did you like frlg.ips... because i did a lot
hi. yeag. i'm sooo normal about it it was so normal. i saw it from an algorithm pull on day one and i was hooked ever since. like i knew it was going to be GOOD just from the trailer.
i wanna ramble about it but i've got friends/moots/followers who haven't played it yet so i'm going to be sharing all of my thoughts under the cut ok. don't read unless you've finished the game.
but YEAH. FRLG.ips was like. i think personally catered to a person like me specifically. because i don't know if you remember this about my other missingno oc. but bêteno.ire is Specifically Based on the idea that missingno is shaped by human perception. glitch pokemon only have as much power as humans perceive them to have. it became scary because WE believed it to be scary. it became hungry because WE believed it to be hungry. it became a god among all other glitches and obscurities and urban legends because WE believed it to be.
missingno was my god. i built a whole damn church for her in minecraft.
so imagine my complete surprise. when i played FRLG.ips and all of the things i had already believed about missingno were being repeated straight back to my face, word for word. telling it to me like some kind of cognito hazard, as if i didn't already believe it in my own heart from the very beginning. and because i believed it, it was so. and it had always been so.
frlg.ips was made to cater to a very niche and hyper-specific demographic of people. UTDR fans, definitely - but more relevantly, people who enjoyed gen 1 pokemon glitches, pokemon creepypastas and pokegod urban legends. i definitely fell into that category. i already knew about the sailor and immediately clocked that he was relevant as a character because of the "buy it or die" thing. i know that the reason we target certain npcs is either because of their relevance to gen 1 glitches (the cycling road guard, the safari guard, the old man) or their relevance to obscure pokegod rumors and their convoluted steps. (mr psychic, the daycare man, the name rater, bill). also i've seen many players confused about "the house that never was" but i knew about that too - the surf house from pkmn yellow, and how there's unused data in the game for it to have appeared in FRLG.
it's a really strange feeling for me personally because. as a kid i enjoyed both pokemon yellow and frlg simultaneously. i was young enough to see the old rumor sites and to be mesmerized by them, but still from a time like gen 3 where all of those old pokegod rumors had already been proven false. and missingno. missingno had always eluded me. because i never had or played the games where i could have found it as a child. my first real experience with having a missingno of my own was NaN - so so many years too late. and even then she still fills me with a whimsy. but i do grieve the fact that i couldn't have known her sooner.
this game makes me burn with envy and mourning for a time period i never got to fully experience. a time period that has long since passed, because now we all know better now. we don't dream like we used to anymore, because we don't see a need to. we all know the next game will be coming in a few years' time. but back in the ages of gens 1 and 2, and even gen 3 to an extent - people were willing to make up lies about them, and we were willing to believe them. pokemon is about living a power fantasy, and the next logical step in a child's mind would be to become completely invincible. to make the world bigger when we run out of areas to explore. so we dreamed of bill's garden, we dreamed of cloud city, we dreamed of a pokegod island. it's a very specific vibe that only gen 1 was able to cultivate, and we lost our ability to dream as the years went by.
IS the game a little bit on-the-nose with its deltarune inspiration? yes. do i care? absolutely not. something something holy shit two cakes. to me pokemon urban legends very much remind me of what deltarune is trying to do now - even despite all of our datamining, it's still trying to have secrets, it's still trying to spark wonder and curiosity in the players to think outside the box and "break" it. in a way - even deltarune's fanbase does this, creating fake chapters and bosses just to spark the imagination. and that's what FRLG.ips is trying to remind us of. it wants us to remember that time where we did the same thing for pokemon. it wants us to bring that age of pokemon back. back to a time where we had secrets and lies because we wanted these games to be bigger than they actually are.
also if you're a big fan of frlg.ips then i would definitely recommend this video by midnight krick on youtube:
not to spoil anything but it definitely shares a LOT of similar themes with frlg.ips. this video probably helped contribute to some of my missingno insanity but believe me when i said it was always there and that things like this video and frlg.ips just made me feel vindicated. but this video definitely helped me appreciate frlg.ips even more as i was playing it for the same reasons i mentioned above.
but oughhh. ips!missingno. babygirl please just give me one chance i can love you like abby did. let that seawater fill my lungs and make me into a vessel for the abyss. let me be by your side i promise i won't let you down. either way BIG fan of its characterization in this hack. was unexpectedly very sassy at certain points and it stole my heart by the end. why must i fall for the unromanceable option </3
my only criticism of is that missingno shouldn't have been given a gender. yes i know it's a reference to masculine eldritch gods like cthulhu or the king in yellow but i don't care. i need that thing to be genderweird with it. or at least be a woman. but that's just my own personal bias talking and should not be taken seriously lmfao
either way tldr good game i love missingno and believing my own lies about her and i need to plunge myself into the ocean immediately
