Dear Skeli, dear Unbound development team members,
I would like to congratulate you on an important milestone of releasing the Platinum version 2.0 of Pokemon Unbound. I've been monitoring the progress of the project for the entire year, and also I've had an absolute blast playing version 1.1 of the game.
Even though I have barely started playing 2.0 (and yes, I'm starting on a completely fresh save, and I actually recommend anyone who wants to experience 2.0 in full to do the same), and I have to mostly go by the change log to determine just how many things have changed since 1.1, I can say that the outcome is indeed incredibly impressive and it can be regarded as a milestone in Pokemon ROM hacks.
I would like to say that the project has indeed grown greatly over the last year. The technical prowess demonstrated in coding Unbound 2.0 is amazing and astonishing, but I don't only mean this in the technical sense of the word - it has grown as a project, as an experience, and as a community of players. The Discord server is a great and welcoming place, the game documentation is very cleanly made and very straightforward to follow, and the atmosphere of both playing Unbound and talking Unbound on Discord is a thing that needs to be experienced.
I can only imagine how many (hundreds? thousands?) of hours went into the creation of Unbound and in bringing it to the state it's currently in, all the way from the previously demonstrated pre-Alpha to version 2.0 Platinum, but I know it must have been a whole lot. Every single aspect of the game demonstrates quality - the great visuals, amazing audio tracks (dozens, even hundreds of them), classic and yet refined Pokemon gameplay - so recognizable and yet so special somehow. Borrius has become a believable Pokemon world of its own, the only thing it's missing, I think, is its own anime/manga, which it absolutely deserves. It's also highly replayable - not only in the sense that 2.0 brings with it a whole fresh experience, but in general - so many difficulty levels, options, gameplay modes, and so many ways to play. Also, so many things to do when it comes to missions and events, it literally takes hundreds of hours to complete the content already in Unbound.
Also, this is the perfect demonstration of just how much you can pack into a 32 MB GBA ROM. An actual GBA game, by the way, playable on real hardware, without resorting to any hacks that would make it emulator-only. I played through the entirety of 1.1.3.1 on my 3DS, and I'm looking forward to doing the same with 2.0.
A big thanks to every single member of the team and, of course, to Skeli as the leader and the prime coder of the project! Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all of you, lots of creative inspiration, and best of luck in your future updates (which, it looks like, will also come, since there are yet more places in Borrius to be discovered as time goes by! :) ).
- Agetian
