>>56282374Just finished reading this, I have very mixed feelings on it. It reads like a typical shonen story (because that's kind of KFC's whole character) and it's pretty good at that with KFC stating his motivations whenever possible and having artificial jokes. It does something that I personally dislike a lot and it's unironically being faithful to the games, so to speak. I always thought that the concept of TM's was really fucking stupid to use in stories and should be taken more as 'A Pokémon that watched another do the move tries to mimic and eventually learn it' or something by the likes instead of an actual magic CD that pours knowledge into your brain, and this story has one of them as a major plot point. Another thing is translating game mechanics, it just doesn't read right, not because it's not understadable but because it breaks suspension of disbelief and ends up being a callback to the games rather than something impactful. I can't take a story seriously when the characters try to literally move and end up doing something completely different because apparently moves aren't something that the Pokémon does using its body and can be controlled by external forces. Cool, it's because of mystery dungeons being anomalies or whatever, it's still something very silly to read and that ends up being a negative because it never gets brought up again. The battle scene ended up being rather boring, because KFC is KFC and KFC can't lose because he's KFC so it's just another non-impactful power fantasy moment. Then there's the entire puzzle sequence that just feels like an entire nothingburger, of course none of the characters would have something significant happen to them because the status quo must be maintained like a sitcom, but other than that, the whole part about KFC explaining why he's suddenly an asshole to Toge felt like an exposition dump and any emotional weight it could've had was lost. Running out of characters so I'll stop now. Cool story though.
