[randomizer download!!!!1!@!]

20 hours ago, Nails said:

I've started a randomizer file, and the run is both extremely enjoyable and also really lame, for somewhat connected reasons.  It's really enjoyable breaking the game, but the randomness has made the boss fights so weak that breaking the game feels pointless. <blank move> was Night Daze, so my starter Darkrai had 2 slots of Night Daze. Leer was replaced by Spore, so running around early game a lot of mons just have Spore. I found a Xurkitree with Pollen Puff and it's Beast Boosting through every fight. My Brine/Fusion Flare Jellicent learned Quiver Dance at level 22, and we (I was screensharing with a bunch of friends) knew to level it up because we saw a Gastrodon use QD and through some careful detective work figured out that Water Pulse turned into Quiver Dance.

 

Figuring out the stupid things we can do to break the game has been an absolute riot, I am a huge fan of that element of the gameplay. The issue is that it's all unnecessary. One of the best parts of Reborn is the difficulty, and the randomizer nukes that. The PULSE Tangrowth was replaced by a shiny Sliggoo. Gym leaders' teams no longer have synergy with their fields or their other mons, and even if the leader high rolled a really good mon there's a strong chance it will have a junk moveset. The player can spend hundreds of rolls sifting through random garbage to find a few gems, and the bosses are dealt 6 random mons and have no chance of competing with the player. I'm probably gonna just start up a new vanilla run because as exciting as the experience of finding stuff was at the start, the realization that the entire game is going to be a cakewalk is a total buzzkill. I feel like keeping boss fights/leaders/etc teams constant would fix this.

 

Thanks for all of the work yall have done, I adore Reborn and I'm eagerly anticipating E19.

Keeping boss fights unrandomised is a really interesting idea and an elegant solution to many of the problems inherent in randomisers. However, for me at least, seeing the crazy combinations on opposing trainers' teams (especially in boss fights) is the best part. 

 

Overall, I think people just need to moderate their expectations about what a randomiser can deliver in terms of satisfying gameplay. It's less an equally viable game mode and more just a neat little side-project that's fun in small doses. 

 

Of course, there are ways to create a more structured Pokemon randomiser that affects everything while still retaining the feel of the original game, but that requires a LOT more work. From my own experience messing with randomising software I know that it's really hard to get the balance right. 

 

In other news, I'm up to the Move Reminder and hoo boy is it wild:

 

 

 Ok so the list of moves that appears when you try to relearn a move contains:

 

1) all the randomised moves your Pokemon has learned or tried to learn by level-up
2) all the moves your Pokemon would have tried to learn in the unrandomised game

But that's not all! When you select a move, the one your Pokemon actually tries to learn is the shuffled equivalent in the randomised game.

So, for example, two of my Togekiss's relearnable moves are Air Slash (as in the base game) and Kinesis (which is what Air Slash turns into in my randomised file). When I try to relearn Air Slash, Togekiss instead tries to learn Kinesis (like how TMs work), and when I try to learn Kinesis, he tries to learn Discharge, which is what Kinesis has been randomised to in my file.

This effectively means that every Pokemon has access to two 'layers' of randomisation on their level-up movepool, via the Move Reminder.

 

Here's a simple example: Magikarp will have be able to learn:

1) whatever Splash, Tackle and Flail were shuffled to (e.g. Leer. Frenzy Plant, Fire Punch)

2) whatever those shuffled moves were shuffled to (e.g. Magnet Bomb, Spore, Geomancy)

 

EDIT: I think the randomised moves only appear in the list if they were learned and forgotten? This raises an interesting question about whether it might be worth learning a bad move so you can forget it and see what its randomised counterpart is.

 

EDIT 2: I just realised that actually this means that you could probably keep learning shuffled moves and forgetting them to create a chain beyond just two layers, e.g. if my Togekiss learnt and forgot Discharge (Kinesis), Discharge would appear in the menu and it’d be able to learn whatever Discharge is shuffled to, and so on. Kinda game-breaking, but limited by how research/resource-intensive it is

 

 

Also I still don't quite understand how Doom Desire works. I reported before that it's shuffled to Fusion Flare on my file and lands two turns after it's used, as expected. For some Pokemon, though, it seems to just deal Steel-type damage immediately, like a regular attack.

[randomizer download!!!!1!@!]

I’m having a lot of fun with this! I like how the 1-to-1 mapping system retains some of the puzzle-like features of battles in standard Reborn. It’s fun when you start to notice patterns and figure out which moves have shifted where (I’ve had a few neat early-game ones, such as Harden —> Shell Smash, Tackle—> Lunar Dance and Leer —> Frenzy Plant). It also has the neat side-effect of giving each Gym Leader a new signature move, which is super cool and something that usually gets obliterated in ROM randomisers.
 

For those who haven’t figured out the TM system yet, it works as follows: 

-TM moves have been randomised, but they retain their original names in the menu, up until you start teaching one to a compatible Pokémon

-compatibility is based on the original compatibility of the unrandomised move, e.g. I bought TM45 (Attract in the original game) from the Onyx Arcade and all my non-genderless Pokémon could learn it, even though it actually taught Iron Defense.

 

Couple of little things I thought I’d mention:

-my Typhlosion learned Hyperspace Fury, but it couldn’t use the move, presumably because it’s normally locked to Hoopa. It’d probably make sense to remove this feature when a game is randomised.

-the Doom Desire thing that other people have mentioned is just funny and I love it. I had an opponent use it and it called Fusion Flare when the attack actually landed.

[randomizer download!!!!1!@!]

2 hours ago, Velthomer21 said:

I am off to a pleasant start with my 'Bulbasaur'.

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bet you feel a lot safer with that backup Infestation

 

really looking forward to trying this out!

 

Edit:

 

 

 

 

first Aster/Eclipse fight lmao