Pokemon Reborn: How a YA Drama turned into fucking Homestuck, and I loved it
Why the fuck is Pokemon Reborn?
I don’t like to open on profanity but JESUS man, Pokemon Reborn, a free pokemon fangame made in fucking RPG Maker, isn’t just proof that official pokemon games could be better, it’s proof that the entire RPG industry is slacking. In terms of the world reacting to your presence, in terms of characters having motivations and being messy and being PEOPLE, it beat up Baldur’s Gate 3 so bad that Gale had to go home for a glass of milk and cry. If a cheap parodic survival crafting game that’s being lauded as the second coming of pika-christ is ‘proof that pokemon needs to change’, what the fuck do you call a free fan game that makes the entire RPG apparatus look like Glass Joe stepping into the ring with Mike Tyson in his prime?
I’m not kidding. You think I’m kidding. I’m not.
I’m not going to do a full plot run down here like I have for other games. This game is long. This is a full length RPG crammed into the pokemon format. My play time for Persona 5 The Royal was 130 hours to first clear, this took longer. Because the postgame isn’t a fucking “postgame”, it’s the conclusion to a story that ends in thematic climax. I have seen a game’s developers learn and grow in real time with the development of said game! Pokemon Reborn is KIND OF A LOT.
In very good ways.
I’ve been obsessing with it over the course of a week. Unfortunately, when people tell me I’m digging too deep, I’m the one holding a fucking shovel and my hobby is digging. Also, unfortunately, there’s a lot of story. It’s a full length RPG the size of Persona 5 with a lot less standing around talking and a lot more doing pokemon things but scaled up.
Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to give you a full plot rundown like I did in other games I’ve talked about. There’s a shit ton of plot here and it’s all... delivered with the enthusiasm of an edgy teenager writing their super cool pokemon x terminator crossover.
But skill that gets more and more... good? As the game goes on. Is that the word? It’s hard to explain. But I’ve been sort of keeping this game on the backburner from before I even thought about making a blog and before I was surrounded by weirdos who also wanted to post here and I considered making some kind of metafiction layer so they could post as their OCs.
Probably still doing that. Ignore the bear behind the curtain.
So here’s the thing. This game is long. I have 130 hours and I’m halfway through the postgame, which on the “Lin Route” actually feels like an expose about Lin and her motivations and the peek behind the curtain of the real story. In a way that... makes her more human, more sympathetic, and still absolutely a fucked up little goblin child who refused to do anything to earn what she wanted.
As for the gameplay... I’m going to do it. I’m gonna fuckin’ do it. I can hear intern Johnny yelling at me. Screaming “NO NO NO GOD NO” over and over again! Someone feed him some lettuce and alfalfa until he gets over it. Because I’m gonna successfully make the comparison that every single games journalist fails to make.
Pokemon Reborn is the Dark Souls of Pokemon.
NOT because it’s difficult. But because it demands you learn how to play Pokemon beyond the easy single player campaigns in the official games that are made for eight year olds that adults scream about being too easy and throw children at wal mart to get the merch for. It wants you to know type matchups back to front because there’s conditions that reverse the type chart! Or force you into a Gen 1 format! The fields are a gimmick that demand you know how to play pokemon, raise multiple pokemon more than just your core team, and you meet the gameplay systems where they are, because you’re not going to beat the game in four hours with a Geodude while ranting about how game devs feel entitled to tell a story.
You have to meet the systems on their own terms and actually master them to win. Like Dark Souls. That’s the thing that separates Dark Souls from other action RPGs (which it is! Not “ARPG” as in Diablo but “Action RPG” as in 3D metroidvania. You dicks.)
Okay, so... the summary of the plot outline, because this is a hundred plus hour game and I may not end up covering further because it’s FREE and I WANT YOU to PLAY IT.
You arrive in the Reborn Region, Reborn City, and the local Champion knocks you out of the train as it’s exploding. That’s the tone setter. Team Meteor is using PULSE machines, unknown machines that amplify a pokemon’s abilities but hurt them to the point of likely killing them to provoke natural disasters, hoping to drive humans out of the city once and for all.
It gets a lot more complicated than that. For now I’m just gonna run down some characters, probably, otherwise we will literally be here all day. Both of us. That is not a threat that is a promise but also a threat to ME because oh GOD why are you making me sit for that long you MONSTER.
In the next section I’m going to spoiler character arcs. If you want to play it before reading this google “Pokemon Reborn”. You have the technology. I believe in you.
SWAG JOCKEY FERN
The first standout character is Fern. As far as spoilers go, he seems like the “Gary Oak” or “Blue” from Gen 1. Like he’s going to learn to respect you over time, since your first encounter is working together to take down a Team Meteor base. This is not what happens. Over time he gets more and more hostile until he joins Team Meteory to spite you, his sister Florinia (who he calls ‘Flobot’ because of her flat register and verbose delivery, who has her own set of traumas we’ll get to later.), and everyone else who thinks YOU’RE cooler than HIM. “Swag Jockey”. You’ll both be satisfied with kicking his ass and incredulous that he can rationalize it as you being “cheap and lucky” by using things like type matchups and team building.
He’s a dickhead. By design. You are supposed to hate him, especially when you figure out that his entire complex comes from him... not being the first pick for everything, him being Florinia’s “Backup” gym leader in case she can’t compete, essentially, everything about him is because he’s not the main character of the world. And he decides that’s your fault.
10/10 would stomp into the dirt again.
Terra Pierce
RAAAAAAAWWWWWR~! That’s 1337 H4CKZ0R for “Terra is an interrogation of both nihilism and existential absurdist ideology in the face of depression”. She sucks. A lot. I love her as a character. She’s the embodiment of everything that was incredibly cringe about millennial internet humor as an antagonist character while also being a gym leader (ground type). She’s crass, rude, and annoying on purpose to stave off the feeling of wrongness she’s had ever since her parents adopted The Real Antagonist and she was, essentially, dosed with Arceus Powers that made her feel like everything was pointless.
She’s like if Justin Roiland were actually a pretty entertaining commentary on millennial humor and hadn’t allegedly kidnapped someone.
She seems like she’s a decent person hidden under layers of existential despair and absurdity, at least. Better than Fern.
WHAT THE FUCK IS A PHYSICS indeed, Terra. What the fuck is a physics?
Lindsay “Lin” Paraeah and Amethyst Lidell
The real antagonist. A bitter, petulant child who apparently found a baby Arceus as a child and got trapped in a pocket dimension with it and really really wants out, so she’s made a puppet she calls Lin to move around the world for her and manipulate Team Meteor into opening the door and letting her out.
Then she decides she doesn’t want to leave. It’s sad, it’s absurd, you feel bad for her even if she got a few of your friends killed, and killed the regional champion herself.
Not that the regional champion was really worth much... Amethyst is kind of the reason so many people suffered. She does have a lot of administrative power in the city’s revival, and may be the reason that Dr. Sigmund Connal even had the charge of the orphanage and mental health facility to begin with. A lot of Lin’s rage seems justified even if she was a little shit. She’s an unsympathic abuse victim, or rather...
A victim that didn’t play perfectly squeaky clean with recovery and got treated like shit for it until she went down this path.
In the postgame she seems to be trying to... speedrun people through therapy? It’s genuinely hard to parse what she actually wants at this point but I’m almost through the postgame story and it’s... something.
So outside of these characters, what exactly is it about Reborn that draws me in?
It’s a genuinely challenging pokemon game. The story is fun. The characters are fun. What the fuck more do you need from an RPG?
Though a big kicker is “Challenge” content in Pokemon means you get the opportunity to come up with things or use things that would never work in the tightly controlled meta of Pokemon multiplayer. Never in a million years would you consider taking some of these pokemon into Gen 7 PU let alone OU. Nobody is going to recommend you run an Ampharos alongside a ground type and spam Discharge and Rock Slide in OU.
But it works fighting Team Meteor a lot. A lot a lot.
If this kind of experimentation was around in multiplayer I would stick with pokemon games far past just the campaign and post game.
So I said I wasn’t going to fully summarize the plot, and that remains true. I am going to go over the gist of both the main game and postgame because they’re both very... tonally different until the end of the main game, where the reveal happens... on the Lin Route. Eventually you all are getting a writeup on the Anna Route and its differences. But I haven’t done it yet, it’s very poorly documented (as in not at fucking all!) so I’m going to be a big big big brain boy and not write about that until I’ve done it!
I’m going to lead into this by saying you can just sort of headcanon a lot of stuff about your protagonist because most of the thing anyone else says about them are untrue, on a textual level. My headcanon is that my little guy was mute. This is going to come up in just a minute. Like the word count of this essay! WhoooaaaaAAaaaaaaAAaow!
So you pick a character sprite, name yourself, and use the ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL and GOOD and COOL and I genuinely mean that is is a MASTERSTROKE of design password system to customize your upcoming experience to either reduce the difficulty so you’re not having to learn how to survive ranked OU ladders in a single player pokemon game or just general customization, check the Pokemon Reborn wiki they’re on there you’ll thank me later.
Amethyst, the local champion, tackles you out the train window as it fucking explodes because she sees a ghost above your head. She tackles you out the big train window because the ghost gives her a big brain moment and she does a BIG tackle to save your life so you don’t do a big fat die. So you shuffle off to the main hall to get your starter and here’s where the first BIG password moment comes in... you can start with ANY pokemon if you put the right password in. If you need an edge I’m not going to judge you. Nobody will. Start with an Arceus named Kitty. Do it, nerd. You can!
So from there you start doing gym challenges because you are, explicitly, here to do the Reborn League, which has just been re opened because they’re trying to restore the city to functionality and they figure that commerce from gym challengers could help.
Unforchies... Team Meteor kind of gets discovered, you break through one of their bases, and you make a game long enemy...
SWAG. JOCKEY. FERN.
Fern is... an asshole idiot loser who’s jealous of your actual swag, it’s canon. Shut up it actually is. He gets progressively angrier and angrier that you’re a silent protagonist throughout the game, and as a disabled guy I decided it would be REALLY funny if he was getting angry that my protagonist who couldn’t speak was such a good listener that it changed people’s lives. Not the Byleth dead eyed stare (Fire Emblem 3 houses takes eventually, mark my words) but just... a guy who’s very clearly listening and trying to communicate but doesn’t have a fucking voice to do it with, and hasn’t had time to fish out his notepad and pen because everything is moving too fast.
It makes Fern’s meltdowns about how the protagonist never says anything funnier to me.
From there the plot escalates. Sometimes you seem to be stopping Team Meteor’s plans by complete coincidence, sometimes you stop them just in the nick of time... sometimes you fail and some pretty fucked up shit happens.
So once you start going against Team Meteor it doesn’t really stop. Pokemon are inherently more respectful to trainers with badges in this region and you having gym battles at all, after a point, is legitimately just so your pokemon will keep listening to you as you get stronger.
The plot seems to be spinning its wheels until you unlock the Sanctum and Adrienne enters the story. Xey’re a fairy type trainer and the fairy type gym leader that went missing over ten years ago... which makes me wonder how people thought they were going to actually complete the Gym challenge if Amethyst hadn’t assigned a new fairy type gym leader yet? Another of the thousand reasons I think Amethyst’s portrayal of her own self insert character is incredibly charming. Well meaning but wildly incompetent is the only vibe I can reasonably get from her based on things like allowing Sigmund fucking Connel to have a job caring for children in the city she’s ostensibly running.
I’m probably going to cap off the first Pokemon Reborn writeup talking about Sigmund Connel. He is genuinely one of the most repugnant villains in all of gaming. He’s even, textually, a transphobe. That’s not conjecture. It’s canon. You find out in the post game when you get infodumped his entire motivation to show that even if bad things happened to him he is not sympathetic, and in fact, said motivations make him worse as a person, not more sympathetic.
Sigmund Connel electrocutes children to mak them behave. Which sounds like saturday morning cartoon villain behavior, but it’s... actually genuinely well researched as a take on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Electroshock Therapy wrapped up in a concept called “ECT”, Electroconvulsive Therapy. His motivation is that his parents fucking sucked and refused to do anything but throw medication at his little sister until she got addicted to it and couldn’t function, separated them when she tried to get him to use his Pichu to give her jolts to keep her awake, and then she downed an entire bottle of pills when their parents wouldn’t let her have more to ease withdrawals and instead made her go cold turkey against her (fired) doctor’s advice.
So now he runs an orphanage that is also an asylum and he shocks kids about it. Also does really horrible things to Saphira. He’s a child predator. I’m not going to sugar coat it. He assaulted her while saying his late sister’s name over and over again. The game absolutely gives a trigger warning for this.
A genuinely repugnant man and a masterwork of a villain. He’s not even the main antagonist. But the main antagonist is his fault.
Basically... everything not motivated by Team Meteor being a bible thumping Arceus cult is motivated by Sigmund Connel and how he wrong the children of Reborn City for years. The angry, terrified god child is because of Connel.
so I’m gonna chew on that for a while and on how to phrase that I REALLY REALLY WANT YOU TO PLAY THIS FREE FUCKING GAME before I start thinking on a part two of this that might take literal fucking months to even start writing.
I’m literally going to play an entire different fucking game before I take on another leg of my Reborn Writeup.
For now, take this disjointed monster as proof you should probably play Reborn. Don’t listen to pokemon fans about anything, especially what makes a good pokemon game. Don’t listen to pokemon haters about anything, either. Especially what makes a good pokemon game.