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The girl blocking scyther from passing was bullshit. They could've added some dialogue about her being afraid of bugs or something, instead it's just a softlock. Way too many easy softlocks in this room.
@@AP-dc1ksIt's an escape room. A good escape room shouldn't be designed so that the person playing can be locked out of progression, because the challenge of standard escape rooms is being able to solve the puzzle within a certain amount of time. Softlocks entirely defeat that purpose, because then when you restart the room you can get back to the point before you softlocked much more quickly and thereby bypassing the limit of the timer. In the event that you don't have a hard time limit for each individual attempt, and are instead competing for the minimum overall, softlocks are still indicative of bad design because it creates pointless added time whenever the player makes a mistake, and players are expected to make mistakes in an escape room.
@AP-dc1ks Yeah but "losing" a puzzle is when you give up, not when your pieces suddenly become unusable lol They could have given her dialogue beforehand to warn you not to catch Scyther rather than just having a pit you can't see coming
@@AP-dc1ks Good puzzle design would at least let you know a potential loss is coming so you can think ahead and avoid it, instead of simply saying "Surprise! Because of a situation you couldn't have possibly anticipated, you lose! You should have had someone who's played before warn you!". That's not a test of skill, it's a reset simulator. A really satisfying puzzle gives you the information you need to solve it, and if you get stuck, it's because you're not thinking clearly and using all your tools. A bad puzzle pulls gotchyas to make you lose, totally independently of your investigation, intellect, and caution. Smart game designers know their genre and play into it: in an escape room and many other types of games, you telegraph and challenge, don't arbitrarily force a blind loss. That's why the scyther softlock is so ugly. It's not telegraphed, and simply punishes a player for not having played before. Penalizing a lack of foreknowledge and metagaming isn't good puzzle design. A good puzzle room can be solved in a single playthrough -- no foreknowledge, and loss conditions (if any) have to be very well-telegraphed to be remotely fair. If a real-world escape room pulled that BS, they'd get negative-reviewed out of existence by a community that's come to expect fair play. Thankfully these issues are totally solvable.
The master ball "puzzle" could be vastly improved simply by making an NPC give you the itemfinder after solving a different puzzle. Other than that, pretty neat.
Item Finder is for Hidden Items. The Masterball is not invisible. If you try to walk behind the Pokemon Center it stops you because it's a "visible" Item obscured by the building.
That Scyther softlock is the equivalent of the Escape Room employee telling you that you got the wrong key, taking it from you, then taking the right one out of the room too and leaving you there
Other than the fact that there's an employee standing there who will say "Oh, looks like you grabbed the wrong key. Here, I'll take that one and give you another chance to grab a key!"
@@Math.BanditIt's still a trash puzzle if the unblock is to make a non essential piece suddenly essential. There is no communications of unblocks in his introduction, he literally tells us he's a helper not a piece to the puzzle.
@@Math.Banditman idk even if that happened in real life and there’s very little time consequence I’d still be like. Why didn’t you give me a clue beforehand then. It’s like MarioMaker pick a pipe, anything in a puzzle that relies on random chance doesn’t feel good when you pass it and it feels even worse when you don’t. It’s weird the amount of people simping for the mod creator making one mistake, it’s okay if improvements are possible it’s not some character flaw you have to white knight for
@@redtaileddolphin1875 It's not "white knighting" to disagree. I could also argue that there *was* a hint, where he saw the Girafarig use Thief and saw the Scyther use 4 non-Cut moves, so he could have deduced that Scyther *held* Cut and didn't *know* Cut, and so he could get the best of both worlds with Girafarig stealing Cut from Scyther.
@@Math.Bandit you could argue that, but by virtue of the fact that you normally associate scyther with cut, its really easy to just miss those kinds of details when you think youve already gotten the plan figured out. and when the plan turns out to have not worked out, the employee throws out both keys. good design allows you to make those kinds of mistakes, then not have to rely on literally restarting and/or backtracking on an aspect of the game in order to progress: plan a doesnt work, thats cool, you have a chance to try a plan b.
yeah, waiting until AFTER the player has spent their only master ball on a scyther to block them from bringing it felt mean. same with the tree only recognizing the girafarig (presumably bc of its long neck), not the scyther (who flies!). and with the game baiting you into using your rare candy instead of grinding.
@@Thisisnotasign It looks like double battles aren't triggered if you have 1 pokemon, so his idea was just take scyther alone up there and go past the trainers.
I do think the tree with the apple could've used a better hint that alluded more to Girafarig than "you'll need to get more pokemon and come back." Like, maybe a simple "it's too high" or something.
it could be easily gated off by a trainer with a pokemon that only has ghost moves or something because girafarig is a normal type and that would even have indicated which pokemon to catch too and given some insightto prevent the scyther softlock
@@ZyquuxAlso true. And the girl that dislikes Scyther could instead not like Persian or even suggest that their Growlithe gets a bit too riled up around Pokemon like Skitty or Meowth
One kinda clever hint you didn't catch onto: the reason May says "I'll blow you away" is because the Japanese name for Whirlwind translates to "Blow Away" (this is the cause of the infamous "Bulbasaur, use Whirlwind" scene from the anime), hinting that you need Whirlwind to win the fight.
"I pride myself at being good at puzzles" *reads sign that says "grinding is not required" 3 times* "ok maybe I'm supposed to grind?? am I supposed to grind?? Ok I can beat scyther, so I think I'm supposed to grind"
2 things you should never feature in your Escape Room hack: -Possible softlocks -Grinding And for the love of god, be sure to advertise none of that is present in your hack.
@@kheireddineattala1281From what I heard there is a way out of the Scyther softlocke but it requires talking to an NPC that doesn't do anything else. So almost everyone will reset before finding out thry don't have to reset.
Congrats on beating this despite some BS that wasn't telegraphed properly. I think the problems with the escape room design are all solvable; hopefully the romhack creator makes some updates to give the player hints on the Scyther softlock (instead of just making you lose out of the blue) and where to look for the master ball.
I think the room needs to be expanded so that if you catch the Scyther first there's a small puzzle to get a second master ball but if you read the signs and understand Girafarig needs to be caught then that litle "get a 2nd masterball"-puzzle can be skipped.
The Masterball is hidden exactly behind the Pokéball logo on the Pokecenter. I think that's a clever hint to look. The Pokéball you need to find is behind the only visiable Pokéball on the map
Game design as harsh as this is just stupid. The puzzle itself was awesome but how anyone is supposed to just "figure out" something so viciously designed is my biggest gripe with this hack.
@@karlgilbertmanongsong7720 Yeah, but that'd be such a stretch ordinarily though. May should have some dialogue hinting at where she may have dropped it, at least something that tells you it's that island and not anywhere else on the map
Freezai will stream, drop a randbats in the middle of it for us to enjoy after and then cut and voice the VOD highlights all in the same day. Insane work ethic
Loved the video!! Found you through the littlelocke you did for Pokemon Emerald so it's really cool to see you back doing cool challenges alongside the really good showdown/tournament content.
Really enjoyed your rom content before with your unique perception to the nuzlockes since you are from a competitive background. Hope we see more of them including nuzlockes and stuff like this too.
Love seeing more ingame/challenge-type content! I've been rewatching the littlelockes a ton lately and this is scratching a similar itch; would love to see the BW2 littlelocke become a reality!
Scyther Sudo-Softlock is trash, with the solution being terribly communicated. It's obvious for people with the correct first idea, but purely illogical for those that follow the rules strictly and don't want to be carried. The "no grinding" + "rare candy" with the first puzzle being "reach a level" ... Is also just stupid, if the intended solution is to grind the level. Like seriously? And IMO I considered Thief to be the most important asset by personal bias. But actually it's totally understandable to assume that Solo-Passing the Double Battle with a Cut Scyther is the intended solution. Obviously it even came up when playtesting the room... So a "solution" was added... In the worst and most lazy way possible. 2 NPC suddenly change their behaviour... One to block you, one to unblock you... But their is no hint towards the latter, before or after. Unless you go back to Communication grinding... Which shouldn't be a thing if there is a "no grinding" rule! If a puzzle piece has been interacted with, resulting in the same reaction. Trying it again, with the believe that something different happens is literally the definition of INSANITY. But the intended unblock ffoe the sudo softlock...
Loved this, such a fun vid. Would love to see you do more of these if there are any more Pokémon escape rooms. Some rom / fakemon game vids would be a nice addition to the channel too (I find fakemon games to be a lot more fun than rom hacks).
Honestly even brute-forcing finding the masterball by checking every tile for an invisible item it shouldn't have taken that long since there weren't that many tiles available to check, but of course when you forget you can walk behind Poke-Centers I can see how finding it would seem like an impossible task :D
i was so convinced the ball was hidden on that 2 block strip of land left of may only accessible with surf. you never checked it once but it was genuinely frustrating that they would put it somewhere basically invisible rather than put it on the patch of land that seemed like it could serve no other purpose than to hold a hidden item.
Great vid! Been a fan of your content for two years now, and this was something new. I very much enjoyed watching you play this escape room. Have you looked into doing challenge runs like your littlelocke on other challenging romhacks?
I like ROMs and I like pokemon escape rooms but this one was just not good lol that master ball and the scyther girl, plus rare candy softlock, and the implication that you might be able to do something about nurse joy's flu and outside of those things the path was pretty obvious, so not even a great puzzle :(
"A good escape room wouldn't make you search every tile." Ah, now, you're right about that, but assuming this is escape room is good, see, that's where you went wrong
I love how the Scyther being blocked on the beta so randomly was probably a stopgap fix to something someone figured out when playtesting. I think the problem there was that rather than make it natural, girl goes from giving you a clue to what to do with Kirlia into blocking Scyther for no reason. I get that the point is to beat the room the intended way, but the player needs to be coerced into that direction naturally. Maybe make a reference to a fear of bugs or something; maybe make her a Scyther hater and a psychic Pokemon enthusiast or something to that ability. Heck, maybe change Scyther to another Pokemon entirely. If it doesn't feel natural, the player will (rightfully) feel that they were punished for technically not making a wrong choice.
Great video, i would love to see more romhack content as I don't think it's covered enough. I think you'd have crazy fun with something like Elite Redux with the four abilities per mon.
Hmm... I probably woulda dropped arm thrust instead of sand attack. You've already got a fighting type move. Makuhita is slow, and almost certainly lower level than any pokemon you're actually going to have to fight to progress, so Vital Throw having lower Priority isn't really an issue. Also, I love how he's mashing through text boxes like he's playing a game he's played before. _Multiple sources say you don't have to grind_ "Are we supposed to grind here?" "They're not attacking me" That's because they're picking moves at random and each only have 1 attacking move that can actually knock you out. So, you spent over half an hour, real time, searching for the masterball, which means you spent an hour and half searching for it in game time. It would have been better to just grab a hint from the gamemaster. Further, the fact that May said she lost it probably should have restricted your search to the starting island right off the bat. Where are the obvious places it could be on that island? There's a couple of spots that look like they're trying to draw your attention with the way they're shaped, also exactly one tile which is hidden from the camera. "If we catch scyther, we can go past the thing over there" Solid shot the couple gives you another catching tool, or some other thing you need to advance.
What was the logic behind depositing 2 pokemon and fainting a third, instead of just depositing all three to save time? I know in gen 3 you can't fight Tate & Liza without a second pokemon in your party, so I believe that would have just saved time.
I did it in 90 mins more or less but I somehow tunnelvisionned on girafarig, not seeing scyther could in theory put me through (if not for stupid little girl), and found master ball quickly. You found the smart stuff faster then I did but got owned by poor design
they could easily have given kirlia rock smash and force you to both smash and cut for the w (or make the scyther a smeargle, theoretically can get cut but no way to actually teach him). And for the apple it would need to be explained how you get it. There is also a lot of contrivance in stuff like yamask just getting no new moves, the second May pokemon being clefable (which could have had magic guard for t spikes, a better solution would have beel lv 100 smeargle with same move), the eviolite yamask thing where you need to have intuition for damage on yamask AND not get crit. The gen 5 movesets thing with misty explosion being in the game, and thw whole nurse joy thing is pretty ridiculous. A solution for it would be to add 3 things 1) a ledge you jump over before may to prevent going back 2) a map redesign to make going back to pokecenter possible once surf is yours 3) a way to reset the game upon being softlocked that does not rely on save files (though that may be hard to implement I am not sure)
The thumbnail made me think this was a FreezaiLive video at first! Glad to see it's a main channel one instead :3c It's neat to see you branching out with the video topics, though I do love your coverage of comp pokemon. Looking forward to your next vid, whatever it is
Idk about all lf the songs but I recognize a lot of pokemon mystery dungeon. The song at the beginning is Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon - Tree of Life: Island of the South
Really frustrating that it told you not to grind but then you did anyway. You could have probably found the item on the ground if u didnt speed everywhere
