Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• i'm kind of standing in awe at the self-project-management on display here in order to effectively design that many monsters, string together all the graphics, map design, writing, music, etc. solo for a full 8-gym monster capture clone in the space of a three-month game jam. bravo! cheers for the clinic in the mid-game and the tasteful (i assume) paintings in the late game. someone told me the menu opening sfx sounded like homer simpson biting a donut, and i couldn't unhear that for the entire second half of the playthrough.
• Well done, clearly tons of effort has gone into this - the amount of content here is impressive, and the level progressions are well-tuned. Gameplay-wise it's literally Pokemon, which is always fun, and I appreciate the way core interactions (especially battles) have been sped up to remove drudgery; though I wish NPCs had slightly more interesting things to say - at the moment they seem pretty generic. There are also many graphical glitches on display, notably inconsistent sprite coordinates causing everyone to wobble as the screen moves, and garbled tile data on transitions that should be hidden from the player. Overall well done, keep at it.
• Awesome Pokemon clone! It's weird to have jam entries with so much hours of gameplay. The graphics are great and the controls feel nice. It's a shame that background scrolling is so jerky, it is quite distracting. Anyway, good job!
• I like the references at the beginning of the game, like not being able to leave the village before you get a spirit!
• There's quite a lot in here! I'll need to keep playing longer to get through all of it, but of what I did play, there's a surprising amount of features packed into this! Clearly, it's obvious what this is inspired by, but to actually create a clone of that particular game within a three month time frame is very impressive.
• Wait, what? This is a jam game?! It has a shockingly large amount of content with a mature story. Besides borrowing mechanics from Pokemon, it even adds some original ones! I had a lot of fun playing it and I'm still singing the battle music in my head. The map design is well thought out and I still want to go back and explore now that I have all the powerups to navigate through it. A few downsides: 1) At some point, I managed to crash the game and lose a bit of progress. 2) It felt pretty balanced overall until I met Stormax and friends, which broke the game and I started one-shotting everything. It continued that way until Ground Zero, where the difficulty returned to normal levels. Sungems work a bit too well and I was able to catch almost anything within 4 tries without even dealing any damage. 3) The ending was a bit too abrupt/rushed. Given the amount of love the secondary characters received, I was expecting it to have a more polished ending.
• The scope and ambition is really impressive! Lore-wise, I really like the twist of some people not being able to perceive the monsters. The systems are solid, I wasn't able to break anything. Game-feel wise, everything happens instantly here, whereas other games in the genre play with tension (e.g. the ball shaking animation in pokemon), and in general it would be nice if the world felt more alive (rn you can't go in most buildings, characters don't walk around). The game suffers from graphical glitches and choppy camera movement. I enjoyed my time with the game, but I think I'd have liked it even more if were more polished, even if that meant less content.