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conceptual games: Pokemon Ultra and Infra

wolftamer9

So if anybody asks you, you belong to Man on Earth
Though I'm working on a major long-term Pokemon project with my friends, I happen to have an idea of my own for a couple of Pokemon games. If I choose to make them, hopefully they can be made through ROMhacking, and if anybody is interested you can ask to help, seeing as it's still a whole game (that and I'm afraid I'll lose interest if I work on my own). These games are called Pokemon Ultra and Pokemon Infra (unless a better name can be thought of). These games feature no "new" pokemon, in the sense that there isn't a region that naturally has different pokemon in it. Technically, there are many new pokemon in this game, but they're not "natural." Other than those, all pokemon are from other games, possibly all kanto. (in fact it's possible that kanto is where the game will take place.) Let me explain the entire plot of both games. But remember I haven't finished it all yet, and I'm making some details up as I go along.

WARNING - MASSIVE TEXT WALL
DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU ARE MENTALLY PREPARED

The first part is the same in both games: You are the child of two researchers for a major university, and as long as you can remember you've wanted to work for the university's pokemon research division. Now you're finally old enough, and the professor who is the head of pokemon research is letting you volunteer for field research, meaning you get to go out and catch and train pokemon, as long as you send any pokedex information you have straight to the university and record whatever you find out about pokemon. Shortly after you begin your journey, which is the same basic "catch, train, fight, beat gyms, go to the leagues" formula, the university hires you along with some other field researchers to go to a place called Spectrum Isle, which is emitting various radio signals and other abnormalities, despite the fact that the island is completely uninhabited.

Pokemon Ultra:

You and your partners go to the island, which seems rather normal at first. But as you search, you find an undiscovered plant, which looks like a variation of a normal plant previously found on the island. The crew accidentally leaves without you, and as you look for them, your generic personal pokecomputer/pokephone starts to act oddly as if some signal was interfering with the machine. You follow a path to a clearing in the middle of the island and see a big purple crystal which seems to be the cause of the interference. Your head starts to hurt so you head to the part of the island you first arrived at, where the crew has come back to in order to get you. But before you get there you come across a ratatta which looks different from most ratattas, maybe even a little monkey-like. It runs away before you can fight or catch it, so you just head home. A little later you check the university, and a researcher tells you that the plant is unlike anything ever documented, and seems to be strangely resistant to many plant diseases which it accidentally came into contact with. You later return to the island alone to find that almost everything has changed. The plants are all different from any that ever existed before, and a few of the pokemon, which were once all well known from the kanto region, are completely different. After some exploration, you come across the same ratatta as before, but this time it's different - it's wearing clothes made from the skin of other pokemon, it's using tools, and it seems to grunt out what could even be words. You go to the university and tell your parents about what you saw. They don't believe you, and they tell you that you should go back to your mission. After beating a few gyms, one of the gym leaders, who once worked for the university, asks you what is going on these days, and you tell him everything you saw. The gym leader takes you on an expedition to Spectrum Isle, where things are much, much stranger than before. There is now a town with no people in it, only pokemon. all of the pokemon inhabiting the town have evolved- not in the typical pokemon way, but in a Darwinian sense. They are intelligent and many of them resemble humans. In fact, some of the plants and microbes have already evolved into new pokemon on their own. You meet the ratatta from before, who is now practically human, despite his unique pokemon features. He tells you and the gym leader that he doesn't know what's happening on the island either, but that the Sages who run the town, who are also ratatta, seem to be involved in it somehow. You go with the gym leader to the university to try and prove that the island is somehow evolving, and with the gym leader's help everyone is convinced. A large research crew including you, your friends from the university, and the gym leader travels to the island where things have gotten even more advanced in even less time. The buildings are futuristic, and all of the pokemon are more intelligent than before. You meet with the ratatta, who gives you some bad news - the Sages have decided that the town's inhabitants are tired of being confined to the island while the inferior humans and pokemon are controlling the world around them, so they are going to take humans and pokemon as their slaves and populate the world with their own kind. You enter the Sages' temple and fight some super-pokemon, and then speak with the Sages, who are more evolved than the other ratatta. They tell you that the town's inhabitants would actually rather stay on the island, and they were actually ordered to carry out the war by the "Violet God" who originally gave the gift of evolution to their island. You fight the Sages and then go much deeper into the temple (it's a labyrinth or cave) until you meet the Violet God, a giant legendary pokemon who tells you of the Violet Beacon - a stone that was activated and caused the island to evolve rapidly, supposedly to bring the world into its next stage of life, where all life forms would be incredibly intelligent and run the world together. But unfortunately, the Violet Beacon was only strong enough to affect the island. The "Violet God" (legendary, name and appearance pending) evolved around the Beacon from nothing but microbes, and due to its proximity, is constantly evolving, and is already far superior to any other human or pokemon in the world, and therefore should be the one to control the new era, which must be brought about by war because the beacon cannot make anyone evolve from a longer range. The gym leader decides to fight the pokemon and destroy the Violet Beacon, but is defeated, leaving you to fight. Once you win the legend battle, the Beacon is destroyed and you can later catch the Violet legendary somewhere else in the game.

Pokemon Infra:

You and the research team go to the island, and search far and wide, but find nothing, until you and a friend are separated from the crew and find a clearing with a red stone in the middle. Your generic personal pokecomputer/pokephone starts to behave unusually, but not glitchy like in the Ultra. Instead, the programs become easier to use, and new features begin to appear. You and your friend bring the team to see the stone, but get surrounded by a small pack of wild pokemon much stronger than any you have so far. You have no choice but to leave and come back when your pokemon are stronger than that pack, or when someone can help you fight them successfully. You are told to train and fight gyms in order to safely conduct proper research on the stone. Your friend from before suddenly realizes that he/she left his/her device on the island, and resolves to train on his/her own so that he/she can go back and retrieve it as fast as possible. After some time passes in the game, people around the region start acting strangely. Some of them receive notices via the internet that they are being transferred to a place called Spectrum City. You see advertisements on television for the new city, and rumors start to go around about how strange but great it is, and how nobody knows where it came from. You and your friend travel to Spectrum Isle and see that there is indeed a city there, seemingly having come out of nowhere. All of the buildings and machines there are state of the art, but no company seems to have built any of them. After fighting a few gyms, and defeating the same gym leader from Ultra, he asks you about the university, and you tell him about the strange island and the mysterious stone. He decides to go with the you to the university and try to contact whoever started the city so quickly and spontaneously. After speaking remotely with the mayor you find out that nobody knows how the city came into being. Even the mayor was personally sent a message from someone that the city existed and that he was going to be the mayor. The research team including you, your friend, and the gym leader start to look for information about the red stone, but the only shred of evidence you get is the mention from someone who speaks of the "Red Beacon", a fabled artifact said to have been created to serve mankind. Your team decides to go to the city and search for the stone, and are surprised by what you see when you get there. First of all, the city is booming with new population from all over the world, and is so populated that the island had to be artificially expanded to handle the new crowd. Second, the technology in the city is decades, maybe even centuries ahead of the world's current science. The local pokemon, which were from the Kanto region, seem to have been infected by the technology, which has turned them into entirely new pokemon enhanced by technology and dedicated to running the city. If you walk around and speak to people, you'll find that they are already so conditioned to the new technology that they look down on you and other outsiders as animals, because they are already incapable of surviving without the machines. And if you look around, you'll even find people who have been infused with technology just like the island's pokemon, and they think themselves to be even more superior than others. You and your friends and colleagues decide to go looking for the stone hoping to locate it by comparing the location where you found it with the current map of the island. As you travel you hear people and machines talking about a new era and the peak of humanity. You go to the theorized location and find a massive building with no people allowed inside, guarded by some of the robopokemon. You, your friend, and the gym leader fight your ways through the building (labyrinth/team base) and arrive at a large room with a giant computer in it. The computer tells you about the Red Beacon - a stone that was activated and caused technology to evolve on its own at an unbelievable rate from your friends old device, apparently given to the world in order to serve humanity as much as it possibly can. The Red Beacon created incredible technology and constructed the city in order to make the lives of the humans easier and better, but it is now stuck at a problem. The problem is the many flaws of humanity preventing people from becoming any happier. The computer offers you its plan - first it will create weapons to wage war on the world. Then, after the humans have given up, it will use special robots to place computer chips into peoples' brains and make them slaves to the computers, so that they can make people interact peacefully and not make the mistakes they do so naturally. You, your friend, and the gym leader smash up the computer only to find that it was a shell and nothing more. The one controlling the city is actually a giant robotic pokemon built around the Red Beacon. The gym leader tries to fight the pokemon (name and appearance pending) but fails, as does your friend. This leaves you as the only one left to fight the legendary. After you defeat it, the Red Beacon is destroyed and the pokemon runs away, giving you the opportunity to catch it elsewhere later on.

*WHEW* that was a lot of typing. So anyway, please tell me what you think. I might post some example sprites of the evolved pokemon and the robopokemon later if I feel like it.

EDIT: here's a sprite of the oddish from pokemon Ultra:
ultraoddish.png
 
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Oddly, I actually had the idea of "mutant Pokémon" being a new type of alternate form a few years back (though I thought that they could just be a more-interesting replacement for shinies, rather than part of an actual story.)

Not a big fan of the "more intelligent = more humanlike" idea, though. Seems kind of... well, a little too human-centric. Kind of like you're ignoring how intelligent a lot of Pokémon are already, and how most of the more-intelligent ones really don't act any more like humans than the rest. Look at the psychic-types, for example.

Of course, after reading the whole thing it seems like this "humanization" was intended to be more of an "evolution gone horribly, horribly wrong" kind of thing (to go along with the "technological advancement gone horribly, horribly wrong" part of the opposite version) rather than just a side-effect of being more intelligent... so actually this could work a lot better than I initially thought it would.

It's kind of neat to see someone come up with an idea for a Pokémon game with an actual plot, since most fangames seem to just be "new region, fight the gyms and so on" and nothing much else, from what I've seen. Maybe an evil-team-wants-legendary plot tacked on, but usually not much more than that. Heck, sometimes they don't even bother to make a new region or anything.
But this seems like it would be really, really complicated for a ROM hack, though; probably doable with a lot of time and effort (since you really can do nearly anything with a ROM hack if you mess around with stuff enough), but it might actually be easier to just make the game some other way instead of trying to change one of the official games into something like this.
 
Personally, I think you should just scrap Infra. It's like you're trying too hard to make a counterpart and as a result, you end up with an inferior, forced plot.
 
Personally, I think you should just scrap Infra. It's like you're trying too hard to make a counterpart and as a result, you end up with an inferior, forced plot.

IDK, I kinda like both. Besides, I'm pretty sure I thought of them together.
 
I love it, but why no friend in Pokemon Ultra? Even if he doesn't matter that much, it would still be nice.

Also, in Pokemon Ultra, it would make more sense if it said, "You find a strange Ratatta [stuff], and you give chase, but are unable to catch it. Since you can't find your way back to the crystal, you decide to head home." It doesn't really make sense to just have the guy head home from an awesome crystal like that.
 
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