Plus Points:
- Cool to see updates on your rivals and other significant characters in the story
- I can really dig the relationships between all the characters. I think this is a case of a hack where it's better to have the main character speaking. In general, playing this hack feels like you're playing as a 3rd person, and just sort of guiding the player through their adventure. That's a perfectly fine and unique experience.
- Underwater bubbles, I like it!
- Player's talking is actually done well here.
Neutral Points:
- After every event script I'm facing downwards. My only guess is that you're warping or using facedown. You can warp facing the old direction too :X
- These trainer tips signs. "Poison hurts", "Pokemon battle". C'mon...lol.
- When you're running, the player's eyes (male) turn Red. :D
- Tiles instead of OWs for Staryu in Vermillion City? Why?
- BLUE KILLED THE ARBOK. THERE'S BLOOD. WHY BLUE, WHY?!?!?
Minus Points:
- Wild Pokemon battles using empty trainers. Please use ASM. Please.
- Intro platform has no one standing on it. But someone somewhere is introducing themselves as the champ.
- On closer inspection BG2 is a transparent image. I'm not sure if that's intentional, but it looks weird.
- In the overworld, the player sends out Bulbasaur, but I use a random Pokemon in the battle. A small hack would fix this.
- Dear lord. The ghetto Follow me that Misty does in the cave is giving me cancer.
- Lots of recycled maps, with very minor/bad edits. It's very obvious which maps are recycled. I know a lot of people recycle indoor maps, but outdoor maps are really noticeable.
Scoring
Graphics:
The graphics in this hack are definitely not it's strong point. There's some mixing and matching going on with custom tiles closer to HGSS, other tiles which are defaults in FireRed as well as what looks like 8-bit tree tiles. I know this hack is pretty old, but I think going back and revamping the tiles would have great merit in making this hack more visually pleasing. Currently the default OW graphics are a little off, and there is absolutely no custom graphics going on here at all. There are a few things that I did like, for example, Mount Moon and the underwater scene where Poliwhirl evolves was visually great. Notice how both of these are isolated from the graphics which is explored during the gameplay. So please, do consider revamping the graphics.
TL;DR: Graphics lack consistency. Some places graphics are good. No customized graphical stuff. Final Score: 2.
Story:
I haven't read the manga which this hack is supposed to be based off of, so perhaps I cannot truly appreciate the story which Athesdote is trying to represent with his hack. However, I like it. Sure, it's probably not his story, but I don't really care about how the story came to be. I think that it's a good story. The character interactions with the NPCs in the game, as well as the emotional connection you end up feeling while playing this game is second to none. I really have my moments when I'm cheering for a certain character's success and that's generally not something you'd experience playing other hacks. I have absolutely no qualms about the story except for Prof. Oak. The guy sucks. The part where I was supposed to call him on the PC, I walked back to his town and talked to him and he didn't say anything. I'm a little salty about that.
TL;DR: As expected from a manga story, the character development and interactions are incomparably higher than in most other hacks. Final Score: 4.25.
Gameplay:
Gameplay and story are probably the hack's strong suit. Unfortunately the gameplay, which would otherwise be excellent, I feel is dragged down by a few things worth mentioning. The first is that certain features are implemented in a sub optimal way. For example, battles vs wild Pokemon are fairly common in this hack's story. The use of an invisible trainer really really makes me sad (you can't run, you can't capture and you end up facing 2 Pokemon even though there's 1 Pokemon the the overworld - it was the case inside Lavender Town's haunted building. The second thing is the spelling and grammatical mistakes. While they're not as frequent and annoying as most of the others seem to think, I did notice them and they're generally very simple fixes (there were a few typos as well). Please read the minus bullet points if you want to know more about the things that should be changed, and the neutral points are minor things that I thought didn't really fall into plus or minus stuff. For the good things, I liked how the player was updated on the progress of his rivals and such. It's something I don't really see at all in other hacks, and I think it leads to some good character development. The player character talking was also a nice touch for this hack specifically. It really does sort out the feelings of the player's character and the type of relationships he has with the people he meets.
TL;DR: Great gameplay is brought down by a few poorly implemented features and heavily recycled maps (which aren't that great tbh). Final Score: 3.25.
General Appeal:
I think that this hacks is very hit or miss on the more advanced hacking community because it does have a lot of pet peeves in there which most of us don't like. For example, short text on non-major characters (1 line interactions), a few spelling/grammar/typos, graphics are very inconsistent. But to really appreciate that this hack is trying to do and what it is, I think it's really important for the player to numb off these elitist feelings and just play the game for what it is. It would be a real shame if you let yourself lose sight of the things which this hack does well because you can't look past the negatives. It's an experience which is better felt first hand than explained. That's what I ended up doing. At the start I couldn't stand the laziness of the signs. Literally 1 line obvious signs; things like: "Pokemon do damage", "Poison hurts", "Routes have wild grass". After a while, I realized that if you looked at this hack with a more comical viewpoint, the minor character scripts and the signs are comedically clever and well written. They're all 1 line, but they're all funny, with the random feels comment. Also some might find it lazy or a stupid work around, but dammit, I've come to like Martha a lot. That stupid old man has some sort of charm to him and he really opened my eyes to the amusing side of this hack. Long live Martha.
TL;DR: Stop being an elitist and getting bothered by the many negatives and you can have fun playing this hack. Final Score: 3.50 + 0.01 (Martha bonus pts).
Final Score: 13.01
Plus Points:
- Music! I don't know if this is considered good music since I don't music hack. It does sound pleasant enough for my tastes though, so I will consider this a plus.
- Lots of mini games and mini features here and there. As an ASM hacker, I'm able to appreciate a lot of the invisible stuff!
- Consistent Graphics style which complements the hack very well
- Custom sprites, overworlds (for important characters)
- Customized battle graphics and battle modes. Cool-ish Battle Marsh
I could do better, pfft.
- Excellent mapping! Really liked the maps. The scripts are OK too, but the maps were the superstar I felt like.
- Great ASM features. Gaia's ASM hacker is really dangerous. That guy is good.
- Character dialog is often without grammatical or spelling mistakes!
- SphericalIce put in tonnes of effort. It's very noticeable, things like the Pokedex expansion was done by hand and graphical reworks of various menus too! (OK, they're mostly recolors, but that's something!)
Neutral Points:
- One sentence trainers get a little annoying after a while. Literally, "Lets battle!", "Ha I saw you!", .... ect.
- The sheer amount of trainers you have to battle is kinda a lot for my tastes. I'd like to be able to avoid them at times
Minus Points:
- I keep getting lost. I find myself not knowing which way/where to go and often have to backtrack and re-explore every area. It's almost never immediately obvious what you needed to do. With the absence of a mission log, pathfinder or something similar it's very important to read all dialog carefully. Even if you do that, in the case you've missed something, there is no second chance to go back and review the missed material. Normally the NPC would say something like, "I'm counting on you /v/h01!" ect.
- Hero is interfering with evil team's agenda for no good reason other than, "Hey guise lets save the Regis".
- As you can see, I'm very salty about getting after every few events. It was common place for me :<
Scoring
Graphics:
SphericalIce has worked some magic here. Lots of customized graphical elements in this hack. Things like menus, sprites, overworlds, custom graphics (mail, fossils, tiles and such) have been revisited and redone. Out of all the hacks I've had to play for this year's HOTY competition, in terms of graphics, Gaia is heads and shoulders above everyone else. Not only does it share the consistent styling from Pokemon Eclipse, but it also has many other graphical reworks waiting to be discovered. Unfortunately, there aren't any custom built graphical interactions such as a reworked introduction, the cable car cut scene ect. I'm very much anticipating to see those in the upcoming releases!
TL;DR: Best graphics out of the three. Still room for new additions. Final Score: 4.25.
Story:
This is a little tough. I didn't play past the required 4 Gyms needed in this contest in order to keep fair to hacks like Eclipse which only has 4 Gyms. From what I gathered playing through Gaia, it felt like a solve-that-mystery story in which the young player goes around the region discovering bits and clues about the whereabouts of the Regis. At almost every turn, the player is met with this evil team which is also after our beloved tank trio. The spice of the story is supposed to be this interaction with the player, the evil team, and the Regi researchers who've sent the player on his journey. However, I find the evil team to be rather forcefully injected. As the player, I also didn't find a lot of incentive to be interfering with the evil team, other than for the sake of doing what the prof asked me to do. I just didn't feel very absorbed into the story, and I felt as though the player was lacking any meaningful resolve. I can only hope that it picks up during the latter half of the game, but from the first four badges which I've played, I wasn't quite satisfied by the story.
TL;DR: Evil team is slightly misplaced. Their intentions and the player's resolve is unclear. Final Score: 2.
Gameplay:
First of all, I'd like to open mentioning that I got lost a lot. I got lost a lot and that bothers me. I don't consider myself to be stupid, or bad at these kinds of games. I admittedly did skim through a lot of text, because it was really just a large amount of monologueing and pondering with the important information concealed somewhere inside. Besides getting lost at every turn, I also found the evil team's purpose and the player's interaction with them to be rather forced. The incentive just doesn't feel like it's there to me. Other than these two points, I really enjoyed playing through Gaia. There are lots of things to do, from the battle marsh, bug capturing competition to just exploring ingeneral. I find that a lot of the top class mapper's maps are very fun to navigate through, and definitely don't feel linear while playing. There's a lot of secret items and paths to discover, and it makes it really worthwhile to spend a little time walking around. The battle graphics and engine (to some extent) was well updated and felt as though I was playing a newer game. SphericalIce also does well to keep his game updated to the latest works by the RnD community. From little things like permanent TMs, to cooler things like IV scores, and common things like the BW exp and repel features, he's got it all!
TL;DR: Hard to play game when lost a lot. When not lost, game is fun, as expected. Sort of my fault for getting lost. Final Score: 3.5.
General Appeal:
At the end of the day, without any doubt, if I were to replicate all of these hacks from a clean ROM, remaking Gaia would be the hardest. SphericalIce has put in truck loads of work into this hack. There are many behind the scenes works which most people would go without noticing, and plenty of flashy elements too. Of course, with that amount of work put into it, the hack really lives up to its expectations. That said, did I have fun playing Gaia? If someone asked me to play past these 4 required Gyms, I think I'd be a little hesitant. I really think that the game's story and gameplay direction has some room for improvement. While the ROM is very high-end, I know SphericalIce could definitely improve and do far better.
TL;DR: FBI doesn't like getting lost. Game was enjoyable and has a lot to appreciate. Final Score: 3.5.
Final Score: 13.25
Plus Points:
- Music! I don't know if this is considered good music since I don't music hack. It does sound pleasant enough for my tastes though, so I will consider this a plus.
- I like fuzzy grass. Sure it's just a few byte changes, but it's so fuzzy and cool :3
- Christos highlights important texts and objectives with separate coloring in his scripts. This allows you to pay attention to the parts which matter while skipping through the decorative dialog which encapsulates the information.
- Use of an Overworld to give hints of hidden items in tree trunks ect. I find this pretty cool
- I like the mapping. The maps are pleasant to explore around and the world seems energetic.
- The Graphics style is very consistent. Christos has made/used a few custom tiles which aren't in the default ROM to enhance the graphical appeal of his maps
- Character dialog is often without grammatical or spelling mistakes!
- Characters have modified and/or customized sprites. It's the little things which add up.
Neutral Points:
- Intro is 1:1 With default FireRed. The titlescreen image has been updated though
- Is Coral town's gym leader a ghost? Cause her sprite is pixelated
- Small inconsistency with text colors. EX: The guy in the library with Kirlia doesn't use colored text, but points the player to the next location.
Minus Points:
- Titlescreen encorporates BG3, which is flashed and replaced by BG2. Results in a quick 1-10 frame flash of BG3. I doubt that's intentional
- That wild Pokemon tree in the forest is indistinguishable
- Guy being attacked by a Wingull. Guy orders around Poochyena that doesn't exist in the overworld. Guy leaves me puzzled.
- HMs like Rockclimb aren't implemented properly. Only on a script level, so they don't appear from the menu.
Scoring
Graphics:
The game itself, while in the overworld (which makes up a majority of the game) is very aesthetically pleasing. However, a lot of the game's graphics remain unchanged and untapped such as battle graphics (outside of the sprites) and the introduction. There is also very minimal graphical hacks implemented in general. That being said, at no point did I find that to be a hindrance. The general feel of the game is very consistent and it keeps true to its own graphics style while having custom aspects such as overworlds, sprites and some tiles. I do encourage the creator do add more graphical elements in order to receive a boosted score in the next HOTY :)
TL;DR: Very consistent. Final Score: 3
Story:
Eclipse is really cool, in the sense that the story is driven through in a unique way. There doesn't exist the typical "evil team" you'd see in a majority of hacks. Instead, Eclipse utilizes to a great extent the player's Pokemon journey to inject various plot elements. As a result, you're able to explore the beautiful world of Eclipse, while at the same time experiencing a story which makes itself clearer and clearer. There is no sense of forced story injection, it all feels rather natural, and I was impressed at how the story went without needing an evil team appearance early to accelerate things. Sometimes keeping things simple is actually the formula to success.
TL;DR: A unique and successful approach to storytelling. Final Score: 3.5
Gameplay:
Out of the three hacks I've been asked to play, I had the most fun playing Pokemon Eclipse. The level curves were fair for the team which I ran, while throwing out challenges which required some level of strategy to overcome (Drapion, I'm looking at you!). I appreciate the occasional challenge, and was very glad that it was left as an uncommon experience - that really made it special. The mapping and scripting in this game is very high-end as well. The maps were fun to navigate in, never felt inconsistent or frustrating, and there were a lot of treats in every map. I think the scripts were brief and well done. They weren't super fancy, and they didn't need to be. What really stood out to me was the text highlighting. I was finally allowed to skim through text without being heavily reprimanded for not reading carefully! I also have to commend Christos for the little things he's put in here and there such as the pathfinder, fuzzy grass and the "sparkle" effect on certain hidden items. Most of the other features are widespread amongst hacks, such as the MrDS patch, BW exp/repels ect. The one thing which I didn't quite enjoy was a few of the half-assed features (Pokenav, Rockclimb). I realize this game is far from completion, and I expect Christos will polish these up!
TL;DR: It was fun. A lot of features were common place in hacks and some were unique. Final Score: 4
General Appeal:
This is kind of weird. I've given Eclipse somewhat high scores in most categories, but I'm still left with the impression that this game is still very much and incomplete project. We weren't presented with an opportunity in the available beta to experience the entirety or majority of the story in place for us, nor has Christos fully modified a lot of the default elements which he probably should. I'm left feeling like I needed more to really put the nail on the coffin. That said, I realise now that I really had fun playing this game, and just wished I could play more. In the end, that's the most important aspect for me.
TL;DR: Incomplete hack is incomplete. Incomplete hack was fun. Fun is good. Final Score: 4
Final Score: 14.5
Guys these scores are out of 5, not 10. The final score is out of 20, not 40. I did this because I wanted to look like a tough judge and give out low numbers. Also, 10 and 40 is too mainstream. As for why I rated Eclipse so high, it was because I was bribed. I feel like I've failed everyone who counted on me to be a fair judge, but the bribe tactics were very powerful.