Poke Wisteria Online RP

Well, I attempted to play this game over the course of about a week.

First thing you're greeted with is an entry screen, "this is a test server" etc etc. Well, you choose new or load. Naturally you choose new, and go through the rounds of picking your icon (which is divided into a head and body section, male and female.)

After that, you get to pick a town, woo. The game is based entirely in kanto, so your choices are... Viridian (Quaintly spelled with an e, for some reason.), Pewter, Cerulean, Vermillion, and Celadon. There's a small chance you can spawn in another town. There's no true benefit to this, unless you have an active professor, or are able to sync your playsessions with theirs. But I'll get to them later.


So, you pick your town, and that's it. You're there. You spawn in a pokemon center with no pokemon, no info, and in my case, no one to help or even talk to. You're restricted to your own town without pokemon, so you can either look around for a school, and pray that your professor (An in-game rank) is there, and is willing to help you out. Otherwise you get a caterpie.

The caterpie isn't particularly bad, it's just not even comparable to the other pokemon you can get if you have a competent professor, or are lucky to match up with one. Those pokemon range from Kanto starters to some of the otherwise unattainable pokemon, meaning they're extremely scarce and shouldn't be sacrificed because someone shouldn't want to wait however long, or rearrange their own playtime for someone elses sake.

But, that's not something I had an issue with, luckily my professor was around, we got to chat, and all that. They were pretty competent in RP matters, so there were no complaints there.

My main gripe starts with the atmosphere of the game once you leave your city. As we're on BYOND, people are scarce. But the few you do find usually favor training to RP. Most spoke of lack of compensation or incentive for RPing. Even if you do find someone to chat or pal around with, they're immediately shoving pokemon in your face, begging for a fight. I guess what i'm trying to drive home is that the game DEFINITELY favors training to RP. Frankly the game would be tons better if they just scrapped the RP aspects, as no one really adheres, and I never saw any sort of RP going on outside of events, which were relatively scarce.

Anyway, I did manage to find a few people to RP with, and we had some neat discussions, but there was no way to really forward character development, as the world seemed to be in a total standstill without an admin or some other heavenly force creating some sort of RP. Again leading me to believe the game would just be better off as a PVP based game, or heavily less reliant on RP and more open.


Now, for the actual pokemon. I asked a bit, and everyone claimed the full 151 pokemon of the original generation were in the game. Of course, the starters were abound, as well as the occasional oddity, but for the most part, teams were composed of a variety of extremely common pokemon like beedrills, and butterfree, and ponyta. I was told the legendary pokemon, or pokemon you would expect to be more rare, were exclusive to admin events, go figure.

On top of the rarity of what should be common pokemon, and difficult to obtain pokemon due to external circumstances, I saw several people walking around with generation 2 and 3 pokemon. And donations played a role in that. As well as a slew of other advantageous features. But donations are nothing new, so I won't go into detail.

The tone of this game is incredibly bleak, with admins controlling 100% of RP advancement outside of student-teacher relationships. Everything revolves around the admins setting up events, picking the right people for the ranks, and then praying the ranks have the motivation to do their jobs. Outside of events, as I mentioned before, everyone trains, and the game goes quiet.

It's got such potential, but it's squandered. Hell, it's not really any different than what it was almost... 2 years ago? Only now you don't get your own starter, you have to wait and hope, and a majority of the time, you get unlucky and are then screwed out of what in all reality, would be your only hope against the already trained and greatly powerful hivemind dedicated to training that is this community.


In short, 2/5 needs a lot of work. Would be an amazing game if they gave up on the RP aspects, and polished it more towards the already flourishing PVP aspects.

Though with how much money the owner seems to be pining for (most of which require multiple payments, due to wipes), I doubt this will ever happen, and this game jam-packed with potential will be bogged down by a lack of motivation, a lowest tier form of RP system, and a community hell-bent on avoiding RP at all costs.