Manatee Cannon posted:

fan games aren't required to play by the same rules as official games but they do still carry those same expectations with them when they have the same name, mechanics, and characters. it's like if you were playing metro or fallout and then suddenly a pikachu mauled you to death. it just feels weird

Wrist Watch posted:

If you want ~the pokemon experience~ then just play pokemon instead of holding it against people for what's essentially extended fanfiction. I'm not arguing that the racism/sexism are okay, and passing on the game because of that is incredibly understandable, but there's plenty of other far worse problems or decent ideas executed poorly to complain about in these fangames without docking them points for not being accurate in tone to the official games.

Ometeotl posted:

I expect "humor" and mindsets like 4chan's to be continually mocked and marked as thoroughly not okay, instead of just throwing up our arms and going "oh that's just 4chan being silly again" and pretending it's ok to foster and normalize such a lovely pile of festering ideologies as that community.

Rainuwastaken posted:

Imagine a Mario romhack where, between each level, there are story beats detailing how everything has gone to poo poo and a bunch of evil koopas have started doing shady poo poo. Then the level starts and you're back to bouncing off goombas, Mario shouting "wahooo" like normal. Uranium wants to deal with heavy issues like nuclear fallout and parental death, but the player's only method of interacting with that plot is sending out construction equipment with angry eyebrows and telling it to use Hyper Beam. Then the villain goes, "aw fiddlesticks", pays you, and leaves.

Brother Entropy posted:

yeah the actual pokemon games have an incredibly charming tone that's fun to be around and even when these fangames aren't waist-deep in edgy fanfiction territory they seem mostly uninterested in trying to hit that tone

Kurieg posted:

Someone's LPing a game that's basically this in the Fangames thread.

Rainuwastaken posted:

The problem is that the standard tone of Pokemon is almost impossible to separate from its mechanics. It's a game about ten year olds capturing magical animals and battling them to be THE VERY BEST. If you were a really great writer, you could probably twist that to have a darker tone and it might work fairly well. But if you're not, any attempt to make it grimdark and super serious just makes the clash all the more noticeable.

Wrist Watch posted:

I kinda disagree here though. Pokemon doesn't have ingeniously planned out mechanics that can't be divorced from it's tone. It's an incredibly standard rpg formula.

Rainuwastaken posted:

alcharagia posted:

How much money does CURIE give you when you beat them anyway

Ometeotl posted:

I expect "humor" and mindsets like 4chan's to be continually mocked and marked as thoroughly not okay, instead of just throwing up our arms and going "oh that's just 4chan being silly again" and pretending it's ok to foster and normalize such a lovely pile of festering ideologies as that community.

Epicmissingno posted:

According to Uranium's wiki, CURIE gives you 6580 Pokedollars as a reward.

Rainuwastaken posted:

You're absolutely right in that the mechanics themselves are fairly plain RPG stuff. If you took out the series-specific fluff like pokeballs and trainers, and made it into a more standard RPG or something, then you could totally do a darker story and it'd be fine. But if you have to strip out everything Pokemon to do that, we wouldn't be comparing them in the first place. It'd just be an RPG with a lovely 2edgy plot.

EclecticTastes posted:

I'm not one to get overly serious here on the internet comedy forums, but I agree completely, there's a great deal of value to calling out lovely stuff like Clover and holding it up as an example of unacceptable behavior, given that the last few years have shown what happens when "ironic" racists, et al are allowed to go without serious criticism for too long. Even ignoring the more obvious, broader horrible poo poo in the world fueled in part by the "just a joke" brigade, it's just getting unbearably toxic to be in any sort of nerdy community because some people think just because they can claim they "don't mean it" (a claim that is usually a lie, regardless), that they can say whatever the gently caress they want.

That having been said, I do think we're maybe running the topic of Pokemon Clover a tad into the ground, given that this thread is for Pokemon Uranium, which is just poorly-designed and alternates between insufferably edgy and mind-numbingly banal.

Onmi posted:

I think it's the mind-numbingly banal hitting now. What's there to talk about beyond "Game's boring and dumb." We've already shat over all the bad designs, which are bad in the way someone who doesn't know what Pokemon is designing a Pokemon looks like. The plot, for what exists of it, is vapid and pointless. It's just a nothing fan game.

And really, I think that's Uranium's biggest sin, above anything else, once the initial "This is lovely." phase passes, it has nothing. It's just a game of nothing that you can't possibly begin to care about. Like.... I can talk about Snakewood forever because it's not just schlock garbage but it tries to hide behind "Oh, it's only garbage for parody." I can talk about Glazed 'The game that never loving ends' because at one point after having beaten two Pokemon leagues you get dropped into a sewer by a guy with a Kyogre (While the plot is about how capturing legendaries fucks up the world) who calls you a bitch loser and is loving the gym leader. You never fight him. That thinks a fitting end to a rival character arc who's been hounding you for 3 loving regions is to go "LOL I'm gonna go to Hoenn, because it's not in the game so you can't follow me!"

gently caress I'm mad at Glazed....

Manatee Cannon posted:

fan games aren't required to play by the same rules as official games but they do still carry those same expectations with them when they have the same name, mechanics, and characters. it's like if you were playing metro or fallout and then suddenly a pikachu mauled you to death. it just feels weird

Rainuwastaken posted:

Imagine a Mario romhack where, between each level, there are story beats detailing how everything has gone to poo poo and a bunch of evil koopas have started doing shady poo poo. Then the level starts and you're back to bouncing off goombas, Mario shouting "wahooo" like normal.

Kurieg posted:

Someone's LPing a game that's basically this in the Fangames thread.

Rainuwastaken posted:

Imagine a Mario romhack where, between each level, there are story beats detailing how everything has gone to poo poo and a bunch of evil koopas have started doing shady poo poo. Then the level starts and you're back to bouncing off goombas, Mario shouting "wahooo" like normal.

BioEnchanted posted:

Honestly Edgy Pokemon already exists and it's pretty charming, even if mechanically it could use some work - Yokai Watch. You are literally collecting the spirits of the dead, and some of them get darkly humorous backstories. The Fighting type Cat is a normal cat that got run over by a truck. In it's afterlife it is obsessed with getting strong enough that it can fight a truck and win. The main character's parents have a massive falling out due to a Yokai deliberately creating a rift between them for a laugh, that kind of thing.

BioEnchanted posted:

Honestly Edgy Pokemon already exists and it's pretty charming, even if mechanically it could use some work - Yokai Watch. You are literally collecting the spirits of the dead, and some of them get darkly humorous backstories. The Fighting type Cat is a normal cat that got run over by a truck. In it's afterlife it is obsessed with getting strong enough that it can fight a truck and win. The main character's parents have a massive falling out due to a Yokai deliberately creating a rift between them for a laugh, that kind of thing.

Aithon posted:

An older example: isn't edgy Pokemon aware of the impact its mons have on the world just Shin Megami Tensei? (Yes, I know the series is actually older than Pokemon.) You bind demons to your will and set them to fight against stronger demons, because the world's kind of become a shithole due to, in large part, demons being everywhere. It's pretty rare to fight fair against another trainer summoner (unless you're playing Devil Survivor), because you really need to gang up on these powerful demons to even stand a chance. The bosses don't just lose in a children's game and walk away, they are defeated or killed and sometimes also become bound to you by contract.

What I'm saying is that while mons in a much less idealistic setting can work and make internal sense, the resulting game will not resemble Pokemon all that much.

e: that cat backstory, though, drat. I've got to play these games one of these days. I've seen the demos and I liked the general tone.

Aithon posted:

The bosses don't just lose in a children's game and walk away, they are defeated or killed and sometimes also become bound to you by contract.

Schubalts posted:

Or in the case of DDS, you straight up eat 99% of the guys you fight.

Malachite_Dragon posted:

The one, single boss fight you don't eat after beating them ends up being eaten by someone else anyway after you spare her and leave the area

Aithon posted:

And if I remember correctly, you don't get any experience for that fight because your party member refused to eat them. Consistency!

Rigged Death Trap posted:

My favorite allusion tho is Meganada, who is later revealed to be Indrajit.

quote:

...Indrajit... ...You're kidding me.

FPzero posted:

In addition to the apparent fangame like this in the Fangames thread, someone's LPing a Mario romhack that does exactly this in the Romhackeria thread right now.

Commander Keene posted:

Yokai Watch keeps the same general tone as a Pokemon game, though. At its heart, it's an optimistic story where bad things happen, and then the player steps up and makes things better. Like Pokemon, there's some darker bits, but by and large, the game's plot is upbeat.

Also, Yokai aren't necessarily the spirits of the dead. That one cat is, as are others, but others are nature or animal spirits, tsukumogami (basically animated objects that have gained souls due to their long histories), and other things based off of Japanese mythology (the same as many Pokemon).

SMT has already been brought up multiple times. It definitely qualifies as "grittier Pokemon", because many of the games' settings are (post-)apocalyptic. In fact, it's not uncommon for the world to be destroyed or significantly altered by the presence of demons during the intro, before the player has gotten their starter 'mon.

Also, your main method of getting more powerful dudes is through fusion, which pretty much explicitly kills two of your dudes to make a new one. Capture is less reliable than Pokemon games, requiring you to actually negotiate with the demons you're hoping to ally with, and the stock you're handed through wild encounters is both significantly less powerful than the bosses, and levels up slowly. You are not expected to take your starter to the end of the game; instead, you generally need to have already fused that sucker into something by the end of the first dungeon, or the beginning of the second, at the latest.

Dragonatrix posted:

That's not a reveal? They've actively the same person in actual mythology AND the first time you see Meganada you're outright told as much:

Robindaybird posted:

Though Demons aren't actually killed from their dialogue, and how the High Pixie in Nocturne can be obtained even if you fused the Pixie (long as you remember which demon she got fused into) - the way the old geezer demons talk abut fusing with a pretty thing, and childish ones wanting to become something cool, it seems almost like Fusion in Dragon Ball Z or Steven Universe - where they merged into a new being.

Arcade Rabbit posted:

SMT does a fantastic job of making the demons feel genuinely alien to the human mindset. Very little of what they do makes sense. Like, you fuse Pixie away, but then another Pixie recognizes you as if it were that Pixie, but then other Pixies refer to other Pixies as seperate people so it's not a hivemind scenario. Its loving weird and I love it.

Arcade Rabbit posted:

SMT does a fantastic job of making the demons feel genuinely alien to the human mindset. Very little of what they do makes sense. Like, you fuse Pixie away, but then another Pixie recognizes you as if it were that Pixie, but then other Pixies refer to other Pixies as seperate people so it's not a hivemind scenario. Its loving weird and I love it.

Robindaybird posted:

Though Demons aren't actually killed from their dialogue, and how the High Pixie in Nocturne can be obtained even if you fused the Pixie (long as you remember which demon she got fused into) - the way the old geezer demons talk abut fusing with a pretty thing, and childish ones wanting to become something cool, it seems almost like Fusion in Dragon Ball Z or Steven Universe - where they merged into a new being.

Arcade Rabbit posted:

SMT does a fantastic job of making the demons feel genuinely alien to the human mindset. Very little of what they do makes sense. Like, you fuse Pixie away, but then another Pixie recognizes you as if it were that Pixie, but then other Pixies refer to other Pixies as seperate people so it's not a hivemind scenario. Its loving weird and I love it.

PMush Perfect posted:

At least in some of the Persona games, it seems to tie into the collective unconscious... somehow? To some degree?

Aithon posted:

And if I remember correctly, you don't get any experience for that fight because your party member refused to eat them. Consistency!

Dragonatrix posted:

That's not a reveal? They've actively the same person in actual mythology AND the first time you see Meganada you're outright told as much: