#se0

[sanchomps]

danse macabre

based on special episode 0 by Canete_PMD

[scribz-ag24]

request I did for Hypertrent after he finished Special Episode 0! Family photo of Shelter Cave's pokemon. hope nothing bad happens to this happy little family!

[mochi-d-lechuga]

I needed to make fanart of them 🥹

[wowitsmetaylor]

This actually happened to me the other day

[beechtreeblues]

Something something found family and more gushing over PMD romhack Special Episode 0 ❤️

[cronchlord]

Like I mentioned in my other post I took inspiration from special episode 0 for my background for Dusknoir and i feel like getting your mask shattered as as duskull and then forcefully evolved would have

interesting effects

[solmarillion]

so i've been playing through the pmd2 romhack "special episode 0: in a dark past" which is a backstory for grovyle and dusknoir, and i just hit the "post-game". and i'm not gonna get into some deep analysis for it because there's just. a LOT there, but i feel a bit iffy on it. here's my mess of a review

the good so far

i liked plusle and minun and their sibling bond. cherrim was interesting too, how she wanted to find her own way to be useful

the found family in shelter cave was sweet and i did get a bit attached to them

i did like how treecko convinced celebi to join him, and also how he inspired the porygon

treecko starting with a bit of a loner attitude before he gets some needed character growth made sense, so he would be ready to accept help from a human

the sunrise scene was very well-scripted and it portrayed both grovyle and dusknoir's motivations well, they both want to save the world in their own way, but dusknoir got manipulated into preserving "his" world

the mind dungeon was a really creative custom dungeon, and i like how the gameplay changed from duskull using his ghost typing to escape, to gaining unnatural strength and doing everything on his own. that gameplay-story integration worked well

the bad (aka where i start rambling)

let's start with the gulpin dungeon, because that was extremely poorly-designed. an attempt was made to have gameplay-story integration with a pokemon that can't move, that you need to have your allies protect while duskull hunts down the stairs by going through walls. the problems with this are: 1.) the AI allies cannot automatically go after enemies before they get close to the unmoving pokemon; 2.) it is entirely up to luck if you find the stairs within the first few rooms you check before the enemies catch up to your waiting allies; 3.) shuppet can go through walls and other enemies can spawn in rooms, so even in rooms with 1 entrance, blocking that corridor does nothing. as a start to fixing this, i would add more quick seeds to the dungeon and remove shuppet as a possible enemy. -

the very... anime-esque dialogue. shouting out moves and abilities constantly and talking about game mechanics mid-fight. the scenes with espeon and rampardos suffer the most from this. and then the cut to black with text showing the outcome of the fight and the finishing move like it's some kind of official match. having moves and abilities do limit breaks like it's final fantasy. this completely broke my immersion. -

the overuse of violence and constantly killing off characters. one character's guts get spilled. a whole series of cutscenes where everyone dies at once. rampardos is insane like a jojo villain. he's power-hungry sure, but he also gets super creepy and obsessive about espeon (a female character) with a disturbing custom art picture of him leaning over her before he kills her. imo this goes too far. there are ways to show the future is dark without a bunch of violent deaths. starvation, dehydration, illness, mental distress, unusual phenomena. onscreen death should be done with care. -

overuse of buzzwords like "singularity", too much infodumping, especially from the human character. take a lesson from tolkien, not everything has to be explained. sometimes things can just... be. i ended up just skimming text when things got like this. -

i feel like darkrai capturing duskull after he lost everyone in order to manipulate him into the opposing side felt rather cheap. the point of the dark future is pokemon giving in to despair. it would have fit the story much better if duskull had come to this conclusion on his own. the "rampardos" (darkrai) in duskull's head speaks aloud those exact arguments, but i don't think that was necessary.

i'll see how i feel when i play the rest of the hack, but so far i have very mixed feelings about it. it's clearly a labor of love with how much work went into it and i appreciate it for that, but so far it's not what i had hoped it would be. perhaps one day i'll write a fanfic that gives my take on grovyle and dusknoir so i can satisfy myself...

[sugar-spice-virtue-and-vice]

hi mal....