Siewek Posted 15 hours ago Share Posted 15 hours ago Scroll to the bottom if you're here just for the list Preamble Hello, my name is Siewek, welcome to my megathread about my long standing archival initiative. In this thread I plan to go in detail about my experience delving into the deepest nooks and crannies of the internet in search of past versions of Pokemon Reborn. The initial plan was to have an archive ready for Ame's patrons to download old clients as a curiosity rather than an intended means of experiencing what Reborn has to offer. I'll be sure to provide sources when necessary. It is also important to know that Ame, dev team and supporters are aware that this has been an ongoing project, and everyone has been nothing but supportive from the very beginning. I will also provide a list of whats recovered and whats missing at the end as a TL:DR because not everyone is interested in the entire process. Who am I? I'm Siewek, lost media is one of my passions, I joined Reborn forums in 2021 but have been a fan since high school years. Over the last couple of years in addition to restoring old episodes I've done more archiving work for the website. As of writing this post, I do have some limited moderation powers given to me with trust to take care of "The Vault". What is the Vault? I'm so glad you asked, It's a forum category available for Patreon supporters, containing an organised list of threads depending on the topics, for example Game history, History of the online league. It's nothing anybody cant find on their own, it's just compiled into an easily digestable way of browsing. I've mostly restricted my forum activity to finding old threads, pieces of information, artwork, anything worth archiving and putting it in the vault. The Easy part This archival initiative isn't anything new, there have been couple of people interested in finding working versions of past episodes of reborn, but Im pretty sure it was never done on such a massive scale as I am looking for them, the plan is simple, find at least one working client of every episode from 1-19 and safely store them somewhere, or better, have patreon supporters download them so they don't go missing again. So with hope in my heart, I went on looking. And to my surprise, it was pretty easy, with some minor experience looking for old things very quickly some old threads containing mega.nz links with past episodes emerged, so within couple of days episodes 9, 10, 12-18 were recovered. But for some reason, episode 11 was missing from that list, the links to it were dead or lead to websites that didn't have them anymore. I did eventually recover episode 11 too, although it wasnt as simple as the previous ones, it is safely archived. More on that later.... The not so easy part Unfortunately, this is where things started going downhill and will have to expand on the concept of how past episodes operated. In the very beginning, before Pokemon Reborn was a game, and when the first iterations of the online league were running, Rebornevo was known as Poke-Place.com, It was given the Reborn name because people would leave during school months and then the community would be "Reborn" and come back around summer time. The first community ideas to make a video game centering around Reborn appeared in November 2011, then couple months later Ame drew a map of the Reborn Region and game plans were starting to form, it wasn't just a wild idea anymore. Ame very quickly provided the community with the first build of the game on April 16th 2012 which contained about 4 hours of gameplay (Note: The 4 hours of gameplay back then, was very different than what 4 hours of modern reborn would be, but this post isn't about gameplay), then episode 2 couple months later on may 28th 2012, and that was happening all the way up to episode 8 on may 22nd 2013. All those episodes were available to download under link Poke-place.com/game (which will redirect you here to a website couldnt be found page, but the link is viewable on waybackmachine), and that's pretty much it, this was the only place you could download the game from officially and with every newer release the old files were swapped for new ones under the same link. So why don't you download from the wayback machine if the link is still there? I hear you dear reader, and unfortunately, wayback machine in most cases doesnnt store binary files, only snapshots, the link leading to files PokemonReborn.zip or PokemonRebornS,zip (animated and static sprite versions) doesnt lead anywhere and definitely doesnt lead to files. You can view the website, but no download will actually work (except for some reason episode 14, that could be downloaded through wayback machine, painfully slowly but it worked, but it Im getting ahead of myself). In 2013 the website swapped domains it wasn't poke-place.com anymore, but PokemonReborn.com, that's why wayback machine snapshots for poke-place.com cut off at around 2013 and anything afterwads will redirect you to the new website. Episode 9 and why was it easy to find and Episode 8 isn't In the late stages of episode 8 and later when episode 9 released the game files weren't just downloadable from one link - Ame had started out using mirrors. Episode 8 had been hosted on GameFront.com, while starting with Episode 9 mega.co.nz was added as another mirror. Its also importand to add that the game has started gaining popularity at that point so more and more people had the game and to this day when you ask a Reborn veteran about old clients, the most likely answer you'll hear is "The oldest episode I have i episode IX". Later in 2016 the website domain switched again to what we know and love now, Rebornevo.com. This is overall a good thing, but for an old post enthusiast like me, means that in every thread a link to PokemonReborn.com post goes nowhere, the linked thread does exist in Rebornevo the link is just different, and requires some knowledge of Decipher-Fu dark arts. For instance lets look at my profile, my user id is 100148, my profile on poke-place would look something like this: http://www.poke-place.com/forum/index.php?showuser=100148 (obviously this profile doesnt exist as I registered my account in 2021, long after poke-place became rebornevo), then similar story for pokemonReborn.com: www.pokemonreborn.com/forum/index.php?showuser=100148, but on rebornevo my profile would be: https://www.rebornevo.com/forums/profile/100148-siewek/ so if you found my hypothetical profile on the old domains, you would have to change the link to the rebornevo version to find me, this is the same story for every thread you can find on wayback machine. Okay, Siewek, but you said that episode XI was also gone? So what's with that if there's Mirrors and people dowloaded the game much more? True... and to be honest, I dont know why that specific episode was gone, at that point in time, in early 2014 the game was pretty huge in terms of popularity, some people did have it stored on their devices but for some reason, whenever someone posted a download link, it was broken. And here comes the absolute legend to save the day: MonkeyDog, owner of MonkeyPro.net MonkeyPro.net I cannot bring up MonkeyDog without calling him an absolute legend every time. MonkeyPro was an affiliate site to pokemonReborn, it was actually a community from which Ame started Poke-Place Reborn, the first iteration of the Online League was held there, back in late gen IV days, called MonkeyPro League, I can write a book about everything Online league related but this would be ramble of its own and I promise you Im trying to stay on the track as much as I can, it's just exciting talking about the League. From episode 10 onwars, MonkeyPro.net hosted one of the mirrors for Pokemon Reborn, When browsing old forums posts on MonkeyPro I eventually stumbled upon a post about a website steam group, I found it and joined it, made a post that Im looking for past reborn episodes and waited in the groupchat, not really expecting anything, after some time, Mr Legend MonkeyDog gets back to me, confirming that he did host the game on his website a while back and he should have some working clients somewhere, and surely enough, thanks to him, Episode XI is safely within the archives. Thank you MonkeyDog this is about as far as I'm gonna go into the future episodes, as all 9 onwards are archived and they're no longer relevant to the search, I will be focusing on episodes 8 and below from this point onwards. 10th anniversary of Pokemon Reborn There has been talks in the Chasing Selene patreon discord back in 2022, to ask Ame to rerelease episode 2, as she said she still had Episode 1 and Episode 2 (but not episode 3 onwards Smh my head Ame), and what better occasion than the 10th anniversary of Pokemon Reborn? Episode 19 was already out, most people completed it or were close to completing it, the hype was still very much there (I can argue ep19 hype never went away), It would be awesome to have a way of replaying an episode that's older than 9. On june 15th 2022 Ame made a patreon post containing a zip file with a dev version of episode 2 available for patreons. It is there and available, however since Ame's wish was to keep to to the patreons, I did not add it to the archives but consider it recovered. Why not episode 1 though? I'm gonna quote Ame as I think she said it best, taken from the patreon post: Quote Well... nothing of the existing content really changed between 1 and 2, so it's more bang for your buck. Also, Essentials changed the save format between those version releases, so saves were not compatible between them. The other thing of note that changed between 1 and 2 was the screen size. Originally it was GBA-sized and it was upped to DS-sized, which entailed a bit of tedious remapping but ultimately is not terribly interesting. Which I think is fair, I officially drop episode 1 from the search. Also I would like to give special thanks to Cass who has been giving us impromptu performance updates to the episode 2 clients which made it more stable, it was pretty cool. Wait, did you say dev version? Ah, good eye, reader, yes, because it wasn't actually the episode 2 as released, they also had project files, and when playing through it, beating Florinia the game kept on going... and this is the part where normally episode 2 should've ended, and then it kept on going further, right until Taka encounter after which there was nothingness. Apparently this version of "episode 2" is actually partly into episode 3 development, which honestly is nothing to worry about, it was realeased as episode 2, it plays like episode 2 so Im counting it as episode 2. It's 2025 now though? That was 3 years ago Yes, and I wish I had better news, this is the time where pretty much all good news end, and it's just tedioussness and dead ends ahead. I've been doing this project on and off since very late 2021, Clawed through every bit of reborn on the internet I could find, visited every shady website, clicked on every safe or unsafe link, checked every archive, fan game pack, rom hack collection and there is no trace of episodes 3-8 anywhere to be found. I wish that the archive could be complete, but unfortunately I don't think tht will come to fruition ever, but that doesnt mean Im gonna stop trying, let me now talk about all the leads apart from the random websites that may or may not have had the link The best leads Remember when I said I wasn't the only one curious about the old episodes? There are couple of threads on the forums with people asking about them, some even provided some (now dead) links, but because episodes 3-8 were only available to download from poke-place.com/game and then swapped when new episode came out, the best chance for any episode to be recovered, is to start asking people who played the game in 2012-2013 if they still have any files to share, and that's what I've been doing for 2 years now (and continue to do so). I browsed old topics found users active in that timeframe. If you want to help looking for old episodes, please let me ask you to Not be contacting members of the community that are not your friends. Because there is a very high chance that I already contacted them, and it would get really annoying if someone gets multiple messages asking for the same thing, especially when they checked and replied that they don't have it anymore. A lot of people replied to me when I asked them, unfortunately nobody had any game clients I'm looking for, but a lot of other cool stuff unrelated to the game itself was recovered that way, and whenever that happens I count it as a win. There are also other communities that Ame posted about Reborn releases in, like PokeCommunity. Pretty much the same story there, I did manage to get in contact with couple of the people who replied to the Reborn thread on their website, some got back to me, some didint, but everyone who did had the same sad news that they did have it at one point, but not anymore. Sadly this is to be expected as those clients are 12-13 years old now and pretty much everybody swapped their main PC at least once in that timeframe. Sadly, there is nothing to be found on Pokecommunity Reborn clients related anymore, Thank you to everyone who replied to me though. It is unfortunate, but the best lead still is a very very slight chance that maybe, MAYBE someone kept the files on their device, just gotta keep banging my head against the wall and who knows, maybe I'll get lucky. Time unfortunately isn't on my side, as I have a real life that sometimes needs my attention (like a full time job etc etc), and also the older the clients get, the higher chance that they get removed if they werent already. This sucks. Gamefront.com I actually managed to get in contact with a GameFront dev, because there was that link to a file they hosted at some point... and maybe the links were just moved rather than files removed.... and it unfortunately turned out to be another dead end. He went into detail about what happened and why it's not there anymore, I will quote what he said when I provided the links where the files used to be: Quote Those look like personal files - please see the following knowledgebase article - https://www.gamefront.com/support/knowledgebase/i-can-t-find-my-old-video-file-do-you-still-have-it In short, old GameFront run by Defy Media et al and then was closed down, through a long and winding road we recovered what we could and rebuilt the old FilesNetwork portion of GameFront, that is, if there was a dedicated game site for it such as Command & Conquer, Bridge Commander, Grand Theft Auto, etc, we could recover the files. The personal file hosting business where you just uploaded a file to gamefront.com and got a link to share with your friends, much like dropbox, megaupload and others operate, we were unable to recover that data, largely because they were not public, and also because the policy was for them to be deleted after 90 days. Additionally, to further compound issues, a lot of media files such as the one you're referencing were often DMCA'd and removed back then also. Unfortunately, episode 8 was stored as Ame's personal link, and it's gone forever. Youtubers Pokemon Reborn has started gaining popularity largely after Shofu started playing it back in episode 7, this is probably my biggest hope that at least episode 8 and maybe episode 7 are still findable, the problem is, people who were interested in playing the game without being part of the community... are kind of hard to find. I did email Shofu's buisness email at some point asking whether maybe he has it, unsurprisingly this email went unsanswered. Shofu has a subscription discord server, to which I have no access because I am not one of his twitch subscriber. I may be letting you down slightly dear reader, but this is I think the only lead that came to my mind that I didn't explore yet, I did not join that discord and I didnt ask... yet. There is a very very slim chance someone thete might have it, but there has been so many slight chances by this point that I will get my hopes up only when I see the files. But Shofu wasn't the first youtuber to play Reborn, there were couple of them before, mainly FrickingNick and TheGamersTree. where they have content that goes as far as episode 4, which is crazy. I am pretty sure Tristen from TheGamersTree is the earliers recorded lets play of Reborn, so there's the live proof that they DID have the game at one point, but like I said, I was out of good news, I talked to both Nick and Tristen and unfortunately they didn't have it anymore. Very cool guys though. As far as random videos go, there are some 12 year old guides on how to install pokemon Reborn, but they link poke-place.com/game as their source, and as we established already, the files are gone. Lost media communities This lead has some potential, but Im afraid not a lot, I did make a post on r/help_me_find and r/lostmedia which didn't get a single bit of attention, and even if they would, Im afraid that because the timeframe of the episode 3-8 is so short, at being only 1 specific year before the game got very popular, the actual audience was seasoned Rebornians who are in a lot of cases not active in the forums or on discord, the actual amount people who downloaded episodes 3-6 is pretty low. There is that slightly higher chance for episode 7 and 8, but considering that I had no luck finding episode 8 which is the latest one Im looking for right now, I don't think realistically this search can go much further by myself. The outcome looks bleak not gonna lie It has been around 4 years of searching for me, It's a very exciting journey and Im not saying Im ending it, I will continue to update this thread whenever something pops up. I dont think there has ever been a search conducted on such a large scale before, and the fact that going profile to profile asking "do you have an old reborn client" (more respectively than that ofc) is my best option doesn't fill me with much confidence, but every once in a while I get a new dose of inspiration and each time I come back to this, which I do more often than I thought I would, I discover something new, Reborn really is an endless source of curious info and I am never not impressed by the scale of this. Im getting towards the end I swear Okay, I wasn't entirely honest about that whole episode 8 thing, there is something I found, and it's pretty bizarre. When Episode 9 released, apparently there was a game breaking glitch with frames, and the solution for it was to boot up episode 8, change frames back to default and then update the game to episode 9. At one point Ame created a mockup version of episode 8 called FrameResetter, which was very very cropped version of episode 8 and I did find a stray link leading to it, because it wasn't hosted on the downloads page, but rather linked withint a forum thread. I do have the frame resetter, it does run you can technically play it, but there's no sound and I don't actually know how far it goes, since it was a mockup version of episode 8, Im not counting it towards restoration project but I thought it was important to mention this. So what's my point? I guess now that I wrote about the journey to right now, my point would be: If you played Pokemon reborn episode 3-8 at any point please please please check if you still have the files and reach out to me. This is the only realistic way the episodes may be restored, I've done all I can and it would mean the world to me if at least one more episode would resurface. Here's the list of what's archived and what's not: Episode 2: Archived Episode 3: Missing Episode 4: Missing Episode 5: Missing Episode 6: Missing Episode 7: Missing Episode 8: Missing Episode 9: Archived Episode 10: Archived Episode 11: Archived Episode 12: Archived Episode 13: Archived Episode 14: Archived Episode 15: Archived Episode 16: Archived Episode 17: Archived Episode 18: Archived Episode 19: Archived By Archived I mean that one OR MORE versions of that episode have resurfaced. If You're interested in a link to the archives so you can play old episodes easily yourself, IF I get a greenlight from Ame to release them, I will update the thread with the link. As of this moment the archives are available for patrons. Another important information about the old episodes, is that you DO NOT need the play through them to experience Pokemon Reborn as it was intended to be experienced, objectively the past episodes are worse in every way than the modern Reborn, and they should be treated as curiosities, a way to look at how things were back then and how good we have it now. Thank you so much for reading my post, I plan to be active within this thread and hopefully at least this was an interesting read. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bruhtonium Posted 10 hours ago Share Posted 10 hours ago Damn, respect for trying to preserve the episodes of pokemon reborn. I would love to play to episode 2 to see how the initial version is. But if Ame is not okay with you sharing it, that's completely okay. I assume you have played through most of the versions and know each difference, if not then that is fine. If you have played rejuvenation in the last years you know how vastly different the early game has been by changing entire chapters. Has the same happened to Reborn where after a certain episode Ame went back to really polish something up or did the only major change happen with episode 19 where only a small part of the early game got a major revamp. Also mayby you can ask the people that got covered within victory road. The NPC are based of people that have been in the community for a very long time. I remember this because of a post about a simulated tournament a while ago. I think there was some guy that did really good in doubles and ame gave him a shootout or something. Mayby I will go back to the posts to find that guy and mayby he can help. I wish you succes with the grind. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Siewek Posted 1 hour ago Author Share Posted 1 hour ago Yes, actually that happened quite a bit in Reborn, there were plenty of gameplay, visual, mapping, story changes to previous episodes as the time went, off the top of my head I'll try to name a few:Different Pokemon events Mincinno/espurr event used to be ralts Magikarp questline you get from grand hall, just gave you a magikarp, and in later episodes the price was bumped up from the 500 pokeDollars The bibarell trade used to give you Abra instead of Munna Gen VI wasnt out yet, so every noibat today used to be a zubat, which gave you early crobat Instead of Danielle in Coral ward, there was an old man giving you a quiz about the online league, those questions were pretty deep Reborn Lore like "What kind of Ipod does Shade use?" (It's 4g, Jailbroken) Gameplay Changes No gen Vi onwards and gen V pokemon sometimes werent functioning correctly No field effects, they started appearing in episode XI in limited capacity, Luna's fight was the first one to have them Most attacks didn't have animations Game was much slower pace with no speedup In episode 2 Florinia's gym was capped to level 35 instead of 25 and Florinia was pretty damn hard Some double battles today used to be singles, like Shelly's gym battle Animated sprites were available to download and use in Reborn until Gen Vi, you can still make some of them work today, but it's not worth it Double battle turn order used to work a little bit different Lots of teams were different as they had to be up to gen 5 and with that some signature pokemon were different too like: Aster and Eclipse used Magby and elekid instead of midday and midnight lycanroc Victoria's starter was tepig Ferns started was snivy Cain rescued Oshawott instead of popplio The entire Obsidia park segment was different, It was there in earlier episodes in different form than it was today, then in later episodes it was take out all together and remade for episode 19 Pulse tangrowth was a regular tangrowth before Mega Evolutions No common candies until later There was an evil scraggy puzzle in obsidia slums where a scraggy in a box was blocking your way and getting past it was pretty hard with how much stuttering there used to be in the game No intro cutscene to the game, you used to hear an explosion at the start and then Ame greets you in Lower Peridot Ward There used to be more references to Online League players, for instance at the beginning of the game there is a confused lady that asks "Who could've done that" and then lists couple possible explanations, in previous episodes she asked whether "Geo did it?". Geo is one of the old community member known for mischief No Influence system was implemented yet, if someone was playing the same savefile throughout the episode releases, they would be screwed endingwise as when it was implemented, it wasn't retroactive Map Changes As Gen Vi wasn't out yet, there was no swirlix on the candy store building Beryl library didnt exist, it was a standard grey building which had a hole with a dead officer in it Gyms were different, Julia's gym used to have the same puzzle, but she was just standing in a small square section rather than in a big glowy arena like today Beryl Graveyard used to have more graves with unimportant to the plot names on them (One of them said Suss Sussington which will never not be funny) A lot of the game feels familliar, but different, It feels super slow compared to now, having to level a new pokemon used to take much longer and was painful. The older episode had a much less of a Game vibe and much more of a Love letter to the comminity vibe, it's fun to look at what used to be different, but it's also important to understand that what we have today, is far superior to any past version. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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