Pokémon Reborn: Entirely Edgy, Eternally Epic

Pokémon Reborn

Oh boy, this is the big one. Pokémon Reborn is rather infamous among Pokémon fangames. It's one of the most well-known fangames that's not just an Enhancement ROMhack, and it's also near-universally agreed that it's super "cringe".

I originally was going to write about this in my roundup blog for May through August 2022, but since this got so long I cut it off into its own blog!

EPIC MOMENTS IN MANIA GAMING

I want to say first and foremost: I love the hell out of Pokémon Reborn. Genuinely, I think it's largely fantastic in most regards. The plot, the characters, the gameplay, the aesthetics, the music. I love the cringy, dark, "mature" plot. I love the ridiculously diverse and bloated cast of characters. I love the absolute rollercoaster ride that is the game's overall narrative. I love the busted-as-fuck battles. I love that most of the OST is remixes of existing tracks. I love the gen 3 overworld aesthetic mixed with a gen 4 battle aesthetic. I think it's a monumentally impressive project, both in quality and most certaintly in sheer quantity. Because this game is HUUUUUGE. It's huge. Sincerely, this game took me like 150 hours to complete. It's ridiculous, and I love it.

Top 1 reasons to play Pokémon Reborn

It's difficult to even talk about this game because of its gargantuan size. So let's begin with the gameplay, that's always been a core part of Pokemon. And for the most part, the game's entirely faithful to generation 7 of Pokémon. Every Pokémon, move and item up to USUM is in the game, fully featured and everything. The big departure that sets Reborn apart from the core series of games is the introduction of Field Effects. Though there's already some of these in the core games (Grassy/Misty/Electric/Psychic Terrain, as well as Burning/Rainbow/Swamp fields generated by Pledges), Pokémon Reborn expands the effects of these existing fields while also adding an additional 24 extra fields!

AHAHAHAHA! WELCOME TO THE RAINBOW REALM, PHARAOH!!

The effects of these fields vary wildly, but most of them influence a bunch of factors such as:

-Boosting/weakening attacks of a certain type

-Boosting/weakening specific attacks

-Boosting/weakening specific status moves

-Boosting/weakening specific abilities

-Changing the type of certain attacks

-Changing the type chart

-A bunch of other stuff idiosyncratic to specific fields

-Seriously, more fields than not have some weird idiosyncrasy to them

For example, playing using a monotype Normal team, I did benefit the most from the Holy Field, Rainbow Field and Inverse Field. The former two boosted my Normal attacks, while the latter totally inverted the type chart and left me with unresisted STAB Normal attacks!

You too will KYAAA when I sweep you on Holy Field

Thankfully, the game does have a little UI indicator in your move selector that shows if a move is boosted/weakened by the field, but there's also still a lot of stuff you have to memorise yourself. There's also a variety of methods that can change fields to other fields, or destroy fields altogether!

These Fields add a big extra layer of complexity and variety to battles. A battle in an Underwater Field plays out completely differently from one in a Flower Garden, or a Crystal Cavern, or a Glitch Field. The game eases the player into these fields, with early trainers not benefiting from the field too much or not having any altogether, but over the course of the game the fields begin to be more prominent, more impactful and stacked more and more in the AI's favour... But they can always still be exploited by a crafty and versatile player! 

You know it.

And the developers do get very crafty with these fields, there's a lot of strategies that are normally not worth a second look that suddenly become very powerful under the right field. A lot of the late game teams and postgame teams can get especially devious and require pretty thorough planning, or sheer luck, to get past.

And this also leads right into the next point... Reborn's infamous difficulty! Reborn definitely takes the approach many Pokémon fangames take of giving the AI increasingly strong teams as the game goes on, ending with COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES at the tail end of the game, to use that horridly cliché phrase. I should mention that this is tempered by the fact that the AI only starts using consistently perfect IV/EV spreads around the middle point of the game, at which time the player should have the tools needed to easily EV train their own Pokémon. The devs went out of their way to make these aspects of the game more convenient!

THE MOST DIFFICULT POKÉMON GAME

Nevertheless, the game is not afraid to dive into the realm of outright unfairness. I'm talking about custom boss Pokémon with high base stats, battle gauntlets with or without healing, illegal EV spreads (252 in all stats) and eventually even some 6v12 Multi Battles. This is all pretty manageable during the main game, but the gloves really come off during the postgame. There's no mercy there, and the very final series of battles is a veritable slugfest through 3 teams of 6 Pokémon without any healing between battles and plenty of Legendaries to contend with... I've no doubt Reborn is the hardest fangame I've played, and I did resort to using stuff like Max Revives for these battle gauntlets. 

What the fuck

Still, despite the unfairness I never felt the odds were just impossible altogether. And the sheer variety and uniqueness of a lot of these battles kept me interested all the way through in a way Pokémon games often do not. There's a big tendency in these Pokémon games to top off on how interesting the battles are pretty early on, but in Reborn things always stay interesting. From the beginning to the very end. I dare say this has been the most fun I've had tinkering with the gameplay aspect of Pokémon, which is quite something given how many Pokémon games I've played.

If any of this sounds too hardcore, and honestly I can 100% understand if it does, the game comes with a built-in difficulty adjuster! The game has a password system, and some passwords can significantly reduce the game's difficulty. Turning off enemy's IVs and EVs is the easiest way to make the game smoother, but you can also reduce their levels and make the AI unable to use items during battles! 

Me when the AI uses items

There's a variety of other passwords to further customize the run, too, such as a passwords to make the game harder, passwords for monotype runs that make random events guaranteed to give out Pokémon of the matching type, passwords that enable all kinds of QoL features like being able to use HMs without needing to know/be able to learn said HMs, toggling the weather and unlocking some accessibility features right out of the gate rather than through story progression. 

One more aspect of the game that warrants discussion is the game's stinginess at giving away things such as held items, TMs and move tutors. Even with the Pokémon you can catch, they made it so most of the really powerful stuff is only available later in the game, or locked behind events where you can only get one of several powerful options before becoming widely available much later. While all of these items, moves and Pokémon are available before the Elite Four, a lot of them are found much later than they would normally be in the games. This means you're much more reliant on your level up moves for a significant portion of the game as well as relying on weaker mons than you might be used to early on, and bosses will often have access to better Pokémon, held items and moves than you until the very end of the game. The game doesn't go overboard with this thankfully, you won't find the first gym, which uses Electric types, throwing around things like Rotom, Thunderbolts or Choice Items or the like, but it is definitely somewhat noticeable. Again, it's not insurmountable!

Me. Just me.

Anyway... Pokémon games aren't JUST battles. There's more to the gameplay than just that. Pokémon games are adventures! There's exploration! Discovery! Puzzles! Oh god, the puzzles!!

I'm surprised that of all the things this game is infamous for, it's somehow not the puzzles and exploration that take the cake. My god, there is SO MUCH exploration and so MANY puzzles. It's actually ridiculous! Did you know they doubled the amount of steps Repels linger for? And yet I still wound up using like 800 Max Repels over the course of the game! Thank heavens for debug, without it I'd be spending all the prize money I earned on nothing but Repels!

I'm not kidding.

The game's map is truly gargantuan, and often individual areas are kind of a hell to explore. More areas are mazelike and labyrinthine than not, both due to their size, but also because the maps tend to be visually cluttered and filled with stuff that makes it so you can't just run in a straight line from A to B, but need to strenuously walk a specific path and hope you don't accidentally jump off a ledge and have to backtrack again. Navigation is quite simply a pain in the ass for some parts of the game. It's most profound in the Bysboxian Wasteland, which is meant to be a total clusterfuck, but still goes way past that into the realm of utter dreariness. I'm not even going to get started on the sheer utter length of all that is Victory Road. It goes well beyond excessive and loops back around to hilarity. Victory Road in this game fucks, in a good sense.

It also has wild level 100 Pokémon

And it's far from the only time this happens. You only access Route 1 when your Pokémon are nearing level 50, and it's utter hell to traverse. Many areas in the game are lengthy gauntlets. Full disclosure, at some point I just got a debugger mod that let me heal my team anywhere since I got tired of backtracking to the Pokécenter all the time! It also made it much easier to fiddle with my IVs/EVs/Nature/Ability and get Egg Moves...

The upside to this is that the game does have a lot of optional stuff to explore, and exploration does feel truly rewarding and oftentimes fun. There's almost a sort of Metroidvania-esque appeal to it all, as more and more parts of this huge region slowly open up as the game progresses, and areas you've visited so long ago now hold hidden goodies to collect. This is also how you do find most of the game's best stuff, by doing optional sidequests and finding items in hidden-away places.

And then there's the puzzles. Good grief, some of these puzzles... The game tosses in a whole plethora of puzzles all over the place, a lot of them are videogame staples, but the game's not afraid to go into the realm of actual difficulty with these puzzles. The kids gloves are off, these aren't the sorts of puzzles just anyone can solve in under a minute. Some of these will all but require you to either use the internet or pen and paper to solve them. These can be quite the pace killers, and you never really know what the game'll throw at you next. Actual chess? A 7-layered logic puzzle? A double magic box? It's all there, and it's all using the oft-janky Pokémon overworld engine to try and make it work. The UI for these puzzles is sometimes just bad, and can make a difficult puzzle into a frustrating one. Sometimes these are fun to solve. Sometimes they're not. There's a good reason why one of my favourite postgame moments was someone appearing and solving a puzzle for me by bifurcating it with a kickass sword, I didn't wanna go and solve that puzzle myself.

Least insane Reborn puzzle

So, that's the gameplay aspect. Before I get to the plot and characters and narrative, let's seque into the art and music first. The aesthetic.

While I mentioned the maps often being a clusterfuck to traverse, the flipside of this is that maps are overall much richer and prettier than the official Pokémon games they are based on. There's a lot more detail to the maps, there's a boatload of unique spritework for all areas, which lets every area feel meaningfully distinct from the others. The visual polish is also not all frontloaded nor backloaded, one of the big improvements in the game's final release was making sure the visual quality is consistently good across the whole game. From the starting city of Reborn to the very final NEW WORLD ASYLUM, every area is visually polished to look good. Well, except for when the area is meant to look shitty, whether that be because the area is a slum, the area is being distorted or it's literally gen 1 Kanto.

No jest

There's also sort of a sense of awe and scope to some of these areas. No doubt that feeling was why they chose to sacrifice the playability of some areas. While deserts or forests in the official games often just feel like small diversions, in this game they feel like more naturally coherent areas of actual size and vastness. There's something satisfying about that, even if it also makes me want to tear my hair out sometimes. I think the game's central hub of Reborn City in particular deserves praise, as it slowly opens up over the course of the earlygame before getting a huge visual overhaul around the game's midway point. It truly feels like an actual big city, a central hub for the region, and to see it go from kind of a shithole to not a shithole is one of the game's most satisfying moments.

#Blessed

There's also just the sheer variety of areas, beyond what would be expected of a Pokémon game. The game has all these different fields and it wanted to find uses for all of them, so the region has pretty much every biome you can think of, and then a few extra. Some of the later areas in particular stand out, such as the Mirage Tower's bizarre architecture or the Steel-type Fairy Tale-inspired castle gym in the middle of a desert. 

The gym designs in general are really good

The in-battle graphics are mostly good, but are a bit more mixed. The game uses sprites from gen 5 for the most part for Pokémon from gens 1 through 5, but the sprites for gens 6 and 7 are fanmade and don't quite have the same cohesion. A lot of those sprites are definitely much bigger than they should be, a lot of them being maximum size for some reason. It's understandable for big legendaries and what not, but why does Vivillon got to look so much bigger than Butterfree?

The game-original alternate forms like PULSES all have really cool spritework. They straddle the line between Pokémon and body horror pretty well in that deliciously edgy way and fit in better with the regular Pokémon. 

Clawitzer's not looking so good.

The game's music is mostly compositions from GlitchxCity, a lot of them weren't composed for the game itself, but there's also some music original to the game and composed by others. The music is overall good, but it took me some time to get used to most music being remixes of other tracks, and some of the actual choices they made for remixes are downright bizarre, like the Kalos Champion battle track being a wild encounter theme, or the Johto Roaming Beasts being used for Team Meteor Grunts. 

A shortlist of my favorite tracks would be as follows:

THEME OF THE LOSER SQUAD

THEME OF GARCHOMP

THEME OF BUSTED FIELDS

THEME OF MORE BUSTED FIELDS

THEME OF LEEENGH

THEME OF ZETSUBOU

THEME OF TEAM METEOR

THEME OF EDGE

THEME OF CLOWNS

THEME OF DOCTOR SIGMUND CONNAL'S ECT FUNFEST

THEME OF CRAUDBUSSY

THEME OF SAPHIRA EXISTING

THE MOTHERFUCKING ORPHANAGE THEME LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

But, well, all of this so far is of course just an appetizer before the main course. That one thing that Reborn is oh so famous for. It's the ridiculous cast of characters and extremely edgy plot! Just a whole gaggle of people with severe mental traumas going at each other in an absolute hellhole of a region. At least, that was the impression I got going in. It's unusual for the plot to be the thing people talk about the most when discussing a game, but Pokémon Reborn certainly earns that when it goes out of its way to cram in so many characters and so many plot beats. There are moments where there's just over an hour of plot stuff happening, only interspersed with an occasional battle. And that sort of thing just doesn't happen in the core Pokémon games, or even in any of its spinoffs. Only Mystery Dungeon comes close, and Reborn still runs circles around it with its plot. The plot's weird, bloated pretty much impossible to talk about succinctly. So let's not do that, and instead ramble incoherently about parts of the plot. This isn't even covering all of it.

Got no time to talk about the best side character, Santiago. Fuck.

The game immediately makes a big departure from typical Pokémon games by making it clear the player character is an adult. Oh, and the train you were riding into the Reborn region is immediately the target of a terrorist plot and is blown up. Everybody except you and the region's League Admin just fucking dies, so like, don't expect the 5 player avatars you didn't pick to become rivals. They're dead. This immediately sets the tone...

Wait no, seconds later there's the hyperenergetic Electric Gym Leader Julia yucking stuff up and joking about boom booms. Yeah, this game isn't afraid to have total tonal whiplashes at strange times. Welcome to Reborn City.

The despair of shit happening.

It's not long after that you meet two of the recurring rival characters: Victoria, an apprentice from some zen-like Academy for the body and mind, and Cain, a perpetually flirty self-described Pretty Boy. Not exactly your typical Pokémon rivals, these guys aren't exactly out to become the Champion and their character arcs go to very different places instead. Some time later the third rival also appears, Fern, and he's like if Blue was every bit as obnoxious and smug as fan comics made him look, then cranked up to eleven, then cranked up to twelve, after sniffing a line of smugboy coke for smugboys. Basically, Fern is the best damn character in the game. Just a huge asshole. The biggest dick around. I love that guy. What an asshole. Love him. Asshole.

It also becomes immediately clear that Reborn City is just a shitty place to live. There's gang activity all over the place, more and more people are becoming homeless every day, the whole city is grimy and mucky and just all around grody. Unlike in regular games, people in the city will just engage you in Pokémon battles, and most of them are poor as hell so you barely get any prize money to buy items with. 

Also, literal gangs of Pokémon

And soon after that, you also meet the game's Evil Team: Team Meteor. Honestly, their first showing isn't much to write about, their motivations don't become clear until a lot later into the game. There's actually a good reason why they're called Team Meteor! But they do immediately feel different from other Evil Teams because the game actually does just outright treat them as terrorists. There will be a whole lot of encounters with Team Meteor throughout the game, and they have a much more complex hierarchy of notable members than the usual Evil Team. 

The writing for them in this earliest encounter is just the generic sort of "Grr, I'm a Grunt! Stop interfering!" though, which is a shame. Not sure why they didn't spice that up when they rewrote the whole earlygame for the final release.

They also have edgy names!

Well, to summarize the whole game would just take too long. But to do it shortly, the first part of the game explores the entirety of Reborn City itself, as it becomes increasingly clear that much of the city's dilapidated state is caused directly or indirectly by Team Meteor, having caused the excessive water pollution, overgrowth of flora and total wreckage of the city's power grid 10 years ago. 

Following this more and more of the rest of the region opens up, including locations such as that Academy for the body and mind, a town where things keep randomly teleporting, a whole toxic wasteland of random bullshit, an honest-to-goodness circus area, a giant fuck-off desert and an enormous mountain range that would make Mt Coronet from Sinnoh blush in inadequacy. Along the way you even get locked out of Reborn City altogether for a long while, and when you come back it's suddenly much more pristine, clean and proper. Homelessness is on the decline, as is gang activity, but Team Meteor is still lurking out there. It's honestly an amazing moment in the narrative, as all the doom and gloom gets mixed with moments of triumph and victory. The path there is much more messy than in usual Pokémon games, but it's be a lie to say the game doesn't have a happy ending. Well, mostly. A lot of people still kinda just die as the plot goes on. Oh, and the game doesn't shy away from addressing that this new pristine Reborn City also still has a lot of the problems the old one had, just tucked away more behind a veneer of shimmer and cleanliness. But still, it's an improvement!.

Ok. So who are the driving forces of the plot? Well, there's a lot. There's 18 Gym Leaders, there's the Elite Four, there's your Rivals, a bunch of miscellaneous characters, some recurring side characters, and a whole gaggle of named Team Meteor members. It'd be impossible to discuss them each individually in depth, but I'll try to at least go over some of them group by group, as a lot of these characters are tied to each other. I should note that a lot of these characters are introduced pretty early in the game, and you'll have met pretty much all important characters long before you get your final Gym Badge. You may only battle the final Gym Leader and the Elite Four at the end of the main game, but you'll already know them all too well long before then. 

Most normal Julia moment

The first squad of people would be a group of 4 Gym Leaders who all went to like Pokémon University together. And they're immediately just a total gaggle of mental issues. Julia the hypercaffeinated Electric Leader managed to be the most sane of the bunch despite her penchant for explosions, trying and failing miserably to keep the group of four together. Florinia the Grass Leader has long given in to despair and has adopted the persona of an emotionless robot to hide away from her feelings, to nobody's approval. Just everybody is dunking on how ridiculous her way of speaking is, and she just stonewalls them all until the very end of the game when she finally opens up about her feelings again. 

oh no

Amaria and Titania are the Water and Steel Leaders and are like a 10/10 in the yikes scale of terrible relationships. Amaria seems like she has it all together at first, but more and more cracks begin to show when it becomes clear she is violently depressed. And I mean violent in the sense of jumping off a waterfall and trying to outright murder the player when she convinced herself you're the cause of Titania breaking up with her. Well, turns out Titania never TRULY loved Amaria, but was just dating her because that was the only thing keeping Amaria afloat at all. This has left Titania completely fucking exhausted, and pretty much the coldest bitch around. She'll just outright stab Meteor Grunts with her Aegislash and leave them dead and she's always got a biting comeback to anyone who steps up to her. Players all hate Amaria, but Titania? Well, they either love or hate her. And I love Titania. She's epic. She's Reborn personified, extremely edgy, extremely serious, extremely hilarious. Whenever Titania shows up things are going to be fucking awesome. Hell yeah, Titania. I also think Titania might be aroace, but it's hard to tell. She's definitely entirely over romance and sex for the foreseeable future at least.

She's sick of all this BS.

Fuck Amaria though. If that whole above paragraph sounded like a mess, that's because it is. The way the plot handles her depression is one of the few times I think the game makes a gross misstep. Her turn from got-it-all-together to sudden breakup with Titania (who was barely established as her girlfriend at that point?) happens super abruptly and before you know it she's committing suicide... But then loses her memory, instead. But then gets them back to have ANOTHER break-up and have another breakdown where she tries to kill the player, but only on one route... But in the other route she still finds out Titania doesn't really truly love her, but she keeps dating her anyway, which is super manipulative of Amaria!! I know Amaria has literal depression, but the way the game makes it manifest is just bizarre, especially when she lashes out on the player and nobody ever really holds her accountable for it. I mostly think the game's representation and diversity is pretty spot-on, but they really just dropped the ball with Amaria.

Actual murder???
Amaria's far from the only one to do this, but the others either apologize or die. Not Amaria.

And did you know Florinia's brother is Fern?! Those two share much of their character arcs, with Florinia trying to guide Fern away from his PATH TO THE DARK SIDE because at some point Fern is just sick of everybody giving him shit so he just switches to the Evil Team since they're definitely gonna get the last laugh. And this all seems ridiculous, but THEN the game drops a bombshell that Fern was ACTUALLY the protagonist in a previous timeline... Because, yes, there's a previous timeline! This is just Zero Escape now! But now Fern's no longer the protagonist, and it's just eating away at him. Honestly I love how he goes the whole game being a massive shitlord and only at the very last minute decides to say fuck it to everything and just retire out of the plot, but not before Titania manhandles the shit out of his face, which he kinda had coming by then. He does get better in the epilogue, and he does finally get a moment of reconciliation with Florinia. 

Seeing Fern break down after 100 hours of smugness was EPIC

And this is just the beginning. Cain gets a whole arc about how the reason why he's going on this whole journey is that he ran away from home because his shitty parents didn't approve of his bisexuality, and he's pretty much been homeless since. He spends the whole game continually running away from this, and helping other people instead, until he gets yeeted into a Black Hole by a Gardevoir. Uh, he's fine though, and he does get a reconciliation in the postgame! Did I mention this game is weird??

I do love the visuals of the boss of Cain's quest

His sister Aya's not much better off, she's left in the spot of Poison Leader following Cain's absence, and she kind hates it, since her gym is her home, and now she's stuck alone with her shitty parents. To make things worse, she also spends much of the later half of the game kidnapped, so she doesn't get much time to shine as a character. She does finally get to kick ass in her own quest in the postgame.

Based Aya Moment

Aya's also dating the Rock Leader, Hardy, who's also Titania's brother. And Hardy's like the only character in the game who doesn't have a bundle of baggage. He's just a rockin' dude who wants to help out. Perhaps he's even too eager to help out, since the game keeps shitting on the poor guy for how much he obsesses over helping Aya. But he does mean sincerely well, which is more than some of the guys in the game can say. He's overall strangely normal in a cast of so many utterly deranged people.

Nerd

Speaking of obsessive dudes, there's Bennett the Bug specialist. This guy immediately radiates nerd energy. He's extremely easy to fit into a locker. He spends his whole life obsessing over Buy types and simping for the strange girl who insists she's the daughter of his mom even though she's clearly not. This guy simps so hard for her that he joins a cult, except that cult is actually just part of Team Meteor... But then he realizes that's stupid and gets over his crush, but he's still in it since he feels he owes them since they are gonna promote him to the rank of Elite Four. This, of course, makes no sense, why would he stick around with a bunch of terrorists because of that? And Bennett later realizes that too, so he just peaces out of the whole affair altogether and helps out the player instead. It's interesting how Bennett does manage to claw a way back out of that deep pit he dug for himself, and it also helps he gets the makeover of a lifetime. He's still a nerd, but he does get a sweet outfit and cool new glasses. And some much-needed hairgel.

The despair of using Bug types.

Oh, one thing I definitely HAVE to talk about is everything surrounding the ORPHANAGE. God, the ORPHANAGE. Everything that sprouts from it is truly EPIC. Like, it's incredible how this weird segue after the third gym where you raid some guy's bizarro electro-torture orphanage turns out to be the driving crux behind most of the game's plot, in the weirdest ways.

LET'S GOOOOOOOOOO

Ok, so, there's this doctor. This wacky guy, Sigmund Connol. He grows up with these absolutely miserable parents, just the worst dad a dad can be shy of being actively abusive and a mom who does nothing to make things better. Then his sister gets some sort of mental illness that causes her to basically become bedridden and homebound 24/7. None of the treatments seem to work, and between all the books your parents make you read (but only non-fiction, because fiction will POISON YOUR MIND) you find a book on ElectroConvulsive Therapy. Oh, and you have a Pichu. Well, it's obvious where this is going...

Uh, actually, Sigmund using ECT on his sister goes well. She feels better and everything. Wow, that's unexpected. But uh-oh, terrible parents find out and are NOT happy. No more ETC, and no more expensive medication either. Sister is miserable again and keeps asking Sigmund for HAPPY PILLS, which he can't give her. Withdrawal symptoms. Then Sigmund sees a Jirachi and wishes his sister would feel better.

Aaaaand then she ODs on the happy pills that magically made its way to her, and she dies. Parents are miserable, and Sigmund is left thinking he could've saved her if he'd used ECT. Well, it's too late for her, but there's still so many other kids to save...

A cool thing is that you actually briefly play as him during the postgame.

ENTER DOCTOR SHOCKO, SCOURGE OF THE ORPHANS. Seeing delusions? ECT! Having an episode of OCD? ECT! Troubles with authorities? ECT! A mild cause of autism? ECT! Gender dysphoria? Oh, he wishes he could've used ECT! But that kid who's disturbed and thinks you're a ECT-obsessed creep?! ALL OF THE ECT!! Yeah, Sigmund's not a great physchologist. His answer to everything is a standard therapeutic talking session and a heaping dose of ECT. Just, all of the ECT. Excessive amounts of it. Screamings orhpans all over the Lapis Ward levels of ECT. Jesus Christ, Sigmund. 

So yeah, everybody else is pretty upset about this, so the player goes to raid the orphanage to rescue a recently orphanaged member of the Elite Four (yeah one of the E4 is like a 10 year old girl) after her dad threw himself off a bridge (Fern was there to laugh about it, too, in an epic Fern Gamer Moment), and we get to meet the ORPHANAGE SQUAD.

ON THE LEFT SIDE: THE BELROSES. 

There's Laura, who's got a hyperfixation on the number 8 and hates 7 like Mista from Golden Wind hates 4. Somehow the most normal of the bunch, she's ever the optimistic type who believes everybody deserves a second chance. She gets together with Bennett in the end. That's nice. Honestly Laura spends too much time being offscreen, I wish she got some more focus, especially when she gets kicked out of the Elite Four, but before we get too much time to deal with that she's already solved it herself.

Bennett & Laura & Bennett & Laura

There's Charlotte, who's the EDGIEST EDGE TO EVER EDGE. She burnt down the house of her parents by accident, and in order to cope with it she made it her thing. She's the Fire Leader now, and she's always got a sassy comeback to everything. She's like Titania, if Titania was twice the bark and none of the bite. She's epic. And then at the tail end of the plot it turns out she didn't even do it. She built her whole personality over a trauma for an event she didn't even cause in the first place. Big oof. But she does keep the sass, and the turns the troll up to 11 and decides to become the Fire AND Ice Leader, with a big hearty middle finger to the rules that say she can't. Epic.

Understandable.

And then there's the Queen Supreme of Mean, the Tzar of Trauma. Titania's Titania. The Meteor-slayer, Connol would-be-flayer, the ultimate non-player, Saphira. Saphira has one goal: Protect her sisters. Actually, Saphira has one REAL goal: KILL SIGMUND CONNOL. Epic. Based. Though in the end someone even more epic gets to Connol first. Too bad for Saphira, but she still gets to stomp across the game and exert her trauma over everybody else. You go, Saphira. 

EPIC!!!

ON THE RIGHT SIDE: THE WONDER TWINS. 

First there's Anna. Anna is a small magical child who can perceive people and situations as they truly are. She sees scars, she sees strings, she sees bright lights. She sees the true forms. Or at least, that's what she says. Nobody else sees any of that stuff Anna's talking about. But her Jirachi agrees with her! But it's just a doll. Or is it? Anna goes through the entire game seemingly several steps ahead of everybody else, as if it were all a game of chess. 

Whenever Anna speaks tbh

Naturally it turns out that, yes, all the things she has been seeing are true. Or are they? Perhaps not in THIS timeline. That's because this extremely conspicuous small child is actually, GASP, a Zero Escape character!! SHE TAPPED INTO THE MORPHOGENETIC FIELD, SHE SHIFTED HERE FROM ANOTHER TIMELINE, SHE WAS ACTUALLY OFF-SCREEN THE WHOLE TIME AND-

Except, no, that's not quite it. It seems that what really happened is that the whole game of Reborn has happened once before. The same characters, the same villains, the same conflict. Except you weren't there, so Fern had to be the hero instead. Obviously, he fucked up. Then the Anna of that world made a desperate wish, to go back and try this whole thing over again, this time with some divine intervention from Anna and a few other people who're in on her plan. Apparently the cost was pretty great, someone had to give up their body to do it. All of this was to guide the player to be the protagonist instead, much to the unknowing frustrating of Fern, who apparently vaguely recalls his lost protagonist status and is quite miffed about it.

Wish upon a star...

Anna's just a real fun take on this type of character. She even has a whole postgame route where she takes the reins if the player takes a very specific path through the game, where her desire to guide the timeline and fix all the messes she made causes her to go somewhat overboard, and also start suspecting the player might actually be the villain all along... It sounds interesting! But it's also not the route I did, so alas.

Oh, there's also Noel. He's there. Poor Noel. He's aggressively bland, intentionally so. He's about as Aspergers-coded as a character can be, and it's pretty clear he's got a chip on his shoulder over how everybody prefers to talk with his strange and magical and enigmatic sister. He even specializes in Normal types. All of this is exacerbated quite badly when the twins' father finally reunites with them, and has a pretty obvious bias towards Anna since she reminds him so much of his late wife, who also had some sort of clairvoyance, which suggested to me this is actually the THIRD timeline rather than the second, though we never learn about that. Thankfully Noel does get to reconciliate with his dad in the postgame, and even gets in on the fucky wucky magic power nonsense that's going on too. Good for him!

Cute doll :3

Also, I wanna briefly discuss what an absolute mess of a man this dad is. Radomus Dadomus, supposed Chessmaster and Psychic Leader. A guy who lives alone in a huge castle with his horny Gardevoir (yes, I know, mega cringe), a castle which he bought for his wife by selling the game's plot coupons to a bunch of powerful trainers. Trainers who then became targets for Team Meteor, since Radomus belonged to that team and stole these items from them, along with a lot of money. Good going, Radomus, you just painted some huge targets on the backs of those unsuspecting people. 

And later on in the game it turns out he just gave away his kids to protect them, right into the hands of the Good Doctor Sigmund Connol, who loves ECT so damn much. Good going, Radomus. And then it turns out he can't even play chess for shit!! He's a giant fraud! A conman! He had me totally duped, I think this Willy Wonky motherfucker was some kind of chess god ahead of everybody else, but all this clown of chaos, this bard of all things bad did, was cause a metric ton of problems in the backstory and spend the whole plot barely making up for it. What a delicious mess of a man. What a wreckage of a rancid dad. But he does try. And he somehow still manages to be among the better parents in the game. 

Faker!

AND SMACK-DAB IN THE MIDDLE, THE FINAL ORPHAN: LIN. GOD DAMN FUCKING LIN. LIN. Well, actually, I can't talk about Lin yet. The magnificence of Lin will have to wait.

Uhh, but I can talk about Shade. Oh yeah, Shade. Shade is so good. Shade's this SPOOPY GHOOST, this translucent transparent entity of PURE DARKNESS, wearing a dumb hat, with a BLOOD RED AURA and a GIANT TOOTHY TRIANGLEY GRIN. He's super edgy, guys, he's real spooky. Nobody knows what or who he is, he's clearly not human, and he's got his gym set up in an abandoned power plant.

MFW the kids movie doesn't properly address 9/11

And you go to the Gym and it's, like, just snuff films. Every screen you come across has a little clip of what seems like somebody dying, and some of those deaths do actually happen, and it's super scary. The music in the gym is the THEME OF EDGE, and his gym battle theme is REVERSED. It's super spooky!

AND HE WAS DRIPPING WITH HYPERREALISTIC BLOOD

He mostly just says ellipses, or says some vague riddles. What is he up to? What is with this guy? Sometimes he appears and pulls some trick to save the heroes. He's clearly working FOR us. Anna clearly likes Shade, she calls him Mister Shadow, and they're clearly buddies. What's going on?

And then we finally find out during the postgame. Shade was that person from the previous timeline who gave up his body. His female body, in fact. As it turns out, Shade was a patient of DOCTOR SIGMUND CONNOL, trying over and over again to just get him to sign the papers to begin his transition, and Sigmund Connol just kept refusing to budge. The whole scene is honestly brilliant, we get Anna immediately doing her clairvoyant girl thing where she sees Shade for who he truly is, we get the dialogue between Shade and Connol mirroring a dialogue Connol overheard with his own awful father, with Shade accusing Connol of the same thing Connol's dad accused Connol's dead sister's doctor of, and overall I got the impression this whole scene hit very close to home for the writers with all of the administrative tape and having to perform these rites of gender normative to actually get some old geezer to agree you're gender normative enough to transition. It's nothing I have personal experience with, but it certainly seems to line up with stories I've read of people here in the Netherlands who are frustrated at how tedious and protracted and oft archaic the process is. 

And so Shade pulls the ultimate trick on Jirachi's price, giving up a body he didn't feel he belonged in anyway and getting a kick-ass CREEPYPASTA SPOOKY ghostbody instead which he can use to fuck around with people with and do supernatural crime solving and whatnot. Shade: 1, Jirachi: 0.

Before I get to Team Meteor, I also wanna talk about MILFy mommy dearest Serra, Ice Queen supreme, two-toned bubblegum hairdo, dead inside. Despite being a very understated and emotionally pretty reserved person, she's always stealing the scene with her complete deadpan reaction to all the ridiculous absolute bullshit that is going on in this game. She's getting too old for all this nonsense, but she's got to put up with it all anyway, and she even gets to have some cute family moments with her son and her newfound family in the end. She might also wind up dating the absolute mess that is Radomus, so, good luck Serra. I think that if anyone can weather that storm, it's her. 

Peak aesthetic

Ok, now we can get to Team Meteor. More like Team Meatier, cause there's a lot to unpack here.

First and foremost, I do think the game handles its Evil Team kinda weirdly overall. Like I said before, Team Meteor are explicitly terrorists. They blow up the train to the city, killing many people. They pollute the water which no doubt wrecks the region's ecology and must've lead to many deaths. They use the concept of PULSE Pokémon, Pokémon that are modified and supercharged way beyond their normal power level and far beyond anything that's healthy, to cause all kinds of disasters: Three whole wards in Reborn City are wrecked by Tangrowths causing massive growths, leading to many deaths. They put a whole city under a sleeping spell. They install an honest-to-goodness long-range cannon in one city to wreck an entire other city. They were planning to blow up a volcano to render the Academy of Mind and Body place totally unusable. They kill lots and lots of people.

Me @ Team Meteor

And they kinda just, get away with it? Titania and Saphira do wind up killing some Grunts, and there's some grumbling about the ethics of it, but nobody else ever offers a reasonable alternative. They never get captured or confined until the very end of the game, at which point their whole leadership has already either converted or died... It's weird. Why aren't they arrested? Why don't we knock them out after we beat them in battle? The Grunts all have names so we keep fighting the same two dozen or so Grunts over and over throughout the whole game. It's weird! The game keeps trying to be different and more mature than the official games, but the Grunts still have this weird contractual immunity to everyone but Titania and Saphira.  

It also gets kinda weird when a lot of the Admins go through character arcs, but it's also like, hey. You're responsible to some extent for all those people dying, and the game sometimes brings this up but doesn't really do anything with it.

When the admin is too busy meming to apologise

Case in point: Ace. Team Meteor's technological expert, master magician and all-around trickster. They love pulling all sorts of tricks and illusions on the player, they're unfailingly affable and loyal to their found family in Team Meteor. They're also enabling terrorism, but the game never really explains why they do that, or why they seem totally OK with it. They just put on their usual jester routine, twirl a lot, say some legit good dialogue and then leave the scene. OK, but... What about all those people who died?? What about them, Ace? And this is a recurring issue with all of the Team Meteor members who have doubts about their plans and whatnot.

You sure are!

ZEL is the amalgam of three people: Zero, Eve and Lumi. For them we do get some explanation, Zero was just some low tier Grunt, while Eve and Lumi were rather forcefully roped into the whole thing when a PULSE experiment on a Magneton went totally haywire. But the thing is, Eve is the one making all the PULSEs. She's doing it under duress, but still, she does help out Team Meteor. The game has like the biggest jerk of them all call her out on it, almost as if the devs both knew they had to call this out, but they also made someone super unlikable do it because they clearly like Eve and Lumi and feel bad for them. And, yeah, their circumstances are sad, but still... A lot of people died!! This would be less of an issue if they weren't so evil of a team!

Terra and Flora have a point

The same goes for Agents like Blake, or when Fern suddenly joins Meteor, or the whole messy situation with Corey and Taka... Pretty much everybody on Team Meteor gets humanized to a great degree, but it also makes it harder and harder to buy that all these people kept participating in all these horrible activities. Even when it's made clear that desertion would lead to death, it doesn't really absolve them either. How did things even get so bad?

Enter Sirius. No doubt the flattest character in the game who has any notable importance. This guy basically exists to absolve other characters of sin by being the cause of all the problems. Whenever the story needs someone to do something heinous and irredeemable, they let Sirius do it. When the story needs to explain how anyone works for this Team if it's so evil, they have Sirius corrupt it from the inside. Know that parable of the frog in the ever-heating water? Sirius is the one putting the water to the flame. Why is he doing that? Hell if I know. Something about making his mark on history. The guy's real name is Dick Clark or something like that. We never really get to know why, because Sirius's goal in the plot is to cause problems on purpose, so others don't have to. 

Such a douche that you get to 12v6 him

Ok so what does Team Meteor actually want? Well... That depends on who you ask! Team Meteor is interesting in the sense that their goals and methods evolve over the course of the game. Team Meteor is an outgrowth of a group of people who've existed long before the game began, people who gathered around a meteor that is said to be the cradle Arceus made for itself when it decided it wanted to make itself birth on Earth. A whole society was built around this meteor. (You don't learn this until like 40 hours into the game, LOL)

Yeah they go, like, full Christianity with it

But at some point, the head of this group got murdered by some thug who wanted to steal his MacGuffins (the very same that Radomus later stole and scattered). A lot of details are vague, but the whole society like, declined over time, and Reborn City was basically built on top of what remained of it. The group's son, Solaris, is pissed about this, how this holy site is being desecrated, so he forms Team Meteor to scare off the people of Reborn City and reclaim the holy land.

Your logic makes me cry, Solaris

Uh... It's not the best or most sane plan. Clearly this dude is loaded and has a ton of resources and brainpower to his team, but he's going about it in a terrible way. At first it wasn't so violent, but then Sirius joined and of course things got violent. They turned to terrorism and basically almost succeeded in making Reborn such a hellhole that it'd be uninhabitable and had to be deserted. But they didn't succeed enough, and then you arrive to foil their plans. 

But what if, actually, Solaris is in the minority in Team Meteor? What if most of the people there have a different goal? Most of the Grunts and some of the leadership aren't interested at all in Solaris's reactionary goal of rebuilding this sacred land. They want to get in on this Meteor to wield the power of Arceus using their PULSE technology. After all, isn't that a much more enticing goal? What better way to convince people to join your cause? If your life is broken, beyond repair... Then Team Meteor is a ticket to a New World. A chance to use divine power to just try again. Bring back those loved ones you miss. Undo your mistakes. So what if people die along the way? We can bring them back, too! Forget about the past, let's look to the future.

Kore ga kibou da

In the end, Solaris finds himself surrounded not by people who share his vision, but people with visions diametrically opposed to him. The main antagonist isn't undone by us, no, it's his own supposed underling who supplants him and kills him for us. Well, Solaris, I can't say I'm sorry. 

THIS IS WHERE THINGS BECOME TRULY EPIC

So yeah, the goal is to make a New World. All under the new leadership of the ULTIMATE GIRLBOSS: Lin. That enigmatic woman who has been climbing the ranks of Team Meteor, wrecking shop wherever she goes. Seriously, she destroys everybody who tries to fight her. She outright decapitates the region's Champion. She pulls of a number off impossible feats, such as walking underwater, being impaled by a sword and just walking it off, getting punched in the face and just tanking it without a flinch. She's ridiculous. 

Roe & Wade v Lin

Oh, and she is extremely edgy. All of her dialogue is just oozing with edge, she barely says anything and when she does it's like nothing but a barrage of one-liners that show of how far above everybody else she is, how everybody else is but a bothersome fly, how justice doesn't exist, how power is power, how nothing ever helps, and how she's gonna be the abortion in the sacred womb of the world. Seriously, she says that. It's actually maybe the best line in the game because I'm 100% convinced the devs were laughing their asses off writing it.

Because Lin isn't Lin. 

THE TRUE LIN

After a whole maingame that has been one big buildup with a battle against the ultimate evil, you finally get to beat Lin twice in some of the hardest battles in the game,and... She just unravels. And I mean that not mentally, she barely even flinches over her loss. No, I mean physically, she just falls to pieces. She was never a true person. She was just a puppet. A marionette. 

It turns out that Lin who was edging it up the whole game was just a construct by the real Lin, an orphan not that much older than Anna. Yes, an orphan from... DOCTOR SIGMUND CONNOL'S ORPHANAGE. Like I said, everything truly epic comes from that place.

So, Lin's got this whole backstory where her dad is all but implied to have sexually assaulted her, her mom gave her up and she basically became a street urchin. I'm not clear in what order the next bits happen, but she does two things:

1) She is found by Terra, a plain and normal girl, and temporarily taken into her family. Lin starts to affect Terra, who was feeling depressed, and basically turned her into like the world's ultimate clown. We'll get to Terra in a bit. At some point, Lin leaves.

2) Sigmund Connol finds out about Lin and uses his authority to have her instituted in his orphanage. Lin then goes on to basically be the ultimate troll and make things miserable for the other orphans. Something's not right with this Lin, so none of them particularly are willing to spend time with her. Nobody but Anna, who puts up with Lin, perhaps knowing she's the real final boss. One day Anna wipes Lin at chess so bad that Lin has a Lin Moment and Sigmund Connol does something with her, and Lin's never seen at the orphanage again. Lin leaves.

Shut the fuck up nerd

Then, whilst wandering the streets, Lin somehow falls into a seam somewhere that leads directly to that meteor that's still hidden away under the city and gets pretty badly wounded. Turns out Baby Arceus is there, and Lin makes quick friends with it. Epic, now this utter troll of a child has an Arceus, but she's also stuck in this weird alternate reality called New World. Lin gets sick of being Homestuck, so she has Arceus make a construct she can use to manipulate others to free her. And she succeeds, the construct comes to Lin with all the items she needs, the MacGuffins to open the path to the New World and the PULSE Machine to increase the power of Arceus and make it weird and cool and different. 

What a useful construct, what a powerful puppet!

I talk, of course, about the player character.

Wait, what? 

Yeah, this is where Reborn adds another layer to its multilayer cake of absolute fuckery. We're going into the realm of WEIRD META STUFF now. The game never outright breaks the fourth wall, I think, but to Lin the reality she used to exist in is now nothing but a game, something for her to toy with. Now that she's free to leave the New World when she wants, she realizes she quite likes where she is now that she has the choice to leave. Instead, she's gonna cause problems on purpose and the player's gonna solve them, since that's fun. And throughout all of this, she's convinced that she's the one in control of the player's actions. 

Who's in control?

So, that's what happens. The postgame has Lin causing all sorts of reality warping, and it's up to the player to help the surviving cast of characters fix it. Along the way they finalize their character arcs, some characters who got Black Hole'd or otherwise died during the main game get brought back by Lin, but also get infected by UMBRAL ENERGY that causes them to lose all personal inhibitions. These Umbral battles are a lot of fun, since they're basically battles over the opponent's soul. 

Lin gets so many good lines.

All the while, Lin communicates from afar using the power of Arceus to give some pithy remarks, troll the player a bit, give alternative insights on the events occurring or discuss her own feelings and her dissatisfaction with how people are typecasting her as a villain now. It's honestly all pretty compelling stuff, Lin does some good bits of trolling and there's some pathos there. At this point she already has to power to bring people back from the dead, so in a sense she did complete the goal of Team Meteor. But she's not just gonna bring anybody back, no, she's only bringing back the people that are fun, the ones who are interesting. 

In the end it becomes pretty clear that Lin's kinda just very messed up as a person, and it's left up to the player to choose whether to save her when they finally defeat her, or just stand by as her precious Arceus kills her. Of course, I chose to save her! Because I adore Lin, honestly. How couldn't I? Lin's an absolute rollercoaster of an antagonist.

I sure am, Lin. I sure am.

But what if... Lin wasn't where it ended. What if there's one final person to discuss? 

I'm talking about the CLOWNIEST CLOWN TO EVER CLOWN, of course. THE ENTIRE CIRCUS. THE CLOWN AROUND TOWN. THE GODDESS OF CLUSSY. TERRA.

YEEEEEES

Terra is a trip and a half. Terra is love, Terra is life. Terra is me, but amplified five fold. No character had me reach for the screenshot button quite like Terra. Terra was created to be hated, to be despised. Her role in this farce is to be a wellspring of cringe unending, and I am the baby mewling to suckle evermore from that unending spring. I love for Terra's cringe. I adore it.

Me when Terra

Much like Titania, people either love or hate Terra. But more often than not they hate Terra. Terra has the uncanny ability to inspire endless seething in some people. It's amazing. It's fantastic. I think even the devs hated writing for her. What an absolute icon.

Terra doesn't believe in 100%. She gives 1337%.

The first time Terra appears in the circus area, I think the writers hadn't a full grasp on her yet. Terra was her usual clown self there, but it was pretty clear she wasn't entirely in her element just randomly tossing around CHAOS CHAOS. Terra works better when there's someone for her to bounce off against, and her polycule just isn't the best source of that.

Enter the LABRADORRA TOURNAMENT OF BOOTY. Terra's turned herself into a PC program, and while everybody thinks her plug has been pulled, she reveals she's still alive and kicking, and she's thirsting for a bullshit out of nowhere tournament arc. Hell yeah. 

Terra Moment

What follows is an extended sequence of character moments, constantly interrupted by Terra delivering a cascade of absolute roasts against anyone and anything, all of them absolute bangers. Terra just goes complete nutso in this sequence, completely off the rails and off the cuff ridiculousness, and it's absolutely glorious. All of the banter, all of the stupid gags. And of course the Nanu x Lt Surge slash fanfic. Beautiful. Gorgeous. Impeccable. 

Forbidden word.

In the end, Terra is undone by the true master hacker of them all, Florinia. Sweet, sodding Florinia, who had prior been absolutely verbally decimated by Titania, gets the last laugh against the whole tournament by being the true MVP in the end. Wonderful. Love to see it. At that moment Terra has a realization that it seems Lin doesn't really care about her anymore the way she thought Lin did, and commits Alt+F4.

But, y'know, of course she comes back during the postgame. But she's different? She's Umbral now.  Her hair's just green now, and she talks in a very deadpan way. Oh no, she's having a sincerity scene. It turns out Terra's life was indeed very boring, bland and typical back before she met Lin. Every day blended together, nothing felt meaningful. Move along, Amaria, there's a new depressed woman in town, and her name is Terra. 

Shocking?!

And honestly? This isn't even a surprise. Terra's bizarre and manic behaviour until then always did seem like it was destined to be a mask to cope with reality. But it's not truly just a mask, is it? It's also still part of who Terra is, she does find joy in acting in that ridiculous way. That's also why when the scene ends, she goes back to doing it. The difference is that she's more aware now of when she's going too far, and when she needs to tone it down. The very final scene with Terra after the postgame credits if you got a high enough relationship value with Terra isn't her doing more antics like usual, but her visiting her parents, without the clowning around, and finally having an earnest talk with them. Because the thing with Terra is, her parents were never abusive or anything, by all standards they seem like good and healthy people, they did unquestionably take Lin in when she was homeless, after all. 

Anyway, I like Terra. She's funny, and there's just enough person behind that clown façade to hit that sweet spot of character depth. She may have set out to be cringe, but in the end, she turned out to be the most based of them all. 

OH SHIT OH FUCK IT'S LIN AND TERRA

Ok, I think that's enough rambling about Reborn. Things got kinda nutty partway through this whole discussion. Clearly the effects of Terra on my psyche are still affecting the writing of this blog. It's a good thing Sigmund Connol isn't here to ECT me. Oh, and speaking of Connol, you might be wondering, who did kill him? And how did he die? Seems there's still a little bit left to say after all...

After the whole orphanage raid, Connol for some reason decides the best way to get the orphans back under his lawful custody is to ally himself with the terrorist gang Team Meteor (why???), so he's often seen just hanging around with Team Meteor for much of the game. He's barely a presence though, and doesn't even fight you for most of the game. It's only near the end of the main game that everything he's done starts to catch up to him, as while he's running away from Saphira, who does he wind up with but Lin? That is, the green-haired Lin puppet. Lin and Connol don't much care for each other, and Connol might've wished he'd died at Saphira's hands instead.

This is what happens when you don't support trans rights, Connol.

I don't know exactly what Lin did with Connol, but the result is that Connol's mangled corpse is left in one of the PULSE machines while the PULSE Mr Mine puppeteers his body and commands his Pokémon to help it fight in battle. Or was Connol still alive? He's certainly in no condition to speak if he was, but months later his corpse is still there either way. It seems like the world moved on from Sigmund Connol, and nobody has any more to say about him. 

Why, I can't think of a better spot to end this blog on! Connol truly is the Pokémon Reborn character ever made, so much that I misspelled his name 26 times in this blog and am adamantly going to NOT correct it! Perhaps that, also, is in line with the energy that Pokémon Reborn radiates. 

Ok, so yeah. Wow. Pokémon Reborn. What a game. You don't spend 150 hours on a Pokémon RPG without liking it. I'm still rather surprised I played it all the way to the end! 

So yes, I would recommend it! It's a weird, wild ride. It's chock full of content. It truly is an incredibly ambitious project! Try it out if you're interested! The game has a build-in speed-up button, so you can probably shave off a lot of those 150 hours by using it more than I did!