Pokémon Reborn: My Review

Robot Devil: You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel! Robot Devil: That makes me feel angry!

• The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings, S4E18 Futurama

I like this game. I like this game a lot. But I also really don’t like this game.

This is an odd statement to make, because at the time of writing I’ve finished my second full playthrough for the purpose of rebalancing the game. Why play through it twice if I don’t like it? Well, see… A lot of this game is good. A lot of this game is really good. But a substantial part of this game is astonishingly bad, to the point where I question how it could go so downhill.

It’s hard to say when specifically the game gets bad. There’s no hard cutoff point; the cracks are there as early as Route 1, really, and it just slowly snowballs and develops until you realise that you’ve played for 50 hours and you can’t stop now. That said, the final third of the game (excluding the postgame) is noticeably worse than the previous two thirds in pretty much every respect.

The Writing

The writing in this game is complex. I liked it better on my second time around - much better, in fact. But the problem with judging the writing for this game is that, really, the later game is written so much differently to the early game that it wouldn’t be fair to judge the first two thirds by the writing of the last third.

The first two thirds of the game is… dated. Is it bad? It’s not winning a Hugo award; but it certainly has a charm to it. The writing is very much dark and edgy here; Team Meteor are just straight up terrorists and multiple people actually literally die. They don’t die in a satisfying or even interesting way, but it’s all very sincere. It is very much a product of its time (I don’t know when the game started development, but from some code comments it seems like it was in 2012-2014 or so which would make sense). Some dialogue has some horrifically dated jokes - a reference to the fucking “I can haz cheeseburger” meme, as one quaint example - but, again, it is charming.

I cannot put it into words how much I fucking despise the writing in the last third of the game. Nearly everything here is wrapped in this fucking disgusting millennial sludge that permeates everything, seeping into every single scene and dissolving away out any joy that one could possibly get from reading the ten minute long cutscenes. Gone is any of the sincerity from before; characters degrade themselves by simply producing a sequence of sarcastic quips between each-other. It gets far worse in the postgame, where every ounce of personality of the game is systematically wrung out until you are left with a muddled pool of words beaten into the shape of a Marvel movie.

Nobody is capable of saying anything without following it up with a wink and a nod to the player of “yeah, what a stupid fucking thing I just said” because the writers were seemingly too embarrassed to own it anymore. It’s an insidious rot that just switches on out of nowhere in the last few chapters, and becomes a festering wound on the face of the game by the end. When the game dares to actually commit to being genuine, it does it in that tone. If you’ve been online, e.g. on Twitter/Tumblr/Cohost/whatever other fascist social media in that vein, you know this tone. t’s the tone that they’ve Won at Therapy.

By the time you reach the end of the main story, every character is Very Introspective about themselves. They can tell you that they have identified the problem within themselves, that they can recognise that it is a problem, and that they are working on fixing it. This happens to nearly every character (excluding, funnily enough, the only characters that actually needed it!) and is presented with the subtlety of a brick with the words “Cognitive Behavioural Therapy” on a post-it note taped to it and thrown directly at your fucking nuts. Why? Why? It doesn’t fucking work!

It’s not like the game can’t do this properly, because it can! It did it well up until the last few chapters of the game! Taking as an example Charlotte Belrose - my favourite character in the game, precisely for this reason - who you can clearly see how her past affected her throughout the game. She’s not snarky about it, she simply walks away when its talked about. She even tries to convince you (and herself) that she’s above it, that she’s happy about it. It’s obviously not true, but that’s an example the game can do this introspection, this interrogation of a character without turning to the camera and explaining her therapy exercises!

But, alas, for everyone else they simply go for the cop-out and just tell you. There’s a lot of people these days who - powered by a diet of exclusively Young Adult novels, fanfiction, and 2010s IP movies - cannot possibly conceive of a way to have a character go through Bad Things without having them stop for a minute and spell out their problems and how they’re working through it.

The Writing - The Characters

Characters - Lin

Lin did nothing wrong. I will die on this hill. Team Nazi’s ecofascist terrorism was already being done by Sirius/Solaris, and all four (yes, all four) of her direct kills deserved it.

The Gameplay - Battling

It’s hard, for me at least, to really justify describing Pokémon Reborn as a Pokémon game. That sounds counter-intuitive; but the game is better described as a game that happens to have Pokémon in it - or, more accurately, a puzzle game that happens to have Pokémon in it. The Pokémon are mostly there as set pieces, as a battle mechanic - a system that primarily blocks your progress.

That’s not to say that the battling system isn’t a focus of the game, because it is. There are battles everywhere; the entire game’s progression is based around battles. But Reborn the story, and Reborn the battling game, are two entirely separate things that happened to be joined together at the hip.

One of Reborn’s two features that really give it its identity is the field effect system (the other one being the jumping puzzle). These are special modifiers given to a battle in a specific location; you can think of them as extensions of the terrain system in the vanilla Pokémon battle system. Field effects usually buff some moves, nerf some others, and cause various effects such as passive healing or DoT on the Pokémon on the field.

The Gameplay - The Puzzles

One of the more infamous parts of this game is the puzzling.