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The recycled text boxes and "Team Steam" being especially bad. It's the uncanny valley effect of falling just short of being serviceable that it ends up as cringeworthy. The former combined with the sometimes very long stretches of no healing spots between locations, and the latter combined with the massive amount of pokemon in the game makes this design choice even stupider.ĭialogue in pokemon games is always super basic, but here it's distractingly bad: because there's an attempt at a more involved story with multiple reoccurring NPCs and the PC actually speaking, it comes off as bad fanfiction at the best of times. Money is really low in this romhack and there's no way to rebattle trainers, so you can only ever carry a few healing items and pokeballs at best before running out of cash. The absolutely mind-bogglingly rock-stupid decision to only have stores stock end-game items like max potions, revives and full heals.
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However, there's just too much bad to ignore. Having a more involved story is something I've always missed in pokemon games, but since I won't be playing it anymore this is more of an "on paper" praise. The AI is much better than the mainline games, giving some challenge while still retaining the fairly relaxed pace. The handing out of free pokemon goes way too far, but I think mainline titles could use it more than maybe once or twice in the whole game. I've never liked how the formula is always only 3-4 new pokemon in each new location, when it could easily be like 10. I like the variety of pokemon provided right from the start, especially with 4 different (but very small) safari zones. However, after a few days of playing and 3 gym badges collected, I'm dropping it. It also being in the GBA graphics helped, because those are the games I played the most.
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I did some googling, and saw Light Platinum being touted as one of the best. I never forgot about the games either, and when I found out about the Crystal Clear romhack I got interested in them. I played pokemon mostly through the first 3 generations, and pretty much after the DS became the default handheld I didn't play them again.
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