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BearDown

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  1. Playing through it for the first time, Desolation blew me away from every direction. Now that I'm done with my playthrough and not concerned with spoilers anymore, I'm excited to review all of the facets of Desolation that I enjoyed. Firstly, the dialogue's polish jumped out in the first few minutes of playing. From about five lines each I wanted to know more about Ava, Scarlett, and then Amelia. In about two lines I wanted to push Connor off the side of the ship, and Shiv and Kuiki piqued my curiosity even faster. Good writing is unusual in fangames, so I was immediately committed to playing this game all the way through, before I had any idea what quality the gameplay would be at. Acclimating to the battles turned out to be quite the journey itself. In Keneph Forest and the village, the initial battles were pretty manageable, so Shiv smashing me with Skill Link Tail Slap was quite the surprise. I grouchily conceded that running away from every wild encounter probably wouldn't go so well, gained a few levels with my Pancham, refused to actually train what I considered to be a temporary teammate in Grubbin, beat Shiv, and moved on. I'd just have to take the difficulty level slightly more seriously and I'd be fine. Or so I believed, right up until the battle against Connor. Over the course of a dozen crushing defeats, my team went from a Pancham not at the level cap plus a few untrained Pokemon to a leveled-up team of six capable of beating Connor. This was the point where I should've realized that the battles were being designed with a good grasp on high-level competitive Pokemon tactics. Unfortunately for me, it wasn't until Aderyn's terrain blocked my attempt to set Stealth Rocks that it truly sunk in. From then on I looked forward to each big battle as a well-crafted challenge that I'd need to outwork and outsmart. As for the non-battle aspects of gameplay, I grew to be mostly impressed by the scope of the map design, though some aspects were a bit frustrating. Each key settlement had a unique feel to it, with Blackview in particular being a daunting scramble of activity. While Blackview's hustle and bustle was great from a mood standpoint, needing to take careful notes to keep track of important locations in the city wasn't pleasant. The biggest difficulty was the lack of a more direct path cutting left to right through the middle of the city. Perhaps there was a winding path to take, but with so many dead ends on each side, I always ended up trudging to the top or bottom of the city to cross over. The other area that I had mixed feelings about was Silver Rise. Both the cave and forest sections were very in-depth, so taking them on back-to-back with only a brief interval felt exhausting. When it came to quests and puzzles, the non-puzzle sidequests were probably my favorites on the whole, with the ranger quests having similar levels of involvement as the main plot itself. The branching quests in the dreamscape were also especially well done. As for the puzzles, I mostly preferred the mandatory puzzles over the optional ones. For the colored piece quests, more than once I had to look up a video solution and promptly found that I had missed using the exactly correct method by one step. However, I did find the main story puzzle to get into the North Cellia Fox base to be a short but extremely satisfying puzzle. For lack of a better time to mention it, only one part of the game actively bothered me. Perhaps this was specific to me, but some of the flashing effects used were at times physically painful on my eyes, be it the red flashes from walking around with a poisoned Pokemon or the white flashes from some story moments, your own Pokemon being sent out, and random encounters. This issue was relatively minor and certainly didn't stop me from enjoying the game considerably, but I'm curious if anyone else felt the same. Returning to Desolation's numerous positive aspects, I'm not a person with much grasp for what goes into making good sprites, but I did immediately like each of the 4 player-character options. Rarely do I spend longer than 10 seconds picking the design I prefer and getting started, but in this case I regretted that the other 3 designs didn't belong to separate characters. Even still, it wasn't until past the second gym when I started to think about how consistently good the spriting was in the game. While the different expressions in the dialogue boxes for each important character were great touches, seeing the full view of characters like Amelia and Tristan when battling them for the first time is what made their designs into personal favorites and brought home the effort put into them. By that point I had to shake my head and wonder how on earth someone could make a game with a striking story, great map and quest designs, challenging and thoughtful battles, and stellar character art to boot. I didn't expect at all when I started clicking around this forum that there was actually a team of 3 developers. It all made perfect sense that the story, battles, and sprites were each primarily handled by different folks, and I'm really impressed with all the hard work y'all have put in. To Caz, I hope the passion for this fantastic story stays strong. It's been created so vividly that I deeply look forward to seeing the next installment and one day the end of the story. To the whole team of Caz, Ruby, and Posty, you guys have done a tremendous job making a beautifully well-rounded game, and I very much hope you continue to work so well together. PS: the team I used to beat the game! (Spoiler warning for details on opposing trainers.)
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