So I admit openly that I am prejudiced against anything even tangentially connected to 4chan (as any human being with a modicum of decency ought to be), and as such I had a lot of misgivings about Pokemon Sage. Trolling is not value-neutral, and neither is Freeze Peach. Much as it is anathema to many people to admit, there is no such thing as “just talk” (or its cousin, “just joking”), because through repetition and rehearsal even outrageous ideas gather a veneer of legitimacy. Participating in a community where such behaviour is tolerated without condemning it is tantamount to endorsing it (or more explicitly: choosing to be part of a community where such things occur when there is nothing keeping you from leaving is at bare minimum a statement that it is not a dealbreaker for you), and normalisation of this kind is precisely what causes the Overton window to shift in the long term. (Go see what David Futrelle has to say if you don’t want to take my word for it, he’s got lots of examples cited.) I will readily admit that I am not an expert on 4chan (and I have never and will never visit the site) and therefore not well informed concerning distinctions in culture between boards there – I have no idea what /vp/ is, the only boards I know by name are /b/ and /pol/ and that is specifically because they are hives of deplorable scum I suppose it’s theoretically possible that those are frequented by completely different people but at least some overlap is more likely.īefore you protest that guilt by association is considered a logical fallacy and how dare I judge the site by its worst members – the standard you walk past is the standard you accept (thanks David Morrison although he claims the quote did not originate with him). This was later renamed to Pokémon Sage.Īs someone to whose first mental associations with “4chan” are things like gamergate, child pornography, neo-Nazis, and Trump supporters, this did not instill me with confidence and sounded like a recipe for utter disaster. It was later decided to create a fan-game that used them, and thus /vp/ Makes A Game (also known as Gen /vp/) began. It began as the project CAPX, which stands for “Create a Pokédex”, and was simply a collaborative attempt to design a set of new Pokémon (fakemon). Pokémon Sage is a Pokémon fan-game, created by the anonymous members of 4chan’s /vp/ board. I’ll quote this paragraph because it’s concise and includes all the necessary details:
Here is a link to the About page on the Pokemon Sage wiki, which explains some of the history and design philosophy behind the game. Content note/trigger warning: 4chan and everything that entails. That said, Sage intrigued me enough and the new demo had enough of it implemented that I thought it was worth giving a try, so here’s my review of Pokemon Sage Demo 2.0.5 (this version released 10 August 2017, available here) after having played it to completion.īefore discussing anything about the demo itself, we need to have a brief digression to talk about some background details on Pokemon Sage and its creators.
#Pokemon sage progress serial#
I don’t normally care for playing incomplete games – I can tolerate incomplete or abandonned serial fiction, but when it’s a video game and you add to that the possibility of getting psychologically invested in a save file (which may not be compatible with future versions of the game even if it does continue to update), the frustration level increases greatly. But we’ll get to that.Īnyway, I was in the mood to play some Pokemon recently, and remembered that earlier this year (late July, I don’t know the exact date) a more substantial demo of Pokemon Sage had been released.
To make a long story short, they’re absolutely right.
People there were much harsher on Uranium than I was (I think rightly so I do still mostly like it, but I’ll readily admit most of the flaws they tore it apart for are real and deserve the mockery), and several of them kept bringing up Pokemon Sage as an example of a Pokemon fangame that gets right the things Uranium got wrong. I later stumbled across discussions of Pokemon Sage again, in reading discussions of Pokemon Uranium in a Let’s Play thread by Orange Fluffy Sheep on the Something Awful forums (the Let’s Play forum is a guilty pleasure of mine, I lurk but don’t participate). At the time, I got the impression it was still in a very early state, there was plenty of concept work to look through and a short playable demo but not enough to draw any firm conclusions one way or another. One of our commenters made us aware of Pokemon Sage then, and I thought it looked promising and would be well worth keeping an eye on. Last year, I wrote about my experiences with some fan-made games, one of which was Pokemon Uranium.
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