#romhack retrospective

[hyphinett]

Shout out to 13 year old me for believing I was going to make an entire romhack when I had only played a Pokémon game to completion one time. I got as far as making your rival be just really mean to you for some reason and added a few custom sprites. In retrospect I was probably trying to make the rival actually reflect people who had been mean to me in real life like I imagined a rival should do. Anyway I will not be releasing "Pokémon but you have a bully version" any time soon lol.

[islandsaoirse]

Let me tell ya a story of another social media whose name started with T.

A really popular social media in spanish speaking servers, the site allowed you to run a blog, put up cool gifs on your page and hell a tag system only matched by Tumblr at the time. It was known amongst a lot of kids for being the place you pirated games from, thousands of blogs dedicated to reviewing and then dumping pirate links at the bottom.

You’d have a strong romhack culture too! With Spanish specific translations for all sorts of games that never got ported over to Latin America, sprite comics, news, heartfelt reviews and retrospectives, blogposts titled “top ten memes that made me laugh” with a paragraph explaining why it was funny. It was another time.

Though something was off, it seemed right wing conspiratorial posts would make the leaderboards of the days posts more than any other genre of post. There still was q wonderful culture though, collaborative fic, roleplays that lasted for over 100 pages, I made my first internet friend group there. In a space whose search bar id start to use over Google at times. A space where Spanish was simply the language that was spoken unlike all the other socials. It was our spot, with our culture.

They kept removing the aspects that made it a blogging site, added a marketplace, added their own currency which much later would set the foundation for the site to start doing crypto, news came out of site admins boosting right wing conspiracies about Latin American elections. All the cool creatives where throttled to hell, we ran to mostly Reddit and here. The last saving grace of the platform was being a place where you could find game roms and while it was removed for obvious legal reasons, it was the final blow to the site.

The site kept existing, though without any of its relevance, only being known as some sort of Latin 4chan with none of its impact. You can go there now, you’ll see someone claiming the president of Chile eats babies and proof of aliens and slurs galore. To think the site was relevant enough to a point it could’ve impacted a whole countries, no a whole regions politics and elections. All for chasing to become the Facebook of a region that already widely used Facebook. To become the right wing town square of Latin America, and to get rid of all the blog and html that made it a wholly latin product.

That’s the story of Taringa! A social media that was once all powerful and squandered it for an audience that already had Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, Facebook, Tumblr.

[secretivecactus-blog]

Restoration Queen: Retrospective

My final thoughts and such are below the divide. Some spoilers, obviously.

On the whole, I’d say I enjoyed Restoration Queen.

I really liked some of the changes -- Amelia and Neimi were absolutely adorable dorks, and Ephraim abdicating at the end was a very nice touch. I appreciated Ismaire’s response to her treasonous subordinate, as well -- he was a traitor and she should damn well act like it.

Eirika demonstrated a stronger will throughout, which was nice... But the fact that she still gave Lyon the Sacred Stone did irk me.

I understand the whole “gesture of trust” thing, but she had acknowledged that Lyon may well be beyond saving and seemed to accept the fact even prior to doing so. Perhaps it was a limitation where the hackers were unable to edit the event itself, merely the text -- and I can certainly understand if that was the case. Plot-wise, however, it still leaves something of a bad taste in my mouth.

There weren’t really any gameplay changes, at least that I noticed -- and that’s fine, the hack only billed itself as a text edit. As it was only a text edit, however, I feel like they could have probably gone further in some places, perhaps given some characters more screentime (as an example, Tana is still a rare face, while her brother has quite a lot of dialogue).

Would I recommend it, though? Yes, absolutely. If you haven’t played Sacred Stones but want to, you might even consider just playing the hack. As noted, the gameplay is exactly the same and the script is less frustrating.

Again, the hack can be found here on the Tumblr of one of the hackers.

If you want the version with my cosmetic mods (and a tweak so that you won’t need to use the control enemy glitch to give bishop-excuse-me-cultist Natasha dark magic), you can find that here. The original Readme is included, naturally.

Unit retrospective coming next.

[miloscat]

2021 summary

What did I get up to during 2021? Let’s review.

I published a few comic scanlation projects with the aid of my translator Horseypope; the Umihara Kawase spinoff manga from the official guidebook, and Toshihiro Ono’s The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past gaiden one-shot Quark and the Fairy Queen. Both of these I imported the publications of and scanned myself, which is new for me. I also scanlated the Baraduke 2 promotional mini-manga with scans from my friend Gibbon, although the remarkable Kate Willaert has recently done her own excellent version of it.

I’ve continued publishing new pixel art projects on my DeviantArt while cross-posting them here. This year I made fewer artworks but they were much larger, with pixel cast portraits of (among others) the Umihara Kawase series, the X-Men cinematic universe, Hyrule Warriors Age of Calamity, and my largest ever piece: the expanded Donkey Kong & Friends, with 315 characters!

Podcast output was a little slow, with 3 episodes of the Arcade Era Power Hour with Gibbon, and 5 Eurovision commentaries. My streaming continued to be regular though, with lots of fun games played throughout the year. Game club spurred some mini-series: Tyrian led to an exploration of Compile’s shooters, I looked at some games tangentially related to Umihara Kawase, and the leaked Dinosaur Planet N64 ROM caused me to embark on an inflated months-long journey through Rare-related titles including fan games, Flash ephemera, and lots of fun obscure stuff. This included a complete 7-part playthrough of the excellent fan game Donkey Kong Country: The Trilogy, for which I also participated and won a contest to find a hidden secret! Towards the end of the year I also looked through the back catalogue of Ludosity and Daniel Remar, which was a lot of fun. You can see all the archived streams here.

I tried to tie streams in with my normal gaming choices too, which included Ludosity (hitting all the major points leading up to Slap City), Rare stuff (catching up on their Xbox output and indies inspired by the classics), and Umihara Kawase (the modern instalments and some fan games), but also X-Men movie games, the Castlevania Lords of Shadow subseries, and Metroid (Dread plus fan and inspired games). Somehow my serial playing of faux-retro games remained entirely off-stream. My PC helped with some of these, as well as regular online games with my brother, but otherwise my gaming was well spread among various platforms. I got new component output cables for Xbox and PS2 which look great, oh and a PS5 as well which I’ve mainly used to make playing PS4 games a bit better...!

Now for some awards. “Best fan game/romhack”: DKC The Trilogy, runners up Donkey Kong Land colour patch, Metroid Rogue Dawn, AM2R, Kaban-chan Chirari. The “making me wait” award: Pictlogica Final Fantasy, runner up Age of Calamity DLC. The “in retrospect actually didn’t mind too much having to play half the game again due to a permanent softlock” award: Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2. “Best crossover”: Slap City, runners up Complex Dream (the Chrono Cross event in Another Eden), Lego Dimensions which we continue to play sporadically. “Best original freeware”: Iji, runners up Ittle Dew 0, Ninja. “Least impressive remake”: Link’s Awakening HD, runner up Conker Live & Reloaded. “Best surprise sequel”: Metroid Dread, runners up New Pokemon Snap, Umihara Kawase Fresh, Axiom Verge 2.

Thanks for reading, and here’s to a pleasant and safe 2022 hopefully!

[mazin-empress]

“With Nintendo, they shut down fangames that are made out of love for the franchises they’ve made. AM2R, Pokemon Uranium, the list goes on tbh. With SEGA, they’ve not only endorsed it, but even hired people working on fangames and romhacks to help create the best Sonic game in fucking years.” Did you forget that 1) the people go to Sega FIRST to be hired and 2) Sega shut down their share of fangames like the Streets of Rage remake? Nintendo sucks, but stop pretending Sega isn’t above it.

I must have been misinformed somewhere regarding the sitch involving Sonic Mania, then. What I’d heard is that Sega saw what the fellas involved were doing with their fangames and the iOS editions of some of the classics, and were like “hey, wanna help us work on an official game?”

In retrospect, that doesn’t really make that much sense.

And, uh… Can’t say I was aware of your Streets of Rage example. I don’t really follow that series, or fighting games in general aside from maybe BlazBlue. I wasn’t trying to say Sega’s above shutting down fan projects, just that they seem to handle them a lot better than Nintendo does.

In my defense I was pretty out of it when I made that post, but sorry I came off like that, mate. I could’ve worded myself better.

[radramblog]

50% completion

So it’s July 1st.

That means we’re halfway through the year.

er, close enough.

That, means a lot, frankly, since it means I’ve been at this blog a day thing for a year for half of its theoretical runtime. In the words of Josh Homme, it’s all downhill from here, but whether that ends up being in difficulty or writing quality is up for debate.

I guess this is something of a retrospective and a prospective for this as a whole. We’re halfway there (whooooahhh, etc)

This blog is and was something that I would force myself to do such that even if I felt like a depressed asshole, I was still producing something, and to that end it’s clearly succeeding to some extent. This became somewhat difficult as I got through what would hopefully be the last semester of my uni work, but eventually that got done as well.

For the record, another function of July 1st is that it’s the day my results came back, and I don’t have the piece of paper yet, but ya boi has earned his Masters degree. Marks are great, GPA is something I wouldn’t have dreamed of. It’s kind of wild, frankly.

I was somewhat worried about being so busy potentially affecting the quality of this blog. And it probably did. And I very much know the quality of this blog does not fucking matter, despite what my brain decides to constantly tell me.

I don’t want to go back and highlight what I think are some of the worst of what I’ve put out so far, because that’s a bit shit to be frank. I do think I want to go back and look at what I think is some of the best I’ve done so far. There’s over 180 of these at this point, there’s got to be at least a couple good ones.

I am legitimately proud of How to make a New York Cheesecake, even if a large part of it was just describing the downward mental spiral I went through over extremely minor stressors. It let me be both pointedly honest and also add a bit of comedic flourish to a story- and not to toot my own horn, I do think comedy is one of my stronger suits.

With how much I tend to enjoy analytical content, I feel there isn’t that much I’ve done on this blog that fits into that sphere and is also, like, good. With that in mind, I think my post about The Legacy of Shrek was pretty aight. Ultimately it’s hard to actually make a good, well thought-out essay within the space of a day and a lax format like this.

Speaking of analytics, I think my Dirk in Homestuck^2 post was, like, actually a good essay, and I’m genuinely really proud of it. It’s just occurred to me that I never actually posted that to the Homestuck subreddit, and maybe I should, it’s pretty decent. Maybe a little indulgent, but it was also cathartic- I’d had the idea for it rattling around since before I even started writing blog posts at all.

The last entry in the Linkin Park series was similarly cathartic, though I don’t think that it is going to resonate with anyone other than myself. It was a series I wrote for myself, moreso than anything else on here, and the finale of such was mostly me processing the grief of the loss of Chester Bennington. A fair few years later than it being relevant, I guess.

 Looking forward into the future has always been difficult for me, but it’s even harder now that I’m basically done with education. Unless I do a PhD, but even then that’s still kind of work. My future is uncertain, even as I have more time to work with than ever at the moment. I’m hunting for jobs, but nothing concrete has happened yet.

With that in mind, I’d like to try and use my time a bit more productively and with a bit more discipline in future, and that applies to this blog as well. You may have noticed I’ve kept Magic to Mondays and Tunes to Tuesdays, and I think that’s going to continue to be the case- I might add more music days when I’m doing a continuous series like I just started with Radiohead. Magic stuff will probably still focus on the formats I care most about- Cube and Commander- though I would like to talk lore and meta stuff at other points.

There are two other things I’m trying to do with my expanded free time, which may be ambitious considering I don’t know how long that will even last for. The first of these is to clean through my watch and play and read lists while I have the time, if only to put a dent in the monstrosity that each has become. To that end, I want to try and discuss a new (to me) piece of media every Wednesday.

The other is my attempt to make a Pokémon Romhack- planning for such has been going on since the start of last year, but actual physical work is stalled out on account of both Uni and me having not a single clue what the fuck I’m doing or how to do it. But it’s pretty heavily planned at least! I think. If I manage to get a move on those, I might start including progress updates as part of this blog.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with this blog after the end of the year. The initial intent was for it to be a new year’s resolution, a year-long production project. But I am not sure whether continuing it on a much longer term than that is at all practical. Like, I’m usually spending an hour minimum on these, which is not an amount of free time you really want to burn once you’re working full time. So the long-term nature of the blog is a bit unknown.

But that’s a problem for future me to solve. I’m only halfway done (a bit less, technically, I think, because February) and the list of topics I know I want to discuss at some point hasn’t gotten that much shorter. Thank you for reading along the first half with me, and I hope you’ll join me as this progresses.

[flyingpikachus]

remembered today that when i was like 10-12 or something a girl at pokemon league was playing Platinum with a naked cynthia romhack or something like you were naked cynthia and i was like...so fascinated just glued to the screen anyways this was definitely a gay moment for me and in retrospect she was also probably very gay and an early crush. pokemon platinum truly was an incredible game

[secretivecactus-blog]

Restoration Queen: Unit Retrospective

Find it beneath the divider. No spoilers this time, but it’s a bit long -- I gave some thoughts on all of the girls.

Eirika came a long way from her humble beginnings. Her strength really blossomed after a shaky start. Her skill and speed were excellent throughout, but her defenses were always somewhat unstable. Her HP improved a lot after promotion, which did help offset her squishiness.

She saw most of her use early-game, hitting level 20 by chapter 5 (arena abuse!). After that she was essentially benched, as I wanted those who could actually gain experience to have the chance to do so and her unpromoted caps were hurting her.

She had a support with Tana, and I made heavy use of it to boost both of them up against waves of enemy reinforcements. Eirika/Tana has been my OTP for the game since I first played it the day it was released in North America, so naturally I had to do their supports. Oh, I’m sure Eirika/L’Arachel would have been cute and that Tana’s other options were good, but an OTP is an OTP.

While her use rate never really recovered even post-promotion, she was a solid unit who took down a few lategame bosses and helped slap around minions in the final chapter.

Vanessa was my second usable unit, and her trajectory was the opposite of Eirika’s. Her poor defenses and middling offense made her nearly unusable pre-arena abuse, and even afterwards her defenses meant she had to be cautious of arrows.

Post-promotion, however, she really began to shine. Her resistance remained abysmally low for a pegasus knight, but she quickly capped her skill and speed and her strength shot through the roof. Her physical defense also became decent, though her HP was still middling.

She had a support with Lute, but their vastly different mobility meant that I rarely actually took advantage of it. Their supports were cute, with lots of Lute being Lute. I like Lute.

She saw the most use midgame, when most of my other units were still in the middle of development. When Shadowshot became common, she had to start hanging back -- while she had decent odds of dodging it, two hits would take her out. There were a number of close calls.

Neimi’s not bad... For an archer. Her resistance was very solid for a physical unit, though her physical defense resembled Kleenex. She hit reasonably hard and got a lot of criticals.

Neimi actually got a fairly even spread of use across the game. Coming as early as she does, she got in on my first round of arena abuse and got to serve as my primary magic tank for a while. Since I got the Orion’s Bolt the level immediately after arena abusing her to 20, she ended up as my second promoted unit -- and it was only the end of chapter 6!

She had a support with Amelia, and the two were rarely further apart than the support boost range. They were a formidable pair, and their supports were absolutely adorable.

The increased stats and caps from her early promotion made her part of my primary offense, where she remained all the way up to the final fight itself. I don’t think there was a single chapter after her recruitment where she didn’t get a chunk of the kills to herself.

Lute was a little like Eirika. She got a ton of use during the early game, even serving as my first promoted unit (end of chapter 5). She served as my primary healer between Natasha’s promotion and L’Arachel’s recruitment (and then again after L’Arachel’s promotion) as well as my main physical tank, as her defense and HP were higher than any of my other units at the time.

Because of her early promotion and heavy use, however, her level quickly outstripped that of everyone else. She was level 15 when Neimi was still level 4, so I had to reduce my use of her for the sake of spreading EXP around. She was barely getting any because enemies were so weak next to her!

Like Natasha, I gave her the ability to use dark magic via the control enemy glitch. This gave her the ability to use four different weapon types (all of the magical ones, with Anima at S and the others at A), the most of any of my units. Nosferatu cast at 30 magic was a very useful boost to her survival when combined with her already-competent defenses and HP.

Lute still got to serve in an offensive role up through endgame, though it was much reduced. She spent most of her time as a healer and running potentially dangerous errands, like going for chests in Rausten Court under the fog of war.

I don’t seem to have a low-level screenshot of Natasha’s stats, so you’ll have to settle for her level 20 cleric self, back when she was still pretending to be innocent.

Natasha never really saw the kind of use that other units did. She was just too frail -- one or two good hits would take her out of the game. It took a while for her magic to begin rising regularly, but she did end up capping it and gaining the ability to hit reasonably hard. She received my only Body Ring (one of the only two stat boosters I actually used) to give her a slightly easier time with heavy dark tomes, not that it was nearly enough for the really good stuff.

Natasha’s primary use was as a magic tank against gorgons and arch mogalls with Shadowshot, and she wasn’t bad at it at all. Her Slayer-boosted dark magic was also capable of tearing through monster units as if they were as fragile as she was, so when she went on the offense she was certainly far from helpless!

Natasha has no supports with females, so she didn’t get any support bonuses.

Most of her use came during the endgame, after I unlocked the final floor of the Tower of Valni to steal some copies of Stone to teach her dark magic. Since I couldn’t let her hit S in either of her other two weapon types, I had a hard limit for how much I could use her prior to her dramatic reveal as a cultist.

All in all, Natasha was a respectable unit that was simply overshadowed by her fellows.

Tana was nearly as res-screwed as Vanessa during the early game, though she had achieved “middling” status by the endgame. Her physical defense was noticeably lower, but that was more in line with a normal falcoknight. Her skill was much lower than Vanessa’s, and until near the end her strength was as well.

In the end, Tana saw almost as many battles as Vanessa. Part of this came from the fact that I paired her with Eirika, and part of it came from the fact that I gave her the Fili Shield.

By endgame, she was mostly being used for chasing down gargoyles and mogalls on top of mountains.

Amelia was the undisputed MVP of my team. She rose from the garbage stats of a trainee class to a powerhouse that naturally capped every stat except for HP. She saw almost 200 more battles than her girlfriend, who had the second-highest battle count. A lot of this probably came from the fact that she near-soloed Darkling Woods and its endless hordes, with a little bit of sniper assistance.

What do I even say about her? She had near-capped HP, and an Angelic Robe (of which I had three by endgame) would have finished her off (and in fact wasted 2 points). Her strength gave her a powerful offense, her skill let her hit and crit with frequency, her speed was high enough that (combined with her con to offset the weight of her axes) she doubled everything except Gwyllgis, her luck boosted her crit rate while reducing the odds of crits against her near to zero, her defense and resistance let her tank absolutely everything (though her speed meant she dodged more than she got hit -- a general with 95 Avoid is obscene)...

She earned the Swiftsole, which was the only stat-boosting item that I used aside from Natasha’s Body Ring. Natasha needed the ring, but Amelia proved herself worthy of those boots.

When I first got her, I had to use her carefully. She dodged a lot, but her defenses were both poor and her HP wasn’t great -- a wrong move and the little knight would have been crushed. Near the end of her knighthood, however, she began pulling in perfect level after perfect level. She was my only unit that actually hit 20 in a promoted class, and she did so with the highest of distinction.

Despite her low use rate in the early- and mid-game, Amelia defined my endgame, all the way up to critting the Demon King in the face with her only swing of Garm.

Tethys was one of the few units that didn’t manage to hit any caps, despite the fact that she made it to 20 (albeit as a single-tier class). She was, however, incredibly useful.

Her speed let her avoid every single attack launched at her -- I don’t recall her taking a hit at any point in the game. Even if she had been hit, her defenses and HP would have let her take a single blow from anything short of the Demon King.

Her support with Marisa was used almost as extensively as the one between Neimi and Amelia -- yes, I sent a dancer into melee combat and she came through just fine. As with Neimi, her fire affinity provided her more powerful partner with a ludicrous boost. The supports themselves were extremely sweet, and easily the most emotionally mature of those that I did.

Tethys saw use from the moment I got her all the way up to the very last part of the endgame. Dance is useful.

Marisa is another one who saw a lot of use all the way through from recruitment to endgame. She still had the potential to cap 3 stats with her last two levels, too.

As a myrmidon character, she had excellent skill and speed -- what was somewhat more surprising was that her HP and strength decided to keep up. With the damage and crit boosts from her support with Tethys (another pairing I’ve adored for years), she was a threshing machine that destroyed everything that got close.

Her defenses were somewhat fragile, but her HP managed to offset that almost as much as her evasiveness did.

From fighters to generals to dracozombies, Marisa killed it all without looking back even once. Aside from Amelia, she was the most endgame-defining unit on the team.

...And, you know, she’s been my favorite character since I first played the game, so. There’s that.

I don’t seem to have a single unpromoted screenshot of L’Arachel (I mean, she was a troubadour), so you’ll have to make do with before-and-after difference of 2 levels in her second tier.

L’Arachel was a solid magic tank, but... That was really all she had going for her. Her HP wasn’t great, her defense was low (albeit much better than Natasha’s), her speed was middling, and her magic wasn’t great. She had trouble doubling, did low damage, and took a lot of painful hits.

As much as I enjoy her personality, she mostly warmed the bench with a physic staff in hand. After a lot of close calls, it just wasn’t worth it.

Is she a bad unit? Not necessarily. If I had given her my Dracoshields and an Angelic Robe or two, I probably wouldn’t have had any major issues with her. I was hoarding stat boosters, however, so (like all of my other units) she had to sink or swim based on the RNG... Which did not like her this time around.

Myrrh is a Manakete, and it shows. She had poor bases and low caps, but her incredible growths quickly filled them out to respectable levels that were boosted through the roof by her Dragonstone. Even Amelia couldn’t quite match her defenses or raw offensive potency, though she was much faster and luckier.

The real drawback of Manaketes is the fact that the Dragonstone can’t be repaired by Hammerne, is unique, and has only 50 uses. Thankfully, gorgon eggs can be used to refill it -- something that I did, in fact, make use of. She still had 37 uses left at the end of the game!

Myrrh arrived as the game tilted over to the end, and saw most of her use as bait to tank against ranged attackers. Many of the kills that she did get were bosses.

A solid unit whose only drawback isn’t all that hard to get around. Definitely one that I had fun using.

[radramblog]

Some weird-ass french pokemon tier list

So ya boi was looking to produce some shit-tier content (it’s deliberate, that makes it OK), and decided I’d just browse tiermaker for a bit. Went to a category (it was pokemon of course it was pokemon), sorted by “recent”, and decided to pick one of the most recent ones.

Now, obviously the options were pretty slim pickings. The most most recent one was actually like, villainous team music, which would have made for too good a discussion. I sure didn’t want to do a waifu tierlist like which came up multiple times, and honestly most of them were either boring, cringe, or both.

And then I found this one.

“Tierlist des types Normal qui méritent un changement de type”, or, Normal types that deserve a type change, was an interesting enough idea. Not just because its an odd thought experiment, but because I’m seriously curious as to who would make this and like, why.

And now I’m making fun of it on the internet. In fact I’m probably by proxy making fun of some random French 10 year old. What has the world come to.

So the list given isn’t actually every normal type, obviously. In fact it’s a pretty limited list.

A total 13 Pokemon, and I’m not sure what the basis was. Are these all things that they think deserve the type change? But like, to what? Why just these, as well?

I guess I’m marking these based on how much they need the change? I’m not doing it by how much I like the pokemon, even though I have surprisingly strong opinions on a lot of these. Iunno.

I guess I’ll just go down the line. Doduo and Dodrio I’m assuming are here because they are flying types but also flightless birds (they do learn Fly by HM though). As it happens, that’s a relic of Flying originally being Bird type before a change late in Gen 1’s development- and probably one for the best- but the two still kept the Normal/Flying status.

I guess they’d fit Normal/Ground or something, but honestly, I like them as they are. It’s just kind of funny. And while in retrospect Gen 1 obviously has way too many Normal/Flying lines, starting a tradition of mediocrity, Dodrio is easily the king of the Gen 1 normal bird castle as far as viability goes, and it’s nice to have it there. Uhhh C tier I guess.

 Lickitung is next. And….Lickilicky just isn’t here. Huh.

While I agree Lickitung probably needs something to distinguish it, I have no idea what type you could possibly give it. It doesn’t look like a rock type, even though it needs a Rock move to evolve. It’s certainly no Fighting, nor Flyer, Dragon, or Ground. It’s elemental affinity is nil. It’s just a big tongue man. I don’t know what you’d do with it! D tier.

 Moving on to Aipom, and Ambipom, the worst Pokemon. If this were just based on my preferences for the mons, they’d go straight to F tier, but that’s not really what I’m here for. At the same time, just like the Lickis, I’m not sure what type this tier list is implying they should have. I checked if there was any previous rankings on this, to see if the creator made one themselves, but they haven’t done so, so there isn’t really any indication as to what they’re going for.

Ambipom, as much as I despise it, kind of already has a niche in Technician Fake Out/U-Turn. I don’t really think it needs more than that. I don’t really think it deserves more than that, but that’s beside the point. D as well I guess.

 Dunsparce is an interesting case. Considering its basis on the mythical Tsuchinoko, and its odd winged appearance, a lot of people would like it’s type to get changed to Normal/Dragon of all things. That, or give it an evolution with that typeline, as many fangames/romhacks have in the past. Alternately, considering its cavernous dwellings, it could suit a Ground typing just as well.

Honestly, considering it’s kind of a jokemon, I’m not convinced it needs a new type, but I wouldn’t blink much if it got one. B tier.

 Miltank…uh. I guess they want this to be Rock because of it’s association with the move Rollout? I’m still not sure why Rollout is Rock in the first place, to be honest, but like. People are already traumatised by Whitney, apparently, and you want to make the cow harder? Come on now. D tier.

 Zangoose is the first thing on here I’d argue is actually justified. The entire design of Zangoose was that it’s a violent mongoose constantly feuding with Seviper, a big fucking snake. And while it does have abilities related to Seviper’s poison, I really think they should have gone the next level and found a way to give Seviper an advantage over Zangoose in turn. Because as it is, it’s kind of no contest.

So honestly, I think Zangoose should just have been Fighting so Seviper resists its STAB. It would be awkward, though, seeing as all the claw/slashing attacks are Normal (and some Bug, or Dark, but at the time it was just Normal), but that’s not too big a deal. A tier.

 Rufflet and Braviary are ones I feel like could have gotten away with like, Fighting/Flying or something I suppose. The thing is, kinda like with Doduo/Dodrio, they’re one of the few Normal/Flying lines (of the many) that aren’t also the “earlygame bird” type. Like, they are legitimately very strong Pokemon, and their typing is a part of that. I’ve run Braviary in competitive and it was super solid.

Also, like, they’re just birds, dude. Normal seems right. C tier.

 Furfrou is one of the long long line of gimmick mons that tied into a game mechanic that they had to just keep bringing back just for them until Gen 8 when they were lanced from the pokedex. In this case, Furfrou is the dog that is making fun of people who do ridiculous makeovers on their dogs, because that’s what you can do with it- it has a bunch of different forms that have no difference outside of appearance because they’re just hairstyles. This thing is just a normal fuckin dog. A Normal fuckin type. I guess I’d like more of these gimmick mons to stop being Normal types, but eh for now. D tier.

 Finally we have Yungoos/Gumshoos, the regional rodent from Alola. I agree with the notion of the regional rodent being pure normal getting extremely boring- of the 8 scruffy bastard lines we’ve got, two (Bibarel/Diggersby) haven’t been pure normal, and most of them suck.

The thing is, most of them have some way of distinguishing themselves. Raticate is iconic, Furret has the walcc meme and Accumula town. Linoone has the god-tier pickup, Bibarel is the most useful HM slave around. Watchog is the most annoying thing on the planet, and Diggersby is one of the ugliest. Greedent at least has a few things going on, what with a signature move and some very silly events in Sword/Shield.

Gumshoos is supposed to look like a PI, and has the ability Stakeout to match, but just ended up looking like Trump. For these reasons, it’s going in the S tier, because both of those clearly match the Dark type. Yungoos itself goes in like, C, because neither Bunnelby nor Bidoof shared the added type of their evolutions.

Now, that’s the entire list, and I’m kind of left wondering what made the original creator pick these specific mons. Like, most of them I cannot justify adding a type to in really any way. And there’s a bunch of other Normals I could see adding another type to- the Chansey line could have gotten Fairy, Dubwool should have had something, and Noctowl absolutely should have been Psychic. But I suppose these are just my opinions.

This is kind of a dearth of a tier list, and I wouldn’t really recommend anyone else do the thing I did and just pick one of the newest lists around. Unless you enjoy the kind of confusion I emitted here. Alas. Next time I’ll just do anime or something.