>>57986279It's hard for me to want to leave reviews anymore especially since most of what I have to say leans negative, and apparently some skemplers (hi assidon, still working on seven shitphonies I hope?) monitor the thread to cry to jannies if something mean gets said and becomes its own little can of worms. But fuck it I'll sum up my thoughts real quick
The "completion" level of the hacks this year is definitely higher, there's maybe one or two hacks that are broken or incomplete, but compared to last year it feels like they're a lot more uninspired.
Tainted's hack showed really good choreography and character writing, but it's in service of a story that just doesn't work and isn't interesting. Characters also tend to yap like it's YIIK and the dungeons themselves were pretty unbalanced and filled with monster houses with no reliable way to deal with them. This hack was probably my biggest disappointment since I'm a huge fan of Tainted - he worked alone this year so maybe it was just too much to have to juggle literally everything by himself. Stories with Arceus are also just impossible to make interesting, I feel, no matter how well you're able to write him, though I do believe if he took a different approach to what the story was about it could have been quiite a bit better.
