explorers

pokemon mystery dungeon explorers of sky is simply the best game ever made

i found my 3ds again and it had my cartridge still in it from the last time i played it, which is probably like 9 years ago at this point. i started a new playthrough as phanpy, vaguely remembering that i tried a phanpy playthrough before and it wasn't a great pokemon but not why; after a few hours of playtime i bothered to look it up and discovered they're considered by far the worst starter in the game. oops!

i decided to reroll my started, and figured why not go for broke and try a romhack for the first time too. i installed homebrew on my 3ds (a shockingly easy process in the modern day!) and found a romhack that seemed good: explorers of arceus, which adds a bunch of extra content and quality of life tweaks along with general rebalance. as a kid i always wanted to be able to start the game as any pokemon instead of only the set starters, and it turns out its exactly as sick as it sounds.

explorers of arceus, it turns out, is kinda weird? it gives you a bunch of op stuff at the very start, like way too many gummis, and something like triples the amount of IQ they give along with adding more skills to each group - this meant that i ended up having both stairs finder and map surveyor at lvl 30 which is hilariously overpowered. meanwhile my stat growth curves were fucked and i was repeatedly dying in normal story dungeons, and had to drop from the "expert" difficulty to "vanilla" in order to not get hard stuck in the fogbound lake exploration section. the difficulty settings dont even seen like they do much though, and random pokemon were still higher level than me all the time and, when recruited, would have higher stats than me. idk if it just expects you to abuse spinda cafe for infinite stats from the get-go or something? the most egregious change was the new fixed floors in some dungeons however: apple woods has a new floor with very high level vespequins that will one shot you, which you're supposed to apparently just so happen to have seeds or orbs to stall them and run for the stairs to not die to. likewise a bunch of other dungeons have similar very difficult fixed floors that seem like they're designed as "do you have stun/slumber items, if no you die" checks. this sucks!! what the hell!!

i suppose the idea is that it gives you a bunch of really powerful stuff, like IQ skills and some buffs to moves, and making TMs more available, and a lot more money...but then also makes dungeons harder so you need to actually use more resources? but in general it just feels pretty unfair instead, and feast/famine mechanics like that aren't fun if you either cheese or wipe to them. its really disappointing, because i think adding more "miniboss" encounters would be a good thing in general and there's probably a lot you could do that's interesting and fun - but i think these fixed floors currently miss the mark by a lot.

i ended up just dropping explorers of arceus because of this, since i dont want to sink dozens of hours into this only to end up softlocked to some insane game design choice down the line, especially when end-game dungeons in the base game already get pretty difficult. which sucks, because some of its QoL and features are actually pretty nice - having your belly status or complete control indicator in the UI and having type icons next to item names in particular.

instead i downloaded and just started explorers of fortune by Windchild yesterday and am gonna try playing through that instead. EoF seems like a more "normal" romhack, which adds more pokemon and some QoL patches but a bit less extra content. i was able to pretty easily hack it up with skytemple to let me play as a shuppet as a starter just because i wanted to, so i also feel more confident that if it has some odd choice down the line id be able to work around it if i really need to - the author of explorers of arceus's forums posts have a much worse vibe than Wildchild's do, and they mentioned stuff about intentionally making their game uneditable by skytemple which is its own blaring red flag for a romhack.

i also spent a bit looking into more modding stuff and the frameworks are surprisingly kinda neat. skytemple has this entire patch manager thing for distributing and handling assembly patches, which is cute and means that most of the romhacks all have access to a bunch of the same QoL changes. they even have a thing for writing patches in c that get loaded as a separate memory overlay so people can all write their own detours without trampling on each other trying to reuse rom slack space. depending on how adventurous im feeling i might try my hand at some small QoL tweaks myself if i run into any annoying things since i have a lot of experience in doing assembly patching and code detours.