ACL: 22. AAA games are hard. Why did I let you do this? (Patreon)

Chapter 22: AAA games are hard. Why did I let you do this?

Brockton Bay, NH, USA
Monday, January 31, 2011
Type: Normal

Yesterday was a great day. It started out with me trolling random people for shits and giggles and ended with making Amy some oran berries to experiment with. I didn’t really know what to expect from this, I wasn’t a doctor despite the honorary title the New Hampshire Board of Medicine gave me, but I did know that the medicine in the pokemon world was at least a decade more advanced than what we had here on Earth-Bet.

A part of it was aura, life was just more robust there, but another part was that we had more resources, incentive, and bandwidth to devote to things like medicine. With so many different forms of life, all sentient to one degree or another, human doctors had to be truly exceptional.

It was probably a bit much to expect Amy to revolutionize the medical industry here, but I looked forward to all that she could make from this. And who knew? If I could get approval, I would be happy to offload more berries for the PRT.

Still, that was that and this was this.

The clock struck midnight and I had to say goodbye to the darkness. Instead, the cogs in my soul turned and my power aligned itself to a familiar form of aura: plain vanilla. Normal again, something I had just a couple days prior. But rather than feel stale, I was happy with the turn my spiritual roulette had taken.

Four days ago, I used porygon to speak with Dragon and acquire a virus so she could hack Coil’s base remotely. I also spoke with Lady Photon and received her promise of help. Laserdream has been watching Dinah ever since under the guise of extra tutoring.

Then I turned into lopunny, cyclizar, and eevee to fuck with Amy some more. It was honestly loads of fun, but I wanted to do something else today, maybe mess about with some forms that I didn’t get to use as often. Normal types were some of the most versatile in the world after all. It’d be a real shame if I only stuck with eevee because everyone and their mother thought of them as the ideal mascots.

I went about getting ready for school. The Egg House was absolute bedlam in the mornings, but Mrs. Wells had corralling the little ones down to an art form by now. She saw me come down and waved to a donated rice cooker, where I knew steamed eggs would be waiting. I’d left them there overnight after all.

The rice cooker, one of four in the orphanage, had been donated to us by some kindly Chinese granny who ran a Hunan-style restaurant a block away. She also showed Mark how to make some tomato rice and other simple dishes, though we mostly used them to steam eggs overnight in bulk. Us older kids just grabbed two to go, plucked some berries from the garden courtesy of yours truly, and headed out.

X

I spent just about the entirety of the school day thinking about what I could do as a normal type. The list was truly boundless, from giving people sage advice as oranguru to randomly blocking off city streets as snorlax. I could pretend to be someone’s long-lost twin as ditto or spend the day pulling pranks as Hisuian zoroark.

But in the end, I kept coming back to porygon.

I’d been through so much since my early days in Sinnoh with Luca by my side. I faced down Champions and crime syndicates alike. I earned the respect of Legends. I discovered hidden treasures and legacies lost to time, traveled the far corners of the globe, and even explored unknown reaches through the ultra wormholes.

I didn’t want any of that to go to waste. I could tell a thousand stories and describe a million more battles. All my triumphs, all my failures, they made me the man I was today, a hero in semi-retirement. I loved telling stories. My original scholarship to Arcadia was thanks to these stories in fact.

And so, porygon. After all, an AI could type far faster than a human ever could. Uploading my memories into text would be the work of an hour at most. Maybe I could spice things up a bit?

I’d written a series of short stories to get into Arcadia, but… but maybe I could give my hand at developing something else?

That thought just wouldn’t leave my mind, like a lileep stuck to a rock. That was the rub, wasn’t it? It didn’t need to be my story, I just really wanted to share pokemon with other people, show them the wonders of the world I’d left behind. As great as my own journey had been, that wasn’t all there was to see of the pokemon world. Professor Oak would say it was our own unique experiences that truly made the world so wonderful.

By that logic, wouldn’t the story be even better through fresh eyes?

Mark had been reading a lot of fantasy novels lately, stories about people ending up in different worlds. Portal fantasy, or “isekai” as he called it, was a popular genre apparently, especially here on Earth-Bet where alternate worlds were demonstrably real in Aleph and so many wanted to find an escape from their daily lives.

Mark's books often had dungeons in them, not literal dungeons, more like labyrinths that could be explored for prizes and the like. They reminded me of a series of movies from PokeStar Studios in Unova. The Mystery Explorers movies started with Rescue Team and went through several iterations of sorta-related stories featuring various pokemon protagonists: Sky, Darkness, Time, and the like, though I couldn’t remember the right chronology for the life of me.

If I combined that general premise, and maybe turned people I knew into caricatures of themselves as different pokemon, could I make a good game?

I left school with a big, toothy grin. Why yes, yes I could.

And who better to be the protagonist than my dear, lovely “girlfriend?”

“Alpaca above, she’s going to murder me for this…”

X

I had ideas. So. Many. Ideas. Just to mess with Amy, the protagonist would be “Aimee,” a nursing student from Brockton Bay who fell into a wormhole and got turned into a buneary. She’d be adopted by a tinkatink named Nike, who went around constantly breaking things with her mallet for shits and giggles.

Nike’s mallet would get stolen by Kaiber the bisharp, who wanted it for its rare metals, causing the two to go on a journey to get it back. This innocent enough mission would grow more complicated as they encountered more pokemon wronged by Kaiber and his group of steel types.

Along the way, they’d meet Mr. Black, a smug as fuck eevee that definitely wasn’t a terrible riff on my own name. Together, along with poorly disguised parodies of the Wards, they’d take down not-Kaiser, only to find that he and his gang of steel types had been collecting rare metals to ship elsewhere for some unknown purpose.

As they chased down not-Vicky’s idiot-bat, they’d encounter more pokemon, including Knightly the charcadet, who’d be hopelessly smitten with Nike, and Pint-Size the chikorita, who never wanted to evolve because “flowers were girly and she was a fierce, noble warrior.” Aimee would discover that it wasn’t just Nike’s mallet. All the precious metals and evolution stones were going missing.

Together, Aimee and her team would follow the trail, encountering various allies and enemies.

I planned the second arc boss to be Karp the gyarados. He worked with Quail the ekans because the sneaky little snake told him he knew the secret to becoming a true dragon. It would be a gloriously tongue-in-cheek way to emphasize the importance of type matchups.

Eventually, the heroes would uncover Quail’s ultimate plot: to awaken Registeel, the Titan of the Iron Age so that he could take over the region with its awesome power. They would of course be too late and suffer a crushing defeat.

Mr. Black would then speak of the “Six Saints,” six pokemon who once saved the world with the help of the “Hero from Beyond.” If those six happened to look a lot like my old team, who could blame me?

Aimee, a lopunny by this point, would be instructed to seek out “Martial Lord Luca.” Under my old partner’s guidance, she would learn the secrets of mega evolution and the importance of bonds, the “power that was inside you all along.” With her newfound fighting type, she’d face down Quail and Registeel, defeating the titan to put it to sleep once more.

I also had side quests planned, such as a mission to stop Ulcer and Leek the doduo, a pair who could never seem to stop arguing after Leek swallowed an everstone, dooming them to a lifetime of mediocrity.

It wasn’t perfect, but for a single school day’s worth of brainstorming, I thought I could create a decent product. All the types, many of the moves, and the abilities I remembered were here, including Luca’s own brand of martial art he’d developed throughout our journey.

I had it planned out. This would be the first installation in which Aimee the lopunny would defeat Registeel. If I ever ended up with normal type again, I could work in sequels to the games to include Regice, Regirock, and of course, Regigigas. Perhaps I’d even include Regieleki and Regidrago too. The other Saints would feature more heavily, as would the Legends where appropriate.

It’d be epic. It’d be hilarious. It’d be a work of art that both parodied my friends while introducing the world to the wonders of pokemon. I wanted this world to get a taste of the marvel and I felt I could succeed here.

I holed myself up in my hideout and got to work.

X

Six hours. Six hours of switching back and forth into porygon-2. As a porygon, I could skip all of the coding. People compared it to learning a new language. In my case, I simply moved data around, rearranging it like LEGO blocks or wads of playdough. I practically willed the game into shape, creating a product that could stand shoulder to shoulder with any triple-A game titles on the market.

Not bad for six hours of work.

I decided to title it Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Legacy of Steel. That way, anything that came after could just pick up the “Legacy of ___” format.

Then my stomach growled ravenously and I realized it was 9:30. After a quick dinner from a local fast food joint, I gave it one last readthrough, made sure it was compatible with most PCs, and published.