Dreamy

Interesting. I personally really like the sense of mystery from all of the story and stuff because there's so many little bits of information scattered around to find but you get the feeling that it all fits together and that you can and will find out what it all means, And I love trying to piece together and solve the puzzle. I also get the feeling that the players importance will increase in the later part of the story, based on the 'interceptor' thing from the puppet master and the fact that Madame X obviously has a plan for us. And to a degree I find it nice to not actually have the story be completely player-centric

Rain is definitely a big help as it directly cuts the power of fire moves. The fire moves will still get a bonus from the superheated field which is the message you were seeing, but it will stop the field combusting, which would then give them an even larger boost, on top of activating things like blaze and flash fire, giving them an EVEN LARGER BOOST. Basically having rain is really helpful. I hear Heatproof Bronzong is available nearby and makes a good support pokemon for the fight. If you bought/rescued cyndaquil from the 7th street dealer, you can also use the slightly unorthodox method I used on my first run of sweeping her with Typhlosions Eruption will all of those afore-mentioned field boosts

Honestly It could probably just be split between Protagonists, and NPCs. most of the gym leaders have a greater role in the story than just their gym leadership. The meteors being labelled as ??? feels unnecessary too.

I'm happy that you took a nice break, and even happier that you're back! I may not have anything to offer to development except moral support, but I'll always be here to patiently wait for the next version and share this amazing game with whoever I can!

I mean, It's only a cliffhanger because of where the current version of the game ends, and I guess it also builds excitement for the next version. I somewhat doubt the tournament will actually be finished though, It'll likely be either interrupted, cancelled, or we won't be able to complete it due to being otherwise occupied. Kinda annoyed that the prize of the tournament makes it so obvious that the player has no change of winning, one way or another. The shiny rate is fairly high, but that's nice in some ways because a bunch of us worked on those custom shinies as a community so it's nice that they're seen more often, and it also increases the change of getting a shiny that you actually want to use on your team, without hunting for ages. most of the bugs should be fixed by the patch, but typos are sort of to be expected due to the sheer volume of text, and should be slowly ironed out over the course of subsequent versions. Pretty sure there's going to be a very good reason for Madame X wanting us alive, we just don't know why yet. I'm sure Nim will be significant again later, potentially in connection to April/Krystal/Alexandra, but for now I guess it makes sense that she's not around after what happened to her. The level cap is part of the challenge because it means that you cant just be overlevelled and bruteforce everything, but there are plenty of options against each leader and they're honestly not too bad, and without the fields you could just run through their teams with a single strong pokemon with type advantage. Not exactly trying to argue here (sorry if it comes across like that) but just sharing my own thoughts on each of the points you raised.

Not super far yet, as I restarted for 1.2 and have been pretty busy, but just wondering if there's a nature changer anywhere down the road? (other than that pokemon thing which from memory was 1/day and had a very low chance of a random nature change.)

Yea I dunno about what they're for (tracking, some kind of sleeper weapon/control thing or something mind-affecting because there are kinda hints about the city being too perfect at times). Purple definitely seems like the generic one and Gold is a special one for Melia, but I'm not sure about the red one. We got the red one because "it's the one we got before" I.E when Comet was disguised as us. Pretty sure Cosmia and Comet are with Team Xen, so the question is, was the red vaccine intended for us, and Comet got it too, or was the red vaccine intended for Comet (and other Xen affiliates?) and we got it too due to the mixup?

Thats patch 10, it's not a full version. you apply that to version 9 by merging the files into your version 9 game folder.

yea the patch downloads fine thankfully.

any low level prankster pokemon with rain dance works too and is worth the team slot even if it can't otherwise fight.

Yea @seki108 I noticed the quote thing too

HALLELUJAH! @seki108 thank you so much for this. took like 2 mins to download as opposed to 15 hours. You and Trevore deserve all of the reps.

That would be amazing. the DL servers seem to be really struggling

Man, you've actually managed to download it already? mines at only like 15% after over 2 hours

Of Course.

Looks like going through any of the doors in shades chamber of CoM takes you to a black void where you can't move (bump into walls on all sides) and I think the grand hall music plays.

Yea I said basically as much in the stream chat. and yea number 3 atm, wonder if that'll change?

so like within 48 hours?

That E17 title screen music is great too.

Well, that's a while to wait, but sounds like a pretty decent plan. Hopefully you don't have to redo too much for E17. early randomizer version sounds fun for just experimenting with all of the pokemon tweaks.

If its that rough without items, honestly maybe it's ok to have them. At most points in the game, the best healing item you have common access to is usually less than a full heal, which will be even more so with higher base HP stats. If you also wanted to push back the points where a new tier of healing becomes buyable a bit, that could work? and/or with the price increase, though you'd maybe also have to check the money rewards of grindable trainers so thats not too easy to farm if you're using price as a restriction

I'm not going to weigh in on the main gender/stereotype discussion here (though I don't think there's an issue really) but I will briefly share some thoughts on the whole HM and NPC's using pokemon outside of battle thing. In many games, Story, Gameplay and Logic are tied together in a way that means often for some areas to shine, others have to suffer, or one will struggle due to the restrictions of another. this is often especially prevalent with pokemon due to the fact that with the world built the way it is for its stories and gameplay, the inherrant logic of pokemon worlds is somewhat flawed and full of holes when you try to heavily investigate or try to flesh things out as much as a real world. Some specific examples off the top of my head: (reborn and general) Levels : this is a big one. very important for the core of pokemon gameplay, yet often causes logic to suffer greatly when it comes to relative power levels of people who you battle. Extensions of this are Level Caps and Gym Team Power, the former doesn't really make sense story or logic-wise, especially with opponents who obviously don't have any badges but match or exceed your level. simplest option here is making them fully non-canon but then they can never be mentioned in-game without breaking immersion. The latter is more just about logic/story inconsistancies regardless of which system you choose (most noticeable with julia, florina, shelly in reborn): if the leaders have separate gym and personal teams, why don't they use their strong pokemon in things like the raid on mosswater. if they just have one team, did we happen to catch them when they were weak and now that they've grown stronger, do new challengers then have to fight Julias lv60+ team to get their first badge? If someone has a consistantly working system for this, lemme know. (we won't go into gym leader rank/ordering based on this) Out of Battle actions by NPCs: Reborn is more guilty of this than main games, but thats because it tells a more intricate story with more NPC interraction. This seems like logic suffering for the sake of story, and in the players case, due to the restrictions of gameplay. Example is coral pier, logic says that Amaria could've rescued oshawott in one of several ways with her pokemon, but instead we got nice interraction with Cain, Amaria and ourselves, Cain obtaining oshwott and a battle with Cain. We sacrificed logic for story. Things like saphira tearing down metal fences is a case of sacrificing logic for gameplay and story in that it gives proper progression of areas. One of the more glaring examples is that the player can't free themselves from the nuzleaf cage, which doesn't result in much story addition, and is more likely to be noticed by the player due to the wait time. this feels like a sacfice of logic for gameplay consistancy more than anything else, i.e "if we can cut/burn that, why cant we destroy XYZ?" Some of this comes down to suspension of disbelief and rule of cool, and usually if you aren't trying to be too critical and just immersing yourself in the story, its often not a big deal. Not saying you can't be critical of this stuff, but it's important to understand that it's nigh impossible to avoid a lot of this with the world and gameplay we have and still have a good game. That's all for now, not sure if I'll revisit this or not.