As the judge handling this submission, I'm currently going through the decision between accepting this movie for Moons or rejecting it for low entertainment. Since my personal opinion is that this movie is enough entertaining for Moons standards, I'd really like to have more feedback from the community, since there are currently few votes for this submission poll;
moreover, I need to hear the reasons behind the Meh and No vote. In the meantime, I'll explain my own reasons.
The importance of the game
The game is original and deep
Most people see this title as a Pokémon ripoff, which is silly, to say the least. The only similarity is that there are monsters fighting to each other,
nothing else.
These monsters fight on their own accord, and not because they got tamed by humans. This happens via an unique concept, that is calling them for help via a phone call. The fight mechanics are also different, as well as the plot.
The game development and marketing
A lot of efforts and money were invested for this series. There were two versions of the game released: Power Version and Speed Version. Limited-edition versions of the game included a physical peripheral called Power Antenna, to be plugged into the Game Link port. A manga was created and serialized from March 2000 to July 2001, and later released in 3 volumes.
The success of the series was sufficent to lead to the release of a sequel, about 1 year and half later, for the Game Boy Advance.
The game popularity
While this game has been released officialy in Japan only, this is not a major problem since the Japan audience is significant for the TASing community; this could be mistakenly be perceived as a problem because of the difficulties that Japan people have in accessing TASVideos, due to language barrier.
There is however an even more imporant factor: this game is also popular world-wide. This was mostly caused by the spread of pirate translations sold everywhere as
Pokémon Diamond and
Pokémon Jade. Translated languages include English, Chinese, German, Spanish. There are as well some pirated ports for NES and some graphics are even found on unrelated bootleg games.
To the present day, there is a respectable
community and an independent
wiki featuring exhaustive informations on this and related games by the same company. They are currently working on the ambitious goal of developing a patch for a correct and complete translation of the game in English, from about 9 years now:
http://wiki.telefang.net/WF:T1TP
The entertaining value of the movie
The movie features optimized RPG gameplay
While some people may find TASes made with RPG games to be boring, I want to point out that this is purely subjective: for example, there is a huge amount of people that find Pokémon glitchless TASes and speedruns to be highly entertaining; in fact, we already accepted for the Moons tier many RPG TASes that forgoe making use of major skip glitches.
The movie in this submission features a nice optimization of fights, setting it far ahead over any possible real-time attempt, which is easily noticeable.
As a side note, the run also features the use of some minor exploits for skipping some secondary battles and some overworld movement optimizations.
The movie features appealing graphics
This game features detailed graphics, that combines nicely with the free movement and dynamic screen transitions, which are something that has been witnessed in Game Boy only for Zelda games.
This movie features awesome musics
This run goal also allowed to hear much more of the incredibly good musics that have been composed for this game. I personally consider these as some of the best found on GB/C titles.
The nostalgia factor
Lastly, I have to point out that the entertaining value for TASes often depends from the familiarity that the watcher has toward both the specific game and the console in general.
For me, as someone who stumbled to some pirated translations when was little, would be delighted to have at least one extra branch for publication.
Conclusion.
I'm firmly convinced that TASVideos needs this run and that rejecting it would set a bad precedent, for both this specific game series and the RPG TASing in general.
