>>23407305Sorry for taking so long, took a while to condense my thoughts.
Let's start with the gameplay. PMD games can't be hacked due to how they were compiled, so the creator of Rescue Rangers decided to use Pokémon Ruby as the base of his hack. Like PMD, you have to go through the whole game with your starter and partner until the end, except here you have to be a Pikachu with a party of Chikorita, Torchic, Espeon, Tailow, and Dratini. Pikachu, Chikorita, and Torchic can never evolve, like in PMD. There's also no grass in the game and every tile is a battle tile like PMD. The problem is it's not PMD in gameplay, so you just get battles every 2-3 steps (every area has a ridiculous encounter rate) that slow the game to a crawl. This doesn't actually make the game difficult, though, because every ten steps you have a plant or a stone or something that fully heals your party when you touch it.
Also unlike PMD, you have to use HMs to progress through the game. You have a locked party in the first 95% of the game and no move deleter so you'll have to give useless moves like Rock Smash and Cut to your Pokémon and never get be able to lose them. Your Dratini is forced by the game to learn both Surf and Waterfall because no other member of your party can learn the moves.
The game also seems to not take into consideration of the fact that you have a locked party -- half of which, like I said, can never evolve past their shitty stage -- the first boss battle of the game involves a (Lv. 5) Gengar, and your party only has one Pokémon with an attacking move that isn't the Normal-type. You're expected to fight Legendaries, whether normal or overpowered Fakemon (I will get to the Fakemon later), and there's just no level curve in the game at all. You're either fighting super easy wild encounters that you can heal from for free at any time, or lopsided boss battles against Legendaries that might have BSTs of 800 or more.
Plot comes next.
