The Pokémon Academy Life Community

Unsure if this should even go here, since this may turn out to be a subject hyrbrid...but if that's the case, the admins can just let me know and we can get it corrected. That being said:

I loved this game and didn't come across it until after the Game Grumps let's play (which was fairly bad..) There were a few issues I picked up on the game from the let's play, but thought I'd give it a shot on my own and see if the problems persisted. Quite a few of them did, however I did find myself enjoying the game, and getting rather upset when I noticed it was only a shortened demo. Game Grumps did not do this game justice.

Right off the bat, I'll set one grievance. The intro to the game is very long winded and boring. One thing Arin mentioned holds true, and that's the classic story telling rule of show, don't tell. However, this becomes quite an issue when it's a written or visual novel, in that you now have to try and tell all the information in writing. There ARE ways to pull this off properly, however the biggest issue was the beginning narration, and the first character you meet. These scenes take far too long, and are very boring and expositional. No one likes being spoon fed information for ten minutes, and I found myself frantically tapping the enter key(s) every time I came across the beginning narration. I even set a quicksave just after it was over so i'd never have to sit through it again when I want to take another path. My recommendation to fix this, is to at least try to break things up with another character, possible even minimally introduce your roommate options to add some personality to the scene, and make it more exciting when you go to select the roommates picture, in a way where the player should see the silhouette of a familiar personality, think "He was kinda funny/cool/dorky' etc, and check them out first and see if it all clicks. This should also serve to make the scene just a bit less expositional and boring, so that there's at least some level of reward to sitting through it, other than just selecting your name and sending you on your way.

My next pet peeve didn't come until I selected Brandon as my roommate. His personality was...interesting to say the least, and then May showed up. Her as a character is fine. However, her pose is somewhat horrid and annoying to look at. She stands incredibly bow legged in a way that I've never seen any real or anime character stand, outside of some pretty bad indie titles. This could just be because you can't see the rest of her legs to force the image to be relaxed to the viewer, but because it's cut off, it leaves the viewer to perceive this as a strange pose. Her original sprite's pose ins't the greatest, either, but her legs are more relaxed. Her sprite needs to be relaxed more, and when selecting poses, there's a general technique that I've learned that talks about the line of action. A good pose is easily identifiable when the character is a black silhouette and has a strong line of action. If you can look at just the silhouette and tell what this person is doing, and the line of action is is strong and makes sense/fits the characters personality, it's a good pose. Extra Credits on YouTube does a good job of both explaining how this works, and showing examples of good and bad posing on their Tracer and Animation 101 video. May so far is the only character I've had this issue with, however.

After actually getting into the game, I was very surprised by, not only how in depth the game was, but just how well put together and interesting it could be. While Brandon's dialogue made me roll my eyes into oblivion, being that horribly cliche 'dude bro' during the in dorm scene, each of the characters have personalities that both make sense, and somehow work they're different. Sever kudos to whomever responsible for crafting Serena's story line, as she lives through an actual fear that I and many other people have. Where people you consider friends, only really hang out/talk to you because they feel obligated to, or just plain sorry for you. It's a very well put together story arc thus far.

Blue/Leaf (Pending on who you talk to, honestly.) is quickly one of my favorite characters in this game, as she's really the only character who actually expresses a general fondness of you and want to be friends with you, without being overly creepy like Shauna. She helps you out right when you first meet her, for no reason other than "Can't be seen with you" but then hands you a map, and assists you again during your next meeting. She has a slight air of sadness about her closer to the end of my pursuit in Serena's arc, where it seems like she doesn't have any other friends outside this school, as well as an air of clinginess.

My next peeve didn't arrive until the introduction of Lt. Surge with the Electric Pokemon class. While I expect some swearing to take place, his dialogue only bothered me with the "Suck your mothers tits" line came about. This line wasn't offensive, but didn't flow well with the feeling of the rest of the game, and was unnecessarily 'edgy'. It stood out in a bad way among the rest of the games dialogue, and didn't sit very well with me. It felt more awkward than anything, and left a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of that class, making it kind of hard to enjoy the rest of this scene.

Blue/Gary/Blueberrry as I called him, is a very 2 dimensional character thus far, in my personal playthroughs. I haven't experimented to the fullest with the game quite way, going through every possible story line, but his character is rather annoying, and not quite in a good way. This is a demo, and I'm sure his story needs to unfold the more you play, but right off the rip, he's nothing but a d'bag for the sake of being a d'bag. Each scene he's in is more of a facepalming moment. Another roll of the eyes and the wish that his character would just sit down, shut his mouth, and leave the scene. Though one thing I do find interesting, is that he's clearly not afraid of talking down to women, as he shifted his annoyance from Red to Leaf when she intervened. However, this is different with May, as he actually stuttered. Got caught on his words. Was he caught off guard? Was he afraid that May possibly got in his face with anger? No matter the answer, this was very interesting and something I'd like to explore a bit more when I follow more of the May/Brandon story when the game is finally finished.

Some other characters felt very annoying, but those are more biased. I was never fond of Misty, and having her act like a total Bi#$@ right off the bat, I had no problem throwing it right back at her. Shauna also bothers me a bit, however, this is only because her type of character always bothers me. It's not badly written, but rather, a personal preference.

I'm interested in seeing how battling and catching are implemented into the game, however I would be very careful in doing so, as now-a-days, you never know what Nintendo will send a cease and decist after. The more in depth this system is, the more likely it'll spark that classic Nintendo rage to put a stop to it. Could NOT happen, but with this sort of thing and Nintendo's reluctance to even properly work with YouTubers, you never know.

The art in the game is fantastic. Aside from some small greivances, like a few scenes with Red showing his clothing to be far too form fitting and inconsistent, it's simply wonderful, and the artists are certainly doing a fantastic job. The opening scene, however, with the Pidgeotto was incredibly cheesy looking with some, no offense, bad CGI work onto it with the sprites. As someone who works with animation and 3D Modelling myself, I can safely say that animating such a simple scene is...well, simple, considering it's short length. The models are easy to come by, so this may be something to look into in the future.

One other thing I'd recommend is to start getting really into some of the character arcs and melding them with the school setting with other aspects of the games. For example, you've given each student a Pokemon they need to train for an actual grade. Cheating happens all the time in the real world, especially with school. Seeing antagonistic characters like Blue or Silver, possibly passing off this pokemon to an outside source for training (Say a Team Rocket-esque service or what have you) and being caught by the player, thus being offered the choice to tell, perform the same action, or simply walk away, and crafting 3 new possibilities in the story. Do you tell, yet suffer the consequences of making a new enemy? Cheat yourself and get caught, or ruining your relationship with another character? Or say nothing and just watch as the character gets caught? To make this even more interesting, it could be a way to introduce the friendly evolution mechanic with Silver, as you could easily use his starter as a Zubat, and get caught on the grounds that his Golbat will not evolve into Crobat after x amount of time, proving other students suspicions and warnings to the staff. But I digress. Some more interesting variety would greatly be welcomed, though considering all I've played was a demo, you could very well have added these types of scenarios already, which I look forward to playing.

I greatly enjoyed my time with this game, and plan to play through every possible scenario in the demo to better analyze the story, as is my favorite part of story driven games. The story isn't perfect thus far, and certainly his it's problems, but it's still possibly the best put together slice of life/dating sim I've played thus far, though I haven't played an extensive amount. Overall, I'd say the devs should be proud of their work so far.

I don't really have much to add to this, but I'm sure Blue will get way more depth as the game progresses, especially if you're in his electives/battle club thingo and he is FORCED to see you all the time or in battle club perhaps even work with you. His personality is also pretty accurate to how Gary was early in the anime/how he is in the games, so no problems there. If you pick one of his electives you get a short scene where he says his usual spiel but you're like "nah fam not gonna lose" and he says "H-ha! We'll see yadda yadda" and Red makes a note that there was worry in his voice but nah Blue wouldn't be like that, etc. I think based on this we can probably assume his overconfidence might be a facade, and he brags about everything like arriving to class first to try and reinforce his superiority over Red in his own mind because in reality he isn't so sure he's the best like he wants to believe.

I do agree with you on Surge, his dialogue is a bit much. Drill Sergeant stuff is good and his Raichu fries people, no need to go over the top with swearing. That one line you pointed out is probably the only one I have a problem with.

Thanks for the feedback! We only wish more people can take the time to do what you did.

As a little bit of background information, there are many visual novels out there that are not quite player-driven, but kinetic "NVL" mode, meaning it's a straight read from beginning to end much like a traditional novel. The original idea behind Pokémon Academy Life was to act like a hybrid of sort, where there are moments of extended dialogue between characters mixed with sessions of descriptive prose. This is why feedback is so important. Some people don't mind the format and some people really dislike it.

To clarify some points, yes, the beginning is very long-winded. In fact, little has changed with the opening since development first started. We've always thought that tackling the opening from another angle could be in our best interest, but we haven't prioritized it since it didn't seem like too many people were bothered by it (at the time).

So before the visual novel is all said and done, expect the opening to get an overhaul. On a similar note, expect monologue to be limited mostly to when the player is alone. There will still be some internal dialogue when the player is among other characters in the same scene, but those will generally be short observational comments.

Character art will be a little different to address. Art is purely subjective. We can bring the topic of May's character art to our main artist to see if change is necessary. My personal bet is that even if change is welcome, it won't be the priority.

As for individual characters and their respective personalities, the demo will not do any of them justice, whether it's Blue, Leaf, Misty, Serena, etc. Let's just keep it at that for now. There's a lot in the works regarding each character (not all of them, but most of the recurring ones). We don't expect people to universally like every character. That's impossible. So it's totally okay for some to be favored over the others for whatever personal reasons; it's much more realistic that way.

Again, thanks for the feedback. We would love to hear more from everyone. Feel free to continue posting in this thread, or you can post in the (mostly for elective class feedback and overall feel).