Pokemon- A Grand Day Out is a "mini hack" of Pokémon LeafGreen, meaning that it's supposed to be short. And it is. Playing it through with liberal use of the speed button, the game took me 2 hours to finish (actual game time of 5 hours). For a bit of context, I am an avid Pokémon fan and I play a lot of Pokémon hacks here on Vizzed. I mostly look for Pokémon hacks with new story lines or settings. I chose to play this one because I wanted something funny and easy to kill some time with. Funny it was, easy not so much.
The game follows a new storyline in an ever-so-slightly modified Kanto Region where you leave on your Pokémon journey from Pallet Town and then get involved in trying to stop Team Rocket from blowing stuff up. The story plays out with a few cutscenes and some battles, so the game is mostly text-driven. The actual story is pretty uninteresting. It progresses at a reasonable pace, but it's very simple and not terribly inspiring. Other than your starter Pokémon, all other wild Pokémon you encounter are the regular ones you'd expect from FireRed/LeafGreen, although the levels are modified slightly. The purpose of this hack, clearly, was just for the rewritten dialogue, which pokes fun at various aspects of Pokémon games, such as the uselessness of NPC dialogue. Most of the NPC's have rewritten dialogue (about 90%), so it's worth talking to all of them.
Since the premise of the game is so goofy, I was hoping that it would be an easy play and I could just breeze through the Pokémon battles, but this was sadly not the case. The starter Pokémon you receive is Cubone, which may sound useful early on, but it becomes very apparent that he is not a terribly good Pokémon for this game. The abundance of Flying Pokémon and Koffing (with Levitate) makes Cubone a frustrating Pokémon to rely on. You have to train him from the beginning to make it through the first battles, and the levels only escalate from there. You do have the option to catch other Pokémon, which I found was absolutely necessary to advance past a few fights as Cubone is useless, even at high levels, without the benefit of his STAB moves. Also, the sheer number of Pokémon that poison you became a real nuisance and made the game annoyingly difficult. Again, having an overleveled Cubone is worthless if he gets poisoned every other turn in a battle, which happens frustratingly often in such a short game. I ran out of cash from continuously spending it all on Antidotes and Potions.
The game itself is finished. The creator implies at the end that he only had a limited amount of time to complete the game, so though I would have liked to see more edited NPC dialogue, I can accept the amount of effort he put in there. The grammar could have used a second look through, but it's not so bad that it really detracts from reading. (For some reason, "Team Rocket" is almost always used as a plural noun.) The game ends rather abruptly with a message from the creator and then a black screen, but you can actually keep going through the blackness and play through the final stage of the game again if you like. Other than that, I found no glitches in the game.
Overall, the game is worth a few chuckles, but past the jokes there was nothing outstanding about it. The time you have to spend level grinding really takes away from the comedy of everything else, especially since the game is so short that you probably won't even get Cubone high enough to evolve. If you have some time to kill and don't mind taking time to train, you'll enjoy the rest of the game. Pokemon- A Grand Day Out is a "mini hack" of Pokémon LeafGreen, meaning that it's supposed to be short. And it is. Playing it through with liberal use of the speed button, the game took me 2 hours to finish (actual game time of 5 hours). For a bit of context, I am an avid Pokémon fan and I play a lot of Pokémon hacks here on Vizzed. I mostly look for Pokémon hacks with new story lines or settings. I chose to play this one because I wanted something funny and easy to kill some time with. Funny it was, easy not so much.
The game follows a new storyline in an ever-so-slightly modified Kanto Region where you leave on your Pokémon journey from Pallet Town and then get involved in trying to stop Team Rocket from blowing stuff up. The story plays out with a few cutscenes and some battles, so the game is mostly text-driven. The actual story is pretty uninteresting. It progresses at a reasonable pace, but it's very simple and not terribly inspiring. Other than your starter Pokémon, all other wild Pokémon you encounter are the regular ones you'd expect from FireRed/LeafGreen, although the levels are modified slightly. The purpose of this hack, clearly, was just for the rewritten dialogue, which pokes fun at various aspects of Pokémon games, such as the uselessness of NPC dialogue. Most of the NPC's have rewritten dialogue (about 90%), so it's worth talking to all of them.
Since the premise of the game is so goofy, I was hoping that it would be an easy play and I could just breeze through the Pokémon battles, but this was sadly not the case. The starter Pokémon you receive is Cubone, which may sound useful early on, but it becomes very apparent that he is not a terribly good Pokémon for this game. The abundance of Flying Pokémon and Koffing (with Levitate) makes Cubone a frustrating Pokémon to rely on. You have to train him from the beginning to make it through the first battles, and the levels only escalate from there. You do have the option to catch other Pokémon, which I found was absolutely necessary to advance past a few fights as Cubone is useless, even at high levels, without the benefit of his STAB moves. Also, the sheer number of Pokémon that poison you became a real nuisance and made the game annoyingly difficult. Again, having an overleveled Cubone is worthless if he gets poisoned every other turn in a battle, which happens frustratingly often in such a short game. I ran out of cash from continuously spending it all on Antidotes and Potions.
The game itself is finished. The creator implies at the end that he only had a limited amount of time to complete the game, so though I would have liked to see more edited NPC dialogue, I can accept the amount of effort he put in there. The grammar could have used a second look through, but it's not so bad that it really detracts from reading. (For some reason, "Team Rocket" is almost always used as a plural noun.) The game ends rather abruptly with a message from the creator and then a black screen, but you can actually keep going through the blackness and play through the final stage of the game again if you like. Other than that, I found no glitches in the game.
Overall, the game is worth a few chuckles, but past the jokes there was nothing outstanding about it. The time you have to spend level grinding really takes away from the comedy of everything else, especially since the game is so short that you probably won't even get Cubone high enough to evolve. If you have some time to kill and don't mind taking time to train, you'll enjoy the rest of the game. |
User Notice 
supercool22 is Offline
| ID: 803671 | 32 Words
supercool22 is Offline
