Day 12 - Infinite Fusion
RPG, Pig Game, Has Treant Protector In It ·
Sam’s Take:
Okay look, I’ve never liked Pokemon. I’ve tried a few times but it always comes down to getting 6 pokemon with different element types, then spamming weaknesses. I know the rabbit hole goes deeper with challenge runs, breeding different natures, competitive play ect. In fact I’ve recently gotten into watching a youtube named Jrose11 play through gen 1 with every pokemon and ranking how hard it was with each one. There absolutely is depth to Pokemon games, but I’ve always enjoyed hearing other people play/talk about them more than going through them myself.
This is all setup for me to say that I played through about 30 minutes of this game, and I do think this rom hack’s gimmick of being able to fuse two pokemon together seems appealing. When you fuse them, you not only get a hilarious custom sprite, but you can also choose between their two natures, combine their movesets, and generally customize your team more than any other pokemon game by far. Unfortunately, this is still a pokemon game, and I used ember on 14 identical Weedle fights in a row and wanted to take a nap.
This is just Fire Red with fusions, so since I don’t enjoy those games, I was never going to click with this. From what I can tell though, the fusions are fun and add depth to the game. This game was made for Pokemon fans, not to get non-fans into Pokemon, and I think that’s good. Pokemon is obviously loved by many people, and I think that this is a huge polished project made by fans for fans. To me it seems successful, but we’d need to consult a real Pokemon fan to know for sure.
Wait who’s that… did y’all hear something?
No way.
It couldn’t be…
SKEETER HAS ENTERED THE CHAT!
Recommend: Big yes for Pokemon fans, no to non-fans
Replay Percentage Chance: I’d rather not%
Time Played: 30 Minutes
Skeeter’s Take:
This might be Sam’s “Off-Peak”. I picked the game today, but he started our google doc where we draft our reviews and so far he’s written “I’ve never liked Pokemon” and “Fart”, so we are off to a good start. Still, I’ve got to thank him for giving me the chance to talk about this game, even if he is miserable for the 30 minutes or however long he ends up playing it for.
I grew up in the height of “Pokemania” during the late 90s/early 2000s. Thanks to my older cousins introducing me to the series, I was watching the show and collecting the cards before I even had my first Gameboy. One Christmas my parents bought a double Gameboy Color pack from Costco for me and my brother, along with a copy of Pokemon Gold and Silver - this was probably circa 2000, and my parents clearly weren’t concerned with Y2K. I feel so old typing all this out. My brother picked Gold and I got Silver. We were absolutely obsessed from that point on. I remember saving money to buy a link cable so me and him could trade the exclusive pokemon back and forth. I remember having to buy those big magnifying glasses with a reading light attached to it so we didn’t have to try to play the game by catching the light from the passing streetlights as our parents drove us home from visiting relatives or whatever sporting event it was. I remember my brother and I burning through AA batteries waiting for the magnet train to come because we heard we could get to Kanto and the conductor said something along the lines of “The train isn’t operating right now, you’ll have to come back later”. We didn’t understand that was “In-game” speak for “you need to come back once you are further into the game and have a train pass” and instead took that as “If you wait long enough, the train will be ready to go eventually!”. It was simpler times and we were young and very dumb and didn’t have the internet easily accessible or a Game Guide to go by. (Side note, since we had dial-up internet back in the day, when I would get really stuck in Zelda: OOT, I would beg my parents to be able to use the internet so I could find an online guide and print out PAGES of the guide to get me through areas I just couldn’t figure out.) Nostalgia aside, the point I’m trying to make is I’ve been been a Pokemon fan since I was a kid. I’ve been playing these series and (mostly) enjoying them for years; and it is no exaggeration when I say that Infinite Fusion is my favorite Pokemon game I have ever played - and it’s fan made. The pokemon series has taken an… interesting turn in recent years. They don’t feel like they used to, especially with the most recent installment of Scarlet/Violet. I think it’s a good thing the games are trying to evolve and I actually enjoy some of the open-world aspects, but it just doesn’t capture that same magic I felt back when me and my brother were sitting in one building for hours waiting for that damn train.
I’m not going to dive too much into talking about the most recent games, but one thing I dislike most is what I would call “padding”. That “padding” comes in many forms - Non-skippable tutorials that last literal hours, unskippable dialogue that you have no choice but to partake in, side characters that are more annoying than endearing, and storylines and rivals that center more around the “power of friendship” than something more interesting. I do appreciate that they are trying to streamline more of the grinding aspects (Bottlecaps RULE), but these streamlined aspects of mechanics only seem to give way to more dialogue and cutscenes, and characters and yadda yadda yadda. That’s the padding. It’s like they are missing the point of why people fell in love with the series in the first place, and it’s not to have a picnic with your Pokemon.
Where Scarlet/Violet fail, Infinite Fusion soars. There is very little fat to this masterpiece, and I think that it owes its success to the fact that it’s made by fans. It’s made by people who fell in love with these games, and wanted to recapture that magic and I think they managed to do that and more. You can feel the love and passion from everyone who worked on this game, and not just the developers, but the fans who play and contribute too, I’ll touch more on this in a bit.
The core mechanic and “gimmick” of this game is: You can fuse any two pokemon together to create a new Pokemon using one as the head, and the other as the body. Remember those days where there were 300 or so Pokemon and that blew your mind? Remember when you had seen those same 300 or so Pokemona million times and started to get a little… bored of using the same 6 Pokemon every time despite telling yourself that you’d branch out this time? Infinite Fusion has the answer to this problem:
As of writing this review, there are currently 200,000 different species of Pokemon (the way they calculate this is based on the number of unfused pokemon, and then all the possible combinations). I would be surprised if you were even able to see every combination even if you played for years.
I’ll explain the Fusion mechanic a bit before we go on:
You need an item called a “Fusion Splicer” to combine Pokemon - a fairly affordable item at 300 Pokedollars from your local mart. There are other splicing items like reversers, super fusers, but the Fusion Splicer is your bread and butter. When you use a splicer, you choose one pokemon to be the “Head” and one Pokemon to be the “Body” the typing and the appearance of the new fused Pokemon will be determined by what you pick for the head and the body. Here’s an example I did with a Spiritomb and Duskclops:
At first, you can only see the silhouette before the big reveal. If the silhouette is gray, it’s just going to use the game engine to generate the new fused Pokemon. These results are janky, ugly, and sometimes really, really funny:
As you can see it literally just took the head of a Teddiursa and the body of the Gyrados and just smushed them together (side note you can see the head influences the color as well).
Now if that silhouette is green - we are in the money my friends. Green means they have a custom sprite and the results are generally so much better:
Now you’ll notice an important piece of text below the sprite itself “Sprite by:__” This is where the community comes in. Every one of these custom sprites has been built by community members. There are so many at this point, it almost feels rare to find a Pokemon fusion that doesn’t have a custom sprite associated with it. These sprites are so fun. Sometimes you’ll catch a neat pop culture reference, sometimes the sprites are based on literal Digimon. There are no rules. These sprites don’t have to be vetted by Nintendo to worry about copyright or anything like that (though how this game gets away with not being hit with the big Cease and Desist from Nintendo is beyond me), so it’s really up to the creators’ imagination. What’s makes this even sweeter is after you fuse, you are given a choice of what sprite you would like to see:
That means multiple people can submit sprites for the same Pokemon combination and you can choose which one you enjoy and that will be the one that shows up for the rest of the game. You can even change the sprites around using the Pokedex if you are getting bored. You can even choose to use the in-game generated sprite if you like it more than the custom sprites (See Teddiursa and Gyrados above). I can’t really express how much time I’ve spent in my PC box, fusing and unfusing Pokemon to find neat combinations that look awesome. There was one point that me and some friends were all playing through this at the same time and just shared screens in Discord of us fusing Pokemon together and showing each other the monstrosities we had made - here’s one of the funnier ones:
This single mechanic adds so much to the game and even gets you to explore using Pokemon you hadn’t even looked twice at in the past. For the other Pokemon nerds in here, you get to choose which ability the new pokemon inherits from one of the unfused’s abilities - same goes for the nature. You can also combine their movesets and will have access to both of the “parents” move pools leading to some pretty wild combinations for those who are more concerned about battle mechanics than aesthetics. There’s also a certain satisfaction that comes from knowing you are playing with a Pokemon party that probably nobody else has ever played with, especially with the 200,000 different options to pick from. Here’s some of mine and my friends’ Hall of Fames - not a single one of us used the same combination:
That last one is mine - Mimikyu is one of my favorite Pokemon and the artist that did these Trash-based Mimics did an amazing job. My Porygon/Mimikyu cross is a good example of the pop culture references I was talking about earlier:
Ok, I think you probably understand the fusion mechanic and why I adore it so much.
You might sigh the first time loading into the game as you are dropped right into Pallet Town yet again thinking “Oh man, cool. Kanto again.” Is it just me feeling the Kanto fatigue? While Infinite Fusion uses the Kanto region, it expands on it also. The story doesn’t follow the original Red story, and instead decides to tell a new story that relates directly with the core mechanic and revolves around Team Rocket trying to triple fuse extremely powerful Pokemon to take over the world. The game even opens up allowing you to explore Johto and the Sevii Islands. Johto has a fun gimmick where you start in Goldenrod and have to track the gym leaders down throughout the world (You find Jasmine on vacation in the Sevii Islands, for example). All this helps add some much needed variety to a couple regions we’ve seen reiterated a ton of times by now.
There are also new ideas added, such as quests:
This nerd wanted me to help deliver a letter to the girl he liked, but love is for losers so I told him I couldn’t help out. You get some rewards for completing a quests and these quests get added to your Quest Journal. After completing a certain amount of quests, you hit milestones that give better rewards. Yes, it’s simple. But I’m glad it’s there.
Lastly, the game offers a variety of ways you can play:
Classic is the standard, boilerplate experience for Pokemon Fusion. Randomized allows you to randomize the game, obviously. Adding 200,000 different pokemon to the game makes for a really interesting randomized run, turns out. The game allows you some control over how these encounters spawn, if trainers will also have random Pokemon, and even if you want your items to be randomized:
Modern mode adds more of a focus on newer generation pokemon, and you will see Pokemon from the most recent generations spawn in the wild/be used by trainers. Expert Mode makes the game more difficult, but I’m not sure how it varies from the difficulty modifier the games gives you when picking any of the other available modes.
Look, I could go on longer about all the little details and ideas in this game. I didn’t even mention the wonder trade (there isn’t online connectivity, but you can still wondertrade with the engine), the black market that only opens its doors at night where you can buy sad, stolen Pokemon from Team Rocket, or the fact that you can catch every Legendary Pokemon in the game. I know you Legendary freaks were foaming at the mouth for that - yes you can catch every legendary (Not sure about Scarlet/Violet pokemon though - there may have been some updates that added those lizards in). I’ve grown to like Legendary Pokemon less as I’ve grown older. The luster of these supposedly super unique and rare Pokemon gets sort of lost on me when everyone is guaranteed one in the game, and you see any kid you compete with using a team full of the same legendaries as the last kid you battled with. Yes, I see your really cool Rayquaza - I saw that same Rayquaza the last 4 battles, you freaking nerds. You know what I haven’t seen? Luvdisc. Luvdisc is more rare of a sight than any of the Legendary Pokemon - I mean, who would willingly want to use this:
Recommend: Yes
Replay Percentage Chance: 100%
Time Played: Countless hours
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