The Elephant games were incredibly formative for me as I grew up. Sure, they're simplistic and small in scope- I didn't take more than an hour to beat each, and to get all the achievements. They're this passion project that has been carried by this one guy for the entire part of his life. Hell, I was there when each game released. I remembered being in Kongregate, on chatroom #02, talking to the people inside, playing Elephant Quest, or Achievement Unlocked.

Even the Achievement Unlocked games were formative for me. They were one of the things that got me obssessed with the idea of completionism, along with Jirard "Dragonrider" Khalil - though, honestly, the latter now leaves a bitter taste in my mouth after the current news that came out about him.

These are games that were incredibly important to me, is the point. I'm so glad to have re-experienced them, to get through their jank and play these small little bits of my childhood that left me so very happy back then, in a much simpler time, where I didn't really need an interesting story or particularly balanced gameplay.

All I needed to see was that blue elephant, and I was happy. And, today and now, I see this blue elephant. And I am happy once more.

10/10. This is a completely subjective rating, but I couldn't give it anything else.

The game has only three positive aspects - it's pretty, it has some epic music tracks (in the later part of the game - specifically bosses and credits song is just beautiful) and it has a really great final act with plot twists, emotional moments and spectacle.

Everything else is mid to horrible.
- The story is a nice fairy tale, but it picks up only closer to the end of the game.
- The map is one of the worst I have ever seen in my 25 years of gaming. No mini map. The camera angle always changes on its own, but the map screen is always fixed. And the elevation tracks very poorly.
- If you want to 100% this game, it WILL be hell. Since the map is so sh*t you will wander aimlessly for hours trying to figure out where you need to go to pick the collectibles.
- The game's has animations for everything, and they're not skippable. Won the battle - 10 second animation of victory pose. Opened a chest - 2 second opening animation, then 3 seconds of cutesy pose. Entered a dungeon - a loading screen and a 3 second animation. Completed the dungeon - 10 seconds and a loading screen. And it just keeps on stacking throughout the playthrough. I actually feel like I've spent an hour total in these same repeating unskippable cutscenes.

I would say I enjoyed it rather than hated it, but it mostly because of how the final act was really really good. I'd rather play a mid game with a banger finale, than a good game with a lame ending.
If the entire game was on par with the final stretch of the game, it would have been an instant classic.

An interesting passive game where you play as a rookie god who is instructed by the Great God to guide a family so it continues for 1000 years. A lot of game descriptions say that you play as Cupid, but Cupid is your partner who supports you by shooting arrows that have various effects. He will also tell you about the family's status and help you save the game.

Some family members are troublemakers, or lazy, and you have to keep a close eye on them or they will cause your family line to end. It happened a couple of times where my family would be happy, rich, living in a big house, and I'd come back with them having no money and there being almost no more family members. My family line barely survived those situations.

There are certain arrows that last for 5 years and they will be visible on the family member with a huge arrow sticking out of their head. It was funny seeing a smiling baby running around with a giant arrow sticking out of them. Some of the outcomes of the worries and goals seem random, so even some good choices can end up turning out bad. It did add difficulty to the game.

It did get tedious after a while because it takes about 10 minutes to calculate the family's actions if you haven't played for a day, so you need to let it sit for that long until you can play. It seems like this is a game that you can just play for a few minutes here and there, but the update feature prevented that.

Overall it as a unique concept and I think the good outweigh the bad. May the Sanbonchiku family live for many more 1000s of years.

So, obviously the core appeal here is the Pokemon Fusions. This idea is kind of self-evidently really cool, and there's a lot of room for experimentation, both with mechanically interesting or busted combinations, and seeking out combinations that come with really cool sprites. Unfortunately, I find that these two goals clash pretty hard. Pokemon has always had a tension between optimisation and aesthetics, but it comes into sharp focus here, especially due to the fangame difficulty (more on that later). I find it frustrating how often I went to check a fusion, and only the vastly worse version had a custom sprite. I understand that the custom sprites come from community contributions, and the number they have already is beyond impressive. It's just a shame, kind of a natural limitation of the concept, that you're never going to have even a tiny fraction of the fusions look good. On the topic of natural limitations, this one is just bad luck on my part, but so many of my favourite Pokemon aren't in the dex. I totally understand the requirement for a limited scope, every single Pokemon added is exponentially more data to store, it's just the choice of which Pokemon get in to that limited roster that doesn't resonate with me personally.

Overall, I've always found the play experience of Pokemon Essentials games to be pretty janky, and this is no exception. Long loads, abrupt transitions, non-looping music, busted collision everywhere, and it's almost impossible to move exactly one tile during speed-up. But, again, I understand the limitations here. No GBA ROM can ever contain the data for [420 choose 2] Pokemon, even with all the decompilation efforts that make ROMhacks otherwise a much better choice these days.

As someone with a lot of backlash and bitterness for genwunning, it's a great disappointment that the game is set in a retread of Kanto. I'm grateful Modern Mode exists to at least update the Pokemon distribution, but it can only do so much. I guess I don't know what I would have preferred - an OC region would vastly distract from the game's focus, and any other canon region would feel like a particularly arbitrary choice. Still, there are some inexplicable archaic decisions left over from the originals, like Lt Surge's gym puzzle or the presence of Sokoban puzzles with random encounters in Victory Road - especially baffling since other things are changed, like Saffron being gated by Rocket events in Celadon instead of. there only being one source of potable water in the region. I would have liked to see more of the experience modernised and streamlined, especially since the vast number of possible Fusion combinations should make the game extremely replayable otherwise.

As stated, I played on Modern Mode, so I can't comment on the vanilla, hopefully better-designed gameplay, but the important Trainer battles in this game can be kinda wack sometimes. Modern Mode changes every Gym's type, which makes sense for replayability, but dialogue is unchanged so you have to just sort of intuit it from the Gym trainers. And then for the Elite Four, you're going in without any idea. The Elite Four and Champion are also way overtuned, with Legendaries a plenty and a sharp level spike. Peak Pokemon fangame design. The Giovanni fight in Celadon is also a sudden level bump. This game shouldn't try to be particularly more difficult than canon, finding overpowered fusions should enjoyably break the game, not be an requirement to succeed without tedium.

I find the OC plot insertions to be lightly cringy but mostly inoffensive - and as with the Celadon example above, sometimes positive. Still, it ties Fusion into the game's plot and keeps things mostly coherent, and it otherwise probably the game's least important focus, so I'm not fussed.

Overall, the concept is incredibly novel and executed... well enough to enjoy, but there are enough marks against the game in various areas to keep me from being terribly enthusiastic about it as an overall experience.

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I haven't played much of the postgame yet, but I had to come back to amend my review because it is absolutely awful so far, all of the worst parts of the main game distilled. Modern Mode continues the legendary spam more vigorously than ever, with random trainers on the road now having them. There are multiple Zekroms just in the one Gym! And I'm supposed to take a subplot about Eusine searching for the one Suicune seriously when the Gym Leader just has a second one? A subplot in which, might I add, Eusine's characterisation is completely inconsistent both to the canon games and just between different cutscenes.

The dungeon design has also taken a nosedive into tedium. I hate both Gym puzzles I've seen so far. One is a trial-and-error Simon says game, and the other involves wind periodically pushing you off platforms - with no visual cue, a bad audio cue, and the wind firing far too often, with a fall being a punishing waste of time.

Was not expecting for this to straight up be a first person dungeon crawler. Like, there's some pretty good game-boy art in it, but it does not feel like its source material at all. There's barely any humour to it, it's just an easter egg hunt in a labyrinth with a Urusei Yatsura skin pasted over it.

I went through the first three floors (of seven), and it is a functional, if a bit boring, game boy dungeon crawler. I like that you can talk to any enemy (would have been a good place to introduce some jokes into this... except they didn't and most enemies just spout generic lines), I dislike that there are no map-markers to remind you of things like stairs and NPC locations.