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

[4nt]

there were two games i got myself hard stuck with no way out forcing me to give up. i was so far into them that restarting seemed more like a chore that i would not enjoy again.

 

[triassicranger]

Pokemon Inflamed Red after repeated attempts of trying to beat Misty only for her to trounce me every time.

I think I quit Pokemon Fire Red Advanced Challenge around Cerulean for the same reason as well.

 

[BladeVap]

My quit moment for fangames is easily separated into playing the games and then developing for them.

For playing, it was realizing how edgy and utterly WRONG Delta species are within Insurgence. They don't canonically change appearance, and if they do it's not that drastic. Insurgence's edgy story didn't help either, and that anti-edge attitude passed down to me playing Rejuvination, which felt like it was trying to get under my skin.

For developing...oh sweet Arceus, Pokemon Azurite. What a MESS.

I was the Vajra/Blade on Pokemon cry sound effects up until a year ago, when I realized the truth behind Azurite - it was unfeasible to continue developing not only with the scope it had chosen, but the scope it had already was bad. Five new types? Too many. A plot important type? Done already. Crystallization was just Megas under a different name, really. And the devs that are still chugging away slave away...for nothing. The game wasn't meant to come out, it was to push as many things through as the lead dev could just "because they could" in a fangame. I can't emphasize this part enough: ten years of my life (I joined around X/Y's era) wasted making fangame cries, only to be told I would not have them in the game is devastating. I have a whole document about what happened about a year ago now, some other former devs and I left the Discord and dropped said Google document in the server. I got cancelled by the lead dev within the server and then banned for posting about it on r/PokemonFanGames. I would post it here, but if anyone wants more proof just privately message me...

So I guess that's my post here about what kills fangames for me, and my way of telling the denizens of this forum that Pokemon Azurite was a sham and is never coming out. I'm really sorry if the Azurite part makes you upset, but it's the truth. I have the proof that it's not coming out, and if it actually does it won't be the quality fans deserve.

 

[Kenobi123]

My point mainly are w games that have fakemons of any forms (evos, variants, original,....). It's when a game feature fakemons that are more form over function. When the creator focus too much on the design and themes of a pokemon, how that pokemon actually plays in a game are usually an after thought at best and actively hindering it's usage at worst. It's even worse when it is a genuinely well design one cause I really want to use it, but its just sooooo bad I loose all interest. The best example that I have is Pokemon Xenoverse. It's a very good game that I'm personally a fan of. However everytime I play it, I seems to be gravitated in using the same team almost everytime cause everything else just SUCKS. Especially Reindear and Reindingo. They aren't good in the beginning, why do they even have defeatist

 

[PokéBanq]

Forced losses. I've played 2 fan games with story battles that you are forced to lose, regardless of how you play out the actual battles. And by forced losses I mean the game treating your win as a loss in the after battle dialogue. This really bothered me in a game I recently played that had no forced level cap, so I was able to grind until I was over-leveled. I powered through these forced loss battles and was really sad to see the game treat it as a loss.


I get that sometimes it's part of the plot that we, as the player, take an L. But find a better way to go about handing us that loss. Set level caps and give important boss battles competitive teams, run us through a gauntlet of tough fights with our bags locked out and no healing, have the bad guys set a literal trap that somehow weakens or otherwise incapacitates our team. Do something other than just ignore the potential for someone to find a way to win a battle or battles your story wants them to lose, or take the time to write in a contingency plan to account for the chance someone finds a way to win.



Lots of valid points in this thread. As someone who sinks 50+ hours a week into playing fan games and ROM hacks, I can definitely see the frustration in most, if not all, of the points made here. I even found myself agreeing with a couple specific examples in games I've played or am playing currently, in the comments here.

 

[Clueless Scrub]

I've played some more games, not all of which I enjoyed. However, these didn't have a single major quit moment, but several small moments that might have been tolerable enough on their own but join forces to upset me into giving up on them.

- Oddly enough, Pokemon Realidea System fell apart in the town with the second badge. It has a gachapon shop where you can gamble your money away on unlikely prizes, and get screamed at by an addict who threatens to kill us all until police take him away. If that's supposed to be a joke, it's not funny. However, the tipping point for me was the gym leader battle. The fight itself was fine, but the music did that thing from Black/White I don't like where it changes the music for the boss's last Pokemon. I had the sound off for the first gym, but not this time, and I didn't want more of the same.

- Pokemon Empyrean has a lot going for it, but even more against it. The plot-required puzzles waste my time with backtracks and interruptions, the cut-scenes only add edge to the point of me actively welcoming story-free parts, and hopeless boss fights pervade. Even the wiki gets hostile, and that's not part of the game. Everything about Empyrean feels mean, and that's not what I look for in my video games.

- I managed to complete the main story of Pokemon: This Gym of Mine, but I'm in no hurry to go back to it. In case you don't know, the main gimmick is you serve as the local gym leader with a type specialty, but in practice the game doesn't really hold to that idea. You're allowed to catch and train off-type monsters for non-gym battles, but you can't get several Pokes even if they do have the right type because they are starters for specialties you didn't choose. There are also quite a few battles you're not supposed to win when you first encounter them, but at least you're rewarded handsomely if you do win.

Related to the quit moment is what I would call the "pass" moment, wherein one decides not to play a prospective game due to some unagreeable aspect, effectively quitting before they've even started. For me regarding Pokemon fan games, I pass on anything with mandatory hard level caps. By itself, the cap is already putting me off by telling me what I can't do. What's more is these caps tend to be comorbid with other factors designed to make the games harder, both physically and emotionally. I struggle enough with everyday life; I don't want more of that in my game time.

 

[BIGFriv]

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.)

I am so curious about this whole "lack of PSS" thing, what do you mean lol, that requires online.

I think it was pokemon realidas, but the unnecessary bashing of kanto to the point of racism made me just dropped it in the Bin

Racism? Are you serious? damn. How.

 

[Corveone]

I am so curious about this whole "lack of PSS" thing, what do you mean lol, that requires online.

The Physical-Special Split introduced in Gen 4.

 

[CharMainor]

Gen 4-9 Pokemon Added to Gen 3... I just don't like it because it removes the uniqueness to the species in that region if they were all in the same one. Cross-Gen Evolutions in Gen1-3... Just why?
My exception is Unbound... for some reason.

 

[Cataclyptic]

I'll throw in my two cents for this thread.

First game I can't remember what the name was, but it was supposed to be set in South Africa. Pretty sure it's gotten a few updates since then, but years ago I quit playing very early on in the game because I could not FIND anything. Basically the entire region is open world and huge. The problem? No map, and everything looks the same. It soon became impossible for me to tell where I was going, where to even find the gyms, get HM's, etc. I had like a level 30 starter and could not tell you where to get the first gym badge.

Next, Pokemon Bioterror. This game's difficulty is way, way too stacked against the player. As somehow who wholeheartedly loves the soulsborne games, this says a lot that I find the difficulty unreasonable. Basically, all of the bosses have custom moves, custom abilities, and a shitton of cheese.

So, the first real boss of the game is this level 20 steel/normal type fakemon with 3 health bars. Yeah, three. You have to KO it thrice. Now, there are some fighting types nearby, so you could totally use those right? Wrong. It has an ability that reflects fighting type damage back to the attacker, enough to KO most of the pokemon that hit it. Also it can hit you after that so you need like 4 fighting types to beat this thing.

But what made me quit was the second gym leader. Basically the Smeargle of the second leader has an attack called Elemental Wing, which hits for either fire, water or lightning damage due to its custom ability. There are no options to resist it. Also it has Moody, and I think Double Team too, so evasion hax is a thing. Oh yeah and his other 5 mons have that signature move which means the player has limited options to actually resist the 80bp attack. Note: the move tutors at this time has stuff like Rest and Snore as tech options. They do not help.

I eventually defeated him with a combination of rock spam, Rollout, and getting lucky hitting through Double Team, but after that I just did not care and uninstalled.

I hate these difficulty hacks because fundamentally, pokemon is a game where you should be able to play with the pokemon you want. But if these games are too difficult, it restricts what the player can/should use.

 

[coolcai23]

Difficulty is a major thing for me. If a fan game or rom hack has bad balance when it comes to its difficulty it's pretty much an immediate drop from me. I recently played Pokemon The First Journey, and while I loved the story and world, the difficulty killed the game for me within the first hour because off how badly balanced it was. The game starts you with a Lvl 13 Tauros, not too bad except all wild Pokemon at the start are a higher lvl some even 10 lvls higher. The early trainers are also all a higher lvl so you're expected to grind a little which is hard when the wild Pokemon are a higher lvl. As soon as you get through the intro you're expected to face three battles in a row with no free heals inbetween or after. The guy that heals your party in the game costs money, 500 poke dollars, and after those three battles it's guaranteed your Tauros will need healing. You only start with 1000 and trainers only give you around 70 each. Some of the earliest wild encounters are Raticates with Hyper Fang, and Ditto's with Imposter. Just feels like the game is punishing you. It's not fun.

 

[Tyrranux]

I must have retried Radical Red at least 3 damn times and each time it's either the Silph Co section or not too long after it.

 

[Lady_Kelpi]

Mature stories being watered down into "edgy just to be edgy." I've already gone through my early 2000s emo phase, I'm good.

 

[poisonhealleftovers]

I don't know if it counts as dropping because it was the ending, but, Pokémon Rocket Edition going fully edgy with, spoilers:

Spoiler:

Red being actually a supersoldier created by Oak to get revenge on Lance over a war they lost... and then he fucking murders Agatha???

I mean, the story was already edgy enough as it was with the whole Kanto-Johto war thing and everyone in the game being secretly a POS, but I could give that a pass because the manga did pretty much the same thing. But the scene I mentioned above was so jarring that I just shut it down right then and there. I don't even want to know what they did in the post-game. So yeah, I say that edgy storylines are my number 1 turn off. Everything else I can forgive, but making Pokémon edgier than Trevor Philips is instant trash bin. Also, even if the story is normal, adding Edgy/NSFW jokes. Pokémon My Ass was kind of funny 15 years ago if you were a teenager and they did every joke in the book, stop with that crap.

Other things that turn me off:

- I might be in the minority here, but hacks that spam you with Pokémon from other gens before the NatDex. I don't mean, like, "oh you can get Weavile in GSC", that's great actually. I mean like "This forest has 250 pokémon because we added every region's bugs" or "We ran out of dragons so Lance has a Dragapult". If a hack is set on a certain region but follows a different story, it's okay, but if you're promising me an improvement of the original game rather than something entirely new then I expect to see the familiar faces most of the time. On the same vein, you do realize an Alolan Rattata is not supposed to be seen in the wild in Kanto, right? If a trainer uses another region's variant, ok, it can help the challenge a bit and God knows it's tiring to face 500 grunts with the same party. But I don't want to see them while I'm trying to find a 'mon from the region I am in.

- Anything that promises to make the games challenging and then achieve that with BS. Abilities or moves that don't exist, comically overleveled trainers, level caps, 15 battles in a row with no break... and it's not like it's hard to make these games challenging but fair, you know? Better EV spreads, better movesets, held items, full parties, more full restores for opponents, make it so that late game trainers don't have first stage pokémon, make it so the teams in double battles have more synergy... hell, even making it so you can't use items during battles altogether is fair enough imo.

- Hacks that change the types too much. Adding Fairy to early gens is weird but ok. Stuff that makes sense thematically, like Psychic Golduck, I can live with that. But some people feel compelled to change every type for some reason, and change types that are perfectly fine. No, Butterfree doesn't need Psychic type. If anything it should be Poison type. Read the goddamn Dex entries, for Christs's sake. Yes, it learned a bunch of Psychic moves because Gamefreak made zero viable bug moves in Gen I and didn't know how to make learnsets back then, so what? Are you gonna give Rhydon the Water type too? It learns Surf! Again, if the idea of the hack is doing something completely new it's fine, but if you say your hack is supposed to feel close to the original then don't go around randomizing the typings.

- Excessive fourth wall breaks. Character questions how the hell I'm flying around in a bird that's smaller than my head? Ok, funny, bit of a dead horse but it's fine. But I don't need a fourth wall beak every 5 minutes, you know? It's like pro wrestling, I know this is fake, you don't need to keep reminding me of it.

 

[rwbonesy]

Mature stories being watered down into "edgy just to be edgy." I've already gone through my early 2000s emo phase, I'm good.

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