What "Quit Moment" made you drop a large Pokemon Fangame/Hack?

[SuperSpyroDragon]

You're all familiar with "Quit Moments" as Josh Strife Hayes once talked about, right?

Maybe the game was unpolished, full of typos and bad grammar and clumsily characterized one-note cliches that go nowhere. Maybe it was a level curve that ordered you to start grinding for EXP, cash, or Game Corner coins before you're allowed to progress. Maybe it was an overly long unskippable cutscene with unbearably obnoxious characters. Maybe it was a poorly designed early-game forest/cave route full of empty space, uninteresting space-filling paths, bad balancing, and puzzle design that thinks time wasted equals difficulty. Maybe it was losing a dragged-out unfun battle against blatantly cheating opponents only for your victory to be ignored by the game deciding you lost anyway, or for RNG to ruin your day and force you to lose, making you endure an absurdly long run (or worse, walk) back from the game's starting location before you can make it back to where you were due to a lack of healing locations. Maybe you started a game and felt 2-3 hours of Tackle/Scratch grinding your starter against Harden-spamming bugs and Tackle-spamming Rattata and other nonchallenging powerless uninteresting nonthreatening time-consuming enemies wasn't worth it. Maybe it was some dialogue or story event egregious enough to make you reach for the Alt and F4 keys and shift+delete the whole folder from your hard drive. Maybe the Pokemon Essentials game was designed to crash if Cheat Engine was opened to SpeedHack the game, and the Rom was edited to crash or screw the player over if you decided to use any classic time-savers like rare candies. Maybe the game felt it was entitled to too much of your time for what it was, seemed to think you have all the time in the world to lose, and that caused you to decide it's not worth another second.

What "Quit Moments" in Pokemon Fangames and Romhacks caused you to drop them?

 

[badgerate]

The reason why i had a quit moment in a pokemon game is because there was no way you could rematch trainers.

No offence

 

[Layerex]

The Fiore Mansion gauntlet in Reborn. It made me quit so hard I didn't come back until I finished Rejuvenation.

 

[ArgentLua]

kiki in pokemon rejuvenation, her field was broken and there was nothing i could do about it, beat her after they added the code to nerf her pokemon's iv's

 

[DarkDoom3000]

Boring dialog and lack of direction.

 

[badgerate]

I dont understand why is there some fangames that dont have the rematch trainers option.

It helps to level up a trainers group of fakemon and allows it to take on other trainers and the gym leaders

 

[Corveone]

Not sure I'd call these "quit moments", more like features and ways of doing things in fangames/hacks that I personally dislike and annoy me to the point I'll probably quit.

1. "Fakemon". Yeah, sorry to the people who spend time and effort designing them, but they're one of the main reasons for me to turn down fan games. I'm ok with them if there's just a few and are limited to special roles such as optional legendaries (as in Prism)
2. Poorly balanced difficulty. E.g. boss battles everywhere constantly padding the game, gym leaders and other important trainers having full teams with competitive held items and broken moves for the early game right away, legendary/ultra beast/paradox/whatever spamming, grind forcing, etc. Not everything goes in order to make a Pokémon game challenging, difficulty needs to be fair and balanced reasonably according to the tools the players have at each given moment in the game, troll or grindy difficulty is just awful game design.
3. Way too many fan-made edits on existing Pokémon. It's fine to give weaker Pokémon a small boost to make them more viable, but when they start to mess way too much with learnsets and typing changes... that's a big no for me.
4. General lack of artistic quality (maps, sprites, dialogues, etc.), or being far too outdated in terms of mechanics (lack of PSS, fundamental QoL missing, etc.)

 

[Clueless Scrub]

I've tried a few fan games, and I've finished fewer. I can think of three examples, and the reasons I quit playing them are all different.

1. Pokemon Abstract put me off with poor optimization. The path I chose to start the game goes through a snowy area, so there's a constant hailstorm there to weather. Not only is getting pelted every turn tedious by itself, the health bar drained at the slowest rate I've ever seen at what felt like one pixel per second. I don't have the patience for that.

2. I gave up on Pokemon Tectonic because it was too hard. The level cap is low, types and abilities are rejiggered beyond my comprehension, trainers stay in my way until I defeat them perfectly, and they could even cheat until that was patched out. The game advertises itself as anti-grinding with every Pokemon balanced for viability, but I had to grind anyway because I wasted limited experience on training the wrong team. I get wanting to make a game challenging, but this felt punishingly so just for the sake of it.

3. Pokemon Wack is filled to the brim with reasons to quit. From multiple game-crashing bugs to arbitrary filler everywhere, the game feels openly hostile towards players and it's doing all it can to stop people from finishing it. The full-on quit moment for me happened in the back half of the game, wherein the game shows a long dramatic cutscene, but in MS Paint doodles. I'm already averse to fan games that try to merge edgy "adult" plotlines with cutesy Pokemon designs, but a purportedly wacky game taking itself this seriously has to be the most pretentious mish-mash I've ever seen.

 

[SuperSpyroDragon]

When I asked this question about "Quit moments" on a Fire Emblem forum, people got hostile. Accused me of being needlessly hostile to hackers and encouraging hatred against them. Even when I tried explaining the concept in other ways they choose not to see it my way and engage with the thread topic honestly.

Thank you, everyone, for being mature about this question.

For me a major "Quit moment" is when the enemy trainers start using RNG Abuse. Brightpowder, Double Team, Quick Claw... It's not interesting to use and it's not interesting to fight.

 

[ShadaneArts]

The one time I gave up on playing someone else's fan game was that time I played Pokémon Prism, and I got stuck on the Magikarp puzzle, and none of the tips other players gave me were working. It was probably bugged, the game was still unfinished prior to Rainbow Devs picking it up.

 

[edwardgp15]

Team rocket edition bc the rom has a bug that dont let me save normally, just save states, and the slow progression in early game, idk if late game too

 

[RMVNZ]

I'm more likely to quit a ROM if I am forced to teach my Pokémon HMs to get around.
Not only do I have to build a team around those HMs, I also have to sacrifice precious moveslots for Cut or Fly.
ROMs with mandatory R/S/E HMs are some of the worst offenders.
The amount of mandatory water-type HMs automatically means I'm stuck with a Rain team. 😭

 

[criticap]

My quit moment would be:
Search for romhack up to gen 9, then found Radical Red.
The moment I realise this is PVP only game as well as outdated graphic/no story.
I quit instantly.

 

[HufsaTheGreat96]

I can't exactly remember which game it was, it might have been Shattered Light but it was a while ago so I can't remember, but in one case I quit after the fifth gym because I realized that basically nothing had happened in the plot. I had just encountered a few grunts of the villanous team, but very little was actually there to keep me invested in terms of story.

 

[Fact Checking Gardevoir]

When, after a slooow back-and-forth walk to get stuff and to try and find where I was supposed to bring it, I encounter, with my level 5 starter, a trainer battle against a level 10 Pokémon.

 

[TsukinoHaru]

PokéMMO I loved the game played almost daily for a few years and ran a team. I quit because the game got dull, the team I ran fell apart and my own members were rather mean to me. All my friends aside from two just stopped talking to me. There's much more I quit for but I just did not like the community.

 

[smokey5787]

Puzzles that require me to move my fingers quickly (Rejuvination maze, unbreakable ties water gym puzzle etc) I play Pokemon and similar types of games because I can't move my fingers the best anymore, I would get it if it was a major part of the game or could forgive it if it was skippable or gave an option to skip after failing.