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Robindaybird posted:in Reborn we really didn't accomplish a drat thing in the entire side trip and we might as well not even be there.
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Aug 14, 2018 01:12
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The only thing we did is rescue Mr. Walking Stereotype, and most of us are in agreement it's better off he's left to rot.
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Aug 14, 2018 01:15
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EclecticTastes posted:In fairness, there are RPGs that have used especially long digressions to great effect, like Earthbound and Chrono Trigger, but you need to keep things interesting enough that the player fails to notice how far from their original goal they've gotten until the story finally puts them back on track. Earthbound embraces it's non-sequitur nature until the halfway/two thirds point where everything gets a lot more linear and focused. It gets pretty inane at times and some of the puzzle stuff is pretty BS but fits with the themes of being a journey of self-discovery. Also most of the spiteful roadblocks are played for laughs and you usually accomplish something in order for those roadblocks to clear up. There are no laughs in Reborn and most of the accomplishment is being a bystander/facilitator for other characters.
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Aug 14, 2018 02:00
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So whats the over/under of that guy who bothered the girl (not going to dignify it with "betrayed") having a dramatic heel-face turn and redeeming himself at a critical moment. But even though she still loves him and admits it he is too ashamed to accept it and go back to meditating on an active volcano or something again.
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Aug 14, 2018 02:09
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Is Cal the smelly hobo who we have to not judge because wow sodeep etc?
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Aug 14, 2018 02:13
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Haifisch posted:That sums up the core problem with Reborn. I think other people have said this, but we're basically just here to watch people's RP characters do things and occassionally beat a PULSE Pokemon. Occasionally, because the RP characters may just beat the PULSE Pokemon for us instead, as Cal showed, thus lowering our role to literally "none".
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Aug 14, 2018 02:38
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FeyerbrandX posted:So whats the over/under of that guy who bothered the girl (not going to dignify it with "betrayed") having a dramatic heel-face turn and redeeming himself at a critical moment. Are you talking about Cal? The guy responsible for throwing a Pokemon into a loving volcano and buddying up to a dude that executes his mentor a second later? My bet is he gets redemption by the next Pulse, if not by the next gym battle. Regardless, he will certainly be forgiven/redeemed despite not deserving it at all. Also, it kinda seems like Solaris ordered his Magmortor to throw Medicham in (not sure if he actually did that or it was a quirk of the gif). I wouldn't be surprised if, during Cal's dramatic heel-face turn, Solaris uses Cal's own Magmortor to melt him, just to say "See? Look how evil he is. He must be stopped." Then Victoria is super sad and we are meant to feel sorry for her AND Cal. Psycho Knight fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Aug 14, 2018 |
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Aug 14, 2018 02:45
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I would legit not begrudge you if you hacked in the loving badge, OFS.
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Aug 14, 2018 02:57
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Maybe Kiki once tried to kill Cal in his sleep when she felt he was turning to the Darkside in her dojo, and that's why he's all evil now.
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Aug 14, 2018 02:59
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Apparently Solaris knows his brother (Blake, right?), so I'm guessing this Blake dude is in Meteor and since Cal's been trying to be Blake he also joined them. Except he said he should stop trying to be like his brother, and from his response to Kiki's execution it seems like he was sincere about that? gently caress if I know.
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Aug 14, 2018 03:09
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SSNeoman posted:I would legit not begrudge you if you hacked in the loving badge, OFS. Honestly, it'd probably do nothing but enable Surf on all zero things I have with it. The rest of Reborn would march on while I helplessly scream that I have the 10th badge.
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Aug 14, 2018 03:12
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:Honestly, it'd probably do nothing but enable Surf on all zero things I have with it. The rest of Reborn would march on while I helplessly scream that I have the 10th badge. ahh, so like sequence breaking in Metroid Fusion.
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Aug 14, 2018 05:26
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Hold on just a second This one's the tenth badge? You have four now, beat this gym leader, and you get the badge for this gym six gym leaders later?
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Aug 14, 2018 07:35
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Another thing to mention is the whole 'whoa Taka is Solaris' son?' and how I dont care one iota.
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Aug 14, 2018 08:10
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DeafNote posted:Another thing to mention is the whole 'whoa Taka is Solaris' son?' and how I dont care one iota. Wait, who is Taka?
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Aug 14, 2018 08:14
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The Door Frame posted:Wait, who is Taka? The guy who's SO COOL because he's all APATHETIC and TIRED-SEEMING. It definitely isn't an OBNOXIOUS AFFECTATION.
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Aug 14, 2018 08:17
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There’s far too many plotlines going on here. There doesn’t need to be a major arc for each named character
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Aug 14, 2018 08:39
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Ratoslov posted:To be fair to Kiki, I don't care if the orphans live or die either. Yeah, like, the entire thing is literally irrelevant. Adding the orphans subplot on top of everything else here didn't actually mean anything and explicitly has only been used to make Kiki out to be a gigantic jerk. Their "danger" was until then just used as an excuse to drag out getting Cain to give you access to the Poison badge, but they could be a piece of shiny foil that he got distracted by for all the difference it wouldn't make. It's impossible to care one way or the other because they aren't characters (even by Reborn's standards), there's no sense of urgency and the game itself has gone out of its way to tell you that you shouldn't care at this point by making them a punchline at the end of this entire island section.
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Aug 14, 2018 09:12
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Going over that terrible, terrible bit of drama and futility at the concept of progression, I was hit with the nagging suspicion that how the game's story is structured was eerily familiar. I couldn't quite tell where, until just now. As things stand currently, Pokemon Reborn is structured in a way eerily similar to terrible, published JRPG White Knight Chronicles. You're given a player avatar who's barely even acknowledged as a part of the main story, who takes a back seat to the group of morons that are more or less the de facto protagonists. Any degree of progression is hampered at every turn by equally moronic plot contrivances that takes you one step forward, and then two steps back. The story itself is just FULL of banal melodrama and extremely poorly thought out beats to the point that it can get a little hard to stomach at times due to how goddamn stupid they are. Even the actual mechanics have strangely similar failures, in how they tend to keep things that might actually be useful juuuuust out of reach and replace anything that one might enjoy out of the game with relentless tedium of some kind. Both games actively seem to try to prevent the player from having fun. Though I guess White Knight Chronicles didn't include using the tragic deaths of friends of the game developers as part of its story. So that's a plus... I guess?
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Aug 14, 2018 10:45
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StrifeHira posted:Going over that terrible, terrible bit of drama and futility at the concept of progression, I was hit with the nagging suspicion that how the game's story is structured was eerily familiar. I couldn't quite tell where, until just now. White Knight Chronicles also had a brief stretch were it became a moderately okay story after the "protagonist" has his main character privileges revoked for about 8 hours worth of gameplay. I don't see that happening in Reborn any time soon. Also, Reborn's got some work ahead of it if it wants to beat WKC's epic climax of "the main character becomes the final boss of his own video game because he can't count to five in his head." I've seen some dumb bastard endings in my time, but that one outdoes them all.
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Aug 14, 2018 11:02
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I can't wait for Fern to suddendly step back in as a partner for an important double battle, except he's got underleveled monsters and for some reason getting him wiped out makes you black out 
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Aug 14, 2018 11:55
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Psycho Knight posted:Are you talking about Cal? The guy responsible for throwing a Pokemon into a loving volcano and buddying up to a dude that executes his mentor a second later?  Looking at the gif, Cal objects to the volcano throwing, but apparently he can't get hold of any loving badges either because his own Pokemon goes along with Solaris' orders instead. I mean Cal is still a piece of poo poo for going along with blowing up the volcano and only getting upset when bad things start happening in front of him instead of far away. I just feel people are overlooking this extra element of stupidity.
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Aug 14, 2018 13:11
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Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:You don't have to win this battle. ... I have to admit, I'm pretty impressed. Not only did you not use Perish Song, Destiny Bond, or Intimidate to beat Garchomp (common ways of defeating it), but you also used a naming scheme similar to Mukeo and Mukiet from USUM.
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Aug 14, 2018 13:19
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Oh yeah, someone asked about the horse.
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Aug 14, 2018 14:29
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EclecticTastes posted:In fairness, there are RPGs that have used especially long digressions to great effect, like Earthbound and Chrono Trigger, but you need to keep things interesting enough that the player fails to notice how far from their original goal they've gotten until the story finally puts them back on track. I’d say CT doesn’t count, because you can fight Lavos whenever you have access to the End of Time. You first get access right after the first trip to the Future, which is when you find out about Lavos in the first place.
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Aug 14, 2018 14:52
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Draxion posted:Hold on just a second I’m hoping that OFS was joking, but I think he might be serious.
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Aug 14, 2018 15:39
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Snipee posted:I’m hoping that OFS was joking, but I think he might be serious. I'm pretty sure he was talking about the badge that allows for Surf.
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Aug 14, 2018 15:41
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I think the point is that the tenth badge the player actually gets is the Fighting one, kind of like how there's a huge delay between Corey's gym and getting the Poison badge from the new Poison leader.
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Aug 14, 2018 15:59
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I wouldn't compare this thing to CT or White Knight Chronicles, if anything, this romhack feels like Golden Sun Dark Dawn. You went on a journey because of a black hole suddenly appeared and to reach it you need to get an item; an item you don't actually obtain in the game, for a plot point that has nothing to do with the rest of the game, your main character is only being led by the villain who did the same thing in all three games and you NEVER fight, and even after you kill the final boss you feel like you accomplished nothing, then when finally go back to where the black hole is the game just ends, as a cliffhanger for a sequel that might never happen. Spoilers I guess.
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Aug 14, 2018 17:19
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I'd compare this to a pie eating contest. The only objective is to forcibly ingest a sickening amount of content for nothing more than bragging rights.
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Aug 14, 2018 17:22
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OgretailFood posted:I wouldn't compare this thing to CT or White Knight Chronicles, if anything, this romhack feels like Golden Sun Dark Dawn. You went on a journey because of a black hole suddenly appeared and to reach it you need to get an item; an item you don't actually obtain in the game, for a plot point that has nothing to do with the rest of the game, your main character is only being led by the villain who did the same thing in all three games and you NEVER fight, and even after you kill the final boss you feel like you accomplished nothing, then when finally go back to where the black hole is the game just ends, as a cliffhanger for a sequel that might never happen. Spoilers I guess. Thanks a lot, jerk. Now I'm frustrated with Dark Dawn all over again. 
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Aug 14, 2018 17:23
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gently caress Dark Dawn. Seriously.
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Aug 14, 2018 17:26
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Someone trick Quovak into LPing Dark Dawn, everything I've heard paints it as a big fuckup like the previous two.
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Aug 14, 2018 17:27
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Wait Alex is the villain in Dark Dawn again? And you STILL don't fight him?
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Aug 14, 2018 17:27
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I'd been thinking about bringing up Dark Dawn also. That game was a narrative wreck (even, I thought, in comparison to the rest of the series). Even the fans largely thought so! You spend the entire game trying to fix an idiotic mistake one of your playable characters made in a cutscene when outside your control. You get railroaded into making more stupid mistakes that you then have to fix, and spend the vast majority of the game doing pointless side narratives. By the time you've finally resolved the original stupid mistake, the game ends on a cliffhanger/sequel hook for a game that's never going to exist and absolutely nothing is resolved! What a satisfying story.
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Aug 14, 2018 17:27
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Explopyro posted:I'd been thinking about bringing up Dark Dawn also. That game was a narrative wreck (even, I thought, in comparison to the rest of the series). Even the fans largely thought so! Wasn't the sequel hook that you never actually accomplished what you set out to do in the first place? I remember being particularly pissed about that one.
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Aug 14, 2018 17:32
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I really love the idea that the reason for the delay of getting a Fighting-type badge is that we have a Fighting TM hanging over our heads now, and we now have incentive of hoping to find that new Gym Leader now! (I don't actually love it) (It's really belittling to the player for no reason. No Power-Up Punch for us, apparently!)
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Aug 14, 2018 17:40
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I could also do without a furry hijacking the plot of Dark Dawn and suddenly becoming the most important thing in the narrative.
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Aug 14, 2018 17:44
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Materant posted:Wasn't the sequel hook that you never actually accomplished what you set out to do in the first place? I remember being particularly pissed about that one. Sort of? I think more accurately it was a greater-scope problem (vortexes) mentioned in the intro that is then forgotten about for the entire game, before it's mentioned again at the end. The conceit was that (NPC) Isaac was going to investigate it but needed a flying machine one of the kids broke while goofing around, and the first real goal you have as the kids is to go fetch a replacement part for the flying machine. The rest of the game never mentions vortexes again. About 2/3 of the way into the game, you finally get the part only to get sidetracked again with another massive derail (the eclipse), spend the rest of the game resolving that only to literally deliver it in the ending and get reminded vortexes exist. The end! I'm a bit depressed to realise I can outline the plot of this game from memory. I left out a lot of details there, but I could go further.
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Aug 14, 2018 17:48
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Super Jay Mann posted:Wait Alex is the villain in Dark Dawn again? And you STILL don't fight him? No, it's Arcanus, a totally different blue haired smug water adept. Because he has a quarter of a mask on his face. It's seriously weird how the plot drives in one direction for the first part and then turns 90 degrees and goes somewhere completely different for the other 80% of the game. I genuinely thought the eclipse WAS the Mourning Moon until the game specifically told me it wasn't, because I'd been expecting them to get back to that plot thread for ages. But no, this world contains two entirely different lunar catastrophes.
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Aug 14, 2018 18:25
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