I commented in this thread that I was playing Royal Sapphire, however I dropped it not because the game was badly made but some decisions really ruins the game.
This game seems to be fully anti-grinding instance, however it absolutely doesn't prepare you to accommodate these choices.
You can see in the shop that all best items are dirty cheap and less rare items aren't even present like potions, super potions, max potions and so on.
This creates a game that you literally have no problem in just spaming items and even more: the enemy does it too
But it doesn't stop here, this may seem simple since it you can choose to use however you want, but they also gave rare candies free of charge. I used rare candies to level up to lvl 15 but then there wasn't a level cap implemented, so after the first gym, as I fought against other pokemon and trainers and got to the next city I was already overleveled. One decision in the first gym affected me later since they didn't acomodate the players possible choices
But the decision that made me drop was this:
Basically every move had the accuracy buffed. So moves that were 80 went to 100, moves that were 95 went for 100. And this completely breaks the pacing of the game. Because right now, the full restore and items aren't an option, they are required items to advance the story. You keep fighting a stall battle where you either kill the enemy or he full restores it, then you keep trying to kill him until he full restores again.
But enemies with sleep/paralyzes just takes the cake in a bad balancing way that pisses me off. A stall battle that begs for items to be used and you lose all the gameplay decisions to use high power moves that can miss and stall battles that can happen from time to time to EVERY TIME.
These choices to "balance" the game absolutely ruins it. I remember playing a Platinum hack named Azure Platinum that I loved every single story and anime section included, however I hated the gameplay so damn much since it was basically lvl 100 trading 1hk0s every time and the battle would be decided by whoever attacks first.
I absolutely hated playing that game.
I enjoyed Pokemon Vega (though, to my embarrassment, I must admit I never finished because I stepped away from it for a few months, and couldn't figure out how to progress from that point in the game when I returned).
The only other hack with fakemon I've played is Pisces, and I would definitely give Vega the win in terms of fakemon design. The biggest difference is that the Vega pokemon's types are much easier to intuit and remember than Pisces' fakemons. The Vega fakemon also look a little more at home next to realmons.
Pisces is better in basically every other respect, but I felt like I couldn't play more than a few minutes without opening a web browser in Pisces because I could practically never look at a fakemon and know what types it had, and it really detracted from an otherwise excellent experience.
I tried Pisces but never finished, the designs were kinda lame but I really liked the map, what bothers me is that there already exists ways to showcase what pokemon types are during the battle in GBA.
In pisces the only way you can know the types is if you go to your PC and see the page itself, the Pokedex doesn't show any info about it
Now lets see Unbound:
You get indicators of your and his type
You also gets indicators of strength in effective moves + stab options
You also gets the types in the pokedex
In two different sections
And Unbound isn't even the best Pokedex information that I've seen. That is still Emerald Seaglass with all information you could wanted.
When your game has original pokemon designs, you have to make clear, but the only thing they added were some flowers in the hud.
