Completed Pokemon Pandora

I saw the cutscene of the trainer walking across the gym, but I left to visit the Pokemon Center before actually battling him. When I came back, here's where he was!

He's close enough I could still battle him normally, and after I won he zipped into place at the computer. No harm done, just odd.

Disclaimer: This is just my opinion. Everyone has their own tastes and thoughts I think, so this is just what stood out to me, personally.

A lot of them game could use some "mixing and mastering" if you know what I mean. There's a lot of neat concepts and ideas you did. Notably, you touched that this game's setting is really just a cut-out of a normal Pokémon adventure with a really really big road-block (the events that happen in this game). That's a pretty neat idea, in my honest opinion. The route before the town is filled with already beaten trainers, you tackle a Gym as you normally do, and then the game's events unfold.

I feel like this concept was executed rather lukewarm though, and in the end, it comes off as confusing, especially when the player first starts. You're given very little context of what's actually happening when you boot up the game, and I mostly just wandered around to find the plot/game-play. I'm running on a toaster, and the town you're stationed in is also huge, and there's no Running Shoes! I felt like I was moving at a snail's pace and I had to literally open up the game's files to manually add Running Shoes to my character. A follow-up consequence to this would be things such as the already beaten trainers in the lower route, where with no context, it just mostly confuses people when they're exploring the map, especially when nobody in the game actually mentions that you, the trainer, was the one who did all of this so far, and at best it's just implied very very subtly. Furthermore, some NPCs don't really give a lot of substantial information or items, and with so many buildings, I couldn't find it in me to explore all of them feeling that there wasn't much incentive , especially without Running shoes. Needing to steal a Psyduck to use Flash is interesting. A lot of Pokemon can learn it so uh, stealing one is a bit odd. You also did a few fan-game sins, like emoticons in dialogue and direct pop-culture references. I'm a bit lighter on that kinda stuff because technically, it's a fan-work and you can do whatever you want, imo. That's all really minor though. I'll move onto game-play.

The Gym itself was a cute idea. I could definitely see something like that in a main-line game, and it was genuinely cool. However, it was a bit flubbed in my opinion. You brought up the concept of a "guess who" type of Gym, but the trainers lock onto you as normal trainers, so it just kinda fell off because you were never given any room to guess.

It would have been really cool if none of them locked on like normal trainers, and you actually had to guess who the Gym Leader was, by talking to the trainers before a battle happened. Then they'd give you hints and stuff like normal. When one of the trainers lock onto you as you're walking and says "Hah, you guessed wrong!" , the effect doesn't hit as much because I didn't even want to talk to that person in the first place.

I will say, I really enjoyed the variety of Pokémon laid out in this small little area. You put a lot of neat picks in every zone, which means a lot of different players will walk out of the game with a lot of different teams. I think that's always fun to know you have a lot of options, and I love it when games do that (even though official games don't really do that, besides Sword and Shield).

However, another small issue with that is the level curve with these Pokémon. You added a Pawniard to the game, but Pawniard doesn't evolve until level 54, which is impossible to do before finishing the game. A lot of the Pokémon I picked up didn't evolve until the 40s, which I couldn't make without hard grinding (Ponyta) or I just couldn't figure out how to evolve them anyway (Gligar, he needs Razor Fang). Some of these were very very reasonable however, like Shuppet, who evolves at 37, and you catch them at like, level 30. If the max level is 40 before you beat the game, I would 100% shoot for Pokémon that evolve a bit around those levels, but take a few levels down.

Did I mention grinding? I did have to grind quite a bit before beating the final boss, who's Pokémon are at 40ish. This isn't a huge deal, but I feel there wasn't a lot of experience to go around, and it ended up quite difficult until I forced my Krokorok to level 40 to evolve (which was fine because he was a starter, which means it's going to be battling more often. But still. Try to gauge how much grinding players might have to do).

I do still appreciate the level of insight that went into the game design. I did notice a lot of the Pokémon the main villains used had super effective attacks versus your starters, to encourage catching other Pokémon. Among the three starter Pokémon, one starts fully evolved and is reliable (Luxray), one's not strong at all but evolves early (Yanma at 33), and one is pretty decently strong, but evolves really late (Krokorok at 40). The bosses were strong, but not annoying (you had the decency to give them 5 strong Pokémon each, when a lot of people would just give them 6 dumb ones) and I felt there were many ways to go about them. You also gave us a good selection of TMs, but I felt they could have been a few more interesting items to play with. I didn't feel compelled to explore to length, with the encounter rate and the lack of areas to rest around at (surfing area).

The encounter rate was very high. I ended up buying Super Repels to offset this. This made the cave and surfing area very annoying too.

The mapping is really nice, but I felt it was a bit too large. I ended up getting lost at certain points, and the game's plot did a poor job at telling me where exactly to go. Of course, there were only a few maps, so I figured it out after walking all over the place. The large maps make it really annoying to go back to the Pokémon Center to heal (or the rest house, thank you for putting that there), and having to deal with all the encounters again. I literally had my Pokémon faint on purpose to go back home at points. I wouldn't say the solution is to make smaller maps, but to do a little better at pacing the game and it's direction. It would have been a bit more acceptable if there were say, a small town in between some of the areas. In the cave system, maybe a rest area or something. I definitely liked the environments and it was really cool venturing through them, and I wish they were a bit more fleshed out. I liked the boss battle areas too, with the Dusknoir and Salamence.

I'd like to say you have a good attention to detail, the attempts of the trainers with the routes, spriting Pokémon in the 3rd Generations style instead of using the HGSS overworlds, etc and I feel that shouldn't be overlooked. A lot of people like the details where there's a lot unique text for objects in stuff, but I personally think overworld consistency is just as important. There were a lot of nice things there.

Other minor things include typos (there are quite a bit of them, and I couldn't screenshot them all. But again, that's minor and all it needs is just reviewing for next time, since I know you were on a time limit), not using the correct e in "Pokémon", grunts not having dialogue etc.

Here's your reminder that I liked this game.