FireRed hack: [COMPLETED] Thirst Trap, V2.0!

[Unfolding]

Sorry to disappoint, but it's not that kind of thirst! (And not that kind of trap, either...)​

Hi, I'm Unfolding, and this is my second little romhaiku, which is a word I've made up to describe a really short but hopefully really polished hack exploring a single idea. This here is a silly, completely SFW romhack about not wanting to pay for overpriced water in a terrible tourist trap! I made it for MAGM 7, for the theme of Tourist Trap, and it did tie for first with Haven's Escher Forest (an actual masterpiece), so go play that and then come back and play this one, lol.

Features!​

• A borderline dystopian capitalist world punctuated by some really silly jokes
• My usual obsession with making my hacks as original as possible
• Yet another absurd but self-consistent premise
• A ton of paintings and sculpture that will make you feel something and then interrogate you about it
• A mystery that's equal parts fascinating and stupid
• A creeping sense of dread about not having enough money to make it in this town
• A bonus boss who is an actual cheater
• And not only the regular puzzles involving obscure game mechanics, but also one actually amazing puzzle by one of my puzzle heroes!

It's a very short experience - if you're a speedrunner, it's beatable in less than 30 seconds, just like Accept Defeat. If you want to maintain your dignity / explore what this world has to offer, it should be about two hours!


Screenshots!




Credits!​

Lu-Ho, for AdvanceMap
Haven, for HexManiacAdvance and the FastNewGame script <--- This is the guy who made Escher Forest, the hack that this tied with!
Pret, for flags.h and misc decomp references
Anthroyd, for his Gen III Romhacking tutorial series
Shiny, for their Hex Maniac Advance tutorial series
Sierraffinity, for their MEGA-HUGE XSE Scripting tutorial
Gamefreak and Nintendo, for graphics and everything Pokemon
The one and only Andrea Gilbert, for her design of a No-Right-Turn maze
and Shiny, Phoenixbound, Yogia16, Archie, Asith, Jordank, Anthroyd, AGSMG, and Haven again, for answering my many dumb questions!

and I always like highlighting some other amazing fanworks in my credits, so:
Jdaster64, for TTYD Infinite Pit (and now the Tower of Trials holy crap go play it)
CraftyBoss, for SMO Multiplayer
Bradley Lovell, for the Looker

Patch and Notes!​

Patch onto clean FireRed. It's hard but not impossible to throw away money to the point where the game becomes unwinnable, so don't do that, hahaha. There shouldn't be much level grinding or anything that's really tedious, but the bonus boss is pretty tough even with a great team. Feel free to play with save states!

Patch V2.0

 

[Z-nogyroP]

Just finished playing through this now! As always, I enjoyed it a ton. I very well might have missed some things, but I thiiink I got most of it? Gonna put my more in-depth thoughts behind spoilers:

Spoiler: thoughts

I didn't mind the grinding at all, since it was basically just one level each in order to get your guys evolved. I beat the bonus boss with a team of Dodrio / Jumpluff / Exeggutor / Shadow (Ninetales) / Shadow (Banette) / Magneton. Confuse Ray / Curse / Leech Seed were vital to getting the win, as well as Drought to turn off Drizzle. I never fought him on the easy track (even though I could've afforded to) because what do I look like, some kind of casual?

I laughed out loud at the goddamn Dugtrio named Pelipper. The saddest part about that for me is the first time I saw it the AI actually switched it in mid-turn, so I didn't get the "Trainer is about to send out PELIPPER!" prompt, but it was still absolutely hilarious. I definitely feel like Ninetales is mandatory to win here, but everything else is pretty open-ended as long as you have one of the several Grasses. Venusaur would probably have done even better for me since it'd be immune to Toxic. The softlock lady was also really funny, and the riddle was clever.

The art gallery was very fun. I have no idea if any of the responses actually have an impact on anything, but the Smeargle was cute. I think I might be missing something with the no-right-turns maze, though - I assume "no right turns" means right relative to the direction you're facing, but I don't know if you're allowed to turn around and face backwards? If you are, it's kind of trivial, and if you're not I haven't figured out how to escape this square:

Honestly, I never felt like I was too strapped for cash - I'm one of those weirdos who knew in advance that Charcoal sells for almost as much as a Nugget, so I played the slots until I could afford one and that was even before I found the one in the rink and the Amulet Coin. I think I ended with around $20000ish, and that's without actually selling the second Charcoal. The puzzle element felt a little light, but I didn't mind too much, I had a lot of fun anyway.

Things that feel like they could lead to something but if they do I haven't figured out what:
- The creepy fridge
- The other floors of the Wales building
- The hide and seek girl

 

[Unfolding]

Spoiler: thoughts

I didn't mind the grinding at all, since it was basically just one level each in order to get your guys evolved. I beat the bonus boss with a team of Dodrio / Jumpluff / Exeggutor / Shadow (Ninetales) / Shadow (Banette) / Magneton. Confuse Ray / Curse / Leech Seed were vital to getting the win, as well as Drought to turn off Drizzle. I never fought him on the easy track (even though I could've afforded to) because what do I look like, some kind of casual?

I laughed out loud at the goddamn Dugtrio named Pelipper. The saddest part about that for me is the first time I saw it the AI actually switched it in mid-turn, so I didn't get the "Trainer is about to send out PELIPPER!" prompt, but it was still absolutely hilarious. I definitely feel like Ninetales is mandatory to win here, but everything else is pretty open-ended as long as you have one of the several Grasses. Venusaur would probably have done even better for me since it'd be immune to Toxic. The softlock lady was also really funny, and the riddle was clever.

The art gallery was very fun. I have no idea if any of the responses actually have an impact on anything, but the Smeargle was cute. I think I might be missing something with the no-right-turns maze, though - I assume "no right turns" means right relative to the direction you're facing, but I don't know if you're allowed to turn around and face backwards? If you are, it's kind of trivial, and if you're not I haven't figured out how to escape this square:

Honestly, I never felt like I was too strapped for cash - I'm one of those weirdos who knew in advance that Charcoal sells for almost as much as a Nugget, so I played the slots until I could afford one and that was even before I found the one in the rink and the Amulet Coin. I think I ended with around $20000ish, and that's without actually selling the second Charcoal. The puzzle element felt a little light, but I didn't mind too much, I had a lot of fun anyway.

Things that feel like they could lead to something but if they do I haven't figured out what:
- The creepy fridge
- The other floors of the Wales building
- The hide and seek girl

Thanks for playing! And wow, thanks for the detailed review!

I know you've played some of my other hacks (maybe all of them at this point???), but this one is definitely less puzzly than the others. So there's a lot of things that are there for flavor and fun, and aren't there to be a puzzle component. There's a wide margin of error for the money, mostly because I figured feeling like you can't buy anything is stressful in an unfun way. The puzzle is more about the shadow pokemon, moves, and items than anything else, hahaha - the art responses don't affect anything, but the one just before the credits sends me an email. Kidding, it's also flavor, lol.

Spoiler:

Glad the grinding wasn't too bad! If you want to see more jokes, I recommend trying the "easy path" - it's a shitty pay to win tourist trap, so it's like stupidly easy to the point of being a joke! You can do it before or after the other path.

I put the Dugtrio in specifically to Arena Trap and KO your Electric types after that exact Shift "Trainer is about to send out Pelipper"; too bad it didn't work like that exactly, but I'm glad you understood what I was going for!

The fridge, Wales building, and the hide and seek girl were just what they seemed. The hide and seek girl in particular was one of my favorite jokes (that pretty much only makes me laugh, but it's so funny to me that I had to keep it in).

And I can't draw a picture right now, but for the maze, if you start and take the second left instead of the first, you can get to the left edge, and then three immediate lefts will send you up to the upper left part of the maze.