Let's Play Pokemon Dark Rising! Bonus Chapter 1

[Rainbow Chara X]

Who's who by color:

Red: Rainbow Chara X
Purple: Her Imperious Condescension (AntipathicZora)
Blue: The Composer

This was such an undertaking that I had to call in help from the crew - that's right, a co-op chapter. Say hello to Her Imperious Condescension and The Composer.

Good evening, friends. I'd like to present a very special episode of Let's Play Pokemon Dark Rising. In this episode, we're going to be tackling the serious issues of glitch addiction, bad spriting and how to tell a rom hacker when enough is enough.

Remember kids, always shade your sprites.

[FONT=verdana, geneva, lucida, lucida grande, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Bonus Chapter 1 - A Breakdown (Bugs, Glitches and Sprites)[/FONT][FONT=verdana, geneva, lucida, lucida grande, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]
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Spoiler:

Okay so I've already picked apart Ch. 1 from the inconsequential things DRG can't be blamed for to the actual meat of the incompetent shittery.

Oh boy this is gonna be good. The best part is that even the Tvtropes page listed DR1 as buggy, so you know things are bound to be awful.

Okay here we go, right from my notebook.

The 1M Circuitboard (Intro, Ch. 1): Inconsequential to actual gameplay and certainly not the fault of DRG so much as how emulation just kind of is, this is a message that you get when the emulator you're using doesn't utilize the correct save file type to battery save FireRed/LeafGreen. Most emulators have the option to change this.

I wasn't planning on doing post-game stuff that required saving to begin with.

Unlike Dan I actually like what Monica is wearing. I think the short overall-dress is kind of cute. If the sprite looks a little flat, it's because the difference between the base colors and the shading is really small. But… it's still got shading so there's that, unlike what comes up. She looks like she's cosplaying as Mario. Well like… Mario in a short dress. Good. It's funny because the Monica I have in mind looks nothing like this, but people will think of her like this because of the Let's Play.

The pure black hair… I'm not sure if having a lighter brown outline left over is a good decision for the pure black or worse, but having pure black hair is never a good decision.

The rival looks ok I guess. A couple of wonky points but it's one of the better recolors.

The House Rooftop: (Fells Town, Ch. 1): Incorrect tiling. The top two tiles of the roof in question should be flagged as movement permission '1', which is the basic 'no entry' flag. Instead, they're marked as movement permission 'c', which is the default 'all clear' flag. Oops.

The Mysterious Upside Down Door (Mainland Cave, Ch. 1): This had been bugging me from the minute Chapter 1 went up, because by all rights, how the hell do you make a door upside down without altering the entire tileset? As it turns out, she didn't.

It's one half of a cave door in the default tileset. I was very disappointed. We all were. In order to make it look right, you'd have to increase the height of the wall, and probably all surrounding walls, to two tiles high. It was probably one of those "woops" things after the map was nearly finished and figured it wasn't worth the time to go back and fix.

This recolor looks better zoomed out than it does zoomed in. It's interesting because usually the shading gets preserved when scratching isn't needed, but not in this case with the orange colors. Then there's the boots, where what should be a shade color is actually dark blue… like the boots are supposed to be two colors? It gets weird.

Fells Lab Door Freeze (Fells Town, Ch 1): This is two levels of fuck. On the outside, the incorrect movement permission is used on the door. Instead of being movement permission '1', DRG uses movement permission '0', which effectively makes the door ghost stairs. This is inconsequential, but the real magic happens inside. Ghost Stairs sounds like a good song name.

(Game freeze)

What we see here are scripted events. 'W' is a warp; the door, basically. 'P' are interactable objects. In this case, the scientists in the lab. 'S' is a scripted event, such as automatically walking forward. The trouble here is that DRG seems to think it was a brilliant idea to layer scripted events on top of warps, thus resulting in an inescapable pit of despair on either side of the door because the game doesn't know what to do with that.

I'm seeing a pattern with these already. It's interesting to note that the same thing happens later on with a… far more horrifying effect, but that's about 14 chapters into the future.

I kind of see what she was trying to do? I think she was trying to make the player walk forward no matter which way they step out of the doorway. But she stacked them on top of unnecessary warps, causing a game-breaking bug.

Honestly, we shouldn't be surprised that the game was going to be bad if this happened so early on.

-

No shading on the hair or clothes. This will be commonplace for all edited sprites.

Look at this edgelord. It's just a recolor of Lance but it's just so perfect. That black leather jacket is just perfect. Well, except for the dots that are present throughout the whole sprite. That's usually a sign that the original sprite had more than 16 colors, and in order to get it down the computer did some weird dithering. It's the perfect first impression of Not-Lance, too, given what we learn about him later on.

This Tornadus sprite comes from a different source than the Landorus in later chapters… It's got an all-black outline problem and the outline on the tail-thing is a bit choppy. Also the creator of that Landorus didn't make a Tornadus until after the game was released, so… more uncredited spriters probably.

I don't like how this was a thing throughout the entire rom hack.

(Insert noise of Dan furiously jamming on the A button)

Nonverbal NPCs (Various): Nonexistent scripting. None. Not at all. In most cases, this just makes it so they can't be interacted with at all. When the person is flagged as a trainer, on the other hand… well we'll see the effects of that later.

Any guess as to what the hell's going on here?

My best explanation for that is something that's happened to me. If you're not careful with where you save things on the ROM, other things can get scrambled. That's why free space finders are really important.

For example, in the dummy ROM I'm currently practicing on, I'm not being careful where I save things because I want to get the map files I'm making saved for when I actually, seriously make a romhack. It's had the interesting effect of making it so battles don't actually… function.

In a prior dummy ROM, I had gotten as far as implementing custom sprites, but when I got to overworlds, it flattened the map data when I saved it, so the maps could no longer be edited. So, in conclusion, my best guess is something to that effect. She wasn't careful saving something, so Pikachu's head bit it.

Poor guy. But yeah, she's not kidding - when I put in the Sigurd and Fafnir sprites, I think I saved over some important stuff because now the game doesn't start properly. There's a blank white screen that prevents me from proceeding to the title. Thankfully, this didn't hinder doing the let's play at all thanks to the savestates I already had… but damn. Yeah, free space finders are important.

They don't look half bad in green, though now you gotta explain what the R is for if it's not Team Rocket. DaRugis? OF COURSE. Of course. Genius.

Misplaced Exclamation Point (Tiki Village, Ch. 2): Scripting error. The script that makes the exclamation point go is placed one tile ahead of the script that makes Noah come your way.

This sort of reminds me how if you're not careful in RPG Maker, you can wind up making events play out in the complete wrong order. I think it would have been more effective if they forced you to take a step or two and lead into the event that actually summons Noah, but I think that was too complicated for DRG and her crew.

This is, shockingly, one of the only bugs in Ch. 2. … Hurray?

-

The Munna Glitch (Tiki Village, Ch. 3): Oh god this one. A spectacular case of bumbling incompetence. When you create a new script of this kind, you have to be careful to save it only within a certain range in the data. Otherwise, you can cause terrible effects within your romhack, ranging from inconsequential, to things like bad eggs overwriting the player's Pokemon, or even complete data erasure. Jesus. Believe it or not, I was terrified of doing this let's play under the presumption that my Pokemon would get eaten up by Bad Egg here. Thankfully it wasn't true.

In addition, this event is scripted incorrectly. There's no check within the script that checks to make sure you've already completed this event, thus meaning that you can repeat it indefinitely and end up with a fucking army of Munnas. This kind of scripting error happens a lot. Next time I expect Dan to defeat the game with said army of Munnas.

Sure, they don't create Bad Eggs, but it's amazing how often she copy-pasted the same awful script. Not even necessarily copypasted. This script is very different from the ones that come up in the later parts of the game, but I feel like she skimmed whatever scripting tutorial she read and missed the lines of code that make things only happen once.

Did you notice how she actually tried legitimate scripting (and failing a bit) at first, but devolved into copy-pasting over vanilla scripts? Sure do. I was interested at first, but the more obvious it became, it sort of became part of the whole "wow I really have nothing to commentate on" problem since it was just Kanto with a paint job.

(Game freeze)

The Male Protagonist In The Bushes (Tiki Village, Ch. 3): I… I honestly have no idea what causes this. It's not there in script view in A-Map. This is some creepypasta shit. It may or may not be another case of careless saving leading to data scrambling, along the lines of the Pikachu in the intro. I'm still amazed that this even exists. The only thing it's missing is a blood red screen and a death wail to complete the experience. Oh wait. Ah ah ah. No spoilers. That's all of chapter 3. Except for sprite talk.

The presents are cute, even if they're perfectly square and have all black outlines. I thought they were a neat change. Little touches like that go a long way.

I like this overworld sprite. It's got good colors, easily readable, just enough detail to not be flat and boring. Even if it is just Maxie. If I didn't immediately recognize it as Maxie's sprite then good enough. Not a whole lot you can do in just a few pixels.

And then he turns out to be a hot pink Cyrus. Always wear a high visibility jacket kids. This guy's got the right idea.

-

This might be the last time I complain about lack of shading on hair and clothes. It's just practically all of them.

Also this Flannery is changed, the original has orange hair and blue pants. That's a really small difference.

I am ok with edgy Heatmor recolor. Was there ever a reason it's black and red? Can you call it a recolor if it's the actual shiny sprite? Yeah that's the legit shiny.Wait really? Oh well there you go. I guess it's to match Hot Topic Flannery. (I don't pay attention to Heatmor it's not an interesting Pokemon to me.)

Exclamation Man (Waterfall Cavern, Ch.4): A script that never went anywhere, I guess. This was pretty far into the chapter, too, so... To my understanding he's scripted to make an exclamation point and nothing else. That's silly. Surprisingly enough, this was the only bug in Chapter 4.

I just went to take a look at what his script looks like. It is as follows:

#org 0x81FE5D
lock
faceplayer
sound 0x15
applymovement 0xE 0x881FE7C
waitmovement 0x0
pause 0x3
applymovement 0xE 0x881FE7F
waitmovement 0x0
release
end


'-----------
' Movements
'-----------
#org 0x81FE7C
#raw 0x62 'Exclamation Mark (!)
#raw 0xFE 'End of Movements

#org 0x81FE7F
#raw 0x2 'Face Left
#raw 0xFE 'End of Movements

He is only scripted to make a ! at the player. That's it. No dialogue. Just !.

Spotted Tynamo (Waterfall Cavern, Ch.4): Not really a bug but I should count it anyway. They replace Spinda in the Pokedex, so they get the dots too. This was explained as "these Tynamo are infected" even though it goes away when they evolve. So why is this Tynamo spotted but not the previous one? Just luck with how the spots lined up? I think so. Vera wasn't spotted either.

This actually gives some interesting insight into how these spots are programmed. Has nothing to do with Dark Rising, but looks like the spots are overlayed on the sprite, have a 1 pixel buffer around transparent pixels to account for the outline, and ignore black pixels. Actually pretty fascinating. Wow.

-

Chapter 5 has no glitches. I'm impressed.

Yellow pant. Falkner re-typed to be an Electric gym leader is weird.

I have no idea what was used as a base for his overworld sprite. It looks like a sarcophagus with a giant head tbh. He has no walking sprites, so your claim might not be unfounded.

Same critique as always. At least he's like… better named than Fiery? Who calls their kid that?

-

Incorrect Reflections (Atlantic City, Ch.6): NPCs that face the water have a weird fucked up reflection palette. You can sort of see it with the officer. This can be explained away as more data scrambling, of a different kind. If you aren't careful when saving color palettes to the ROM image, they can and will affect other things in the game. When I was working on overworlds and sprites, this happened to me.

Okay, this one was sort of caused by me, but I'm still counting it:

[Sigurd collapses to the ground and gasps for breath. Monica runs over to him]

(His normal health was around 80+)

Wow Dan (Atlantic Path, Ch. 6): … I had learned that if you hack the stats of an existing Pokemon and they level up, the stats will change to reflect that. Thankfully this was fixed when he got another level up with the proper stats, but it still scared the shit out of me. I don't even remember why you had to do that tbh. It was to make grinding with the "Riolu Sigurd" cheat code easier, because remember those little fuckers are worth 255 Base EXP. Right.

At least this sprite's more than just a recolor. I can get behind labcoat Brock for that. I'm impressed Brock is even in the game at all.

I don't like this kid but at least his sprite's not bad. He looks like a vampire with how pale he is. I think Monica is paler. Look closer. There's actually has some gray on his face. He's got some weird MS-DOS palette limitations going on with his skin.

Oh yeah you're right. Looks like the light tone on his skin got replaced with the color on his collar to keep the color count below 16. That's silly. That's what happens when you let a computer replace your color palette. It never looks good.

That's all for Chapter 6.

-

I've always liked Tabitha's sprite. He looks like a normal grunt except completely unhinged. Kind of silly to use an admin's sprite as a grunt here, but at the same time it gives it some difference than the main games. You should see G-Boss's sprite.

Skipping An Entire Goddamn Cutscene (Atlantic Cave, Ch. 7): If you step in front of this Dark Thug, you can make the Goon move forward and create a big enough gap that you can skip this entire cutscene.

I'm not going to pretend to be a be all end all expert in scripting in particular, I just know the basics, but really the basics are all you need to know that this is poorly coded. But what looks to be the issue is that if the Goon walks forward, as he does when you exploit this, you're allowed to walk around the script tiles that would trigger the above cutscene. I have no idea why standing in that specific spot makes the goon move forward because there doesn't appear to be anything in the script for it.

She didn't expect it to happen. But at the same time, if she were competent, she should have play tested through this.

-

You ok there Tangrowth? Looks like you didn't survive your resize very well… Yuck.

Infinite Victinis (Aroma Town, Ch. 8): Yet another case of, I think DRG skimmed her scripting tutorial and didn't learn how to make an event only go once. This is why I'm fairly sure the scripts aren't copypasted until much later on, because it's a much different event. Mind you, this comes with a free Sacred Ash each time, so not only are you getting a free legendary with each repeat, you get a free party-wide revival item. That's a wee bit disgusting.

Hideous Border Tiles (A lot of places): DRG has no idea how border tiles work, plain and simple. It's not even hard. You take the solid fill tile, you put it in the border tile square. That's it.

So, I was going to praise this sprite, because the white hair floof thing reminds me of one of my characters, but…

It's transparent. Which would explain why the overworld sprite has solid blue hair. Oh my god. That's hilarious. In fact, this could explain why we never fight him more than once with different backgrounds.

His hair is now a proper shade of black and it makes him look like a young Professor Oak. They couldn't have made a new professor sprite? Really? I mean the fact that this one keeps its shading is still better than most of the other recolored characters. Don't get me wrong the recolor looks okay but it's still kind of silly. He's not even named after a tree. Even the side games keep this convention. Why can't you? I'd suggest Professor Ivy as a nickname but that's already a thing.

Yeah. I mean, did you really expect her to pay tribute to Pokemon conventions after all the stuff she's done?

(There's no screenshot for this, but trust me it happens)

Invisible Professor Ivan/Zachary Battle (Battle Cave/Mystic Falls, Ch. 8): More of the same, really. She doesn't know how to make an event only happen once. Only this time, she somehow bollocksed up so hard that she managed to make the sprites disappear, but not the events. I cannot for the life of me figure out how.

-

Sudden Character Appearances (Grass Isle, Ch.9): I think this is because their sprites didn't exist on the map before it. If so, why didn't she move them farther forward? Also, these chucklefucks are responsible for one of the most game breaking glitches in the game because there's a part later on where you are required to beat the gym here to learn Fly. This is the first part of it, seeing as they disappear regardless if you beat the gym or not.

This is entirely correct. She could have easily placed them further back on the route if she wanted them to look like they were always there. Instead, we get teleporting roadblocks.

100% Flinch Rate (V Battle #2 I think, Ch.9): She made it so Zen Headbutt will always make the opponent flinch no matter what. That is fucking busted.

That's a simple matter of entering the wrong value in the attack editor she used.

THE SHIP OF THE DOOOMED, OOOOO (Mystic Falls, Ch.9): Apparently being bound with a magic spell horribly fucks with your palette. I couldn't tell you whose palette this was originally, but whoever it was shared a palette with the SS Anne, and when that was overwritten, it affected this too. It actually very strongly resembles Thundurus' palette in a way, but it lacks the dark purple/blue bits.

Seeing from offscreen (Mystic Falls, Ch.9) - How does this work, Zor? It happened in Snakewood too. I'm not quite sure what you mean- OH. You mean line of sight. I'm dumb. When you assign an NPC to be a trainer, you manually set the number of tiles they can see you from. Sometimes people set this too far and so trainers can see you from offscreen.

-

Purple May is purple.

"Due to being Lavender Town, the white hand girl is here. Everybody talks about spirits, but the people inside the houses seem to be convinced that Monica has already helped them out... despite the fact we just got here."

Already Finished NPCs (Salem, Ch.10) - Despite whether or not you completed the events up ahead, the NPCs still act like you completed the quest. A sheer lack of care is evident.

Bad Map For Mist (Voltair Forest, Ch.10): Exactly as it says.

Whaaaaaaaa this sprite. This is quite a bit more than a recolor and it doesn't look half bad. I mean it has problems but the shape of the body is actually pretty well defined (well, from the mid up) and shading looks good. It's got pure black but it mostly looks ok, except for the hand.

Unfortunately it loses definition in the hand where it just becomes a mess of black and purple, which is a shame because it looks like it has some crazy claw thing going on there. If the hand were posed up away from the rest of the body, this would be a pretty cool sprite.

It's interesting because this was a brand new thing she used just for the game. Like okay, Darugis is able to create brand new Pokemon and this is sort of what they look like. … Except not really for the Let's Play version, thanks to the stuff we'll be doing in the future. (For those of you reading, this is a mega spoiler, so we're not telling)

Trying to find who made the Conarp, but I can't figure it out. It's listed under their credit list. Oh ok so at least that's credited. I find it strange that she will do it for Conarp and overworld sprites, yet not do it for regular Pokemon sprites.

(By the way, if you step towards the kids here, Light's sprite will suddenly reappear but can't be interacted with. I can't even begin to comprehend what kind of script fuckery is going on there.)

Light's Sudden Reappearance (Voltair Forest, Ch.10): I… Zor? What the hell is this? More scripting errors. She at least managed to put in a check so you don't have to battle Light again… but forgot yet again to make it so that the sprites don't reappear, making it once again a case of Nonverbal NPCs. It's amazing that she managed to make so many variants of Nonverbal NPCs.

This Isn't a Graveyard (Rosary Graveyard, Ch.10): Guys, do you think the tilesets from the tower would have worked here? At least for the gravestones so this could be an actual graveyard? Frankly, the default tilesets have ground bits on them that would make it look incredibly wonky. The gravestones are meant for Pokemon Tower.

However, she's inserted custom tilesets before, so a custom graveyard one should have been no issue. (I'm still mad about this, btw) Should be pretty simple to just cut out the tombstone and paste it onto a grass tile.

At least the recolors are getting better. For some reason, they remind me of Purple May. Because they're all using the same color scheme?

-

Really Bad Tiling (Amaris's Mansion, Ch.11): What even is that tile that she's spamming over and over here? I'm looking for it in A-Map, hang on. Whatever it is, it's not in a vanilla ROM I don't think. Wait, yes it is. In A-map, it looks like this:

It's the default 'background' tile that comes with the tileset that Pokemon Mansion uses. You know, as opposed to just using the black like a normal person. I knew it.

Infinite Big Pearls and Lucky Eggs (Kyurem's Den / Iceland City, Ch.11): You could make a drinking game set to all the times when something like this is caused by DRG not knowing how to only make a script happen once. Don't play unless you hate your liver. But seriously though, this was one of the first major bugs that prompted us to make this bonus chapter to begin with. It's sort of a good thing money is useless otherwise this would be even more game-breaking.

-

Talking Treasure Boxes (Underground City / Battle Dome, Ch.12 / 15): … I don't understand the reasoning behind this no matter which way I look at it. When you set an NPC, you also must manually choose the overworld sprite they're going to have. In this case, she set the sprites here to the treasure box. She was possibly intending to change them from people into items, but never did. So… the Itemizer effect from the Mystery Dungeon games? Basically.

uuuuuuUUUUUUUUHHHHHHH… I think that's a poorly-timed screenshot. It's a steam puff. Oooh ok that was seriously bothering me this entire time. I was focusing on the treasure box, sue me. It doesn't help that the steam is the same color as the ground.

Poorly Tiled Grass that You Can't Avoid (Numassity Path, Ch.12): As the title says. There's also a NPC here that repeats Evil Dark Pete's loss dialogue despite not fighting him yet. Lazy scripting, I guess. The grass tiling isn't even a bug it's just DRG being an ass with the tile editor.

(Game-killing glitch)

Kai's Father is worse than Darugis (Numassity Path, Ch.12): It may not be an outright freeze, but this asshole blocks your path after you beat him. Which means you can't go back to get Serena's badge if you never fought her. Which means you can't use Fly. Which means you're dead-gamed for something important later on. This is just plain idiocy. This roadblock is totally unnecessary in the first place, but the fact that it makes the game unwinnable just puts the cherry on the shit sundae.

Blue Balls the same color as the gym. (Numassity City, Ch.12): ?????? The blue balls appear to just be run of the mill tiles for whatever reason. It's a problem with whatever tileset she used.

Oh my god. So there's two copies of the Numassity City map in the game, right? One looks completely normal, and the other…

...looks like this. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA- When I brought up this map, A-Map spat an error at me. I have no idea what went so terribly wrong but no sir I don't like it. … It's Saffron. It's fucking Saffron, but corrupted to hell and back. We did it guys, we found Glitch City.

52 Pickup - People Edition (Novella Town / Malice Dungeon, Ch.12 / 15): So, effectively what this is, is that DRG couldn't be assed to delete NPCs and trainers from these maps, so she stuffed them in a corner for whatever godforsaken reason. How do you get so inspired to make a game, yet not even go through the effort of doing something simple like this? There are 5 trainers stacked on each other in Novella Town, and 4 in Malice Dungeon.

-

Stolen Sprites (Light Battle #3, Ch.13): Well I mean it's a trace of the B/W sprite, but it's a very good trace.

Unexplainable (Inferno Mountain, Ch.13): Just what. This isn't scripting, this is one hundred percent a text editing bollocks. I can't even believe. What was she even trying to accomplish here? Like it gets ridiculous when you realize just how easy this actually is to do. Hell, I even did it for Bellamine and the Sand Cloak (which is an item from Snakewood, by the way - it was the last item she had in that game and I figured it fit her character, so...)

It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black. Vintage Spinal Tap reference.

We never captured Landorus, stop thinking we did (Inferno Mountain, Ch.13): DRG has no idea what the fuck context sensitive scripting is. Actually pulling it off though is really, really complex. Even Ashgray pulled it off, so I know it's possible.

Not a glitch but I think his overall color scheme is cool… even if his sprite is being consumed by the black void.

OOOOOH GOD, IT'S THEM. [whispers] no. Well… props for trying something more than a recolor. But shading… it's not optional. Wrath's apple hat is what murders me. Heh apple hat.

Text Spacing (Thunder Mountain, Ch.13): Yep. How did this happen, Zor? AdvanceText has a line where if you type past it, this'll happen. DRG typed past the line.

-

(Another one caused by me)

Wow, Dan - Act 2 (Orphanage, Ch.14-1): Fafnir replaces Venusaur in the Pokedex, so this happened. To top it off, she had the moveset of a Venusaur… which is because the moves of an enemy trainer's Pokemon can be anything if you use a trainer editor, hence all of the illegal moves that late-game Pokemon use.

I am still a bit salty about this. I like the Bulbasaur line. :C Womp, womp. Hey, at least they'll get brand new spots in 2. At least there's that. Granted, I'm not sure the game can handle the strain of 10+ new Pokemon/sprites being inserted with Gen 3 Suite. Remember, young padawan. Free space finder.

This locked door leading into Kyurem's Den (Orphanage, Ch.14-1) - Why does this exist. She pretty much just took out the warp.

What is it with this woman's fascination with solid black? Darn I already used my spinal tap reference. Gotta wonder why DRG decided Misty would go the emo route.

Of course DRG gets the best sprite for herself. I disagree but you do you. Honestly, compared to everything else we've seen, this is surprisingly unoffensive. Plus Shauntal is a cutie. I don't understand her collar.

… That's part of the original sprite and even there it's like ??????. Still though, it's like… compared to everything else, the edits don't destroy the original sprite like a lot of the other recolors have. That's what I mean.

Infinite Legendary Glitch (Twilight Zone, Ch.14-1): I'll let Zor explain this. So, the coding for every single one of these legendary encounters looks something like this:

'---------------
#org 0x7E4DA5
special 0x187
compare LASTRESULT 0x2
if 0x1 goto 0x81A7AE0
special 0x188
lock
faceplayer
checksound
cry 0xFB 0x2
waitcry
pause 0x14
playsong 0x2 0x2
setwildbattle 0xFB 0x46 0xCD
setflag 0x807
special 0x138
waitstate
clearflag 0x807
special2 LASTRESULT 0xB4
compare LASTRESULT 0x1
if 0x1 goto 0x8162558
compare LASTRESULT 0x4
if 0x1 goto 0x8162561
compare LASTRESULT 0x5
if 0x1 goto 0x8162561
setflag 0x1017
release
end

'---------------
#org 0x1A7AE0
release
end

'---------------
#org 0x162558
setflag 0x2BC
goto 0x81A922D

'---------------
#org 0x162561
setvar 0x8004 0x96
goto 0x81A9236

'---------------
#org 0x1A922D
fadescreen 0x1
hidesprite LASTTALKED
fadescreen 0x0
release
end

'---------------
#org 0x1A9236
fadescreen 0x1
hidesprite LASTTALKED
fadescreen 0x0
bufferpokemon 0x0 0x8004
msgbox 0x81A63C4 MSG_KEEPOPEN '"The [buffer1] dug underground."
release
end


'---------
' Strings
'---------
#org 0x1A63C4
= The [buffer1] dug underground.

Now what this means, is yet another case of 'DRG doesn't know how to create one-time events'. As for the Audino message, we see that in this:

bufferpokemon 0x0 0x8004
msgbox 0x81A63C4 MSG_KEEPOPEN '"The [buffer1] dug underground."

Where the 'buffer1' Pokemon isn't set to the legendary in question, it's set instead to Audino. This script is copy pasted for each and every legendary in the Twilight Zone with like, three values changed and that's all.

Wow. By the way, something similar happens whenever you catch a new Pokemon. It says Throh instead of the actual name of the Pokemon you caught, nicknamed or otherwise. All of this coding stuff is really neat - it's a shame she never took advantage of learning how to do it.

The Ghost House (Pax Town, Ch.14-1): IS A PHANTOM!

She forgot to change the movement permissions on an entire house. Brilliant.

Help Grandpa (Pax Town Game Corner, Ch.14-1): … No, seriously, why is he there. Well you'll be happy to know that at least this one shows up in A-Map. That said, he doesn't have any scripting or anything so…????

Infinite Lift Keys (Not-Rocket Hideout, Ch.14-1): … What happens if you get multiples of a Key Item? Pretty sure they overwrite each other.

Missingno Appears (Not-Rocket Hideout, Ch.14-1): This is just a part of the sprite as far as I can tell. Nice fuck up.

I don't have anything new to say about recolored Maxie. Lack of shading, broken black outline, the works. To be honest, he looks better than when he did with his pink vest. Wasn't that Cyrus? Yes, but the game doesn't want you to acknowledge that. Heh, but to be fair that hot pink high visibility jacket may have saved him from being hit by a bus. Now he doesn't have that. He could die in a freak accident. You could even say a... Monica-related accident.

-

Look at this putz. At least there's some splicing going on here. New cape and arms and stuff and most of it is actually shaded. The inside of the cape is apparently The Void though.

Demon Slowbro (Pinnocle City, Ch.14-2): … Yes. Yeeeeeup.

Blue Cut Trees (Haunted Forest, Ch.14-2): Is there a reason they're blue here? Palette fuckery, mostly. This happened to me when I was doing overworlds too. It doesn't look too bad, though. It kinda fits here.

Unlike the last fakemon, this sprite doesn't make much sense. Its body shape seems to be random, boxy, coral thing shape, and the light source seems to be in the fuck all direction. It's still cool in theory but execution is a bit lacking. And blackness. The black void of pure blackness. I'm just… she thought this was a good idea.

But this was worse. [strained anguish noise] [joel voice] OOH THATS GOOD You don't need to be a sprite expert for this sprite.

… Yes. Oh boy this one. I'll give my thoughts on Atem once we see his trainer sprite, but I'll admit he actually looks very professional in his overworld. Like he's got a prim white shirt and tie. The overworld sprite is really well done, surprisingly enough.

Repeating Giratina Event (Spirit Tower, Ch.14-2): She only made the event stop when you beat Giratina, not if you catch it. Admittedly, a better track record than before, but still garbage. Mind explaining the Pokedex entry thing? I can't tell you why Giratina turns into Blitzle but I can tell you that most people don't bother doing dex entries when they patch in the new Pokemon.

Holy Hombones. The worst part is that this isn't even all of it yet. [sob] The crazy thing about this sprite is that I'm 99% sure it isn't even done. Like, I know shading hasn't been a thing on a lot of these sprites, but I feel like the white here was just for the outline and it never got colored in.

I mean, when's the last time you saw Yugi/Atem wearing something other than the school uniform or black leather? And the leg on our left seems to be missing a foot. And the face… it's like half smooshed. He looks like a turtle man.

-

Monica is being eaten by the ground and other bad things (Battle Dome, Ch.15): Oh boy, now we're getting into the real bullshit. There's so much going wrong with the game at this point that I'm surprised it hasn't collapsed into itself yet. Zor, if you would? To start off with, I have no fucking idea what's up with that door. It just… is like that with no rhyme or reason.

Alright, so. This is taking place in the same chapter but I never got around to actually showing it off in the let's play proper - there's an entire area behind and ahead of the Battle Dome.

Ahead of the Battle Dome is the actual area where Trainer Tower is located… Also, I've never seen this sprite before. Is this from the vanilla game? Yes it is. Psychics pretty exclusively only appear in the Trainer Tower area and in Sabrina's gym so it's not likely for you to ever see them in the base game if you never battle everyone in the gym/go to Trainer Tower. … Huh.

That's going up. Going down takes you to…

Here. Yes, it is exactly what it looks like - a brand new area that is completely blocked off from you for reasons I've yet to figure out.

They all have brand new names and have the mist effect (which obviously doesn't work for these areas). I think this is postgame stuff, considering DRG bothered to change it, unlike a lot of the unused content.

For example, this was a team on the route. It's actually a modified battle with the same levels as the other trainers in this part of Dark Rising. It might also be unfinished postgame content? Like she wanted to, but then didn't bother when it came down to the crunch.

Actually, you know what it is? This was supposed to be used for the Reshiram/Zekrom event (hence, Tao), but they cut out the middle man and just took you straight to them. Huh.

(Two game freezing glitches at once - Video here)

Even More Creepypasta (Dragon Valley, Ch.15): How do we explain this? Just link the video. I got this.

This here is the problem. That warp? Points nowhere, goes nowhere. That person script also has literally no scripting, but is flagged as a trainer. Normally, no scripting just means a Nonverbal NPC, but in this case the trainer flag compounds when you step off of the warp in a very interesting, terrifying way.

When you remove the warp tile, this ceases to happen. However, when you then talk to the trainer on his own, the game gets confused, and spits out a blood red screen of death, because he has the trainer flag, but the game has nothing to tell it what to do. It is straight out of a creepypasta. My lord. We better make sure that some evil Pikachu doll isn't going to murder me in the dead of night thanks to this.

The game doesn't care if you get these or not (Yin/Yang Valley, Ch.15): Despite this being the reason we even came here, capturing them is not necessary. Hell, all you need to do is to make them drop off the cliff and you're done. All she really would have had to do was put in a roadblock that disappears as soon as you catch one. But knowing DRG it would have been broken to shit.

Too many sprites lag the screen (Malice Path, Ch.15): Yeah, I don't think Pokemon was designed to have this many sprites on screen at one time.

So despite it having all the same problems as the ones before it, I actually like this sprite. Relatively. I mean the Pikachu was a nice touch and in-character for Ash. Admittedly the Pikachu is kind of squished looking, but I'm pretty sure it's another case of taken from someone else. Don't know from where though, couldn't find it on Google.

Not a glitch, but still really baffling (Flamen Town, Ch.15): Just look at that map. The map has to point you somewhere, and it's apparently really hard to change town map data as of right now. There's no technology for it. That program I've been following the development for promises to make it easier, but…

The map is only one part of the problem because how the hell does it take you from down there up to Flamen Town? It might just be a default pointer that DRG just didn't bother to change. No one really uses the Town Map anyway.

-

Like I said in the actual chapter, if she had a bit more work done on her sprite, she could be really cute. It's dark but it's actually not bad.

BUT THIS GUY, THOUGH. [sobbing intensifies] The best part is that I think I covered most of the issues in the actual chapter… unless The Composer would like to add onto it. You tried. That's… all we can say about this one, really. It's baaaaaaaaaaaad. Points for trying.

The same problems we've had all game, but Envy looks like Edward Elric thanks to my cousin pointing that out. Also, what is going on with Not-Clay's arm? Probably just trying to edit out the sleeve.

Evil Identity Thief (Malice Castle, Ch.16): Ignoring the fact that his sprite sticks out like a sore thumb, he stole your rival's name. The thief! Okay I can explain this because I had the same issue when I was replacing the rival. It's coded into the game itself to use the rival name rather than any name you enter, I'm still trying to figure out how to fix it. Pokemon Life Version did it and I need to learn how it did the thing.

Speaking of Life Version, they use the Gen 5 overworlds for everything (on top of having actual graphics). Here, you have a mix of the normal Gen 3 overworlds and these giant Gen 5 ones. It doesn't work very well, to say the least.

Messed Up Ending (Finale, Chapter 16): I at least know why the Venusaur is colored like that - it's because of the Fafnir sprite I used. But everything else? You got me. Hmmm. It's obviously one of the custom sprites, but I'm not sure which. Satan Pikachu stares into your soul.

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Well, that's the end of this bonus chapter. Next time, we'll cover the gameplay and story for this dreck. Say bye to The Composer, though - as wonderful as she is, she just doesn't have the time to be around.

I'm still here though. You can't get rid of me that easily. I wouldn't anyway, though.