Commander

I want to say writing is highly subjective and if a story is popular and well liked it could be called great writing like Twilight even if many critics state its flaws or call it "fan-fiction" writing. Anyways, I really hate when people focus all on the features a game adds which are more just bells and whistles. Like fast travel is the most amazing thing in a game, but the game isn't awful just because it doesn't do that. Sometimes these features take away from certain experiences which is kind of why I'm against mods in general or tampering with the game until you first experience it fully. Let's talk about battles for a minute as there's two ways to go about it: stream-line and grind-it-out. Stream-line is basically the focus of having bosses be easy enough you usually can win within two or three times with a few obvious exceptions. This is the modern style of RPGs letting players feel like they're very progressive and getting stuff done which is recommended especially now that RPGs are getting longer and longer. Grind-it-out is kind of a term I refer to older RPGs and games with the prime example being Dragon Quest. The idea here is that bosses are way tougher than everything else and you need to adequately prepare for them, but that rarely is enough so you need to grind for money to have the best equipment to even be able to challenge them...which usually you can tell since money feels really, really stingy. Reborn was very steam-line with bosses of course being a struggle and a few hiccups that were smoothed out...until E18 where difficulty kind of came out of nowhere. It's such a big turn off that if cheating weren't easy nowadays I feel like most people might of dropped it (I don't know if I would have or not). I'll be honest that I was kind of done at the glass gauntlet and I even said "this is something I think is too much even for Redux," to myself. Rejuv I can't really say but from the V10 I played is very grind-it-out like as you are supposed to focus on team building and maximizing your team's strength. If you don't have the right team, you could end up being screwed which for people walking in blindly is very common. Yeah we have some early game broken mons like Lycanroc but believe me, Walter really only saves the day if he outspeeds otherwise he's kind of worthless. A large chunk of people actually like this style of gameplay because it ends up being way more difficulty and requires strategizing and planning better. It's a long discussion but both have their pros and cons and it's probably easy to tell what I prefer (hint: I'm a story kind of guy) We'll eventually get to the V8 content but I may have taken a sneak peak at a certain new Sensei and it got a chuckle from me. Saki is what we refer to as the gag character. Their purpose is simply to bring forth comic relief which is often why they get mixed reception. Now a little tip of the trade is to balance them. I mean I've never even used a gag character let alone ever thought about it...well there was one but considering he was a villain...yeah I wouldn't count him towards that. Problem is that there's a point for everyone where a character like that goes from funny or entertaining to just straight up annoying because their character is only built for humor and runs on it. And that's the most important detail when even considering building a character like that. I think Reborn handled its forced hand at using one quite well limiting her screentime to what not even 1% of the game vs Saki's 3-4%. It might be 10% but you get the idea. What makes Terra a fascinating character is what's below that facade. Very deep and interesting character to talk about and speculate. If I had to rewrite Saki, it honestly would be an easy change. Simply change her from trying to be this funny character to having a happy-go-lucky personality. You honestly don't lose much of her character and you could see why Venam really hates her. We know Saki is brilliant but imagine if she was going into art instead of engineering. That would be an interesting character to explain and explore. A lot of her mean lines would have to disappear or be altered but you still have mostly the same character, but without the weird gags. I don't know how interested people would be in me explaining how Saki would work or her lines, but I'd be glad to elaborate or show examples. And yes, keep that dumb scene which she launches a dish 1,000 feet in the air since that's part of Rejuv's stupid fun (not a bad thing) which is where it shines. So yeah I would let it be a 1 vs 2 since it really is easier now than it was even before. As for Metagross here's an easy solution: Choice Scarf EQ lock. I actually wouldn't mind Saki being a terrible gym leader since well being carefree she probably inherited the job due to her father or something. And I'm not talking like Texen's underleveled stuff but actually using a not very well built team then maybe later when you face her she's actually competent. This is just "what ifs" since a lot of this is too late for Rejuv to change. I really do dislike Melia's inclusion since it was supposed to be the player's moment and it's now her moment. I'm actually going to bring up something cool I got from playing a certain game which may explain some stuff. Now something I do have to comment is that framed narratives...actually that's uhhh a different term...in-progress plots have an unfortunate case of can't be changed since they were planned out beforehand. Most written works have a framework which cannot be changed. The path which the player is pushed and tugged cannot be changed otherwise we'd have many, many issues, but I like and dislike some of those ideas. If it weren't for this fact I'd go into more details on what I like and dislike (Crawli being frozen would be quite interesting). Anyways this is kind of how I'd go about a rewrite if I was in charge and needed to do so: *** First thing is the boat scene would remain the same for better or worse. That is beyond my control as too many events rely upon it on top of the forced Melia fight in my requirements. The biggest and most notable change is...all the rangers are gone. None of them are on the beach shore and none in the jungle. If I didn't have a specific reason for doing so, I would keep the ranger scenes like they are despite me disliking them. I want to make note of this because it is very, very important on how this rewrite is portrayed. So the gang lands on the beach searching around to figure out where they are. Melia and Valarie are checking around near the hut when Melia suddenly recalls that they are on Terajuma. Valarie is in disbelief given how far away that is compared to where they currently were. Adam heads back to the group with Braixen saying there isn't anything of interests. I'd probably have Braixen say "We would've searched longer, but Adam couldn't SAND it any longer." And have Adam grumble, "This is why we keep you as far away from Saki." Valarie then asks Melia if she remembers if there's a town in this area so they can stock up on supplies before heading back to Gearan (or whatever that island is called). She says that Kakoriku Village is just a short walk through the jungle. Valarie complains about having to go into a humid jungle with Adam inserting "A little heat never killed anyone." Braixen then replies, "Actually according to the studies of the..." Valarie then goes. "Nope! I don't want to hear it. I'm going right now." Before running off. Adam then turns to the rest of the group and says, "Sorry about that, but she grew up in a really cold climate so she kind of hates heat. I better catch up to her before we lose another one." Then Braixen and Adam run off. Melia then goes "Seeing those three makes me wish Ren and Venam were here, but nothing can be done about that. Oh! I should probably tell the captain to park at the docks before low tide kicks in." She runs off and it's just you and Aelita which she says, "Something tells me I'm going to have quite the tale for the elder by the end of this." We then skip to the vine scene in the jungle which is kind of the same in which Valarie kind of helps guide the conversation (since the rangers aren't there) also commenting about how there's so few people around. Melia walks in and sees the situation where she recalls a teleporter being close by. Then we have the same old dialogue except maybe have the cave collapsing be the reason they fight outside. Whatever everything up to the teleporter is the same. We then get to the teleporter which Melia tries but it seems to be broken. Conversation is the same but when they are about to leave, Valarie asks if Adam can stay behind and watch the boat. Melia doesn't like this and says they need to stick together while traveling through the jungle. Valarie responds that she feels something is very off about this. She also already lost her people once and she wasn't about to let that happen again especially since they didn't know how long they'd be gone. And if Adam wasn't going to go, she was. Adam says he's going since she's right. He's the strongest and definitely could hold down the fort while they're gone. Braixen also says she's going to go with Adam since all of this traveling is tiresome on her feet. After Valarie leaves the room, Melia gripes about giving orders despite her being the designated leader. The Carnivine scene would play out the same. Maybe cut some of Valarie and Aelita's lines but not much needs changing. Instead of Braixen having dialogue explaining what happened (it'd be optional dialogue later) it's simply cut to when Geara captures and gives the demand for Melia to surrender later. They retreat and we get to the front gate. The gate scene I'd play similarly except have the two guards bicker with each other on why the other didn't resolve the Carnivine problem. Melia interrupts asking if they'll let them in and a guard responds "Sorry, but foreigners are banned." Valarie is about to lose it when Crawli interrupts and meets them face-to-face. He apologizes for his rangers' actions and tells them to keep the gate open for now and to meet him back at his office. Melia explains the situation there and Crawli says he cannot help. Something has been going on in Kristillite Town and he sent all of his trained rangers there to resolve it, but not a single one has reported back. He's had to promote rangers prematurely and load them with work just to keep his own village protected and guarded from whatever caused all his rangers to disappear. He doesn't feel comfortable sending improperly trained rangers on such a risky mission, but he will give access to the mountain. Melia understands and the group leaves. Before the group leaves off the beach, Valarie suggests Melia stay behind with Aelita since she is their primary target and they could be walking straight into a trap. If everything looked fine, they'd tell them and bring them along. Melia says they'll be fine as long as they stick together and flies ahead. Valarie really isn't happy with this and surfs on with her Primarina, completely forgetting about Aelita. Aelita tells the player to just go on ahead without her. There's actually two ways I'd offer for the Zetta scene to play out. Option A is for something similar to my rewrite before having him challenge the player 1v1 to spill a secret. Option B is to have Aelita and Valerie duke it out in an argument annoying Zetta in which he says "Just quickly beat me so I can leave this pitiful display." I prefer option A myself. After the battle Melia marches ahead again, but Valarie turns around seeing smoke. She says she needs to check it out and for the player to keep an eye on Melia. Zetta scene and the Deoxys scene plays out pretty much the same except it slowly fades to black before jumping to the bed scene. I feel the Angie scene should be straight up cut as it doesn't add anything we need. So now we jump to the meeting (again) since the bed scene probably would stay the same. Anyways, they talk about the Lava Surf TM to get in and instead of saying Crawli doesn't have a spare copy, I'd say he just lost his a long while back and hasn't gotten a new one since the mountain was dormant for so long. He doesn't like the idea of them going to Krisillite, but he can't stop them even if he wanted to and says they'd be his hero if they also stopped whatever was going on over there. Crawli also asks what was going on in the southern part of the island as his rangers saw smoke. Melia explains that there was an attack on the ship but it's come to an end with no casualties thankfully. Valarie adds that Adam was able to keep them at bay for quite some time. Melia interjects that if Adam stayed with them they wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. Valarie hears this and finally has it saying that if Adam didn't stay back people could've been injured or worse, killed. Crawli breaks up the fight by calling out Valarie for her behavior saying that she should know better by now especially given she's the face of Akuwa Town and her actions reflect people's impressions of that place. Before they could continue, a ranger breaks in saying that a curious ranger has gone missing. Crawli apologizes for ending the meeting early but this was an emergency. Valarie and Melia leave the room without speaking a word and Aelita goes "That almost got ugly there. I'm going to step outside for a bit." When the player leaves the room, that's when I'd put that oh so infamous bridge scene in. If it has to go back where it was originally it can (before the first meeting), but hear me out here. So Melia would be glad to have alone time with the player after so long. She then apologizes with how she acted during the meeting as it was uncalled for as everyone was safe which is really all that mattered...well almost everyone. She also apologizes for both Nim and the player's mother. If she would have handled those situations better then maybe they'd still be here. She feels bad given how close those two seemed to the player and then asks the question "Do you hate me because of it?" It doesn't change much since she's about to continue thought before Aelita interrupts. You know the rest before they all go back and Melia hears a strange song being blasted in the gym which she rushes to see. I'd also place Valarie near a pond reflecting that maybe Melia was right and she shouldn't have questioned her orders like that since she is the leader and she's actually the one acting childish. Melia and Venam scene is the same (then shifting back to the player saying she realizes they need more gym badges), but Venam says that Crawli left already and has no idea where he went (I'd place the Venam arriving right after the player exits the meeting) and then Melia recalls hearing that Crawli's dad arrived back home rather recently and says that maybe he'd know where Crawli went. I'd leave it at being somewhere in the forest, but we all know you need to be specific mentioning the waterfall. And then you'd meet Rorrim B (which I realized is Mirror backwards) and this is the first time you meet in a long time leading to the reveal he's Crawli's father and reveals he knows where Crawli went. Rest of the events go down the same, but I would have Melia be kind of a dick after Aelita suggests telling Valarie and saying they need to hurry and don't have time to search for her. Rest plays out the same until they all arrive back. Melia goes up to Venam but if you go up and follow her (this is all optional) she says there's someone more important she needs to talk to. You can follow her and see that she went to talk to Valarie. It's pretty much just a "Hey, I need to talk to you" since I want to imply it happens during the gym match. Gym match happens the same and I just realize how the hell did Crawli read that sign? How about he asks the player to read it and the makes note of the name, Angie. He wonders if that's the cause of his problems as he continues to stare at the piece of paper. When the player leaves the gym, they are greeted by both Valarie and Melia saying they need to head to the resort since Valarie heard news that there's a gym leader there. Also she assures they won't get into any more fights before the two head off. Yeah, yeah it's a first rough draft, but you get the idea. Also that took a long time so no chapter this time and maybe later (besides those segments have plenty to talk about). Basically the tl;dr version is to make Valarie more relevant and a character and remove Adam and Braixen since they contribute more being offscreen.

Being honest, I don't think many of the devs (or hell me even) have really done serious battling in a long time let alone frequently. Pretty sure the Pent-Op would win.

(Sorry for late replies as I've been busy) Pirating is something we can keep track of and research and really video games is a very, very small branch onto the discussion of pirating. The most common ones are shows and movies and even broader is software itself. Let me see if I can find an article on it being bad: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nelsongranados/2015/12/03/how-piracy-hurts-the-filmmakers-and-artists-you-admire/#56c0d8164554 It's about movies but it does bring up the point that smaller companies can be driven out by having their movies free of access. Again, that's a possibility but I'm not finding any good source to explain the financial impact of piracy. And that's where we get into the gray area. We don't know and we probably never will figure out the true impact of pirating (yes it is bad and you should buy a copy to support a company). Anyways, we can get a rough estimate of how impacting pirating for the Pokemon company is and...I would say that it's not even a 1% impact. Pokemon is not hurt financially at all from this discussion though I did notice two very unusual patterns if VG Chartz is correct (this number can be slightly off): Diamond and Pearl sold better than Ruby and Sapphire. This is obviously expected since I'm pretty sure the DS was more popular than the GBA, but it's by a whopping 2 million while most of the other new gen games kind of sold very close to each other. Now here's the crazier thing: ORAS outsold HGSS. This is not normal as most games in a series the latest ones usually do slightly generate less and less sales (not always) and now I'm going to throw something absolutely crazy at you showing the sales with popular hacks/fan-games at the time: Gen III sales: 15.85 million Gen IV sales: 18.25 million Gen V sales: 15.18 million Fan-games/Hacks at the time: Sacred Gold, Ruby Destiny Series, Raptor (etc) Gen VI sales: 16.05 million Fan-games/Hacks at the time: Reborn (E7-12), Zeta/Omnicron, Brown, SPEE (etc) Gen VII sales: 15.02 Fan-games/Hacks: Reborn (E13-18), Insurgence, Phoenix Rising Now you may look at this and go "oh, these big fan-games are impacting sales" and that is one way to interpret the data. But we have something VERY interesting to look at and to consider. Gen VI was released when the handheld was thriving and kind of had a monopoly of the handheld market at this point while Gen VII came out near the end of its lifespan and the switch came out not long after. Gen IV and V was the exact same story. So now want to hear something crazier: the 3ds only had half the consoles sold as the DS did. It could be argued that based on the playerbase ratio, Gen VI and VII are the best selling Pokemon games. It's kind of crazy how well Gen VII did despite being the lowest selling new generation on this list. So with half the playerbase, the games did as well as Gen V. I want that to sink in. Also based on projections, Gen VIII likely will sell 15 million on the switch. So does this mean fan-games helped sales? No, they still likely hurt sales, but we're looking at small scale impacts that are so hard to prove or disprove either way. Pokemon is still doing very, very well and are at a healthy zone despite what has been going on. If we look at SE's Final Fantasy series, we can see they are starting to nose dive with 15 being their lowest selling game of the modern ones (FFX and beyond). Sorry to nerd out, but I just wanted to point out that money really isn't up for discussion since we're arguing over a possible $100,000 compared to the millions they make for each game. So I did do some research to get the idea of the scope you're talking about. If fan fiction was getting the reception and in a way "advertisement" all the shut down fan-games did, we could see a very interesting change in how things are handled and what gets shut down. Fan-art is impossible to shut down (trust me, Nintendo tried taking down...certain things) since it's a giant pool and it's endless. Do I even have to go into further than this: It's also costly to properly deal with these things and games...seem to be the closest thing to games. Japan is kind of unusual when it comes to fan works even allowing for the sale of doujins though I'm not sure on the stance of games in Japan. They are way, way more popular than anything we mention since a piece of fanart gets reception and feedback for x amount of time before fading. Interesting thing about Fan-games is that were in this weird period where they've turned up really good...which is kind of unusual if not unheard of. Taking off my critic hat for a moment, we've got a very interesting issue here. If there was an RPGmaker pack for Pokemon, that would kind of open source it in a way. Very dangerous and risky move given it's basically Nintendo's most protected franchise (they'd possibly sacrifice Mario before Pokemon...oh wait they kind of have and it worked super well). If we go the super mario maker route, it'd just be an inferior essentials as we likely wouldn't be able to touch or edit the scripts. There's just no good solution to the issue at hand. Maybe in 10 years we'll be able to have a base where both sides can be at peace, but at the current situation, there's no feasible way to regulate or maintain a licensing system that won't get out of hand. Pokemon DOES have competition but because they were at the right place at the right time, most other monster collecting games are just considered "inferior Pokemon games"...even if many them are far, far superior. It is an interesting idea for a Sandbox Pokemon game, but I don't think there's a big enough audience to appeal towards an official version (100k vs 10 million is a very big difference and that's me being generous to the fan-game/hack community)

Use Tepig

We could argue back and forth about the dev times but in the end, saying it doesn't matter because it's all beta is a big fu to fans and players who have been supporting this game for a very, very long time. Most what I'll call episodic RPGs (multiple games that share a singular storyline) have summaries or recaps due to the long delay between releases. I am merely saying there just needs to be something and not to release the whole game at once. I mean arguing against that is saying people should force themselves to play a 40+ hour game again because they tried it out too soon. I see you are a man of culture as well. One thing Xenosaga doesn't need is more hate. But being more realistic is that most people who have that attitude undoubtedly wouldn't pick up the game in the first place. It does have a hive mind effect though which is why you have to be careful with your choice in words with entertainment. But let's refrain from that discussion since it'd just be a bashing of media and humanity as a whole. We would have to wait and see in another episode to see Shofu calm down but I'm not going to assume he doesn't dislike the game due to his very common outbursts and rants on the game. Tell me if you spent 5 years on a project and were so close to being done, would you suddenly just abandon it? I've stopped watching Shofu a long, long while ago and the current content I see from him just gets worse and worse. There's a pile of explanations but ultimately it really doesn't matter. Reborn has had haters for the 5 years I've been around and it will after it's completed. Clearly they turned this place to an awful, toxic comm...whst do you mean it hasn't? If you really don't like Shofu and his content nowadays find someone else to watch. Sure it may not be Reborn but seriously there are RPGs with much, much less coverage than Reborn which are still doing strong and have great communities around them. I mean at worst we can laugh at an angry guy being overdramatic. And as for nerfing the gauntlet, we've had major nerfs before including Radomus, Samson, and Luna, but only time will tell.

Yes to SPEE. But for a metagame that is an awful idea. It's like expecting a random person to be able to perform and script something with Smash given you would need a server to make that even logically work and to handle lag and such. Time and flow is much more critical than turn based. I'm not as much of a fan of ATB so I haven't dug around for games that use that system. There are some but you'd have to dig for them yourself since I'm more geared towards turn based combat.

I mean...the coding exists so we could probably look at it and make something similar to its functionality since the hard part is the graphics and where to place them. Not sure how it'd work with the SWM since I code my stuff within the scripts.

Can't say I disagree with this, but advice that has to be said again and again to young, ambitious creators is to not let your ambitions overcome you. It is better to have a finished game with some poor mapping than an unfinished game with fantastic mapping. That is one of the biggest reason why things fail or never get finished. While I do poke fun about how some maps look a big jagged or unclean, I wouldn't complain if it was the final product. You do you though and I'll step out of your way.

All of it honestly is pretty valid including the developer's control of time releases. The game really does treat you like you're supposed to remember stuff from even 5 years ago. Sure you could say there are resources outside of the game you could use as a refresher, but that's the thing. There's no in-game way to refresh your memory which many long RPGs install methods to remember or recall stuff (like I could make a long list of what each one does and doesn't do). This is also the game which removed the field effect manual for a gimmicky in-game version so why can't there be a synopsis in the Poke Gear? Now I'm going to bring up a good oldie series called Xenosaga which the original game had some massively long cutscenes which could go on for an hour and a half. It's not unheard of to have very, very long cutscenes but it's a combined effect of the previous battle and one of the longest cutscene segments (and 3 times as long as most Pokemon games) that it's just fatigue. Even RPG enthusiast like myself felt that fatigue just due to the battle before so I may have turned my brain off and didn't process almost any of what happened. Xenosaga was a rollercoaster of reception due to the sheer amount of clipscenes (and direction change in the second game) so we're going to experience that here. I imagine there's quite a different reception from the fandom and the playerbase since this is just due to the mess started in E17 (most people are likely way too underleveled at this point...again to deal with that). I know Shofu probably does overreact to stuff due to how he is, but I do think having to make one episode he likely didn't like twice just added towards it. If I was in his shoes, I probably would have done the exact same thing and reacted the same way. Just not as vulgar and would have probably just been silent for a bit for the fans to read. I'm not one of those people who thinks he can do no wrong, but he's just in a tough situation. Also, I don't think he wants to stop after investing so much time and effort into the game and being so close to the end makes you think "why should I stop?" I think it's more curiosity and the fact he's so close why he may force himself to continue at points. As for my stance on the fight, either E17 needs to be redone with trainers or the glass gauntlet should be nerfed significantly more. I know that the reward is really, really good, but that's like trying to force someone to give a victory speech seconds after finishing an iron man. Of course my knowledge is so outdated and skewed from really only working with and playing the modded version so I do have bias. I really do understand why Shofu is frustrated and acted the way he did because I kind of reacted the same way. You could say I handled and coped with it better than he did.

Hardy ain't easy and probably on par with Titania in difficulty. It's just that the gauntlet is that hard probably making the rest of the game a joke. I don't know what the rest of the game will throw at us but I really doubt it's going to top that.

Calcs are just simply calcs and it gets very complicated to figure out the exact calcs to figure out damage and really can only test the legitimacy of a lper and let's face it these guys have been bending the rules and cheating for a while now and we know about it. Not a lot of their criticisms can actually hold much ground due to that. I will say from my own testing that having low IVs and no EVs really does make the game much, much more difficult than you might think back when I was doing test runs for early hardcore builds. As a sidenote: I don't think the complaining and griping will disappear as this game can get very frustrating just due to not being prepared to handle a certain leader. I do think the ones who struggled more won't hate it as much (let's face it this was probably torture for Twit) so who knows how it'll go now. I gotta hold off of watching it for now, but usually the comments fill me in on what I need to know. Wonder if Nappy will have second thoughts when he hits that E18 battle on that nuzlocke.

So I just want to go back and talk about that Youtube comment as I'm not surprised people turned down a very valid complaint. The fields and other factors do kind of screw players over as Pokemon relies more heavily on RNG than most RPGs do...other than fire emblem which ho boy that's a fun one to talk about. The point to his complaint is that even with understanding and having a well built team can still mean you lose just by the luck of the draw which is more often than not. Pointless frustration is the best way to put it. Not saying anyone should do anything about it because that'd change it from a luck based game which people have grown to know and love to a luck based game where luck is more against you than for. Just saying he has a point and not everyone is a salty and angry person who hates the game if they aren't part of the community meaning they don't know any better. That is all. [Rides off into the sunset]

Alright so that question I asked in a way could be considered a trick question (in my eyes) and some of you got that answer kind of close to mine but it doesn't seem the majority really, really understand the why behind it. You're going to learn a little bit about marketing, but I believe the answer to that question is no for the most part. The amount of revenue a company makes on average and their size should usually have minimal effects or negative effects. The gaming industry is a little finicky thing and uses something to what I would call brand recognition. If people do good work on a game, fans will pick up on the name of the company and start following them. I'm sure most of you recognize Developers like TPC, EA, and Activision. And as much as you may dislike certain ones, you can at least trust that what they sell is safe and not malicious at all (many Chinese games and applications contain malware and spyware). One may argue that more often than not it could help save the company barely making it by as most hacking and modding communities are very niche often bringing more good than harm. In fact, a lot of smaller companies usually are very supportive of it despite heavy legality terms (which I've seen some give the okay for spin-offs even). The quality also usually inferior to the original product or what the devs make so it's pretty easy to recognize it's not from them but a passion project. Sonic Mania is one of the most well known projects, but when you dive deeper you'll kind of learn smaller companies and publishers are quite lenient but also many of the fans are as well and will take steps out of respect including removing things to help localization. It's a lot deeper than this, but it's a nice thing to get into once you look beyond the casual games. I do want to step a little bit into profits for a moment as well. We know about piracy and you may think that it'd hurt sales. You'd honestly be surprised that it doesn't at all. You see the thing about piracy (I do not promote btw) is that most people who use it wouldn't buy the games normally and most people who are a fan do buy those games. I know there's the "I'm too poor to buy these games so my only option is to download games" is bullsh*t. That's saying you can't afford to spend $20, $10, or even sometimes $1.00 to support a company. In fact, you will have a hard time finding evidence to support piracy hurts video game sales. Just want to debunk the idea that something being free automatically affects sales figures. That stats don't lie. *** You'd think diffusing my biggest bombshell would be bad for me, but...we aren't talking about piracy here. Not necessarily true, but we don't necessarily call it fan-games. Could be other forms of media and such as fan-fiction written works, songs, or a dance if you really want it. It's more the game radiates with people than the budget or size of a company (*cough* Undertale *cough*). I think your argument is sound and I can't really argue anything about it though I can't say I agree with it. One common issue with video games with older people is that they can only see through rose tinted lenses that these games are only mindless fun like many board games which some are. I'd argue that many are a unique form of art that should be treated the same as books. That's a very, very deep conversation that I must refrain from. And you are right that it doesn't necessarily matter what side of the spectrum it falls on compared to a severe crime like murder. I had to actually go back and look at the copyright infringement laws to make sure but both fanart and fan-fiction break the same laws as fan-games so a company could order a C&D on both of those. Just thought I'd mention that. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Guess it's time to throw my own thoughts into the ring: If we look at community projects as a whole, I would say there's been way more good than harm and usually ends up being beneficial. I'm going to narrow it down to Pokemon Fan-games now which is the odd one out when it comes to all of this. Nobody has come close to hitting the sheer scale that the Pokemon Fan-game community has. I'm not talking about a single game, but the number of projects that pop up and get worked on. While many drop, you don't see even close to as many make a fully playable and fully functional Pokemon game for Final Fantasy, Tales of, or honestly even Mario. Mario and Fire Emblem are kind of big, but they are small in comparison to Pokemon. I just want people to get a slight grasp of the scale first. How did it get to be so big? Well the obvious answer is because Pokemon is popular, but that isn't exactly the whole truth. It's more about the simplicity of it. Hacking was quite a bit tedious and very restricted as you had a limited amount of space, and required tools to perform certain tasks (and editing images was a pain). RMXP is a much more streamlined system which is simple to use and there was a built add-on so that all the hefty work for building a Pokemon game was done for you. So now you have a popular franchise that is even easier to build than a flash game (probably way more time consuming though). Building a fan-game is no small task, I will admit to that, but building an actual game is a whole different level. 60-80 percent of a fan-game is stolen content which is where we start to differ from other sources of fan-fiction. The engine aka the scripts are the hardest to prove or use against someone as coding can be similar and still can be considered different so long as it doesn't follow what the original source code does. Very complicated but we're not here to discuss legal terms. Most music (and sounds) from the game are remixes from other players which obviously are not original from the main-game series or whatever game they are from. Graphics are so-so as some are completely original and others are ripped or edits from the original source. Most trainer sprites are simply edits using the old frames of trainer sprites from the source game. The story is original so it must be completely original and mine, right? That's similar to saying a book where you simply changed all the names is your own creation. I highly disagree with having protection laws on fan-games as it kind of is legalizing stealing. Now there's also the concern of profits. Money is a gray area and sometimes projects ask for money because they either need it or would like at least some coin for there work. Sometimes it's mixed or disguised as something else such as supporting the site, but we kind of know the reason people are "donating." I'm not against donations believe it or not as I feel that's presented as a choice, but I really do not want to get started with Patreon and that field. Coin doesn't matter as I said before. The bigger concern and more scarce resource is time. It takes time to play and beat these games. Remember the C&D for Pokemon Uranium? That hit over 1 million downloads in less than a week. That's a number that would make even companies like Square Enix have a mild panic attack. Let's just be theoretical and each person is worth $5. That'd be a whopping 5 million in profits that a possible company may have missed out on. That's a lot of money and even enough to make a desired sequel for many smaller companies. Could you imagine a world without Fire Emblem simply because most players were busy playing Pokemon Bestagame at the time they almost went under?

I'm actually going to flip the situation @PokeFailure mentioned as it is a good discussion point I think should be addressed. Let's change the situation a little bit: Let's say the Pokemon Company (TPC) is a very small, niche company that's just barely getting by with every game. Does this "hurt no one" suddenly become an issue or is it the exact same as if they were a big company with a lot of resources and money? (Not jumping in yet, but I did want to bring that up)

Also known as the I'm going to regret this topic. So after watching a "Prove me Wrong" video, I kind of got to thinking about Pokemon Reborn and I'm actually not quite sure people really understand the concepts and ideas around fan-games. Unlike in those videos, this kind of topic really has no right or wrong answer and honestly the debate and discussion is kind of split across the web on the idea. We're not here to discuss whether or not fan-games are legal (which they aren't) but whether or not it is a morally good or morally bad thing to do. Things can be illegal and still the right thing to do, but I don't want to throw any bias or skew opinions right away. Since I already know that this is going to turn into a big disaster and get locked right away, I'll lay down some ground rules: 1. You MUST be respectful of other users and their opinions. 2. Do not post something with the purpose of egging or trolling users to comment back 3. While you are allowed to state your opinion or thoughts without it, you must provide facts when refuting or rebutting. 4. Try to keep the discussion within the scope of the topic If this lasts less than two days before being in a forced lockdown, I won't be surprised. Since this is an experiment, I am going to keep it open for two weeks (also a follow-up to my one COGA) before I lock it myself. Don't be intimidated by the rules as it's mostly to help keep emotions in check. Now it may seem odd, but I do not want to be the one starting the discussion and will hop in after a couple responses or so. I don't feel it's right for me to start as I'd likely skew opinions. Since we are in a community centered around a fan-game, I shall at least take the stance of "fan-games are immoral" which funny enough I guess you could say I'm also siding with "Nintendo is doing a good service shutting them down." (None of you have to choose a side, but I am for educational purposes).

Continuing from Alistairs The game was way buggier in early releases where crashes could be frequent and error messages would pop up. Due to above, animated sprites were removed from the download...also made it hella laggy Partners only had one Pokemon The pre Neo Reborn Peridot soundtrack is a mix of the original Many league references such as the togepi quiz and magazines were removed. Saphira's did make a return Obsidia Park forest was a thing E10.5 added Gen VI and E17 added Gen VII. During these two transitions many teams were changed The game was very very laggy which many maps were edited to help reduce. Event Pokemon only had level up moves and most were pretty low leveled Rematch trainers were added in IDK what episode (they showed up after Corey) and were once a day only Light Shards, Candy, Ice Cream, and Common Candy didn't exists in E7. Not sure when added Adrienn and Arclight were eventually implemented into the plot since the game was being made before season 3 started. Radomus gave Calm Mind since Trick Room was broken. The Obsidia Railnet puzzle was changed And some oops such as Energy Ball Typhlosion for Charlotte and Stone Edge Excadrill for Terra Dialogue used to have more ellipses than it does now Shade used to give Shadow Ball instead of Shadow Ball I think factory field had 100 percent accuracy hypnosis Cave field used to make the field collapse in one turn making diglett pure evil. That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

Held items are based on bulbapedia but to double check you should use the Pokemon text doc as that's what determines what a Pokemon may hold and the chances. As for headbutt low and hi, just look up Heracross in HGSS if you are still confused. Basically trees are randomly determined what contents they may hold which usually will be a low but sometimes you'll get lucky and find a jackpot tree with better mons which is the high. I think Ame kept them the same due to that but I don't recall perfectly. Also just a tad bit of advice, you may want to be more clear in the title as usually a topic about PBS asks for the download link. Just would make it easier to see and for people to respond faster.

>19 episodes have been confirmed even before E7's release >E18 was released prior to Essential's takedown even having a tease for the finale So yes, essentials is why the game is ending so soon because that's the only logical explanation here.

Sidequests for a month...so basically a part of the game where you are actually the star and don't have to deal with whatever screw-up Melia caused. Seems like it'll be a grand month indeed. Seriously why is it that the dumbest characters are always the most important? Might as well put a leash on that thing.

I'm not going to really say Ame has to give a reason for anything (given I haven't worked on modding for like 2 months now), but this is kind of like the old days so please don't panic. Ame has been working on this game for so long that it's to the point she wouldn't stop unless it would literally kill her (and even then she'd still find a solution). It's going to be around 2 years so just sit back and find things to do in the meantime. That 2 years probably will fly by for me given the two massive site projects I'm doing plus that fun silly one. Just gotta learn how to deal with the wait.

Basically back when field effects weren't introduced, the whole Market scene was the same, but when you got inside El showed up and they all have a talk in which Serra says Bennett always challenges Serra's opponents before her in which you talk to Bennett and challenge him. Once you beat him, El asks Bennett to come with him outside and then you face Serra. Once you defeat her the scene outside takes place and that's the end of the episode. It's honestly an RPG trope where an unexpected boss comes out and sometimes you end up challenging the big bad (such as Cackletta) way before you'd expect making for some quick thinking or changes. Unexpected bosses are to be expected...though sometimes it does go too far. Bennett definitely isn't that and he's very easy to underestimate. It's VERY unfair to criticize Bennett when this is the third time this thing has happened (Victoria in Shelly's Gym and Fern in Aya's Gym) so that's kind of to be expected. Kind of ironic Nappy saying this game is being unfair when he so reluctantly forces everyone to play with the nuzlocke setting because he either thinks the run is going to be boring or too easy. I mean if you're really sick of watching this then don't watch it. Goodness I've just been reading this topic just for kicks and entertainment (only watching videos to sometimes see what the heck you're talking about). I'm not trying to self advertise here, but I could picture him coming back and instead of doing a nuzlocke trying the Redux version. Unfortunately I only have a dev build (able to add or modify things) so there's no playable E18 version yet. I mean he actually does try to use strategies but the nuzlocke rules and rare candy cheats do make their Pokemon so weak they die so quickly and easily creating an endless cycle.

To even have the great Pikachu Sage even acknowledge a lowly scrub's presence as myself would be of the highest honor. Now thank you for waiting while I re-energize myself using Cherry 7-Up and Doritos. Episode II: There's More Cracks Here than an Episode of South Park So when leaving the gym you bump into the mobile roadblock. She tells you where to not go, but considering that jack*ss Fern is going that way you decide to ignore her and go away. Victoria is a terrible roadblock who can't even do her job properly. We finally make it to Obsidia Ward or for most people: that one place with a bunch of holes and vines. Like how does anyone ever even remember the name of these places? For now, we shall just call it Whole City. Whole City is where you pretty much do everything including buying all your items. Too bad everything is blocked off by f*cking trees. And because of one single tree, you have to go down south, walk all the way around the ghetto, fight a weird gang of Scrafty, and then have to go South even more because...reasons. Trees are the real villains of the story making you do work. Down in Coral Ward or because of what all those sailor are on is also known as Doobie Docks, not much happens. You sacrifice a Ultra Potion for a Skitty. Poor kid doesn't realize he just got gypped. There's this annoying blind girl who asks you questions and makes you feel like a f*cking idiot for not knowing how many buildings are in a city. You meet Amaria, a woman who won't have any relevance for a long time, and Cain again who rescues a Popplio which falls in love with him. It's weird, we fight, and then we're back to Whole City. You meet Florinia who was holding the HM Cut and being the worthless machine she is, just watched you run all the way around like a jack*ss just to get to her. By the time we got to her, I could've been the Kanto champ three times. So now being her f*ckboi we have to use the HM she gave us to clear away the trees since she was completely unable and then just charges ahead to get captured. Water girl is also there but nobody cares about her. You also meet ZEL, a guy with more issues than Charlie Baileygate, who is standing in front a Tangrowth straight out of an R.L. Stine book. After defeating that Pokemon...if you can call it that, all the f*cking trees are gone and you saved Whole City. Next you go North to Onyx Ward, but most of you remember it as School City. School City is where Florinia's gym is and after all the sh*t she made you do because of her incompetence, you just want that badge and to get out. Unfortunately, a certain jack*ss decides to lock you out and now you have to do the one thing any college student dreads: going back to high school. After venturing through books which are pretty much just Bulbapedia articles and typical random trainer fights, you'll come across a puzzle which is guessing a bunch of questions. If you don't feel like wasting more time than you have to, you probably used Bulbapedia to skip past it because f*ck reading. You see Fern and beat his little ass before you can face his sister. He says he'll get stronger and beat the league before you do as he runs away like the little pussy he is. Normally a piece of trash like grass trainer like Florinia would be a joke, but this game hate you. The only available ice type requires it to be a sunny day so you can buy a chocolate ice cream so you can shove it up Jimmy's ass to get him out of the way of the ice cream vending machine to get a shitty Ice type which is worthless. For fire types it requires it to be rainy or fight a bloody overleveled Klinklang which probably will beat your ass. There's Pidove, but nobody likes Pidove. That pretty much leaves you with just Swalot. Oh wait, you need a Pokesnak and if you gave it away then good luck finding another one as vendors only appear on clear days. You could catch a Spearrow or Makuhita and level them up, but grinding in this game is about as fun as trying to revive a party member in Dragon Quest. At least you have Kricketune. Unless you said no and now it's gone forever. So what makes Florinia hard? Two things: first is a Ferroseed with a special little thing we call seeds. While Field Effects crank the difficulty up to an 11, this takes it to a whole new level. What do they do? Basically, they make your life more miserable. On this field effect, they make an already tanky Pokemon even tankier giving it a +1 def and sp def boost so good luck killing it seeing the above. And the other thing? It's a Cradily, an incredibly weak Pokemon nobody ever talks about. Well since your Pokemon are in their 20s, this thing is a behemoth. Good luck doing damage while sand is up and this thing is spamming stockpile. Even better it has recover just when your about to finish it off. You already knew that though as this is something that still haunts your nightmares after attempt and attempt of losing to it. Once you finally take the damn thing down, you earn a badge, but she sends you off to finish up her work in Jasper Ward.