So first things first I would like to give my sincerest gratitude to the people who made this game. Secondly this is a post more for me to get what I thought of the game so far out there. With that out of the way lets get down to business. I can tell that the people that made this game really put in a lot of work and effort into the game. It has the same feeling as a normal pokemon game but it an actual challenge. The level caps with the badges actually make sense in this game unlike the regular pokemon games. It was the first time I had to really consider training too much during a pokemon game. Having a field that helps your opponent, it makes matches that much more difficult. From a mechanics standpoint this game is like a breath of fresh air to someone that has literally played every generation of the pokemon all the way from red and blue to omegaruby.
Next comes in the story aspects of the game. I will be honest I wasn't expecting much at first. I expected the more liberal speech and internet inside jokes but that is just fluff. The real meat of any story is the development of characters within the story. I love the fact that not all the gym leaders are good guys. It gives a greater sense of reality into the game. Some characters developed in a way that I truly didn't expect them to. Fern for example was always the stereotypical jerk rival but I never expected him to actually join the bad guys. I can see that a lot of thought has been put into making a good narrative story.
Sometimes when I played this game I thought to myself, "wow Amethyst you must be a real sadist". I intend this as a compliment. While some of the puzzles were easy and done before in pokemon games others I had to look up a guide for cause they were so complicated. Even after you get through the puzzles you still had a really hard boss fight to deal with. I think out of the 12 gym leaders so far in the game, only 3 I beat on the first time. This doesn't even include hard fights outside of gym battles like the one with Cal on the volcano. All of the competitive movesets and fields helping the bosses didn't help either. It made me go back to the drawing board to think of a way to beat people. And sometimes even after that I had to pray to the RNG gods for specific things to happen in order for me to win.
This game has a lot of original content. From sprites to music to the field effects, somebody had to draw, create, and program all of that. All of the people who work on this project, you have my upmost respect. The best art I can do is stick figures and you give all of these characters and interesting and new life to them. Listening to music is easy but creating sound pieces that makes people want to listen to them on repeat is truly a difficult skill. The field effects which add one of Reborn's most compelling features into the game was an original idea. Somebody had to have programmed each and every single field and their effects. Before I entered college and got to know people who were computer engineers, I never truly understood how hard programming was. All we see as consumers of the game is the finished project. The one thing about games that I have learned through my programming friends, 1) NO GAME IS EVER COMPLETE there is always a bug or a situation you didn't account for that can affect a game. When it comes to the art and music once the product is done that is it. But there is always going to be some sort of new problem in programming. And I have seen this community given feedback and the creators do something about it. That is why I love this group.
Once again I would like to thank everyone of the Reborn staff for all their hard work and effort. This is something that I would truly love to see a complete version one day. But until that day arrives I look forward to the next episode with much anticipation.
