[Meta thread] Lord Windos' PokeRole Adventure : Celadon City Vandels

[Dragonstrike]

At long last, my campaign is done. I feel....a bit lacking all of the sudden, yet......satisfied. Lacking that its all complete for now, but satisfied that I told a story we could all share and enjoy, even it was rocky as Everest, wild as the Old West, and constantly changed in tone like a messed up dial up phone.

All I can say now is I hope everyone enjoyed it.......and stay tuned for the Epilogue to come.

Dragonstrike, feel free to create your own After Story Thread like Spiritmon has for Arial, so we can wrap up everything else for our byronic hero.

I'll make sure to create an epilogue thread later, yes.  Not now, though.

Before that...a little constructive criticism, if I may.

First off...

The Story: As soon as Zuryk showed up, I was almost certain that I wasn't going to like him in the slightest, tbh.

...sometimes I hate it when I'm right.  From that point on, it felt like I had a lot less agency in the choices I could make story wise.  And I was already strapped for time as it was!  The fact that Reiner was obligated to help even though he'd never asked to be involved nor was looking for some kind of grand reward from a god...you get the picture.  It was a recipe for a bad time.

Given the original scope of this game was a simple, grounded game that followed the adventures of a Team Rocket Grunt that was in the position to become an Executive...it felt like it had definitely lost sight of that original goal around that point (even though there had been setup before then).

In addition, going back to the very start of it all, I was reminded of this line at the start of the meta thread:

No magic or supranatural powers are present in this setting, besides the ones exhibited by Pokémon . Wizards be gone. Psychics, Meduims, and other strange Trainers exist , but your character can't be one.

...reading that kinda left a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth, to be honest.

Now, that's not to say that the story that did develop wasn't decent, but...I wasn't prepared for it to become what it did.  In terms of the original scope of the game, I REALLY wanted to focus on my character's personal goals, at least in a short term sense.  The Cursed Arms...kinda got in the way of that at times.

I also feel like that a lot of the events could have still happened in some capacity even without the CAs being involved.  Romeo and Juliet?  Oh yeah, insane couple.  Perfectly reasonable on its own (though the kids probably would have served a different role).  I was down with participating in that simply because it was an easy way for Reiner to look like he wasn't up to any shady business.  Riza?  Well...she wouldn't have been a bug woman...and hopefully not a 'vampire'.  Main reason I was considering getting involved in that originally was the same as the R and J reasoning.  The NRF?  Unless we would have had a compelling reason to go there besides the CA, we probably wouldn't have even touched the place.  No person in their right mind would have wanted to go to a location like that, after all.

The surprise with Clair was alright in my books.  If she hadn't been related to Reiner, though, I might have taken Reiner in a faaaaaarrrrrr different direction than I did.  Being related to someone important (or multiple someones) and having a family name to live up to instead of being a plain ol' mischief maker definitely changes your outlook on things somewhat.

I was surprised the Mew thing was resolved as early as it was, but I think the campaign turned out all the better for it.  Same with Emily.

Giratina: I honestly still don't entirely understand why exactly this happened.  Or why it had to.  I mean, it's been generally beneficial, but...why?  Were it not for the massive part that Giratina played in the Clair encounter, I'd say her inclusion was a little unnecessary so far as the overall plot is concerned as well.

Events in General: It often felt like there was too much to do because there was always something happening.  A little downtime in-game would have been nice and relaxing for everyone involved, tbh.

The difficulty: well, this was certainly a challenging campaign, I can definitely say that.  It was brutal at times, but you did your best to make it rather fair.  The NRF was probably the one area where I felt the difficulty spiked little too much, however.  Nuclear pokemon are a tricky thing to balance, after all, but facing large horde after large horde of them is what really illustrates just how terrifying they can be.  All the encounters that Reiner was in felt more like they were bordering on being on the HARD side of moderate, simply because Nuclear is such a difficult type to prepare for.

I hope Shadow Pokemon don't pose as much of an issue in the future, particularly if every single attack they use becomes and is required to be Lethal on top of being super effective against everything except other Shadow Pokemon...that could very quickly become a massacre, and I don't think anyone will want to be on the receiving end of it unless they're prepared...not even the games are that brutal with the interpretation, and the main villain's goal in Colosseum was to basically hold blood sport type pokemon battles between Shadow Pokemon!  *shudder*

4th Wall Breaking: I feel this got to be a bit too much at times, tbh. 'Course, it wasn't really an issue until Zuryk showed up. But some things wouldn't have happened at all or would have happened very differently if the 4th wall breaking hadn't gotten so rampant. There were times when it was important (Giratina) and/or fun (earlier conversations with Mew) to do, though.


Overall: despite all my various gripes with some of the stuff that has happened, I did enjoy participating, relatively speaking.  I really appreciate that you worked with me on integrating the details of Reiner's story into the campaign's story once it shifted into more of a narrative instead of a challenge game.  As a narrative, though, it could have certainly used a little polish and/or focus for the original intent.  As a challenge game, the only real gripe I had was the NRF thanks to hordes of overwhelming Nuclear pokemon being difficult to deal with in general, and thus artificially inflating the difficulty.

That being said, let's see if we can't fix some of this later should a sequel happen, yeah?