Pokémon Dusk

Even if you’re not a fan, we all know about Pokémon, don’t we? Cute Cartoon animals battle in elaborate sparing matches on the behest of energetic, starry-eyed 10 year olds. It’s about teamwork and friendship and being competitive without being a dick about it (Unless you work for Smogen). Well screw that! Love and friendship are dead and have risen from the grave to eat your face. Forget everything you know about Pokémon. This is Pokémon Dusk.




The Basics:
Game Type: GBC style, Action Survival Horror… with Pokémon.
Length: 3 to 3 and-a-half Hours
Difficulty: Might vary, but manageable if you know what you’re doing.
Initial Response: Its Pokémon meets The Walking Dead. How is that not awesome?



Story:
Our tale of woe begins innocently enough with Ethan, the male player character of Pokémon Gold and Silver on his journey to become the greatest Pokémon trainer ever with his loyal Quilava, Brando.




Ethen has earned two Gym badges and is heading to Goldenrod city for the third. Though I have to wonder how Ethen managed to get that far in the first place. Not only has Ethen neglected to catch anything other Pokémon than Brando, (by this point I would have a Pidgey, Geodude, Gastly, Zubat and Slowpoke in my team) but even more bizarrely, somehow managed to raise himself a Quilava whose only move is Scratch! No Smokescreen, no Flame Wheel, hell it doesn’t know Ember until the main story of this game is well underway.

What is that story? Well we find out after Ethen enters Goldenrod city only to discover everything locked and a woman who is clearly a zombie, but Ethen doesn’t realize that because Night of the Living Dead was never released in the Johto region. Luckily Ethen is promptly rescued by Dave, via the tried and tested method of shooing things in the head (Yes with a gun). Considering Dave not only uses more colorful language that the Pokémon world is used to, but seems to be the only person to ever use gun, I’m thinking Dave is really from the Left4Dead universe and crossed over games due to Missingo messing with data code.

Dave then knocks out Ethen (I’m not sure why) and carries him off (I’m not sure how) to a shelter for survivors in the Underground Tunnels. It’s there we learn what’s going on, and it’s pretty much what you’d expect. There’s a mysterious infection or something turning the dead into zombies, people and Pokémon alike. And if get bitten by a zombie, you die and become a zombie. And since no one else can fight and Dave is all out of bullets Ethen – or should I say Brando since he’s the one doing all the work – has to brave the zombie infested streets of Goldenrod finding various items for Dave and the other survivors in the safe-house so that everyone can survive and possibly find a way to escape the city.

So yeah, it’s your standard Zombie Apocalypse with your standard zombie apocalypse narrative. These stories all about people and human nature. What a person is willing to do to survive and the difficulty of keeping servility and ethics when there is no society left, stuff like that. While this game touches on those teams it really doesn’t do anything any other zombie survival story wouldn’t. Only that it’s taking place in the Pokémon universe, which really doesn’t add anything here except instead of only fighting infected humans you also fight the occasional infected Houndour and Jigglypuff… and infected Magnemite and Grimer, which you wouldn’t think would work.

The story’s not bad though, I have seen worse from survival horror. Even though there is one character whose actions makes no sense even when they do explain themselves to you. The overall mystery surrounding the infection is intriguing with good foreshadowing. Although it still doesn’t answer everything. But really the story is a character piece about Ethan and Brando and that’s where it’s strongest. Like I said the Zombie Survival story is about people and human nature. And we get a good look at Ethen’s character as he deals with horrors he finds himself in.

There is one thing you really need to be aware of before playing this and that’s the grammar. It’s pretty obvious this game was originally made in a different language and then translated into English. It’s passable most of the time, but then you get dialog like from the scene below in all of its laughable badness.





Simply put if you’re a grammar buff you might have trouble playing through this one. It’s understandable, but maybe next time someone should get an editor for this sort of thing.



Aesthetics:
The developers for Pokémon Dusk really wanted to emulate the look of the original Gold and Silver, and boy did they. Goldenrod city is faithfully recreated with all the graphics taken directly from the GBC games. The few new areas the game dose add don’t feel to out of place. Even if they are all long windy tunnels, but they work with this gameplay. There are a lot of small sprite edits to make things more zombie like while still looking like they belong in the GBC counterparts. With the noticeable exception of Brando, and the Facesets which are from the Heart Gold/Soul Silver re-release and even they have some edit work done and there are multiple expressions for Ethen.





They even went so far as to remake the original menu screen, albeit with some minor adjustments. It even has the Name tab that tells you how many badges you’ve collected and the Pokegear, complete with map, and phone lists and both look how they did in Gold/Silver. Mind you, neither really does anything, expect for the Pokegear which is used exactly once in story and that you can upgrade into an IPod to listen to some Punk Rock. Its attention to details like that though I appreciate and I’m glad it’s there.





All this lovely nostalgia paints a nice contrast to the darkness and gore the game is actually about. There are a lot of dead, dismembered bodies everywhere and lots, lots of blood. Whenever a zombie ‘dies’ they collapse into a mess of blood and gore. And what’s more there remains stay on the map, producing a nice ‘Squash’ sound effect when stepped on. You can easily judge your progress in the game by the how many slain zombies Brando has left in his wake.

The soundtrack is mix of appropriately creepy overtures (none of which I recognise which is good), epic remixes of Pokémon tunes (which is also good) and heavy rock battle themes (… eh). Accompanying this are the occasional screams and moans that add to the atmosphere. It’s well done, nothing feels out of place and I like it. Well except for the battle sound effect which are clearly from the RTP. And I only point this out because it otherwise contrasts the authenticity of the rest of the game. I’m just saying thy put so much work into menu screens and maps that not having the attack sound effects from the Pokémon games stands out so much, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered addressing it.



Gameplay:
As most people reading this would know Pokémon is a turn-based strategy RPG, where Pokémon with their selection of four moves do their best to reduce the opponents HP to zero, based on a variety of factors like type advantage. Well none of that will help you at all here.

There is no separate battle screen, all the action takes place on the map. Zombies try to walk towards you and if one touches Brando, he takes damage. I say try, because zombies constantly get stuck behind walls and obstacles. The game says it’s because the Zombies are stupid. I’d say it’s because of lazy programing, but I'm a jerk like that.

To defend himself Brando has a whole two moves at his disposal. The melee Scratch attack and, after an NPC teaches it to him, the ranged Ember move. Yes a human NPC has to teach a Quilava how to use Ember! For crying out loud Ethan you’re making Ash Kechem look like a Pokémon genius. And not season 1 Ash ether, but dumbass Ash from the Diamond and Pearl saga.

Anyway you attack with those moves using the A and S Keys, A for Scratch, S for Ember, and both the moves have advantages and disadvantages. Scratch only targets the space directly in front of Brando, so if you time it wrong you risk being hit by a zombie, but if you do connect the foe is sent backwards. Ember naturally can hit foes at range, but has no knockback effect so the undead keep coming. Both moves also share the same cooldown timer of about half a second, so you can’t just spam moves. It’s more about timing and tactical maneuvering and positioning. In fact it’s so about timing and positioning once you get the timing of your melee attack down you’re pretty much invincible. It’s the best way to kill zombies one on one as they constantly walk towards you as you keep hitting them back before they can hurt you bonce-locking them in place until they explode into gore. Sure latter on you run across infected Poison Type Pokémon with their own ranged attacks, but I found it still more effective to melee them to death so Ember will mostly just be used for boss battles.

Oh yeah, the boss battles. Every now and again you’ll have to face off against giant infected Pokémon 4 times your size. There frantic, epic battles and some of the best parts of the game. At least they would be if the main strategy for fighting them wasn’t the exact same thing. Hide behind a corner to the side where they can’t hit you, then dash out between waves of their easily timed ranged attacks, fire of a few Embers then dive back behind cover and repeat. In other words boring. The only boss that doesn’t follow that formula, and requires actual skill to beat, is unfortunately That One Boss. An insufferable prick who will kick your ass. Not helping at all is the fact it comes at the end of a long zombie filled area so you probably won’t be at full health and it preceded by a long dialog heavy cutscene that you will have to repeat every time you loss (and you will).





You really want to avoid taking damage too. One of the things developers often forget about in survival horror is the survival part. Not here. See Brando only has 20HP and there are only 2 types of healing items - Berries that heal 5 HP and Potions that recover 10 - and they are scarce. You can’t buy anything so the amount of healing items you have is limited to what you can find and what people give you. And later on those Poison Type Pokémon can well poison you so you’ll be needing Antidotes too and there even rarer. Although I only got poisoned once during my whole palythrough. Now you can go to the Nurse Joy in the shelter to fully heal Brando, but she can only heal you 5 times. So what do you do? Do you heal Brando now or wait until he’s taken more damage to get the most out of Joy’s healing and hope he can make it till then? It’s good old fashioned resource management like that which makes games like this work. Although my advice? Stock up those potions and berries till the end of the game. Trust me on this.



Final Verdict:
As the sun rises and the light chases the nightmares away, what can we few that survived the ordeal see upon looking back at our experience? Other than mountains of chard zombie corpses created by the Simon Belmont of Pokemon? Not much actually.

The game is pretty much what you expect. What would happen if the Pokémon world got hit by a zombie outbreak? It’s dark, bloody and brimming with zombie Jigglypuff. The stories decent and fairly well told hitting all the strangers desperate for survival tropes without feeling cliche. The characters are believable and most are likable. And the atmosphere is good and creepy while still feeling faithful to the original games.

However they don’t really do enough with the concept that makes it thematically any different from any other decent survival horror. It’s Silent Hill with a Pokémon twist, not Pokémon cross Silent Hill working together. The gameplay is a bit of a letdown too, it’s simple and easily exploited. What should be epic fights against massive bosses are either simple games of cat and mouse or hair pulingly frustrating repeated slog-fests.

But I think the biggest detriment to the title is that I was never once scared. Granted I don’t think that was something the game was going for. It’s kind of hard to be terrified of a tiny 8bit zombifed Bellsprout especially after Brando has already ripped apart 11 other zombies. But if someone was seriously wanting to play this to be scared, you’ll probably be disappointed. Well except for one jump scare that might catch you off guard, but only because it comes out of freaking nowhere.

The game is still pretty good though. I liked it and if you’re a fan of Pokémon or survival horror in general I recommend to try it out. You could do worse. You could be playing Resident Evil 6. Now that’s a horrible endless nightmare.


The Last Word
I'm so going to raise up a Typhlosion just in case Pokemon X and Y get invaded by a zombie infection next.