Hello there. Before anything the TL;DR of my post is "This game is awesome"! I just made an account here with the thought of saying a thank you to you for this fan game you created and post a mostly pointless rambling of joy. I have not played that many fan games in my whole life, with probably the ones I played the most being Zeta/Omicron, while with others I would eventually give up at a point, as I would eventually lose focus. I do have to admit that Pokemon games stopped really interest me at the point where X&Y appeared, although I am not sure if it was the fact that pokemon changed to 3D or I did not particularly like newer generation pokemon. But enough about my thoughts, now I want to talk about your fan game =)
I am currently midway though the Hoenn region and I have sank in the game 120 hours and I am 100% sure the only moment I will stop playing it, will be when I will be fully finished with it! One of the main reasons I started liking Pokemon was the catchphrase of "Gotta catch em all" and from Pokemon Red/Blue up to Pokemon Black/White, my main focus was exactly that, catching them all. For the first time ever in my life, I am getting the chance thanks to your awesome game to satisfy that catchphrase in a single game. Even if someone points out that there have been numerous fan games where you can do exactly that, my problem has always been, be it with well made or not fan games, the fact that a large amount of pokemon where squished to fit inside a single region, so obviously when it came to catching them, I would be getting a lot of new pokemon on every new route, path and cave I would visit. That usually made me quite fast lose interest, as the feel of accomplishment would soon go away and feel more like grinding.
And here comes your awesome fangame. I was reluctant at first to play it, mostly cause in my head the "Satoshi" "Ash" part made me think it would be more about following what Ash did in the anime and being restricted by it. Thankfully the reason that made me ignore that thought was the phrase "loosely follows" in your game description. The game up to now has been really really awesome to say the least. Your project is such a huge uptaking of recreating all regions up to 7th gen, following the story of Ash and keeping the player entertained through all this, just blows my mind. You have spread around pokemon quite nicely through the game and not a moment felt like up to now that I was overwhelmed or bored. The fact that also caves and routes have become smaller is actually nice, as I imagine if there where not that compact, going through 7 generations would become tiresome.
To sum it up and stop rambling, the game to me feels perfect and awesome. 7 regions along with Orange Islands all packed up in a single game, with every single pokemon up to that point, while the story follows the anime loosely. What more count one ask. At times it feels rough around the edges, but that definitely does not prevent me at least from enjoying every moment I have been playing the game. 3rd gen sprites are adding quite the nostalgia pleasure too. Thankfully at least up to now, the only reoccuring non-game breaking bug I have run into has been an error pop up that I get while I or the opponent try to use moves that put target pokemon to sleep. The move does not work when that pop-up appears, but it does not really affect the game in any other way than the move not working for that battle. Another thing that attracts my attention is the sprites of characters in the map, that are not made most of the time in a pixel art form and always have only the front side of the character, but again, that is a really minor thing that does not really affect my enjoyment.. I know, I am still rambling..
The only actual negatives I could mention for the game, is probably the fact that the game has a lot of tearing and bad FPS on Windows 10, when played in windowed mode. My setup has dual screen, so I can do other things while playing a game, but if I do not force it in full mode, the game lags and tears a bit too much. That though seems to be more of a limitation of the RPGMaker XP, rather than anything else. Eventually I ended up installing Windows 7 on VMware, which solved that problem for me~ I have even found out about Joiplay, which lets me play the game on my phone, all because you just had to make such a awesome game that I really can't just stop playing day in and day out, so I am blaming you for making me enjoy my time so much D=<
Thank you so much for all the effort in creating this awesome pokefan game =) Cheers and I wish you health and joy mate!