Pokemon, Pals, and Pain - Scarlet’s January of gaming
2023 was a busy year for me. I got a new job, I moved across the country, and amidst all that I found myself playing fewer and fewer games. Despite time seeming to be stretched thinner as it rolls on, I wanted to put an active effort into playing a little more through this year, be it older games I've beaten six times over or the new releases that always seem to slip me by. As a bit of a way to justify it as productivity, I bring to you folks a new monthly editorial series where I'll fill you in on all of my latest adventures in the hopes you'll share yours too. January may have been a busy month with many of us coming down from that Christmas buzz, but I'm glad to say I did manage to get a few games onto the list!
Pokemon Omega Ruby (3DS)
Released way back in 2014, Pokemon Omega Ruby is a game you’ve almost definitely either seen or played. Heralded as either a spectacular face-lift for the Hoenn region or a wasted opportunity of water routes and missing battle facilities, it’s one of the more divisive games in the series. I love it though. Omega Ruby is a comfort food game for me, and a game I can come back to time and time again. This is naturally made easier with randomisation tools being more accessible than ever.
The Universal Pokemon Randomiser is a tool that allows you to mix up your experience in Pokemon games ranging from the original Pokemon Red, all the way to the DS’ Black and White 2. With thanks to a fork from Ajarmar though, the ZX edition adds in each of the 3DS games along with a few extra settings. It’s as easy as loading in your dumped game, ticking a few boxes, and you’re good to go! Randomisers are something I swear by in revitalising your favourite games, but having shuffled this game and others in the series countless times already, I thought I’d mix things up a bit. Instead of randomising wild encounters, trainers, or anything in particular, I figured I’d leave it up to chance and spin some wheels to decide on which elements of the game would be different. This was a great idea.
The end result was me not having wild encounters randomised at all, with only trainers having new Pokemon. Wild Pokemon had random held items, which was interesting, but the clincher was the fact that every move now had a random accuracy and base power. Suddenly Swellow became a hot sweeper with a 125 BP 100% accurate Wing Attack, not to mention a 105 BP Power Up Punch and 135 BP Earthquake on my started of choice, Blaziken. Every battle became an intense bout of stress as enemies turned up with moves I hadn’t seen before, potentially spelling my doom with a randomly powerful attack out of nowhere. Add to this the pain of deciding a nuzlocke would be fun (permadeath for each Pokemon and a few catching limitations if you’re unfamiliar with the term) and Magma Admin Courtney having a terrifying Latios and Palkia in her second and third encounter, and I can really say I had a great time.
Lives were lost in this unfortunate encounter.
If you like me have been playing Pokemon games for the past 20 or so years and perhaps find you’re just going through the motions with modern titles, a randomiser might just be the blast of fresh air you need. Adding in arbitrary rules will get you using things you’ve previously shrugged off, and get you really celebrating those hard-fought victories.
Pokemon Elite Redux (GBA)
I know, more Pokemon? Well this one is even less like your traditional series entry. Elite Redux wasn't a game I was planning to come back to any time soon though, having originally played it to completion back in September. For those who missed out on the initial buzz the project got, this is a Pokemon Emerald hack based on another project, Inclement Emerald. It pulls in the modern battle engine, along with Mega Evolution and Z Moves, but his hack is like nothing else I’ve seen before it. Elite Redux puts forward an entirely unique take on a competitive-focused game; there’s a lot to break down so bear with me. First, every battle is competitive. Every trainer you face will have Pokemon with solid movesets, proper EV spreads, and a synergistic held item. Every single fight is going to be a hard-fought one, but the game isn’t unfair. To balance the difficulty of trainers, you’re given more freedom than ever before to build the team of your dreams. You’ll catch Pokemon like normal sure, giving you a growing pool of potential party members as you progress. Where the experience differs from normal is that you’re able to completely edit your Pokemon once caught, all from within the game’s menus. You can set their ability, nature, EVs, and teach any more they would normally be able to learn by level up, egg moves, TMs, or tutors. On top of this you’re given pretty much every useful item out of the gate, and have access to rare candies to instantly boost your team up to a given level cap. You have a game with no grinding and a seemingly-endless stream of possibilities.
Dugtrio genuinely did more for my original playthrough than any other member of that team.
But it doesn’t stop there. Outside of the game’s huge streamlining and quality of life improvements you also have to come to terms with the fact that every Pokemon has four abilities instead of your usual one: one primary ability and three innate abilities. Your innate abilities are always the same, with there usually being a few options for the primary akin to how abilities usually work. It’s a lot to keep track of, I won’t deny it, but before long you become absolutely engrossed by the sheer depth of it all. I’ve never seen a Pokemon hack like this one, and if you fancy yourself a challenge and a good time, I can only recommend it.
Now I’ve given you the rundown though, you might be wondering what I’m doing back here. After all, I beat the game in September, and on the hardest difficulty at that. The version I played back then was v1.5, and there’s actually been a good bit added since. Version 1.6, dubbed the Mega Update, brought with it more than 45 brand new Pokemon. As the name suggests, these focus mostly on new Mega Evolutions to satiate fans still hungering for the star players like Mega Flygon and Mega Milotic. Add to this new challenging trainers to encounter on your journey, a flurry of both new moves and abilities, and a list of balancing changes long enough to make my eyes go crossed, and my lord do you have me excited.
Imposing your own bans is important in keeping the game fun... Prismatic Fur is a bit too strong...
The vanilla experience is incredibly fun, and it’s what I would recommend if you’re new to the game. A lot of Pokemon are designed in a way where their abilities synergise quite naturally, allowing you to form fairly cohesive strategies out of the box. With this being my second playthrough though, I opted to try out the game’s built-in randomisation features, giving every Pokemon I catch four entirely random abilities. I could have also shuffled the species themselves, the moves they learn and their typings, but I wanted to maintain at least the same sense of progression as the base game. In short, it’s been a blast. I’ve been using Pokemon I’ve never used before for their insane ability combinations. I have a Shiftry who is entirely immune to damage for two turns, a Vileplume that gets a defense boost when it comes in and also sets up the Sun, a Gallade with Huge Power. And even with all of this fights still come down to one or two Pokemon. It’s brilliant! I spent around 30 hours on my first playthrough, and with this run still ongoing, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that amount of time repeat itself. The only real sadness is that Battle Frontier isn’t yet in the game, but if they do decide to tackle that almost-certainly monumental task, this will be the definitive Pokemon Emerald hack in my eyes.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Nightmare Troubadour (NDS)
Beyond all the Pokemon I have found myself falling back to an entirely different globally-successful brand on my bi-weekly commutes: Yu-Gi-Oh! Now I’ve never been a particularly devout fan of the series. I’ve seen some of the shows, I’ve owned some of the games, but I’ve never really delved any deeper than that. The only reason I really came back to this game was because I was after a DS game that could be played with only the touch screen to throw onto my Surface Duo while I wait for a controller to come. Nightmare Troubadour ended up being a good fit.
I did have some experience with the game in my younger days, but I’ve never really put in the time to properly play it. When I did originally pick it up, it was with cheats to build the deck of my dreams out of the gate, and when I really wanted a Yu-Gi-Oh game to play, I tended to gravitate towards the more narrative-driven 5Ds titles. The first DS release, Nightmare Troubadour is… Rough around the edges. It has one of the most brutal introduction sequences I’ve experienced in a while with thanks to you needing to grind random duels, and one in particular revolving around a (definitely rigged) dice roll or six. If you can get past that initial hurdle there are a lot of fun duels to be found. The randomness of fighting others is reduced as you progress, allowing you to avoid battles you would find particularly frustrating, and before long you’ll probably be having a good time. I wanted a game for a train commute, and this did a good job in filling that hole. Would the later GX release have done a better job? Probably. But I’m sure I’ll get to that later. For now, I’ll enjoy my deck of chains and dancing crabs. Yu-Gi-Oh is great.
Palworld (PC)
Given its absolute surge in popularity it should come as no surprise that one or two of us from the Editorial Team have put more than a few hours into Palworld since it launched earlier this month. I really am having a great time with it; I picked the game up at launch and managed to clock 24 hours between coming back from work on Friday and going to bed on Sunday. It’s the kind of game you can’t help but compare to other things to explain why it’s so fun.
Obviously you have the creature collection of Pokemon. We’ve all heard that comparison, but on top of that you have really fun base building that you might expect to see in Rust. You have the exploration and freedom of Breath of the Wild, the production and automation of a game like Satisfactory, and it’s all wrapped up in a package that is genuinely compelling and engaging. I’m excited to be playing more of the game, but I do want to contain my excitement to just this short paragraph for now. Assuming I find the time I’d love to get my thoughts together into something a bit more meaningful, be it a larger dedicated editorial or a full review of the early access release.
Games For the Backlog
I unfortunately don’t have the time to play everything I want to thanks in a small part to working a full time job, and a larger part to me spending most of my free time replaying games that are almost ten years old now. With that in mind, I do want to spend a bit of time to mention the games that released this month that I fully plan to come back to at some point.
The big release that’s on my radar is the remade collection of Another Code and Another Code R (Trace Memory for the Americans out there!). These are hugely popular adventure games that I’ve only heard good things about, and while I’ve attempted to play the original DS release of the first game on a few occasions, other things have just gotten in the way. The Switch release looks fantastic. Fully voiced, updated visuals, and a whole assortment of puzzles I’ve never had the pleasure of solving. These are games I feel I need to clear my schedule for, and I just don’t have that freedom right now. If you do have such a luxury though and decided to pick it up, I’d love to hear some spoiler-free thoughts.
The other two releases to be thrown onto the wish list are less due to a lack of time, and more down to the fact they’re sequels to games I’ve not managed to get to yet: Apollo Justice’s Trilogy, and the latest Yakuza game in Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth. These are two fantastic series that deserve anybody’s attention, but unlike Another Code they require the time to be put aside not only to play them, but the games before them. I do have plans to start the Yakuza series next month and slowly chip away at them, but time will tell whether those plans ever make it to fruition.
See You Next Month!
And that’s that for my January of gaming! I’d love to hear what everybody else has been picking up, and suggestions as to what I should be playing next month surely wouldn’t go amiss. Stay tuned for February and I hope 2024 has kicked off well for each of you!
