I finished the game yesterday, No wipe until
and I lost only once because Heal pulse targeted the oponent instead of my own pokemon (there are some issues with targeting sometimes in the game).
Overall the story is simple but quite cool : a champion, looking for good fight, wanting to protect pokemons, in its amusement park with its friend. I missed a little the feeling of exploration, I understood fast that talking to NPC was not really interesting (excluding story related ones) but..as you said, you focused on gameplay. And Arceus, that was good.
Technically the game is impressive. From building your own team in five minutes from scratch to differents fight modes, new abilities, new moves, new forms... I really enjoyed battling
Boss fight, even if they are rare, were also good
Oh and I loved some details,
Now, some things I want to point out :
- Musics in battles are way louder than outside battle. I adjusted my sound to the level of battle music and so missed the overworld music.
- Back sprites are little compared to front sprites, I felt like fighting giant pikachu with my tiny Tyranitar that was...strange x)
- Sets designed by the AI are sometimes crappy, but regarding the quantity of data you did implement, that's note a big issue. Oh and the battle AI is dumb, like trying to go for max guard three times in a row but..welll, that's Pokemon Essentials AI, you can't really do something about it whitout reworking it from scratch so that's ok.
- No precise docs about changes, they are just mentionned in the word but... that's not really clear, base power of moves, new forms, new abilities, and it prevented me from trying new cool stuff. Maybe just an issue in my part ^^"
- Be more clear about controls. The first time I played, I didn't found controls, how to activate the menu and F1 was note working the way it does in base essentials. Maybe a little sentence about esc being the menu button could be good.
And just some minor things :
- being sad about Mikhail talking about its Bug team and lot and ending having a fire monotype team during the wedding :/
- poltergeist being a spread move ?
- white herb not activating upon intimidate
- Held items (consumable ones) diseappearing after each fight
- targetting issues, sometimes I tried to target my allies or a specific ennemy and it's choose a random one (healing a boss sometimes, woopsy).
And bugs :
- when fighting
, I flinched the base form with togekiss and it kept getting flinched during the whole fight whithout me attacking it
- same fight, at the end of each turn, this message displayed. Not a critical bug, I could resume the game and eventually win it, but might be an issue :
End note : That was really a good journey, thank you for your game and... I am thinking about developping my own game and I'm interested in the battle with up to 6 pokemon (for fights against hords of pokémon for example, 1 vs 6 or things like that), is it a public ressource ?