I played and finished this in roughly 2 hours, here's the team I did it with and my genuine thoughts so far.
Positives first:
The diversity of Pokemon that are available within the first route and around the towns is good, it allows for more planning when it comes to team building and is good when wanting to build harder encounters as your players will be able to have answers for them naturally if they don't want to over-level. The music choice for the game is decent enough, though I'll always prefer unique music if possible, picking good tracks however is more than workable for this.
I also like the rival's design, she seems cool and likeable so far and I'm interested to get to know more about her.
The art for the Lopunny scenes is pretty damn good, and while it feels a bit rushed, I do like the idea of nurturing pokemon up in the grove and getting them to my join my team.
Minor things:
The Nurse Joy in the second town disappears when healing your Pokemon, and you definitely need to pick one style of overworld sprites for characters. The younger trainer sprites which are ripped from FRLG/RSE look off-putting when compared to the rest of the characters, stylistically it looks bad.
The Mighteyena attacking the Buneary can straight up flee the battle due to Roar, allowing you to skip that encounter if the AI thinks it can't beat you, which I don't think is intentional.
The elephant in the room:
Difficulty in the current version is not well-balanced, to start anyways.
I'll preface by the fact that I kept my Pokemon on level the entire time, and never overleveled my team at any point.
A good example is the starter battle and the first trainer battle.
The starter battle is completely random, you can just outright lose if the AI decides it wants to beat you and you missed the Leftovers/have a bad nature on your starter. This isn't even necessarily a bad thing because losing the first battle is a thing that can theoretically happen in baseline Pokemon games if you're unlucky, but it's something to take note of. The game punishes the player, at least in theory, for missing something that is easily missable.
The game does offer a method to make things easier and if the player doesn't take advantage of those then it's technically not the game's fault on that point. I'd say the only real issue is that the rival's starter being theoretically better in a 1 v 1, with no items mind you, isn't great.
The first fight however is straight a sucker-punch.
That Zangoose is straight up busted.
This is a rant, tl;dr - Blocking the exit to the starting town with a Pokemon that can 2-3HKO almost every available resource you have of a similar level is bad, even worse is that it can do this via knowing moves it shouldn't know. Having illegal sets + a level spike on Route 1 is not real difficulty, it's artificial and lazy. And no, getting to lvl 10 before leaving home isn't normal either.
Why does it have Fake-Out, a move it doesn't learn and almost guarantees that it 2HKOs almost anything from the starting town? As well as Cut which wouldn't be that bad if this wasn't a STAB move on a pokemon that has a base attack stat of 100+, also guaranteeing that it 2HKOs almost anything from the starting town. Hone Claws too, which I'd presume is to try and prevent you from Double Team spamming just in case.
That Zangoose, more than anything, is a hurdle that foreshadows the rest of the battles on the route.
Leaving the first town can become a hurdle to climb over due to said Zangoose, because despite having gone and found the counter that is available in the grass in the town (ie Mankey), you can still lose if you're not at least on level with it due to it having a set of moves that it shouldn't that allows it to be a bigger threat than it should be.
This is an example of
artificial difficulty.
You're opponent isn't beating you because they're better or you're worse, they'll beat you because they have access to things you don't and can't have. The game is ignoring it's own rules to create a challenge for the player, this is inherently bad design on the level of rubber-banding in racing games.
This continues as a trend in the form of illegal Pelliper, Pidgeotto, Stoutland, Tentacruel, Graveler, and Zoroark from memory. Some of these aren't even that difficult to deal with because the game does give you options to beat these things ie; Mankey, your Starter's first evo, Snubbull w/ Intimidate, Oddish, and obviously Lopunny.
However, it sets a bad precedent that the game is willing to be unfair to challenge and beat you.
And if you overlevel, sure it's not going to be a problem because overleveling side-steps the issue entirely. If you overlevel, you're no long engaging with the bad level curve so the argument of "well i didn't have trouble with x I just used y to beat it I don't understand your complaints" falls flat.
You can beat anything if you overlevel enough, this isn't some new idea. As kids, lots of people beat pokemon with just their starter because they leveled it to the point where it was just so much stronger than everything that things like type advantage/disadvantage stopped mattering. This is something you can do in this very game, in fact.
However, a lot of people don't like grinding to overlevel and do that, you're average player isn't going to want to grind so they'll engage with the game with what they have and find a level/difficulty that spikes immediately before leveling out.
Youngster Joey having a full team of decently leveled Pokemon on Route 1 is not good. Especially when said team is actually fairly competent and can be a threat if you haven't either evolved your starter, gotten Lopunny, or have a full team of 6 yourself. Even if it is just a joke, which did get a chuckle out of me admittedly, it's bad design.
Everything after the first route, after Youngster Joey even, levels out to being a more reasonable mid-point, I'd even say that the first gym leader is a genuinely decent challenge depending on how you approach it. This is due in part to the breeder with the Audinos, which should probably have a limit to the amount of times you can battle, making it easier to grind.
Ultimately, the first route is just a bit too difficult for what is supposed to be your real introduction to the game.
Here's why.
The first route, even sans the illegal pokemon, still has a
massive level jump from
6, where your starter pokemon would be at after winning the rival battle to
14-15 on average counting the first battle through the bridge encounters.
I just can't see how that's okay.
Suggestions:
I went through the thread and noted that the developer has an idea of how they want this game to be, which is fine, but I care enough to not want to see people get filtered by the opening segment of the game so here's some ways to tune the difficulty to keep it hard but not busted.
- Get rid of the Zangoose/Illegal Pokemon from standard trainers: Zangoose is nowhere to be found in the grass, unless it's a super rare find, just ditch it and give the first kid something like Zigzagoon, Bellsprout, and Houndour. The team is more diverse and can out most of the encounter pool whilst also being something that the player can deal with as long as they use some decent strategy and not being a pokemon that is blantantly out of place. Standard trainers shouldn't typically have Pokemon that you can't catch in the current or previous area, though there is leeway here.
- Make Route 1 longer/Add more space inbetween the starting town and Gym 1: Adding more to the area in-between the Starter Town and your first Gym Town allows for a more gradual build-up in levels. You can throw more battles at the player, as well as having more room to put stuff, so that they can get up to the level you want them to be for the first gym whether that be 14-18 or 22-25. It prevents the weird spike from level 5 to 9 that happens immediatley because typically, after the rival battle, you're going to immediately try and leave the town and this game spites you for doing so currently.
This is why most pokemon games have a transitory town or two in-between starting town 1 and gym town 1, it allows you to space out encounters, introduce early plot elements, and more.
- Nerf the starter a bit: The starter is busted after it evolves, with the tiniest amount of luck it can solo the entire first gym by itself if not all encounters in the game. It's signature move at level 18 is incredibly overpowered, allowing for a no thought strat which is just sit there and wall-up. Fire Fang Mighteyena does not threaten it in the slightest after +2 Def and having items to heal in the back.
- Mess around with the AI: If you haven't already, Pokemon Essentials allows for you to change trainer AI to be better. I'm sure you've likely tuned this a bit already, but I just thought I should make note of it. This is a much more fair, technically anyways, way of having harder battles whilst not relying on unfair tactics to do so.
Conclusion:
Game's okay.
The H-content that is there is pretty good if short, the early level spike is bad and should be leveled out, the starter Pokemon is busted, the custom art is good, game's a 3/5 so far. I hope to see the game get further developed.
