tl;dr i don't think this was necessarily bad, just underpolished and definitely far off from reaching its potential
i think the concept of it is really neat and i'd love to see a more competent dev take a tackle at progression like this, which is almost like SM64 where you have an overworld hub and unlock more levels in a slightly nonlinear fashion by completing objectives in worlds
the portraits and overall presentation in terms of bringing a bunch of different looking 'worlds' (fangames) and being able to catch fakemon from them to assemble a team of different fakemon across worlds is also very neat conceptually but i think the game could've honestly done without.
the problem comes more from just...execution, the game does not have any QOL, or modern mechanics (seriously, why the fuck, it's 2024, just use CFRU) and has a lot of jank, some of which i mentioned and a lot of which i didn't. basic things like how the basic map design tended to go fucking apeshit with wild grass/cave tiles, but then for repels you have to manually reset them, for one
there were also some neat 'objectives' in some of the worlds, like okay cool in sinnoh there was a neat enough rhythm game, but then what the actual horsefuck was
>>56529581i didn't mention it also, but the hub area is very badly organized. like again, take a look at SM64, that castle is famously well set up and very inviting, the distortion world is distinctly uncomfy and also annoying as fuck to navigate without any landmarks. could maybe have it where cyrus has built an island or something in the distortion world? i don't fucking know