Hey all, I decided to make a review of this game because there's just a lot I wanna say about it. Hope you enjoy!
Recently I tried to play through the fan game Pokemon Empyrean.
Tried being the operative word here. The game itself was fine, I enjoyed it and all, I got quite far into it, but I couldn't bring myself to finish it.
And that is a major problem.
But I suppose I should start from the beginning. Empyrean follows the story of a child who's father works for a kind of international agency, and you set out on a quest after finding out that daddio got kidnapped. Simple enough premise, right? Well, you eventually run into some kind of berserk mutant pokemon, which leads you to believe that there's some bigger scheme, and that you gotta find the truth and save the day.
But it's not that interesting. The mutant pokemon aren't really explained that well. In fact, all I can remember is that they were the product of some psycho lady trying to achieve pokemon fusion, and this is just used to sorta explain away this whole plot point. Think that's weird? Oh boy, it's gonna get weirder!
You later learn from some guy from the future that Bill, the scientist from Kanto, joined a cult worshipping some all powerful alien race from the future, and he turns some kid into a some kinda god-like creature from this alien race by fusing him with his kirlia. Why, you may ask??? Again, it was because he wanted to "unlock the power of Pokemon Fusion". See, this whole idea isn't usually the kind of out-there concept that you'd imagine to be a bad one. However, my problem with it is that all this pokemon fusion and alien worship stuff is just weirdness thrown in for the sake of weirdness.
THAT IS THE WORST KIND OF WEIRDNESS YOU CAN HAVE.
But hold on, it gets a bit stranger. For some reason, there are 2 new types in the game: Light and Data. This wouldn't be so bad if a) Fairy is essentially the type the made to represent light, and b) data type was something that wasn't restricted to like 10 pokemon. It's just not good execution.
I'm not gonna be a whiney ass for the whole review though, so now I'll take about some positives.
Firstly, the rivals are great. Blitz is a riot to mess with, and although he is just an archetype, his dialogue makes him really fun to interact with. Unfortunately, I can't quite say the same about the second rival, given that she's really not that memorable. I do remember that she had a really nice arc, and that her character development was fun to see, up until she was suddenly some angry biker lady, which was just sorta out of the blue, but it was funny nonetheless.
Secondly, the fakemon/alternate forms. Christ they did these well. About 99% of the fakemon and alternate forms are dope as fricc; the Wiseraph line is awesome, and I feel like it really is the best example of what you can do with a fakemon line. It does, however, feel like they created the light type just for this line, but we're not gonna talk about that.
I really loved seeing some of the alternate forms of really underrated pokemon, such as the Tailow and Zubat lines, which are really well designed and feel like they're quite balanced.
Finally, the card and generation points system. If there was one word I could use to describe this system, it would be dope. Using this system, we get to see what kinda whack ass overpowered sh*t we can pull off. I remember a member of the discord showed me their 5 gen point platinum carded platinum Sylveon(?), and it had over 1000 in every stat. This is, obviously, extremely op, and getting this kinda stuff is quite difficult. However, it is definitely worth it in the postgame, or so I've been told.
So, to conclude. Empyrean is a really fun game, with unique and well balanced mechanics that give really good flavour to the game. However, the overall experience is brought down massively by the lackluster story and some strange design choices.
Thank you very much for reading, and I hope you all enjoyed