact that you can't speed it up or console save after a decade of getting used to that. They also changed the battle style so that you couldn't switch between enemy slots and I spent maybe 16 years getting used to that. I 100% acknowledge that I am a boomer about these games. For my money, Zeta/Omicron were the best and Infinite Fusion was also great, just different.

 

I beat Pokémon Unbound about a week or so ago, really enjoyed it.

The problem I have is the difference between normal and difficult settings. I played on difficult till about the third gym and right before I got surf. I ran into the rival and as normal his Pokémon are scaled to be a little higher level average than mine. Tough battle, but with one glaring difference- dude mega evolved his starter. The normal response to being stuck in Pokémon is to abuse match-ups and grind levels. In this case, grinding up a Pokémon so it could be the same level as my main starting team would take time- my Pokémon were about 40s and wild Pokémon only went up to mid 20s. Fine. I do the grind. But then everyone in the story has a monster sweeper that one shots anything and gets tickled. I’m talking normal trainers too. So I switched to normal in the settings when I got tired of going to the Pokémon center after every trainer battle.

The jump in difficulty is insane in the mid game and when I switched to normal- well my overleveled pokemon trivialized the game- until a random story mission where the enemies scales regardless of difficulty. Then you have to back to back double battle legendaries- had to switch back to normal. With the elite 4, well the difficulty difference is extreme here too. Neutral type match ups with equal levels shouldn’t one shot each other, and the difference between normal and difficult is who is getting one shot.

I think co-sign everything else BTT says- ah one more gripe.

I wish the game had more cool areas like in the main story missions, but also with Pokémon. To me, if you make an original area, you might as well add in the monsters to go with it. These places are really cool and a pixilated feast for the eyes. Shame there’s nothing else to do there.

 

As if on cue, time for the yearly Fangame Feature. This time around, I played Pokemon Tectonic - a finished game in the same engine as Reborn or Empyrean, i.e. Pokemon Essentials, but not bad.

The good:

• It's Essentials but through what I can only assume is programming magic, it runs pretty well. My laptop is unworthy of even the name 'potato' at this point and it had only a few minor issues - a bit of hang here and there, never in important moments.
• There's been a concerted, beyond-Drayano-like effort to make every Pokemon feel like it could have a niche. Whether it's changing types, throwing in new abilities, changing stats or making a vast array of new moves available, every 'mon has had a real glowup, as the kids say. For example, Chandelure has an ability that makes it functionally immune to priority moves, Registeel has an ability that makes it immune to the last type of move used against it, etc.
• They've taken several Mega Evolutions or Gigantamaxes and made them into just regular evolutions, as part of the balancing process. E.g. I had a Medicham that evolved into Palmantra, which uses Mega Medicham's sprite and has more or less good but regular stats. Lapras evolves into Saurenaid, Abomasnow into Conifear, etc. I was impressed with some of the names; they felt pretty on point.
• They're very committed to avoiding grinding. You can relearn all moves that a 'mon could know through omnipresent move tutors in each Poke center, IVs and EVs are gone in favour of a system where you can pick exactly how you want points to be distributed between stats. EXP candies are very, very available. Hell, even consumable items are returned to you after a battle ends so berries and gems are genuinely pretty useful. There's no breeding, which considering there's a very long plot about a Ditto soulsearching is probably for the best.
• The game itself contains most of the necessary documentation except for missable sidequests involving characters that reappear throughout the region and have you do random tasks for them, and there's a list of those on the Discord (of course there's a Discord). There's a "MasterDex" that shows weaknesses, possible Abilities, stats, location of where to find the 'mon or its pre-evos, how it evolves and if it does, and even TM info. This is accessible even in battle, so that's good. There's also a DexNav if that's your thing.
• HMs are gone. This is unequivocally good. Fuck HMs.

The bad:

• Level caps. There's constant level caps in steps of 5, starting at 15. Beating a gym or other important story moments will give you an item that you can use to add +5 to your level cap. Upside is that there's no expectation that you'll be hitting the new level cap immediately. The extra EXP that you get can be transformed into more candy with the use of a key item, but still, it kinda sucks to see that your mon could become a lot more useful if a move or an evolution wasn't locked behind that level cap.
• Similarly, wild Pokemon don't give any EXP whatsoever. In return, EXP from trainers is boosted. Hooray?
• There's no postgame. The final level cap as far as I know is at level 70. Presumably they'll add a postgame at some point, but for now it's just "go trek around some more and see what you can find I guess". There's also not really a need to level further than that considering there's nothing more to learn after that, though.
• The story itself is kind of meh. They had an interesting thing going with "you're some rich kid coming into a region whose evil team was beaten already and reintegrated into society" but that doesn't really go anywhere. When the big villain is revealed I just kinda groaned, and frankly the way the final boss fight went down was kind of dumb. Hell, the villain's motives are straight-up dumb.
  
  Spoiler

  "I have social anxiety and I've gotten bored with being the best at Pokemon, so I'm gonna have Regigigas reset the world!"
• There's a "make this mon shiny" guy but all the shinies kinda suck. Most of 'em you can barely tell anything's different.
• The difficulty is sometimes a little aggravating. Some old lady says at the start you can make any 'mon work, and while that's absolutely more true than it is in most fangames, it's also much less true than it is in the official games.
• There's dating plotlines or something. Eurgh.
• You can tell the edgelords to shut the fuck up and some of them get mad at you, but not so mad that it feels like you're able to rub it into their faces as they run off crying. Shame, especially considering there's a mechanic for just such a purpose.

The interesting:

• Some things were reworked that I'm not sure needed to be. Ailments have been completely reworked - no paralysis, now it's "numb". Frozen is basically special Burn now, there's a status called Dizzy that supresses abilities, Leech Seed is a status now. Type effectiveness is also different in subtle ways - e.g. Psychic is now super effective against Steel. It's all shown in the UI, though, so it's easy to not forget even if it isn't easy to remember.
• The items you get to use are held items. Beyond that, no items, no healing, no revives etc. Also removed is the option to Set or Switch - it's all Set, meaning no advance announcement what mon is being brought in and an opportunity to switch in your best mon for the job.
• The Avatars. Avatars are basically super versions of regular Pokemon that appear on the map, with at least two health bars. You fight them with two 'mons at once, they can have two status conditions at the same time, and when you take down their first health bar they change into a different type (shown by changing into a different colour) and they pull a super status move out of their ass, e.g. inflicting burn on everyone on the field or summoning a helper 'mon or boosting their stats. There's a bunch of them, but most of them have been removed.
• Legendary Avatars are basically Avatars' Avatars. At least three health bars, you fight them with three mons at once, etc. To be honest, most of them are kind of drags.
• Enemy trainers have better AI - they'll switch Pokemon if you've got something that's 4x effective. That said, the AI's not so good that you don't learn to predict it fairly easily and make use of its flaws.
• When you beat an opposing trainer and head back to the PokeCenter, they normally return to being ready to fight you. To make sure that they stay down, you have to 'perfect' them - beat them without a single Pokemon of yours fainting, which is easier said than done, believe me. Doing so nets you extra EXP candy, though.
• Gym leaders have both 'simple' and 'full' teams. Beating them on simple is enough to get you the badge and the level cap raise, but if you beat them on full blast without a single Pokemon of yours fainting, you get a key to a special room where you get to fight a legendary Avatar to get a good item. You can rematch the Gym Leaders at any point, so after the third I decided to just beat the leader on simple, get myself the level cap up, and come back when my mons were five levels higher than the gym leaders' highest. Fair? No, but I couldn't bring myself to care.

All in all, excellent fangame material. Not revolutionary or anything, but doesn't need to be. I give it a definite 8/10.

My team:
Valconaro, the Makyan Dustox (Bug/Fire) - absolute speediest boy on the planet, no contest. Hits first, absolutely no questions asked, which sometimes leads to very funny things happening with Fly. So named because he's not Volcarona.
Slim, the Marshadow (Fight/Ghost) - hits things hard, gets hit hard. Late addition to the team, but a good one, especially once he was trained up a bit.
Koh-i-Noor, the Diancie (Rock/Fairy) - got given an Assault Vest, has a Fairy move that uses Sp.Def for calculation. Simple as that.
Siren, the Saurenaid - Gigantamax Lapras evolution. HP for days and good general defense due to its Dragon/Water typing, while also being able to hit others with boosted ice-type moves due to its ability.
Sabine, the Saharicane (Ground/Flying) - Gigantamax Sandaconda evolution. Immune to electricity, immune to ground, life is good as long as there's no ice nearby because hoooo boy.
The Queen, the Arclamor - Gigantamax Toxtricity evolution. Surprisingly fast, surprisingly hardy as long as no earth is involved, all around Fairy-and-or-Flying killer. Was with me since the early days. Named such because she's British and God Save the Queen and whatnot.

Next up, during my vacation in two weeks from now, I'm gonna try Pokemon Wack. Apparently it's got 52 types, so I'm sure it'll be a complete clusterfuck. We'll see.

 

So, pokemon was my first game and I loved it at the time. But I stopped playing after a few generations. I've played around with fan games before, and had something of a good time. But it's been ages. Like 5-10 years.

If I was to play one game, which would be the best? I'm interested in having a fun time, rather than hardcore min maxing. I wanna catch some cool pokemon, fight some gym trainers, and do the usual stuff. I reckon I'd be considered casual here, but I also don't want trivial.

I'd be interested in a mix of good exploration, fun story and challenging but not too grindy battles.