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Childishly "Adult"

This is a review crossposted from review blog Dragon Quill. The original article can be found here.

You know that fanfic that newbie barely teenage boys have, the one with the new region and new pokemon but this time it’s got ALCOHOL and SEX REFERENCES and ZANY unlike those squares at Nintendo? It’s that. Like, beat by beat. If that’s you? Well, you’ll love this.

Pokemon RMN is a RPGmaker clone of Pokemon, with a brand-new region and completely new set of pokemon. The brand-new region is basically Hoenn. The new set of pokemon are somewhat rough and rather similar to existing ones. The game itself has been coded impressively close to the official Pokemon games and plays exactly the same…except it's just barely choppy/laggy enough to be distracting and make repetitive gameplay a chore. I never realized how important it was to me that the games run smoothly through repeated battles, and like any Pokemon game, it's mostly just battling. Also, for some reason cancel and start menu are the same button and there’s no way to skip through dialogue. And my one true love, flavor text? Exists for the trash cans and only the trash cans, and often in service of mentioning something gross or edgy.



Text which often has a mistake or two in it, as well. There’s errors all through this.

(Also, the evolution animation is horrible – the sprite spins in a circle really fast. Look, what’s wrong with just flipping back and forth? I realize this is really petty but it’s going through more effort to make something look so much worse!)

The game opens asking if you’re a boy, girl, or Namekian – which, for those of you who jumped at the option of not picking boy or girl, just results in being told to stop screwing around. You then get to pick an adjective: cool, tough, calm, quirky. This determines your look, and has similar problems with female trainers as the standard games. Want to be quirky, female, and not playing as the pantyflash fairy your whole journey?



Sorry, the technology isn’t here yet.

If you want to be female and wearing functional pants, your only option is calm, with the cool sprite particularly infuriating me by being almost decent but having those horrible just-below-the-knee jeans. You’re then given a palette swap option which includes skin color changes (at least in the case of the cool girl, the tough boy was just picking how intensely white your skin is and I don’t care enough to go through to check all permutations), and you can’t do any mixing and matching. Pink and cool? Blonde white girl. Green and cool? Slightly darker blonde white girl. Blue and cool? Dark-skinned redhead! I really don’t understand why it was impossible to let people change the color of things separately.

Once you pick you go to your house where your mom explains emphatically how she would never do any sort of pokemon journey and it’s only our great trainer dad’s genes that make us have any interest in doing the thing the setting revolves around, followed by going out to see the male professor and male assistant in trouble from a wild pokemon (followed by them identifying us as related to our dad who’s so important – like I said, basically Hoenn. Just even more so.), then the antagonist, a crazy male professor, shows up and steals only one of the three starters for some reason before running off to hop in a flying saucer. And half the characters have horrible phonetic accents. Later, our other rival, a middle-aged man appears. Throughout this, there’s lots of references to alcohol because that’s so adult and mature, with multiple characters whose personality trait is “is drunk”.


Look at how grown up this game is!

The only meaningful female presence is the first gym…where the gym leaders spend their time gushing about how I have a special destiny and I’m so great. Then there’s a girl ranting about how the card game minigame is too complex for her and only nerds play it. She also talks in third person and is an idiot, and she’s HILARIOUSLY assuming the evil villain’s robots are going to molest her.



Girls thinking people are perverts and crying wolf out of pure stupidity is obviously the best joke imaginable, so much that it goes on line after line after line. The only positive thing is that the designer didn’t bother to change her dialogue (yet?) so if you play as a girl, she still hits on you and kisses you after you save her, all the while talking about you in terms that make it so very clear this isn’t designed to be inclusive but is assuming she girl, you boy. There’s a girl in the first cave (Noob Cave because seriously, beat by beat) who also brings up same-sex stuff, but it’s only so the girl in question can go on at length about how gross the idea is and how she wants my character to leave her alone because she only likes boys. If you play as a boy, in contrast, she hits on you. And there’s a third female character who also hits on you regardless of gender…and do I even need to add that no male characters hit on you regardless that I saw? You could probably guess. Because that might bug male players.

The second gym introduces what I thought I wanted, puzzles that are an actual challenge…except actually they’re bad reaction time minigames where you just keep doing it until you get it right with no consequences for failure but your own rising boredom, and adding insult to injury, we’re told this twitchy reaction time game is somehow a meditation minigame. While flailing around on the final one before the gym leader, somehow the game decided it wasn’t going to open my start menu any longer so I couldn’t save and I decided I was done with it.

If you really love new pokemon and type combos, the game might be worth a play just for that, but they’re much more miss than hit to me, and looking at the current spritesheet most of the ones I didn’t get far enough to see look even worse. Also, for anyone annoyed they pretty much can only play as a white person, it’s okay because there is black representation: a black pokemon you can capture.



Maybe it’s just an unfortunate resemblance…?



Nope.



It’s okay, though, it’s not racist because grinning blackface caricatures who are simple, carefree creatures who only care about their primitive stomp-growl music is a compliment.

Posts

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Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
author=Link_2112
author=Ratty524
To be fair, I listed everyone who made a Pokemon submission as "developer" here
Not true. You didn't list me as a dev because you said I didn't do anything beyond submit a pokemon. Others helped with designing areas and gyms and trainers and that's what got them on the dev list, as I understand it.

I'd rather have ms for this than be able to maybe submit a review.

edit: and nobody would be able to affect the core game because isn't it a premade pokemon project template?

edit2: in fact I'm not listed anywhere on the page. If I cared that would hurt my feelings.

iirc you specifically asked me to remove you from the list.

Anyway, thanks Dragon_Quill. I'm glad we were able to have a civil discussion about this amiss the controversy this review stirred.
Now that you mention it, I seem to recall something like that...but I also recall you saying that pokemon submission alone wasn't enough to get me on as a dev. Only some other lowly title that wouldn't get me ms, so in response to that I may have said just leave me off the list so I can review it. Would have to check the logs to know for sure, but if I can be listed as a dev then please do so.
Seiromem
I would have more makerscore If I did things.
6375
I thought it was just a mistake on Ratty's part, considering the number of people who submitted Fakemon. You asked if you had to do more than submit a Pokemon, Ratty interpretted that as "Is there anything else I can help with" and then said something along the lines of "Oh, that's enough, I just forgot to include you"
I don't think I contributed much at the time other than Pokemon and was still listed.
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
Alright, I added you back in as a developer, Link!
I know I contributed with my shiny and beautiful personality.
I know that people feel like this was a travesty but this was actually really good for this game! :D It'll be good to see the improvements this brings~
author=Dragon_Quill
author=Corfaisus
You can actually change the rating yourself by going to your submissions on the top and editing the review.
Ah, so I can! I was assuming that since they had to be approved the actual content was locked once I submitted. It is done.


It's a great asset to weed out typos and to adjust to the game's rating in case massive changes have been made, or the game has been completed.
Thanks boss! And yeah, I played it some and it's a great game. So far exactly what I had hoped. Although I'm not a fan of written accents.
I think this review is a bit harsh in my opinion. First of this game is far from being finished. I understand reviews make a game better with constructive criticism, but for me a review is a final verdict. There should be a blog for feed back on what to improve. I did not see any positive feedback within this review except for one line possibly, but nothing on what the game did right. I read what the game did wrong and a lot of mocking went into this review. I think the reviews should be put on hold while the game progresses and a blog or a forum should be opened for feed back and opinions. And what does Afro Pup have to do with racism? And how do you know the characters are all white??? For your information a person who is Hispanic can have blonde hair. Hell any of those can be Asian as well. Were you expecting him to put all types of nationality in this game?
The reviewer gave a list of things to improve and suggestions on how to achieve it in the comment section (it's a little loaded), so it's been quite constructive.
You can argue about the harshness or the final verdict though.
If it's people like this that have made you stop working on the game, then I just want to tell you that I'm sorry it came to that. This game looked awesome and I'd probably have played it. The amount of work must have been immense. It sucks that people like this will look for any little thing they can to cry racism/sexism in a FAN MADE game. For god's sake, all they do is whine and complain having no idea the amount of work you must have put into this game. If she really wanted to play a borderline sexist game she should have played mine, that would have given her a wonderful tumblr blog, hahaha!
I don't think this had any (important) effect on Ratty's decision, since I actually value this review because of his response. Also because this reminds us of the amount of misconceptions we as visual communicators have to deal with.

And stuff... yeh.
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
Yeah, this review had nothing to do with it and when I look back on it, it's rather justified, really. I can only hope whoever is taking over doesn't dismiss the points brought up, here.
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