First of all, thank Spherical Ice and everyone who helped in the making of this project so much for this amazing experience, I had such a good time with Gaia that I had to create an account here just to praise it. It had been a while ever since I played a Pokemon from start to finish without going full turbo mode, but I never felt the urge to use it with Gaia outside of skipping random encounters.
The story, outside of a few points regarding the New Elders motivations, that I felt were a bit rushed/not explored enough, which have already been pointed out in this thread, was engaging and the way the tone was handled reminded me of the mainline Pokémon games, really well done. The overworld is a thing of beauty and the way secrets are scattered throughout it was also something I really liked, making me actually interested in backtracking to find stuff previously locked by HMs and the like.
One thing that got me worried was the difficulty curve of the game. Even though there were some moments that felt challenging at first, those were mostly due to the element of surprise (the last battle against the Rival and Morgana's last stand come to mind), overall the game felt way too easy. Mind you, I only did one playthrough and it was a Normal-type only run (with the exception of Umbreon which I decided to keep for roleplaying reasons), so while I believe this should've also contributed to making the game harder than if I played normally, maybe my team was overleveled compared to what you expected when developing the game. I did no grinding though, so I find it hard to be the case.
I'd also claim the Battle Marsh is not well balanced for end game mons with proper movesets and training, it was real easy all the way up to the 20th battle (I believe) against Iris,
in which I got a game breakingbug. Right after she mega evolved her Gengar, the game got stuck during my Staraptor's Brave Bird animation and never went back to normal. Since I don't have a discord account I apologize beforehand if this has already been reported, I couldn't check. I'll do another run later though, I really want to get to 100 wins.
Pic related:
Hi, Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I've been playing this hack for the past few days (love it!) and I've noticed an issue that seems consistent.
On the turn that an opponent's pokemon mega-evolves, my pokemon's attack targets itself instead of the opponent. This happened against the Nurse's mega-Audino, and Will's mega-Slowbro. On the poison gym leader's Venusaur I switched out on the turn that it mega-evolved so I don't know if it would have happened or not. I've only reached Will so far so I have no more examples to test as yet. Is this a regular issue? Or am I missing something?
Additionally, when my Scrafty is in battle and the opponent mega-evolves, Scrafty's Intimidate triggers on the mega-evolved pokemon. This is the first game I've played with mega-evolution so I don't know if this is standard or not, but it seems weird.
Sorry if these things are already reported, I haven't browsed extensively.
Cheers, and thanks again for the amazing hack!
I've encountered both of these too more than once during my playthrough.
Anyways, thanks again for making this, here are some pics of my HoF team (Boufallant transformed into a Spinarak for some reason but whatever). Great rom-hack, Belly Drum Linoone OP, Loamas best town. Peace.