Reviews for January 2024
New year, new trash
A short article, sorry, blame Palworld and Person of Interest1 taking up most of my time.
Also, yes, I’ve written over 5000 words of an upcoming review, but it’s still not even close to done, and I’m only halfway through the actual novel. It’s hard, and nobody understands. Even I don’t understand half of what I’m reading.
2024 update: I’m retroactively adding the modern ★/* highlight system to the top of each old monthly review post, as it was a well received feature.
★: N/A
*: Pistol Whip, Pokemon Fire Red: Rocket Edition
Previously:
Pokemon Uranium
This is a Pokemon fangame, not a romhack. This means, in practice, that it’s badly glued onto RPG Maker’s engine instead of editing a real Pokemon game file, so let’s get that out of the way: it runs like shit.2
It’s one of those extremely ambitious projects where basically every Pokemon is original, as is the region, storyline, etc. In fact, you could say it’s too ambitious, as the game is at least twice as long as any regular installment beyond maybe Gen 2, and you can feel it. Another issue is that almost every Pokemon looks like crap. I understand that when you’re making a lot of new monsters, you want people to be able to tell their type at a glance. Usually, you do that with good design, instead of forcing primary colors on every creature like these developers settled on. All poison Pokemon are bright purple, for example.
The story is alright enough. It’s edgier, within reason, with some enjoyable details like a likable rival with an actual character arc. You’re basically fighting a terrorist who keeps causing nuclear plant meltdowns in order to feed a legendary Pokemon, working alongside a team of Rangers led by your aloof father. Also, like in the most recent Pokemon release, every gym has something of a quest to them instead of simply being a succession of fights. You never feel like you’ve fallen into a rut like often happens with these games.
However, I didn’t actually finish this game. I got pretty far, to halfway through its Elite Four equivalent, but it defeated me through attrition. The biggest reason was the difficulty. It’s not as hard as Radical Red, but it’s far more unforgiving. It will gleefully let you softlock yourself into areas with too-high-level enemies, where you’ll need to grind for hours before you can beat the boss. To make matters worse, it doesn’t have any quality of life features that you usually expect from romhacks, so you WILL spend far more time going to heal than fighting enemies. The game is poorly balanced, and gives you less experience than you need throughout it.3 I’ve actually seen people recommend that you only use Pokemon that have natural healing abilities so you can save money.
So, despite all Uranium has going for it, I’d say it’s a skip? Honestly, I only started playing it because the Borne of Caution author said he was thinking of writing a fic set in the region, but I’ve never heard it praised in any other context than “oh a lot of effort was put into it!”. Fun, it was not.
Sliding Towards Chaos
As you know if you follow this blog, I recently watched all of Person of Interest. It’s a human tradition to feel empty immediately after you finish an extremely long work of fiction, so I engaged my own personal tradition and went looking for the best fics in town.
After removing 99.99% of fics on the grounds of “this is just gay porn” and “this is just terrible gay porn”, I only found two potentially-decent fics. That’s right, after 6 seasons and 13 years, that’s all this fandom could muster, but I guess it’s better than LOST with its zero (0).
One of them was obviously this. It was written by a Tumblr user, so it contains gay porn, but it doesn’t consume the plot, and all the erotica is locked away in a side story I gleefully ignored.
If you haven’t watched the show, this will be meaningless to you, but Sliding Towards Chaos addresses a what-if scenario: instead of Shaw’s actress getting pregnant and forcing the showrunners to half-assedly write her out with a kidnapping plot, Finch is the one that gets kidnapped, and the remaining crew is forced to complete the plot without the help of the One Guy Who’s Actually Smart.
That’s a good concept, and sometimes it shines through. Only sometimes. Most of the plot is still bad romance that reads as if written by an alien. After I finished the fic, I looked up the author, and they’re aromantic, which I guess might explain it? Anyway, ignoring the bad romance becomes hard, as the story keeps skipping over the action in service of repetitive character interactions and “slow burn”, which you can do well but wasn’t done well here.
The plot progression is really slow, the ending is unsatisfying (basically, it becomes a fix-fic where everything goes smoothly), and the author’s mindset makes some character interactions less than enjoyable. I do appreciate that The Machine takes more of a role and she’s pretty well written, but that’s it.
All in all, I don’t recommend this.
Mean Girls (2024)
I haven’t watched the original, but Fuck You, it’s January, and there were no other remotely watchable movies when I felt like going to the theater.
Without the knowledge of the premake, I can hardly contrast the two, but I have discussed the movie with other people. The titular mean girls didn’t feel all that mean, to the detriment of the storyline, and I’ve learned that the original had more of a bite to them, which sucks for me.4 It just felt very flat and forgettable.
The music was its strongest feature, but just okay on average, with only Regina’s songs (one of which is above, though it works better with visuals I can’t find anywhere yet) leaving a lasting impression. Her actress really seemed like the only good singer in the cast, but she’s not good enough for me to recommend you watch this incredibly mediocre movie.
Pistol Whip*
This is kind of what I was hoping for when I played Beat Saber, and I find myself coming back to it more often.
Pistol Whip is a virtual reality game (I played it on my Quest 2) where you shoot guns at people at the rhythm of the music. The music fucking sucks, much like in Beat Saber, fitting more a club than a rhythm game soundtrack, but the gameplay is much more satisfying, letting you emulate that one so-bad-it’s-good Equilibrium film. While writing this I discovered the game actually has native modding tools and a mod browser, so I bet I can just play better songs!
I don’t have much else to say about it, though? It’s a very simple game. There are some “campaigns” with a story, but they have no depth and are just vehicles to make you shoot at people over and over. It’s just really fun, and that’s hard to get across to you guys within a 2D medium. If you have VR, try it.
Recalibration
This was the second Person of Interest fic I checked out.
The concept: The Machine gets a human body. Cool idea.
The catch: Goddammit, it’s one of those fluff fics.
Don’t fucking bother. I dropped this the moment it became clear this was never going to get a proper plot.
Pokemon Fire Red: Rocket Edition*
A decent romhack that I initially hated.
There’s too much story, that’s the thing. The game opens with a wall of text, and you don’t start at Pallet Town. Instead, you begin the game at the Celadon Game Corner as a Team Rocket grunt, where you’re told to fly to Mt. Moon and get some fossils. For a while there’s barely any fighting to speak of, just endless “talk to guy”-style quests.
Then, it opens up a bit, and you learn what they’re going for. The gameplay is still the weak point, but only because whoever made this game focused HARD on the storyline. They worked tirelessly to ensure:
Every single weird “video-gamey” aspect of Pokemon Red is addressed diegetically, from that one guy’s missing teeth to Missingno.
Every appearance of Team Rocket in Red and Silver is part of a larger plan behind the scenes, and you’re instrumental in every step of it.
Fandom memes like Gary’s dead Raticate and the Mew truck are also embedded into the story, for fun. In general, the game is pretty funny, though the screenshots above don’t really showcase that well.
You can do anything Team Rocket does, from stealing Pokemon to being a general dick.5
Once you grasp their design philosophy, this is a fun romp through Kanto, as you wait for whatever bullshit the writer pulls off next. The game is too easy and the allowance for Pokemon thievery makes the enemy teams pretty unbalanced and artificial, so that sucks, but I think I’d still recommend it. A really good first foray into the world of fanmade Pokemon games.
Ups and Downs
This is not very well written on a technical level, and the pacing is glacial. Usually, that means a story will be swiftly dropped, but I have a weakness: cool powers.
This story is a Discord quest where users control Worm’s protagonist’s mother, Annette, or rather her shard, which can grant her random but arbitrary superpowers every day. Most of the time, RNG-based fics stumble onto broken combinations pretty fast, and the writers fall over themselves to explain why the protagonist won’t insta-win.
Here, the abilities are usually weak but pretty creative, almost to a fault. There are endless power testing scenes, justified because the powers are incredibly specific and hard to pin down, for example “accelerates healing slightly as long as they’re exposed to a strong light”. The weak powers can synergize between themselves and create single, stronger ones, but given they’re based on shard keywords like “clean” or “phone”, their potential is limited.
Our main character is also pretty passive, and this is one of the few Worm fics where the protagonist fully obeys the law at all times, which helps it feel fresher than it should, but certainly doesn’t help the plot progression. With only a fight scene every ten sets of powers at best, your mileage may vary on whether the testing scenes are worth the fic.
Hermione Granger, Dermatologist
This was apparently written by the author of another fic named Hermione Granger, Demonologist, as a joke (no, I haven’t read the original).
For some reason, this “spinoff” made it to my desk as a funny twist on Harry Potter. It’s just a below average, stations-of-canon crackfic (the title says it all, even oversells it) that thinks it’s funny but it isn’t, which is the worst crime a crackfic can commit. Terminally short, too, don’t waste your time.
Palworld
The flavor of the month. This game made some people incredibly upset, due to the AI technologies involved in its creation: none. But one of the developers mentioned an AI tool on Twitter long ago. Unrelated to the game, but still. Oh yeah, and they ripped models directly from the Pokemon game files! Wait, you’re telling me that the user who claimed that was faking their evidence and ended up admitting it?
Anyway, Palworld is fairly unoffensive, and even fun. It’s most definitely ripping off design elements of Pokemon, both visual and gameplay-based, but all within the bounds of the law, especially when you add in the parody elements, like guns and sweatshops. So I beg you to be chill about this, lest Disney gains more power over what art is allowed to exist.
I haven’t played Ark, the game this is reportedly most based on, but I’ve played Valheim and other open world games, which inherit a lot of the former’s philosophies. From what I can gather, Palworld is nowhere as grindy as any of them, because your pals can mine and craft shit for you, letting you actually play the game. That alone is almost enough to make up for the follies of the genre, almost, as I’ll explain later.
The exploration and catching are basically the same as in Pokemon Legends: Arceus, though there’s a true open world instead of three smallish areas, and there are generally more things to do, bases to build, and so on. Base building is barebones, catching mechanics are a bit more draconian, but I would say I enjoyed this game more than the Pokemon version.
I put 46 hours into it, getting to level 43, and based on achievements I’m apparently in the top 0.6% of the playerbase by time investment, but I still ended up dropping the game before finishing.
Unfortunately, the game does eventually, in the mid-to-late game, get as grindy as its predecessors. Pals can’t automatically produce some specific materials involved in ball creation, bosses become overleveled, and the experience curve becomes draconian. Leveling is mostly achieved through catching new pals, which requires expensive balls past a certain point, which requires grinding...
Nevertheless, I will just blame Early Access for this, and the many glitches, and trust the developers somehow.6 The first 35 hours or so were extremely addictive and fun, and the problems seem fixable with time, so I’ll be following its development with great interest, and so should you.
Swiss Arms
Okay, okay, let’s be fair. For one, Swiss Arms actually came first, the writer just keeps going on hiatus so it’s taken twice as long to get half as far. For other, this one is actually a self-insert, not an original character, so our protagonist is allowed to be a bit smarter than the dumb muscle in the incredibly better written Legends Never Die.7
This story has much more of a political focus, and the brunt of the plot concerns our main character’s reactions to the major players in the area as they encroach on his science experiments. I’d say it’s very average in its approach, honestly, if you’ve read one uplift story, you’ve pretty much already read this.
I will praise that the specifics of the uplifting aren’t the usual “hey let’s magically find a cave full of bat guano and give everyone guns”, but areas like gem faceting, porcelain and dyes. That said, let’s be fair again—in addition to the uplifting, the protagonist swings around a huge Berserk-style sword and cuts people in half to win skirmishes. I’d almost say the gamer part is actively fighting the other half of the story, but his supernatural strength is the only reason the plot has any action at all, so I’ll let it slide.
It’s just fine. It’s not as good as Legends Never Die. Oh hey Ideas-Guy, the writer for the latter, has just started a Pokemon Fic—8
Incarnation of White
Taylor Worm gets White Mage powers, based on an old strategy game where those have religious implications.
Since that type of power is villain-coded in this universe, she has to covertly start gathering followers so they pray to her and make her stronger. This sounds far more interesting than how it’s actually executed.
Mainly, the writing just isn’t very good.
"Hey, dad. I've got something important to tell you," I said with a serious face.
"Hm? Did something happen at school again?" He looked troubled.
"No. I think it'll be easier if I just showed you," I said. Then I rolled up my sleeves until my armlet was visible, and detached it. As the effect went away, I hesitated for a moment about what I was doing, but pushed forward.
"Try putting this on."
He looked at me and the armlet curiously. "What's this?" He asked, but he did as I suggested and put it on.
Then his face changed.
"Wow. What just happened?" His eyes darted around the room, and he flexed his muscles. Then his eyes found their way back to me with a focused look. It was unnatural seeing that kind of intensity on his face.
"You're a cape," he said, without any room for doubt. "A Tinker. And this…" He tapped the armlet. "Just made me smarter and stronger. That's incredible, Taylor."
"Not exactly. I mean, I am a cape, but I'm more than just a Tinker. And I'm not sure if that actually makes you smarter. I think it's more like experience, especially in fighting skills and quick thinking in dangerous situations,"
No one is even remotely in character, and the author always takes the path of least resistance both in dialogue and plot development. It’s like a lazy alien ran with the concept, and I had to give up when it didn’t get better or more interesting.
Big Brain in the Dungeon
A magic-buff-themed Gary Stu self-insert in the world of Danmachi. It’s got one of those funny protagonists, but without the usual side annoyances, which stopped me from dropping it and calling it a day.
Even so, it’s still Danmachi. It’s just a lame horny anime world with horribly flat characters that say EEHHHHHH? a lot. The pacing is also so slow this might as well be slice-of-life, and essentially nothing has happened in 85 chapters. So business as usual.
Don’t bother unless you’re in the mood for one of those stories that don’t demand a big brain from you.
See you next month! Remember pointless metrics like subscriptions are what drive me to take notes on these shitty fics, so do your part if you want more.
Person of Interest just got its own full length review here, so it’s not a short month:
Another fangame I wanted to play, Pokemon Opalo, actually ran so terribly on my smartphone (yes, I know) I had to stop playing it. It technically works, but I get a five-second black screen before every encounter and it drove me insane. It’s my understanding RPG Maker can’t deal with large numbers of assets, which is something every Pokemon game has, so I will never understand what developers were thinking when they chose it as their Pokemon fangame engine.
The game advertises its Nuzlocke mode a lot, and that would have solved the issue of wild Pokemon being stronger than me, but come on. I just wanna grill.
A huge subplot involves the biggest bully getting fat after she’s tricked by the protagonist, becoming unpopular partly because of that. However, in this version the actress isn’t very traditionally attractive, or all that thin to begin with, so surely she would have been bullied already if that was how 2023 American high schools work? Whatever, I guess she was already part of the musical’s cast and her voice is pretty good.
Never to this memetic level, though:
Allegedly they abandoned Craftopia, a previous early access open world survival game, so that’s not a good track record.
I reviewed Legends Never Die just last month, coincidentally.
Sadly, as of this post, there’s only one chapter, and I have a sanity rule to avoid anything below 70k words. The alternative is reading low effort trash like Hermione Granger, Dermatologist. I know, I know, everything else I read is so much better.