#pokemon infinity

Pokemon Infinity Team 🖥️✨ commission to @ R.

If it was up to you, which Pokemon fangame do you hope that she makes a video about?

This last part, I'm going to go over the games I played but didn't finish in 2023, for various reasons. None of these because they were bad, really- I'm still in the middle of most of them. Just didn't have time! But here's my impressions anyway:

[1] - [2] - [3] - 4

Fire Emblem: Vision Quest

This is a hack of Sacred Stones that I played just because I had a hankering for Fire Emblem and wasn't going to stoop to playing Heroes or Engage. It delivers pretty well, I think! It's challenging and fun, if a little dull on the story end.

The main innovation here is... just, an atypical willingness to give the enemy's rank-and-file mooks special weapons, actually. The map design is generally really satisfying and challenging, because... you really can't just throw your strongest guys into the middle of the enemy and let them crash against their defense stat. Enemies routinely carry things like weapon-triangle-reversing -reaver or -slayer weapons, or hammers and rapiers and things that deal massive bonus damage, or these unique-to-the-hack gem weapons that double down on weapon triangle effects. You've got to be really mindful of exactly which units you're putting yours in range of...

...but you can't just take it slow, because almost every map has some kind of timed objective, and you've got to be advancing at a decent clip or else lose out on rewards. Moreover, you've got to be careful about which enemies you kill, because... the shop at base never sells better than D/C-tier weapons, enemies rarely drop weapons, and you almost never receive gold as a part of the story progression. Your only real source of income is using the party thief to steal gems from enemies that don't drop them on death, and she's pretty fragile, so every map has a secondary objective of "nab all the stuff you can sell for money so you don't literally run out of weapons to use because you're broke". You really need to approach every map with a plan.

It's not... great on story and character, honestly. It's doing something, but the character writing's just a touch too flat to carry the story. It's faithful to other GBA fire emblems in that respect, I guess- it's maybe a cut above those, for the most part? Doesn't really have an eye for comedy to give texture to the serious-mans-fight-serious-war stuff. I think it's trying to do, like, a subversion thing, where the hook is that you play as the map-1 Generic Ugly Bandits, forced by circumstance into heroism? But they don't really lean into that enough.

oh also the main character's name is "Storch". which sounds like something the Game Grumps would name Link in a zelda game.

Void Stranger

Man, Zero really wanted me to like this game. And, like, I kinda appreciate what it's doing, it's clever, but I just...

Void Stranger, on the surface, is a gauntlet of a few hundred block-pushing puzzles.

It has a unique gimmick where you can use a magic wand to pick up floor tiles and place them elsewhere, which it uses in a lot of really clever ways- the puzzles are definitely well-designed and reward you for sneaky lateral-thinking solutions. But it's a gauntlet of a few hundred block-pushing puzzles.

It's clearly doing some crazy mind-blowing The Witness or Tunic-esque mechanics-hidden-in-plain-sight stuff where the nature of the game transforms when you realize the significance of that one strange geometric shape, or learn a bizarre rules interaction that opens up what's possible. But it's a gauntlet of a few hundred block-pushing puzzles.

It's got a story- but I put like ten hours into the game without it managing to hook me. There's some mystique to the true nature of the mysterious videogame dungeon you're exploring that I never learned much about- but also, every few dozen block-pushing puzzles, you'll get to take a brief rest and watch (or sometimes play) a brief cutscene wherein the player character is serving as handmaiden to a headstrong rebellious disney princess type. It didn't really manage to go anywhere interesting after a gauntlet of 160-something block-pushing puzzles, but maybe does after a few thousand more.

Also, there's a lives system, and no save system, and if you run out of lives you have to start the gauntlet of hundreds of block-pushing puzzles over again. Which also happens if you [spoilers], or accidentally [spoilers], and I'm given to understand that the real game is the really cool metagame of doing multiple runs of the game over and over after learning new mechanics and secret truths about the game's structure. After the fourth time I died slash accidentally triggered a reset by screwing around and lost all my progress, I lost patience with replaying the same gauntlet of a few hundred block-pushing puzzles and dropped it.

Sorry, Zero- I just don't have the patience for it. You should probably just tell me about all the cool shit it does.

Pokemon Infinity

This is a Pokémon fangame! It's... kind of nothing to write home about- it's just polished and has good QoL and a lot of fun regional forms. I'm pretty far in- beat the last not-a-gym-leader and am about to embark on the bog-standard Evil Team Wants To Do Some Kind Of Apocalypse Evil By Controlling A Legendary Pokémon So Go Take Some Time And Stop Them Before Doing The Elite Four segment of the game.

The thing that stands out about it is how much it feels like it really could just be an entry in the mainline franchise from an alternate timeline. As mentioned, it's very polished, and the writing has exactly the same kind of inoffensively uninteresting tone as most real games in the series. Very authentic, with a lot of effort put into nailing the feel.

(The only big mechanical addition is the way it does HMs- they exist and control the progression, but you don't actually have to teach them to your pokemon to use them on the field. You get Fly pretty early on, and as long as you have a pokemon that could use Fly, you can just Fly with them from the party menu without wasting a moveslot. Very appreciated.)

Unnamed Space Idle

Ugh. I'm only really posting about this as a mea culpa- I kicked the idle game habit for all of a month and a half before getting hooked on another one. This one's annoyingly well-designed, with a shitton of different mechanics and ways to optimize your build for different objectives. There's always some low-hanging progression fruit you can pick by respeccing some stuff, and it's paced out to introduce new systems the instant the existing ones start getting old. The balancing and timing of it is pretty immaculate... for the purpose of getting me to check in and waste time on it every couple hours. Huge addictive time sink- keep a safe distance.

Fate/Hollow Ataraxia

You may have noticed that the title bullet point is not a link to a store page or something, unlike the rest. That's not because I don't want you to find the game- it's because much like Fate/Stay Night, the sequel Hollow Ataraxia is fucking impossible to find a way to purchase legitimately. Big thanks to Tulip and Wise for providing me with a copy. It's a whole process.

Anyway- FHA is a sequel to FSN, which I've mentioned on here before. FSN had this whole dark and complex plot about mages fighting a secret shounen battle war except the war was sort of fake and a conspiracy and you had to figure out what was really going on... and FHA is weirdly doing the same thing, except replace "shounen battle" with "slice-of-life omake collection".

It's very strange. It's like... "hey, thanks for playing our very serious and dramatic game! now that you've done that, how about you relax with some hilarious vignettes about all your favorite characters from that game just kinda hanging out and doing wacky anime hijinks, instead of trying to kill each other? don't worry, nothing sinister is happening in the background! this is just a fun video game! don't read into it! for the love of god, DON'T REĄ̴͕͈͓̮̘̘͌̆̇͗̕̕̚D̷̡͚̰̤̱̝̰̣͙̼̙͍̬̻̈́́͛́͝͠͝ ̸̮̭̙̳̯͍̤̣͎̖̺̊̌̔̄̇̉̽̀͐͘I̶̢̛̻̦̙͚͔̻͖͙̞̺͖͑̇̈́̌̾̑͌͝N̶̢̛͙̭̫͆͆̽̑̈́̇̎͛͛̔T̴̨̨̡̰̘̮̺̝̠̬̼̗̬̝̜̼̒̋̿̔͐O̵̢̻̟̮̩̘̖̙̖͍̒̅͑́̎̏̍ͅ ̶̨̙̱̥̣̙͔͔̫̰̲͎̣̘̹̭̰̒͐̽̐̆͂̎̏̂̍̂͑̚͝I̷̢̡̧̛͙̤̠̦̖̩͂̆̈́̔͊̽͒͐̃̽͑͗͘T̵̡̨̪͕̘̲͔̮́̚͝!!̶̡̧̧̟̮̜̻͔͓̜̩̟͖̼͓͕̑͛͌̀̃̐̊̑͗̋̅̀́̔̓́͂!"

But yeah, there's a whole-ass actual sequel going on here, except the veneer you're trying to decipher the truth of is goofy romcom nonsense instead of super sugoi battle anime nonsense. It's doing a lot of sneaky stuff, and I'm pretty sure I've twigged to a couple of the big twists already, which fills so many of these scenes with delicious dramatic irony.

I haven't finished it yet, though, mainly because when I have the wherewithal for visual novels lately, I've been working through...

The Sekimeiya: Spun Glass

I mentioned I'd started on this last year, and I've now sunk over 60 hours into it and have finally managed to finish chapter one.

This VN is long, and it is dense. It's an ontological mystery type thing about people trapped in a facility where Weird Time Shit is happening... and fuck almighty they are doing everything but explaining how the Weird Time Shit works. There's a magic egg that works as a time machine, but how exactly its time travel powers work, mechanically, is the central mystery of the story. And the game just bombards you with incident after incident of weirdass time travel and teleporting going on, each more impossible than the last, and you're supposed to, like... grope around blind-men-and-the-elephant-style, using all these weird incidents as clues to how the time travel has to work.

Except, clearly, at least one of the characters, probably multiple characters, already know how the time machine works and are hiding that fact, while actively attempting to misdirect and obscure what they're doing with the time machine to try and throw off other time travelers. So the actual whodunit mystery of who- uh, murdered some people, there's murders that occur- is this whole other layer of complication where you can't exactly trust that any given instance of time machine behavior isn't some elaborate ruse.

So this is, obviously, catnip for me.

But it's taking fucking forever- I can't just read this thing and absorb it- I have to stop every five minutes and pace around the room and lay down in the dark and focus on time travel logistics for half an hour. SO MUCH insane shit happens! Like nonstop! And every time someone suggests a plan for testing or investigating the latest insane shit, that becomes the staging ground for new insane shit! It's so, so fucking complicated, and every new piece of evidence comes with a dozen caveats and additional mysteries! It's fully bonkers and it's eating my brain.

As long as it's been taking me to work through this... I feel like the game could benefit a bit from being a little slower-paced, giving the cast some room to do things other than dig themselves deeper into impossible time travel logistics from time to time. Some of this stuff needs time to settle! It's exhausting. Static and unexpressive character portraits and kinda flat dialogue writing make it all the more difficult to focus and take in what's happening, and honestly the VN format makes it kind of harder to consume. It'd be a lot easier to follow along with the logistics if, like, the game was in 3D and we could look around and see how people were moving.

Still, I'm gonna keep at this one. It's got its hooks in me and won't let go, and I'm really impressed by how meticulously it manages to lay out its stable time loops without giving the game away for this long. Wild stuff.

-

Alright, that's it! That's everything I played in 2023. I still want to go on an in-depth mega-rant about how furious I am at all the stupid little things in Horizon Forbidden West, but that's for later. For now... onward to 2024!

Huh.

Add it to the list!

If you're going to post pokemon art, you need type icons. So I drew my own!

Some of these are existing icons, some of these are self-made, and some of these are combinations of existing ones or tweaks to them.

Like for example, this normal-type icon. It's a combination of the icon for Normal in SWSH and before, and that of Battrio/Tretta. With a little bit of Mezas in there.

Fire and Water are pretty much existing icons (Water also being Battrio/Tretta). When I was designing Grass' icon though, I wasn't thinking of the icon from the Ranger series... I tried to add a little more energy to the icon for electric and forgot to color in the bolt dangit

I added a little aura to the fighting fist. Some respect to the very rare special category moves for fighting type. That's just the New Snap flying icon. I decided to take inspiration from Masters EX with the poison icon.. I like how it turned out. Ground's icon is just if MasEX and SWSH had a kid. Rock is also the MasEX icon.

I gave the bug icon little antennae! I cannot draw the moon. Psychic is just the tera jewel from SV. Ghost is a nice reference to one of my favorite series, leave a guess which series. Steel isn't inspired by any particular icon except maybe the modern one.

Ice is the MasEX icon with a dash of Mystery Dungeon DX. Dragon's icon is also the MasEX icon with a little mouth added. Fairy is some stupid hodge-podge of previous icons: GO-SWSH's weird light burst, Rumble Rush's heart, and the modern fairy symbol. oh my god i made the little tail ends too thin

And a bonus! Classic ??? type, and two fanmade types: Nuclear from Pokemon Uranium (awesome fangame go play) and Cosmic from Pokemon Infinity (also really cool).

WOW this got much longer than I anticipated. Whoops. Having never played Masters EX (i do not enjoy gacha anymore) I am surprised by how good the icons in it are.