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Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky is a roguelike spin-off of the Pokemon series. It's a remake of the second entries in the Mystery Dungeon series, Explorers of Time & Darkness, including new starters, items, dungeons, and, new to this remake, side stories covering the various adventures of the side characters we will meet during the main story. I've completed Explorers of Time, but I've never completed this version, so I decided to do that while sharing this with you guys. What's this going to be like? This is definitely going to be a screenshot LP. Beyond that, I have no idea yet. This is probably going to be a hybrid of an informative LP and a narrative LP, since to be quite frank the game has enough cool ideas with the Pokemon formula to have its guts torn out, but the dungeons, especially the longer ones, have way too little content to be interesting to an LP, no matter how paranoid I get that I'm about to get screwed by the RNG. That being said, I love the heck out of this series, despite how much it kicked my rear end as a kid. Any rules? NO UNMARKED SPOILERS!!! This may be more than a decade old, but someone is probably coming to this fresh, so I would like them to not be spoiled. That being said, this game's relative popularity and age mean that some of you might want to discuss things that I won't get to for a while. As a concession to this, I will allow you to put spoilers under bars, but this is a privilege, not a right. If discussion of this game starts to resemble a CIA document, I will revoke the right. Current status: Spoilers under bars are ALLOWED. So, without further ado, let's get this started. Updates Update 0: The Personality Quiz MayOrMayNotBeACat fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 20:12
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Post reserved just in case.
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Jun 9, 2020 20:12
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Update 0: The Personality Quiz Alright, let's get this started. The main menu has different art every time we open the game, but while it's very pretty, we're probably not gonna see this much once the game gets started. ???: This is the portal that leads to the world inhabited only by Pokemon. Beyond this gateway, many new adventures and fresh experiences await your arrival. Great! I'll just take the personality quiz, choose my starter, and- ...Oh, right. Choosing my starter independent of the personality quiz wasn't added until Gates of Infinity. Welp. Time to lie. ???: Be truthful when you answer them! Oh shut up. ???: Now, are you ready?  For convenience's sake, I'll put my honest answers below the pictures, which will show the answers I actually chose. Play? I own both of them. I got one of them for free. From what I can find online, saying yes significantly weighs the questions that will get you the new starters for this game. Honestly, not really. ...I'm not very good at interacting with other people in real time, so I would probably say nothing. yes i know it's awkward shut up Who cares? I got it already. I've never really done both at the same time. I left something I bought on the counter, and I've bought a duplicate of an item I thought lost, only for it to turn up again, but I've never bought that duplicate because I forgot I bought the first. Take a wild guess, given where this is posted. Nope. Too much of a conscience. I'm the boring person who sits down in the bed and lies straight on it. But sometimes I curl up on it I'm one of those freaks who never really studies. But given the way I am, I would guess either the third or fourth choice. Otherwise my attention span wouldn't last long enough. Male. A different answer to this question will give you a different Pokemon, but the two Pokemon you are choosing between are decided by the rest of the quiz. gently caress Reset time! ...got us new art. Oooo. Anyway first and last questions are the same and have the same answers as last time, so onwards! I wouldn't be in the marathon in the first place.  I'm a dirty computer toucher who prefers the indoors, where my screen won't be washed out. Annoyed. That's why I preorder. Although that hasn't been necessary since I started buying digital. Walk away. I start to feel out of place whenever that starts happening. I'm not part of that party. Get embarrassed! My socks are supposed to be pre-paired after all! Yes.  Hey, wait a minute. These were in the last quiz. RNG  So, "male" players get a nice, soothing blue border. "Female" players? They get an eye-searing hot pink. 'Cause girls like pink, right? Oh right, the aura test. This game was released Gen IV, where Lucario the Aura Pokemon debuted and was heavily marketed. It doesn't come across in screenshots, but the ribbon is moving like a wind is blowing on it and a green transparent ring is radiating from the center. After a while, the following screen pops up: Bullshit. Your aura color is determined solely by what you entered as your favorite color in the DS settings. ???: Your aura is... I'm doing this on an emulator, so our favorite color is green. Please be what I want, please be what I want... YES ???: You have a good sense of humor, and you're compassionate. You're always making others around you laugh. Yet for all your great cheer, you're also open to tears... But you bounce between laughter and tears so easily! What an adventure life must be like for you, bouncing around like that all day! So, a jolly type like you... Eevee Starting Moves
Without it, Eevee would be mediocre: a support oriented Pokemon whose poor attacking moveset damns it. With it, Eevee has the potential for insane damage against a wide range of mons. To get just how insane Adaptability is, we have to look at the common damage multipliers for our attacks. 1.5x - Same Type Attack Bonus 1.4x - Super Effective Hit 1.0x - Normal Hit 0.7x - Not very effective hit 0.5x - Hitting an immunity Normally, using an attack with STAB will give you 2.1x damage on a super-effective hit, 1.05x damage on a not very effective hit, and 0.75x damage if you hit an immunity. This makes coverage moves a necessity for maximum damage. Raising the STAB to 2.0x changes a lot of that. All of a sudden, we're getting at least 1.0x against Ghost-types, 1.4x against Rock and Steel Pokemon, and only 10% less than the damage multiplier for a STAB boosted super-effective hit on a normal hit. That makes Tackle our go-to move against everything except Ghost types, meaning that coverage moves for non-Ghost types have to outdamage Tackle's base damage, which is... interesting. I'm choosing this Pokemon just for that alone. We're going to have trouble against Fighting, Steel, Rock, and Ghost Pokemon, but against everything else that increased STAB is going to HURT. That isn't to say you thread viewers won't have a choice of Pokemon. We still need a partner, and for that I'm leaving it open to you guys. Below is a list of Pokemon the game will let me have as a partner. unfortunately i expended too much effort on eevee, so all you're getting is names and genders Candidates
Dear God, Phanpy. So I need
I will pick the most popular choices for all three of these unless the winning combo would not make sense to me. So if you have clever choices for these that would work well together, be sure to explain why, so that I don't put a nickname that makes no sense on a partner. I will determine a winner next Tuesday, on June 16th. Once that's done, we can begin our adventure! Next Update: Let's Meet Our Partner MayOrMayNotBeACat fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 20:13
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Because it's my favorite (but objectively bad in main series) Chikorita Name your Eevee:Eevee and your Chikorita Lilly Because naming yourself after your species will get REALLY confusing later
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Jun 9, 2020 21:49
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I'm gonna (gasp) listen to your advice, and suggest a Riolu named Mary Lu And Eevee can be left to someone else, I can only be creative once!
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Jun 9, 2020 22:06
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One of my favorite games in the entire franchise, Ah, memories. Vulpix because I absolutely love Vulpix, iirc she's Sky exclusive (not in Time or Darkness), in this game she has a couple of interesting moves, AND I believe that your original result, Relaxed, would have given you her anyway. Name your Eevee Charity and your partner Faith. Y'know, because you'll bring hope. :V
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Jun 9, 2020 22:06
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I'm terrible with names, sorry; I'll just say make the partner a Riolu and leave the naming to someone else.
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Jun 9, 2020 22:21
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 Knew I forgot something. All the partners have fixed genders. I've updated the post with the genders of the potential partners.If the genders affect what you want to name my partner, you can change their name. Edit: also, character limits. Names can only be 10 characters long at most. MayOrMayNotBeACat fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 9, 2020 22:25
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Sorry for the double post, but I decided to add another question. What is our team name going to be? I'm not sure when I'll need to answer this question, but knowing the answer now would make getting through the beginning faster.
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Jun 9, 2020 22:45
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Name the Eevee Charlie (yes I am that boring cliché who always names Eevee after Darwin in some tenuous manner) Vulpix because Ninetales is still my favourite pokemon 8 generations later. Backup option would be Mudkip since water/ground is pretty useful in terms of coverage. Name the Vulpix Tango because Foxtrot is too obvious. And obviously our team name is the Goonies.
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Jun 10, 2020 08:54
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Seconding Charlie for our name and a Chikorita named Lilly for our partner! Chikoritas are adorable.  Oh yeah and I guess we need a team name. Uhh, how about Team Hope?
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Jun 10, 2020 10:53
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Best of luck with the LP, this game is like super long with all the added postgame stuff, definitely an amazing game to play, but maybe just the once cause boy it is long. Anyway, never seen Vulpix used, so definitely go for that, and Team Skybound.
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Jun 10, 2020 12:13
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Black Robe posted:Name the Eevee Charlie (yes I am that boring cliché who always names Eevee after Darwin in some tenuous manner) I'm going to be boring and vote for this bandwagon. These are all great choices.
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Jun 10, 2020 14:43
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I have no name inputs but I do like the idea of having Vulpix in our team.
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Jun 10, 2020 15:57
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I like Charlie for the evee name Voting Cyndaquil named Hodge because it’s the best line and entirely ignored in most games And the team should be Team Skybound
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Jun 10, 2020 16:24
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I agree with Tango the Vulpix as our partner and... I was going to go against it at first but I will vote for Charlie for Eevee's name. However, for team name let's be Team Kilo.
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Jun 10, 2020 16:25
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For those considering what to cast a vote for, I would like to note that the current crowd favorite (Vulpix) would result in a somewhat rough main game, mainly due to the surprisingly common presence of Rock-types, which resist both Normal and Fire type moves and would have a STAB type advantage on Vulpix. In addition, some of them have Levitate to make the best option for handling that, Dig, a no-go. Oh, and Ground-types are also surprisingly common. It's nothing Eevee can't handle, but it's worth noting. That being said, Vulpix can learn Iron Tail, a Steel-type move which is a tad inaccurate (78) but hits hard, via TMs. I've also read Vulpix being described as "playing the game on easy mode," so I'm not going to be entirely miserable. I just might have to exploit Wonder Mail sooner than I hoped I would have to to keep my sanity.
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Jun 10, 2020 21:29
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It's fiiiiiine. Vulpix also learns some other real nice special attacks that hit neutral on rock types, and moves like Imprison more than compensate for the vulnerabilities.
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Jun 11, 2020 00:20
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Tango the Vulpix easy, who cares about type matchups when we can have a cute fox friend. And let's go with Team Fluff to round out the fluffy voting.
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Jun 11, 2020 06:22
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CURRENT VOTE TOTALS Eevee Name Charlie: 5 Charity: 1 Eevee: 1 Partner Species Vulpix: 5 Chikorita: 2 Riolu: 2 Cyndaquil: 1 Partner Name Tango: 4 Lilly: 2 Faith: 1 Hodge: 1 Mary Lu: 1 Team Name Skybound: 2 Goonies: 2 Fluff: 1 Hope: 1 Kilo: 1 It looks like this LP is going to turn into a Charlie Foxtrot before it even begins, given how hard you all are pushing for Charlie the Eevee and Tango the Vulpix. The team name vote is tied right now, so that looks like a good place to put your votes if you haven't voted already. Crosspeice posted:Best of luck with the LP, this game is like super long with all the added postgame stuff, definitely an amazing game to play, but maybe just the once cause boy it is long. Post game spoilers below:I am definitely not going to do all of the postgame, mostly because I wouldn't be able to keep the endless gamut of optional dungeons interesting the entire time. More likely than not, the postgame is going to consist of the rest of the main storyline, Shaymin Village, and then whatever postgame content will help us prepare for the Zero Isle dungeons. That last one is definitely going under "bonus content," because the preparation for Zero Isle could take so long that I might burn out before I get to it. That being said, I'm going to be mostly blind to the dickishness of Zero Isle, so if we get there it is going to be really funny. Jadecore posted:It's fiiiiiine. Vulpix also learns some other real nice special attacks that hit neutral on rock types, and moves like Imprison more than compensate for the vulnerabilities. Fun fact: given equal user stats and move power, a non-STAB that hits no resistances or weaknesses will deal approximately 5% less damage than a STAB move that hits a resistance, due to resistances only reducing damage to 70% instead of 50% like the main games. With Adaptability, the net damage multiplier with STAB becomes 1.4x, meaning coverage moves have to have a higher base power than Tackle to be worth using over it damage-wise. However, if this is correct, then the damage multiplier when hitting a resistance (but not an immunity) is actually approximately 0.84x due to an adjustment. The damage multiplier for a STAB move hitting a resistance would become just under 1.26x without Adaptability and 1.68x with it, removing the need for coverage moves for every type other than Ghost types for Eevee.  Eevee effectively being able to ignore the type effectiveness system when choosing its moves is so insane I am obligated to disbelieve the guide on that front. Unless someone who can look at the code for Explorers of Sky can confirm that that adjustment is actually done, I am going to plan out Eevee's moveset under the assumption that the damage multiplier when hitting a resistance is only 0.7x.
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Jun 12, 2020 23:07
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Switching team name vote to Skybound
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Jun 13, 2020 00:07
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CURRENT VOTE TOTALS Eevee Name Charlie: 5 Charity: 1 Eevee: 1 Partner Species Vulpix: 5 Chikorita: 2 Riolu: 2 Cyndaquil: 1 Partner Name Tango: 4 Lilly: 2 Faith: 1 Hodge: 1 Mary Lu: 1 Team Name Skybound: Goonies: 2 Hope: Fluff: 1 Kilo: 1 Alright, here's the deal. I am pretty sure that my team is set well ahead of my deadline of Tuesday, and if at all possible I would like to get this going as soon as possible (the big reason being I'm going to have to do work for this that I had to put off until after the vote). However, I am well aware that this is well ahead of the deadline I gave in the last update. To resolve this conflict, I'm putting the vote into SUDDEN DEATH mode. If another vote is not cast in the next 24 hours, I will close the vote and begin working on the next update with the thread's choices. If one is cast, however, I will instead postpone the closure of the poll another 24 hours, up until the original deadline. In short, this could be your last chance to cast a vote. If you haven't voted on something yet or want to change your vote, do it now. If you're content with your vote, then just sit back, let the polls close, and the next update will be gotten to you that much sooner.
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Jun 13, 2020 01:14
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I like all of the leading options so I'll just vote for team Skybound to lock that one in too.
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Jun 15, 2020 09:33
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Alright, so it look likes we're going with Team Skybound, consisting of an Eevee named Charlie and a Vulpix named Tango. Thanks for voting! Expect an update within a week.
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Jun 17, 2020 03:44
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So you may have noticed it's been more than a week. I was going to post something like this on Wednesday, but then I found out that the forums had caught on fire and wasn't sure if I was going to even be able to post a second update. Now I know the SA forums (and the people watching my thread) are probably still going to be here. This is still going (I've recorded the next update and have part of the next update written), but I've also had to deal with a complete change in how I get images for my updates (Blame animated GIFs, me being on a Mac and Avidemux only supporting mass export to JPG) in addition to my summer schoolwork and my habitual lack of executive organization. It coming in the next week seems pretty unlikely, given that I have to start on my schoolwork TODAY, but rest assured that the next update will come... just not by next Tuesday. I just have to get motivated to do it. I also blame me finally playing Bloodborne after getting it two years ago.
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Jun 26, 2020 20:57
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No worries, as long as it happens eventually.
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Jun 27, 2020 09:14
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Being cautious about posting on a forum you're not sure is going to be around long enough to finish is perfectly understandable, and I have no issues with your delaying posting considering the circumstances.
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Jun 27, 2020 11:45
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Update 1: A Storm at Sea The thread has voted, and their choice was Vulpix! guys we're gonna have so much fun with rock types  By default, our partner is named after their species. However, for this run...  You all voted for Tango to be our Vulpix's name!  ???: You're off to the world of Pokemon! Be strong! Stay smart! And be victorious! Yeah, right. I know that you're plotting my brutal failure. Don't pretend you aren't.  After this, we transition to a black screen. A flash of white appears.  ???: Are... Are you OK?! Another flash of lightning. ???: No! Don't let go! Just a little longer... Come on! Hang on! ???: N-n-no! I can't...hold on...!   Call it a hunch...  ...but I think tonight was a terrible night to go sailing. Sometime later...  ???: Urrgh...  ???: Where...Where am I?      ???: Whose footprint? Whose footprint? ???: The footprint is Vulpix's! The footprint is Vulpix's!  ...  Tango picks up the stone, and shakes herself off.   And so Tango leaves to the south...  ...but we don't, because first these shady eavesdroppers have something to say!  The two of them then leave the same way Tango did. Meanwhile, at the beach, something very special is happening!   The Krabby have come out to blow bubbles! For some reason that makes me feel irritable.  And it's here that we find Tango.  If you have any complaints about this GIF, you can keep them to yourself.  But anyway, back to Tango.             Unlike our partner, our main character does not have a default name. That being said, I asked you guys to choose a name, and you chose Charlie.     Somehow, I doubt that that was genuine.      The bosses for the first dungeon, ladies and gentlemen.    Charlie and Tango go the same way Koffing and Zubat went...  And just like that, we're exploring the first dungeon of the game.  This last sentence is very important. If you get in a tricky situation, it's a good idea to stop and think out your next move.  This is what we'll be looking at most of the time. The UI tells us what dungeon level we're on, our level, and our current and max HP. In addition, we have a map that will fill out as we explore the level. On the top screen are our controls, but I'm not going to discuss all of them quite yet. On the map you might see some colored dots. The white dot is us, the yellow dot is our partner, and the red dot is a foe. The blue dots indicate things we can pick up.  Whoops, I guess I talked too long. Charlie and Tango seem to be getting antsy. Let's do something! ...about that Shellos. Sometimes enemies will be generated sleeping, meaning they will do nothing. However, moving next to them or attacking them will wake them up and cause them to become aggressive. Our first priority is therefore to get rid of this Shellos, as regardless of what we do he is going to wake up next turn and there isn't anything we can do about it.  Using Y, we can change Charlie's direction without having to move. Now it is time to attack! We can do a normal, untyped attack using the A button. Unfortunately, it's not very strong and can only attack enemies immediately next to us. In addition, if that attack kills, we only get half the experience points we would get.  So let's use a move.  Tail Whip lowers the Defense of one enemy by one stage. Not terribly useful except in boss battles, where the extra damage might come in handy. Tackle, unlike Tackle in the main games, is going to stay on Charlie well into the future. Low power, high PP moves have an actual use here, unlike in the main games, because if the move can defeat an enemy then you don't have to use the PP of a more powerful move with less PP, saving that for when you need an enemy dead right now. In addition, Tackle works off of STAB, meaning that with Charlie's Adaptability we get a 2x multiplier to our damage. The only problem with it is that it is a little inaccurate, with a 95% hit rate, which is not a good thing when the RNG hates you. Helping Hand is also much better than in the main games. It raises the Attack and Special Attack of everyone but you by one stage. Fun Fact: Buffs and debuffs last THE ENTIRE FLOOR without external intervention. This makes Helping Hand much better than Tail Whip: Tail Whip's damage increase only lasts until whatever you used it on is dead, while Helping Hand's lasts the entire rest of the floor. Last, we have Flail. Flail sucks. Its gimmick is that it grows more powerful the lower your HP is, with a 2x multiplier at <75% HP, 4x at <50%, and 8x at <25%. The problem with this is that it requires you to be at low HP, a problem when we're only going to be pushing triple digits HP at the very end of the loving main game. Chances are that if your HP is low enough to use Flail at its full power, you will probably also end up getting oneshot by your opponent if it's still alive afterward. It does have 100% accuracy, but it also has an attack power of 2, 3x weaker than Tackle. That plus low PP makes this one a pass.  In this case, we're using Tackle. We get a superfluous critical hit and OHKO it. Now that we don't have to worry about Shellos, let's see what's lying on the ground.  Poke, unlike every other thing that lies on the ground, does not take up space in our inventory. Instead, it goes in a separate counter. That being said, if we want to keep this money, we'll have to escape this dungeon. If Charlie or Tango is knocked out, we will be kicked out of the dungeon without all of our money. No pressure. A total of 68 Poke is lying on the ground. Not much, and it's useless to us right now.  In a corridor, we can only see a few space in front of and behind us. We need to traverse them, however, to reach other rooms, and they can also serve as a chokepoint in a pinch.  While exploring the corridors, we come across a new enemy: Shellder. He's not terribly threatening, using since all of his attacks deal 1 damage, even Tackle.  Oh yeah, I haven't talked about Tango's moves. Tango also has Tail Whip, so I'm skipping that. Ember is Tango's closest equivalent to Charlie's Tackle. It's a tiny bit stronger than Tackle (7 attack power for Ember vs. 6 for Tacle) and can attack around corners, but has half the PP and worse accuracy, at 84%. Tango also has worse STAB, meaning Ember only gets a 50% bonus to attack. Unlike the main games, that bonus is still good enough that it is a better idea for Tango to spam Ember against resistances, unless she has another move that can hit its opponent for super effective damage, due to how the multiplier for type advantages work in this game. Tango's only other attack move is Faint Attack. It's not STAB, and only as strong as Tackle in terms of attack power, but it doesn't have to worry about hitting, as it has perfect accuracy, and it has 30 PP. Think carefully before forgetting this move, because there's no way to get it back afterwards. Ember doesn't connect on this, as well as the second one, and then the Shellder dies to a tackle. You'll be able to compare the damage soon.  Anyway, I decide to show off how terrible our regular attack is. It dealt 5 damage. Yeah.  Two new things! The metallic tile with a green arrow on it is a Wonder Tile. It is the only way to remove debuffs, but it will also remove buffs, so watch where you step. To the right of us is the stairs. If we go down it, we'll advance another floor, or end the dungeon if we're on the last floor. That being said, we don't always want to go down a floor. Enemy pokemon respawn slowly but infinitely, making grinding another option. I decide to go down to the next floor. B2F  It isn't kidding. Tutorial: If you find an item, open the menu with the X button, then use the Items options to see what it does. I will, but first...  Let's look at the Others menu. I'll explain Options and Window separately. As for the others... Map blacks out everything but the map and UI, making it easier for us to see the map. Message log allows us to scroll back through the message log, which can be useful during turns where a lot of attacks are made if we want to check something. Mission objectives shows us our current objectives. Dungeon hints contains useful information about how to play the game, in case you forget.  Touch Screen sets whether we can use touch controls anywhere, only in the menu, or whether they're disabled altogether. Top Screen sets what is displayed on the top screen. Right now it's showing the controls, but it can also be set to display our team stats, the text log, our map as well as our team's levels and HP, or the current job. I'm not gonna talk about that last one just yet. Bottom Screen sets whether the map on the bottom screen is clear, shaded, or not present at all. Grid affects whether or not a grid appears when we press Y. By default it is set to on. Speed affects how fast we walk. We can set it to be faster than normal. Far-off Pals specifies how the game should handle offscreen team members being attacked. Look cuts to the attacked member, while Self keeps the camera firmly fixed on us. Damage turn affects whether or not we turn to face an attacker when we take damage from them. D-Pad attack if turned on allows us to make a regular attack by pressing the D-Pad in the direction we want to attack. Check direction if turned on will ask us what direction to attack in when we use a move or throw an item. I leave all of them on the defaults, although I might bump Speed to fast later.  Window allows us to change the style of the border. Unfortunately, it doesn't allow us to change the color of it. Hope you like hot pink!  My favorite one. I didn't touch the default window border in this update, but I will in the next one.  What is lying in front of us is an Oran Berry. Unlike in the main game, where they only restore a measly 10 HP, Oran Berries here are insanely good, restoring 100 HP upon use. I choose to take it with me. You can't see it onscreen, but we got lucky: the stairs are in the current room, meaning we could leave without encountering a single enemy. I decide that getting extra levels for Charlie and Tango is more important.  I am immediately annoyed. Kabuto is a Rock and Water type. Like everything else here, she can only use Tackle. Unfortunately, that Rock typing is enough for her to survive one Tackle from Charlie.  So I decide to make my life easier. When choosing a move, I have the option to set it. This allows me to use it by pressing L and A simultaneously. In this case, I choose Tackle, since I'm going to be using it a lot.  Kabuto also has pretty good Defense. The move would have only dealt 20 damage even without the resistance. You can compare this with the above screenshot if you want a damage comparison. There's no such thing as double resistance in this game, so Vulpix would have dealt 13 damage without resistances. Adaptability is insane, yes. That being said, Ember ended up killing Kabuto. We continue exploring the floor, and...  Hey, not every room's gonna be a winner.  I proceed to dash right into a Shellder. She proves just as threatening as last time: not at all, going down to one Tackle. Oh right, dashing. If you press B and a direction in a corridor, you will move along it until you either hit a wall, get to a fork, or encounter an enemy.  This is what happens when you step on a Wonder Tile with no changes. It says "X's stats returned to normal" if you do have any stat changes.  Oh for gently caress's sake, another empty room? There was nothing else on the floor, so let's take a look at the complete map.  Cool, isn't it? It's also completely useless to you, the viewer. The game will randomly generate a new floor every time you go to the dungeon. Don't believe me?  I was playing a different session to figure out what each of the options did. Having reached the second floor, I decided to fully map it out. Same dungeon. Same floor. Different layout. The penalty for losing is much harsher than it sounds, isn't it? B3F Two dow-  SHUT UP GAME I ALREADY TALKED ABOUT IT  Otherwise, an inconspicuous start to the floor. To our left is a Sleep Seed. This seed, upon being eaten, causes the eater to fall asleep for a few turns. This sounds useless for us, but we can also throw seeds, and if it hits another Pokemon, they will eat it, disabling them for a few turns. This is nowhere close to the best status seed. Unfortunately, we only have room for one item, and 100 HP is better than making an enemy sleep for a few turns, so we pass this up.  And the stairs are in the next room. I ignore them, as I want both Charlie and Tango to get to level 6 before we reach the bottom of this dungeon.  This is a very common situation. Kabuto is outside our range, but it will be able to attack first if we move towards it. In this situation I choose to move to the right, to draw it in, and then down, to bring it within range of Tango. After that, I beat it silly.  When I try moving to the next room, though, I get a very nasty surprise. Look on the lower right if you're having trouble seeing it. Water types can walk on water tiles, and Kabuto is partially a Water type, allowing one to flank us. It's not the only here either.  While approaching Kabuto to attack it, Corsola, another Rock and Water type, walks out of the corridor. He's as unthreatening as everything else and after I kill him and Kabuto, we move on.  ...To an empty room and a dead end corridor. poo poo.  Upon coming back to the room with the stairs, a Corsola jumps out of the water and starts advancing towards us. Eevee's Tackle, despite hitting a resist, one-shots it.  I decided to see what was on the right, and this Shellos somehow saw me through a wall. When it did, it decided to use Mud Sport, a thoroughly useless move due to the fact we have no Electric moves. It once again got oneshot by Tackle, but more importantly...  We got a level up! Charlie's HP increases by 3, while her Attack, Defense, Special Attack and Special Defense increase by 1.  Tango also leveled up!  Unlike us, Tango will say something whenever she levels up. Her HP increases by 3, same as Charlie, but her Attack, Defense, Special Attack and Special Defense went up by 2. All that was left to the right was an empty room with a Wonder Tile, so Charlie and Tango move on to the final floor!  ...Once this Shellos dies. B4F  I loving TALKED ABOUT THIS ALREADY  The initial room. The seed seen at the top of the screen is another Sleep Seed.  And we find the stairs right off the bat once again. I decide once again to explore some more.  I find two Blast Seeds in this room. When eaten, they deal a fixed 20 damage to the enemy you are facing. Meh. I wanted to explore more, but then I saw my Belly was down to 68. Belly is one of the ways grinding is punished: moving around and doing anything causes your Belly to deplete. If your belly hits 0, the damage of all your attacks is reduced to one and your HP drains with every step instead of regenerating. There is an item that can help with that, but even if I knew where one was my lack of inventory space means I have no room for it. This scares me enough to bail for the stairs.   Well look who it is.       Boss Battle  I would highly recommend clicking that link. Anyway, this boss fight is a complete pushover. It's so easy, you don't even need to use items. an oran berry helps though  Pictured: me loving up. I was hoping to move Charlie, Tango, Koffing, and Zubat into a 2x2 square. This ends up working out, but in the moment I'm panicking a tiny bit. So what do I do?  What I should have done on the first turn. Helping Hand doesn't just increase the power of our partner's next move in this game. Instead, it increases the Attack and Special Attack of everyone but the user by one stage. Given what I've just gotten into, I need Koffing dead now to stop Charlie from getting ganged up on, and increasing Tango's Special Attack will help with that.  ...Okay, so this isn't terribly impressive. Just wait until Tango uses Ember. Koffing and Zubat just use their regular attacks, dealing a total of 8 damage to Charlie. This is a good thing, considering that Koffing has an actually threatening Tackle he could use.  I decide to use this bout of mercy from the AI to buff Tango's attack again.  This time it pays dividends, taking Koffing out of the fight. Koffing and Zubat's low health is honestly what keeps them from being a huge threat. Zubat is even more fragile. How fragile?  Fragile enough that a single non-critical Tackle from Charlie is enough to take him down from full health. So yeah, take down Zubat first, then buff and focus down Koffing. That's it.   One fade to black later...     Tango picks it up. Later...            Narrator: And so, Tango and Charlie formed an exploration team. This turned out to be their very first step into many fantastic realms of adventure that awaited their arrival.  
MayOrMayNotBeACat fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Jul 3, 2020 |
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Jul 3, 2020 17:10
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MayOrMayNotBeACat posted:
That first pic is meant to be Vulpix, not Eevee.
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Jul 3, 2020 18:31
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This game promises to be dangerously cute.
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Jul 3, 2020 21:36
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Blaze Dragon posted:That first pic is meant to be Vulpix, not Eevee. Fuuuuuuck. I even put the portraits in their own text file so that I could put them into the update when I needed to, sorted by each Pokemon. How did I make that big of a mistake when I was transcribing? Oh, right. Fixed. Actually, I would like to ask the thread a favor. You see, one of the more annoying things I have to do when writing these updates is create portraits. Thankfully, the portraits are usually in the same spot, so I already have a fullish set for Vulpix. Unfortunately, I don't have a full set for Eevee, nor do I have a single portrait for all of the Pokemon in this game. Could anyone direct me to a full set of portraits in this game? That would cut out the need for me to go through all the dialogue twice: once for when I record, and once for new portraits. The full script for this game would also be nice. A good amount of time last update was spent on just transcribing the dialogue. I would still have to go through the update videos in order to get the correct portraits for each line and deal with scene changes, but being able to copy and paste non-protagonist dialogue would speed things up massively. I'm also just too lazy to search for all of the above. Thanks! EDIT: Never mind on the portraits, I found all of them on The Spriters Resource. So really, the game script would be the most helpful right now. MayOrMayNotBeACat fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Jul 3, 2020 |
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Jul 3, 2020 22:24
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Oh you were getting the portraits from the game footage? Spriter's Resource is always the first place I look lol. Also use FaceCopy to easily, well, copy portraits if you wanna see if that's easier. Game scripts are usually hit or miss, sometimes I find them, other times no one's bothered to do so, so get used to typing everything down. Good thing this game is pretty snappy, right! Haha...
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Jul 3, 2020 22:55
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Can't find a full script, but you should be able to copy most of the dialogue from the previous LP bar the lines that change for the specific characters. Cutscenes etc don't change.
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Jul 4, 2020 08:46
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Crosspeice posted:Also use FaceCopy to easily, well, copy portraits if you wanna see if that's easier. joke's on you, I'm on a mac just kill me now Black Robe posted:Can't find a full script, but you should be able to copy most of the dialogue from the previous LP bar the lines that change for the specific characters. Cutscenes etc don't change. Sadly it becomes a VLP after the next four dungeons. It'll be useful until then. Honestly the portraits were the big pain point. I had to play through the game twice, once for the update and once to get those portraits. The deal with transcribing is that it just means I have to take and upload screenshots one at a time instead of all at once. The animated GIFs are honestly my next huge pain point, mostly because I'm on a Mac. Actually, y'know what? Time for a behind-the-scenes rant! Hopefully this makes me feel better and/or gets someone to tell me I'm an idiot and why. So because I am on a Mac, I am presented with several difficulties. The first is that DeSmuME on Mac claims to have video capture, but it actually doesn't. I can see the source code, the infrastructure for recording video is in place, but DeSmuME's user interface files are so old that the application can't target anything newer than 10.7. MacOS 10.7 does have native support for recording H.264 + AAC, but I can't find a way to map the commented out implementation, which uses FFmpeg, to the internal settings used on MacOS, and not having a full implementation would drive me loving crazy, so recording using DeSmuME is out. DeSmuMe does have a pretty fully featured screenshot capture, but I can't get smooth looking GIFs with just that. Being on a Mac, I also don't have access to VirtualDub. This means that to record a video on a Mac, I have to use OBS. Thankfully, this is pretty easy to setup, but it has its own problems. The first problem is that the smallest resolution I can record gameplay footage at is about 2x the resolution of the DS. This doesn't pose any problems for getting screenshots (since they would need to be upscaled to that size anyway), but for making GIFs that I can upload to LPix it's pretty loving atrocious. In addition, it also bloats the filesize of the video (half a megabyte for 10 seconds of video), to the point that recording lossless video would make me worry about storage space (I do have a 2TB external SSD with write speeds of 550 MB/s, but I want to be able to pull a video. So yeah, I'm already recording lossy video in a game that uses sprites. I'm using some of the settings I found in the commented out implementation, but I'll try refining it further for the next update and see what file sizes it gets me.The second problem is that OBS, by default, doesn't capture any sound from DeSmuME. This actually isn't specific to OBS, anything recording on a Mac trying to get the desktop audio will just get nothing, but I would like to note that the method recommended in the Tech Support Fort for recording audio on a Mac is woefully out of date (LineIn doesn't even exist anymore), and every free solution I tried didn't work either. In the end I just ended up shelling out $100 for Loopback, which did solve my problems and allow me to record audio. The third problem is that OBS has a slight audio issue when recording video. See, it seems that whatever it writes has the audio track clock in as being slightly longer than the video track, which results in the video slowly desynchronizing from the audio. This would actually be pretty easy to fix in Avidemux if I were just recording from a capture card, but because I'm capturing from a desktop window a fourth issue arises. OBS's method of recording a desktop window, whatever it is, is... weird. Moving the recorded window at all will result in noticeable jitter in the recorded video. To make things just a little bit worse, it also just... inserts black frames into the output, for some reason? This is very rare, so it hasn't made capturing screenshots any harder so far, but it also makes the audio run ahead of the video. So yeah, don't expect an actual video for this game anytime soon. That being said, one thing that I can be blamed for is setting the color space to NV12, which does not losslessly convert to RGB24, which GIFs and the DS use. So I've been putting a sprite based game through a lossy process twice. In retrospect, this is probably why most of the GIFs look like crap, and why I'm amazed the screenshots (and the GIF with the bubbles) look mostly alright. I switched it to RBG24 for the next update, so maybe we'll get better looking GIFs in the next update. We'll see. Next on the agenda: getting screenshots. Again, I don't have access to VirtualDub. Thankfully, Avidemux is available, and works well as an alternative for everything except getting animated GIFs. All I'm saying is that for how poorly VirtualDub apparently optimizes GIFs, at least it has the option to export to GIF. For bulk export the only format available for Avidemux is JPEG. (Do I hear three times?) If I want to turn a section of video into a GIF, I have to use FFmpeg. I'll just leave this as an example of my pain: code:I apologize for that rant, I just needed to vent. I wish I had something more concrete for those who don't care about the particulars of how I get screenshots for my updates, but I haven't even started my next update. I'm just trying to get my schoolwork done. Feel free to tell me exactly what I'm doing wrong, but I'm probably not going to see it until tomorrow due to being busy with schoolwork. To try and end this on a positive note, I did create this reimplementation of megasend.py in Go. Been kinda useful? oh who am I kidding it's barely faster than megasend.py about the only thing it has compared to megasend is that it only uses the standard library i'm just going to post this and get back to doing my schoolwork
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Jul 5, 2020 03:11
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I wish I could help but this is way beyond my area of what I'll loosely term 'expertise'. Maybe the folks in the Tech Support Fort thread can offer some advice?
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Jul 5, 2020 08:40
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Sorry, don't really have anything for you this week except that I've recorded the next two dungeons and HOLY poo poo I FIXED THE GIFS AND THEY LOOK MUCH BETTER AND COMPRESS WELL AND WOW. I'll see if I can get the next update out before too long. Better GIF shown below: 
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Jul 12, 2020 22:42
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That gif definitely looks a lot better!
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Jul 13, 2020 02:38
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