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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 There's probably a mod for that, to be honest.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 18:26 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 16:10 |
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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. 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. 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. The Uranium devs (And Reborn, and Clover, and almost all the rest) are not good enough to overcome using Pokemon as the frame for their story.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 18:29 |
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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. no, my point is that it's boring to see people getting shocked over a product whose whole job is to shock people. don't touch the poop, don't feed the trolls, etc etc.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 18:34 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 18:36 |
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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. Someone's LPing a game that's basically this in the Fangames thread.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 18:37 |
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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 The main games still manage to be charming even when they are dealing with plot points such as slavery, child abuse, genocide, the apocalypse, etc. Hell, Magikarp Jump is charming even when its informing me that my fish suffered a horrific death at the hands of a wayward pidgey.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 18:44 |
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Kurieg posted:Someone's LPing a game that's basically this in the Fangames thread. I don't know whether to be amused or disappointed.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 18:45 |
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Thanks for all the responses. I get where people are coming from now, but I guess I'm just going to have to disagree a little on this one. I don't go to fan material for an experience that matches official stuff, I go for a bunch of dumb poo poo stapled on to the source material with varying degrees of effectiveness. I see basically no fangames that actually pull this dance off properly, because I've noticed those projects tend to stop being fangames and end up as competent games or IPs capable of existing divorced from the original game. I guess I just have much lower expectations for fangames in general, so something like this doesn't bother me as much. Like I said, I'm certainly not trying to claim these games are actually good here. 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. 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.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 18:52 |
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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. I might not have worded it all that well. Lemme try again. Any game titled "Pokemon Uranium/Reborn/Omicron/whatever" is obviously going to be using the core concepts of catching monsters and using them to fight other peoples' monsters; it's right there in the title. It's the CONCEPT that completely ruins any attempts at a super grimdark or edgy plot for me. The game's antagonist might be the Super Devil, but he'll still get beaten in a fight between his helldino and my sparklehorse. When everything boils down to a magic cockfight between fuzzy monsters, an overall darker tone feels completely out of whack. 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.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 19:13 |
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How much money does CURIE give you when you beat them anyway
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 19:23 |
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Ah, I get what you're saying now. I guess it's just me coming at it differently then. I've read far too many lovely sprite comics back in the day to be bothered by stuff like this at this point.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 19:33 |
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alcharagia posted:How much money does CURIE give you when you beat them anyway According to Uranium's wiki, CURIE gives you 6580 Pokedollars as a reward.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 19:38 |
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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. 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.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 19:59 |
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Epicmissingno posted:According to Uranium's wiki, CURIE gives you 6580 Pokedollars as a reward. Bit low for a deadbeat mom Pay ur child support damnit
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 20:32 |
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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. There's plenty of dark story potential to make out of Pokemon without removing any of the elements of it. Heck Uranium has some parts of this in Garlikid and the Poke-translator of all places: Pokemon fighting for their own sake rather than at the behest of a Trainer. I'd imagine there's a lot of uncomfortable potential to be mined there simply from the cock fighting analogy yet no one really does more than dip their toes into it (Shadow Coliseum's probably the one that most got their feet wet with this) because it would run counter to the Pokemon experience.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 20:44 |
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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. 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....
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 20:49 |
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Yeah I know what you mean. Clover seems like a trainwreck but also like it's partially enjoyable (though the racist/sexist jokes are lovely no matter how ironic/4chan they are). Reborn seems like a trainwreck throughout. Uranium is just...half-baked and mediocre with occasional really dumb bits to make it stand out.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 21:02 |
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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. Yeah, that's true, Uranium is entertainingly lovely for maybe half of it, and the rest is just really dull, OFS has been a goddamn champ at making it as entertaining as he has up to this point, but it's like low-quality gum, we've chewed all the flavor out (and it wasn't a particularly good flavor, at that), but we're not entirely comfortable spitting it out so soon, so we're left with that gross pencil eraser taste in our mouths until we're ready to get rid of it.
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# ? Jul 3, 2017 21:03 |
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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 So basically: Why people poo poo all over Fallout 3 when it came out. 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. Yeah, I was about to say this is just every Super Mario World romhack that isn't a kaizo-styled muncher hell. EDIT: Oh, look, Mario Uranium already exists. KataraniSword fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Jul 4, 2017 |
# ? Jul 4, 2017 00:40 |
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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. 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.
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 04:31 |
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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. 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 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 fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Jul 4, 2017 |
# ? Jul 4, 2017 05:16 |
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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. 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). 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 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.
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 05:46 |
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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. Or in the case of DDS, you straight up eat 99% of the guys you fight.
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 06:17 |
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Schubalts posted:Or in the case of DDS, you straight up eat 99% of the guys you fight. 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
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 06:40 |
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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 And if I remember correctly, you don't get any experience for that fight because your party member refused to eat them. Consistency!
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 07:17 |
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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! You do get exp/karma. But not Mantra(i think its mantra?), [e: its Atma] which is the skill path xp. In fact one of your party members wont even start on that until she becomes fine with eating people. My favorite allusion tho is Meganada, who is later revealed to be Indrajit. One of your characters demon form is Indra. [Ps2 era Atlus was loving killing it. Too bad everything they made became cult hits.] Rigged Death Trap fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Jul 4, 2017 |
# ? Jul 4, 2017 09:44 |
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Rigged Death Trap posted:My favorite allusion tho is Meganada, who is later revealed to be Indrajit. 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: quote:
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 20:24 |
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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. Doseku's cross posting it in both threads.
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 20:28 |
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Ah I was unaware.
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 23:26 |
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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. If you don't believe in your friends, maybe. (this was a terrible and unfun thing; do not actually do it)
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 05:00 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 05:16 |
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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: Hey you LPd it you remember it better than me.
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 07:33 |
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.
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 07:46 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 07:55 |
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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. Here, on Marklar, we refer to all people, places, and things as Marklar.
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 09:29 |
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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.
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 09:34 |
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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. tho they are totally dead in persona 5
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 14:51 |
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?
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 15:32 |
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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:
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 15:38 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 16:10 |
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Pokémon Uranium. P.U. Jay, your verdict?
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 16:27 |