Pokémon Infinite Fusion
released on Apr 22, 2015
Pokémon Infinite Fusion is based on the Pokémon fusion generator.
Features -
Pokémon Fusion: Every Pokémon can be fused with any other Pokémon. Each combination has a unique sprite, stats, movepool, Pokédex entry, and everything else you could expect from a Pokémon.
176,400 possible combinations: This allows you to get truly creative and have your own, truly unique team every playthrough.
Every Pokémon from Generations 1 and 2, with their evolutions, as well as 101 Pokémon from Generations 3 to 7.
Over 15,000 custom sprites made by the community.
16 Badges: Fight all 16 Gym Leaders from the Kanto and Johto regions
Full Kanto region with extra areas and gen 4-5 inspired graphics
Johto postgame: Continue your journey into the Johto region 3 years before the events of Gold and Silver.
Sevii Islands postgame: Explore the Sevii Islands and find some exotic Pokémon
Legendary Pokémon: 25 Legendary Pokémon to track down and catch
Nicknaming Pokémon directly from the menu
Over 40 Sidequests
Rematch or trade with NPCs after battling them: Rematched NPCs become stronger each time and can eventually evolve their Pokémon.
Fairy type
Wonder Trade simulator
Faster Day/Night system
Trainer House: Take part in the trainer house challenge in Viridian City to battle against trainers with teams of completely random Pokémon to earn Trainer Points that you can spend on great prizes!
Integrated speed up button
Classic mode or Random mode
Reversed mode: Special game mode that flips every trainer fusions
Reviews View More
Honestly the most fun I've had with Pokemon in a long time, this is a blast to play. Discovering new fusions is addicting (as long as theyre fanmade as the AI generated shit sucks), the added shit to this game like the permanent HM items and the various new story elements is great. Only thing holding it back is just how buggy and unpolished it feels, it's pretty bad in those aspects, and while that definitely makes me dock a point right then and there, it's not a deal breaker imo since it's still so much fun to play through. If it ran well and didn't glitch out or have awkward music choices, this would be an amazing fan project tbh.
Also, I randomized this playthrough and yeah, was a ton of fun.
This is the first time I've had fun with pokemon in a while. Mainly because the fusion mechanic allows you to create some unbalanced Frankenstein's monster ass abominations that God Game Freak would never allow to walk the earth. For one, you can now give abilities like Magic Guard, Levitate, Speed Boost, Wonder Guard, Compound Eyes, Huge Power, etc, to anything your heart desires. Coming up with the most busted combinations I could think of finally lets me put the immense amount of information on pokemon stats rotting in the corner of my brain to good use. The first few hours of my playthrough consisted of me frantically catching everything I could find, just on the off chance that they might serve as complimentary in a fusion.
I don't usually have a big interest in pokemon fangames, so I don't have a real point of comparison outside of the mainline games, but there are some good quality of life additions as well as some new features that make it enjoyable to play. And yeah, it is somewhat buggy and lacking a bit in polish. However as it is still regularly receiving updates I imagine that it will continue to improve in that department as time goes on.
I don't usually have a big interest in pokemon fangames, so I don't have a real point of comparison outside of the mainline games, but there are some good quality of life additions as well as some new features that make it enjoyable to play. And yeah, it is somewhat buggy and lacking a bit in polish. However as it is still regularly receiving updates I imagine that it will continue to improve in that department as time goes on.
The best Pokemon fangame, and better than some of the Pokemons. The fusions are incredible. There are something like 76k possible Mons to get. There is a built-in randomizer for a fresh playthrough each time, and there is a game mode where you can have it be themed around one Pokemon. Sound boring? Remember: even just limited to one Pokemon, there is still a ton of possibilities.
The engine it is running on in pretty janky, unfortunately.
The engine it is running on in pretty janky, unfortunately.
This game is on the precipice of greatness, the biggest fault it has is that the game engine is extremely buggy and unpolished. It's understandable why the game had to use a separate engine as opposed to a romhack to support all the new mechanics and the massive number of unique fusions, but knowing that doesn't make things like the non-looping music, awkward and often broken overworld interactions, and just generally crusty gamefeel any more palatable. If it can ever achieve a state of being relatively bug free and having a presentation level on par or even close to the GBA/DS games it stands a very good shot at becoming the best Pokemon game in general. Despite the issues I mention here it does seem to integrate the Pokemon battle mechanics totally faithfully, or so close that any differences will be imperceptible to the average player.
Onto discussing the game itself, the premise is right in the title. The game adds a unique mechanic allowing you to fuse any combination of any two Pokemon (of the 400 or so present within the game currently). You can choose one as the head (which inherits the special and hp stats) and one as the body (which inherits the physical and speed stats) meaning you've actually got two possible fusions for every single combination.
The degree of freedom this gives you with mixing and matching types, stat allocations and movepools (the fusion combines the moveset of both its parents) is staggering. You can created extremely overpowered or hilariously pathetic Pokemon. Of course enemy trainers are packing fused Pokemon as well, so you'll need to put thought into your combinations to compete with their juiced up super-teams. Fusions and de-fusions are performed via an in-game item which costs a small sum of money, about as much as a pokeball. Enough to make them cheap and plentiful, but also to make you consider what you're doing before you go combining willy-nilly, at least until late in the game when you're swimming in cash.
It's really hard to state how much this adds to the play experience, combining one of the best features of Shin Megami Tensei with Pokemon's own roster of cool and unique designs. For the first time in a long time I found myself going out to just catch as many Pokemon as possible in the Safari Zone so I could experiment with all the cool combinations I could make. Now all those box Pokemon aren't just filler destined to waste away collecting space and could easily become a staple of your team by combining them with one of your lead Pokemon.
The game world itself is primarily a recreation of the Kanto story from the original Pokemon games with the new mechanic integrated slightly into the plot. While there are occasional instances of what I would call 'romhacker humor' peppered throughout the game it was thankfully kept to a very minimum amount. No edgy OCs or cursing here, just the basic Gen 1 storyline with a few small adjustments to the story to accommodate the fusion element. This is great since it lets what this fangame does well, the awesome fusion mechanics, shine without distracting from them or bloating its scope with a whole new region. There's also a very healthy postgame that sees you traveling through Johto and the Sevii Islands that's well worth playing. It's a game rich with content.
Speaking of one of the real hidden gems of this game are some of the NG+ features unlocked only after completing it. The player unlocks a whole host of options for customizing their new playthroughs. You can play through a version with remixed or randomized enemy trainers, change the mechanics to exclusively utilize double or even triple battles, carry over your box Pokemon and other cool features. The double battle option is especially welcome from me as someone who vastly prefers that format over singles, though it has an unfortunate bug where it has to be set back to 2v2 in the options again every time you face a trainer who has only a single Pokemon. This is rare enough to not be a major issue, but it's another thing which highlights the game's lack of polish and how it can occasionally hinder the player experience.
The game boasts over 170,000 Pokemon fusions and about 1/3 of them have unique, custom made sprites. These are made from community members and vary in quality, but even the worst of the custom made ones tend to be decent and the best of them are fantastic and inspired designs that wouldn't look out of place in a mainline game. Often times it's worth it to fuse Pokemon just to see the cool combinations you can get, and the game has the decency to highlight which fusions have custom made sprites with a green silhouette when you're mixing them in the menu. Unfortunately the quality of these makes the ugly, auto-generated sprites many of them still use stand out even more. But with more being added every day and close to 60,000 already done it's not unreasonable to think one day we could see the whole Pokedex, from start to finish, all with beautiful custom sprites. It's a really amazing community effort!
I think this game is absolutely worth playing for anyone who likes Pokemon or even just monster collecting rpgs in general. If you can deal with some jank go and play it asap, if not keep a close eye on it as the project has so much love put into it already I can't imagine it won't be getting updated and having its issues ironed out for a long time.
Very fun gimmick. Dozens of custom sprites are made for it about every day. Game needs some bug-fixing though.
So, obviously the core appeal here is the Pokemon Fusions. This idea is kind of self-evidently really cool, and there's a lot of room for experimentation, both with mechanically interesting or busted combinations, and seeking out combinations that come with really cool sprites. Unfortunately, I find that these two goals clash pretty hard. Pokemon has always had a tension between optimisation and aesthetics, but it comes into sharp focus here, especially due to the fangame difficulty (more on that later). I find it frustrating how often I went to check a fusion, and only the vastly worse version had a custom sprite. I understand that the custom sprites come from community contributions, and the number they have already is beyond impressive. It's just a shame, kind of a natural limitation of the concept, that you're never going to have even a tiny fraction of the fusions look good. On the topic of natural limitations, this one is just bad luck on my part, but so many of my favourite Pokemon aren't in the dex. I totally understand the requirement for a limited scope, every single Pokemon added is exponentially more data to store, it's just the choice of which Pokemon get in to that limited roster that doesn't resonate with me personally.
Overall, I've always found the play experience of Pokemon Essentials games to be pretty janky, and this is no exception. Long loads, abrupt transitions, non-looping music, busted collision everywhere, and it's almost impossible to move exactly one tile during speed-up. But, again, I understand the limitations here. No GBA ROM can ever contain the data for [420 choose 2] Pokemon, even with all the decompilation efforts that make ROMhacks otherwise a much better choice these days.
As someone with a lot of backlash and bitterness for genwunning, it's a great disappointment that the game is set in a retread of Kanto. I'm grateful Modern Mode exists to at least update the Pokemon distribution, but it can only do so much. I guess I don't know what I would have preferred - an OC region would vastly distract from the game's focus, and any other canon region would feel like a particularly arbitrary choice. Still, there are some inexplicable archaic decisions left over from the originals, like Lt Surge's gym puzzle or the presence of Sokoban puzzles with random encounters in Victory Road - especially baffling since other things are changed, like Saffron being gated by Rocket events in Celadon instead of. there only being one source of potable water in the region. I would have liked to see more of the experience modernised and streamlined, especially since the vast number of possible Fusion combinations should make the game extremely replayable otherwise.
As stated, I played on Modern Mode, so I can't comment on the vanilla, hopefully better-designed gameplay, but the important Trainer battles in this game can be kinda wack sometimes. Modern Mode changes every Gym's type, which makes sense for replayability, but dialogue is unchanged so you have to just sort of intuit it from the Gym trainers. And then for the Elite Four, you're going in without any idea. The Elite Four and Champion are also way overtuned, with Legendaries a plenty and a sharp level spike. Peak Pokemon fangame design. The Giovanni fight in Celadon is also a sudden level bump. This game shouldn't try to be particularly more difficult than canon, finding overpowered fusions should enjoyably break the game, not be an requirement to succeed without tedium.
I find the OC plot insertions to be lightly cringy but mostly inoffensive - and as with the Celadon example above, sometimes positive. Still, it ties Fusion into the game's plot and keeps things mostly coherent, and it otherwise probably the game's least important focus, so I'm not fussed.
Overall, the concept is incredibly novel and executed... well enough to enjoy, but there are enough marks against the game in various areas to keep me from being terribly enthusiastic about it as an overall experience.
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I haven't played much of the postgame yet, but I had to come back to amend my review because it is absolutely awful so far, all of the worst parts of the main game distilled. Modern Mode continues the legendary spam more vigorously than ever, with random trainers on the road now having them. There are multiple Zekroms just in the one Gym! And I'm supposed to take a subplot about Eusine searching for the one Suicune seriously when the Gym Leader just has a second one? A subplot in which, might I add, Eusine's characterisation is completely inconsistent both to the canon games and just between different cutscenes.
The dungeon design has also taken a nosedive into tedium. I hate both Gym puzzles I've seen so far. One is a trial-and-error Simon says game, and the other involves wind periodically pushing you off platforms - with no visual cue, a bad audio cue, and the wind firing far too often, with a fall being a punishing waste of time.