I don't know why, but somehow Pokemon saying their names seems fine, but the Fighting Foodons saying their names like "BEEF STEAK" just seems so ridiculously hilarious
Same with a lot of the companies that released anime at the time. ADV and Software Sculptors ended up being pretty bad at giving us "shovelware anime", like Ghost Stories which they got in a bundle and was allowed to do anything they wanted with it as a blessing from the studio because it was so unpopular in Japan in its original version.
Let me just dispel that myth, the original JP version of Ghost Stories did just fine and was not unpopular in the slightest; the director of the dub I guess just wanted to go crazy go nuts.
Animorphs is the Brave Little Toaster of book series. It looks like a typical kids series to keep your elementary schoolers entertained for an hour, but if you actually read it you’ll find a truckload of insane creative decisions and nightmare fuel that leaves you wondering who in their right mind was writing it.
And honestly, that's part of why it was such a good series. Because it's not afraid to touch darker topics, it was able to ask questions and make examinations and observations a lot of children's media still can't, and I firmly believe that because of that those kids that grew up reading the books are better people for it.
The first half of animorphs was written by Katherine and her husband, the second half was mostly written by ghostwriters under Katherine's direction. I love always loved her rule for writing the series: write yourself in to a corner and then ask "how would each of the kids solve this problem".
Yesss, I'm actually reading the series for my gf who grew up a huge fan of them rn and wow. The amount of disembowlment, genocide, and resulting ptsd is insane. I cannot believe I never picked them up in the 90s, but then I don't know I'd have believed any descriptions of it had I been told.
I know kids who played Robopon. It was literally a playground debate and I remember getting pissed at recess cause there were like 3 kids who swore it was better than Pokémon because "Robots are cooler than turtles" F**k you Jason, Nick, and Matthew. I have NOT forgotten Edit - The more I watch the video, the more I can't believe that was an actual argument we had. I'm honestly shocked there was even 1 kid who had Robopon, let alone 3
Haha I was going to comment and see if anyone had heard about Robopon. I really enjoyed it as a kid. Sure, I liked Pokémon better, but it was still cool. (Even if I didn’t understand the type match-ups whatsoever, lol).
I played a bootleg “Pokémon” game on an emulator website when I was a kid called “Pokémon sun” and it was just robopon but if you lost the game crashed
Fighting Foodons: That one show you can never talk about in public without most people assuming you were either having a serious nightmare or on a ton of drugs.
@@vwtsAnimal war. Animal war never changes. In the year 1996, my father, serving in the animal army, wondered when he’d get to go home to his mom and the brother he’d rarely seen. He got his wish when the US ended World War III by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Telefang was a very Japanese thing. Not only flip phones were extremely popular there, appearing in all kinds of pop culture series including Pokémon itself (what did you think the PokéGear was?), they stood up against smartphones a lot longer there due to incorporating some of their innovations (Japan had flip phones with apps, touch screens and enough memory to access the internet and run games)
@@richardadamson1438I think I might have played it a long time ago, but for some reason it was labeled as pokemon yellow??? Probably the same translation.
The lack of door sprites is bad, but an rpg game using a password system is inexcusable. Somehow it was always the licensed games that cheaped out and forced you to use passwords instead of giving you a battery to save. Nick games on GBA always did this.
If you wanna get technical, Megami Tensei was one of the first monster capturing game and also Dragon Quest had monster capturing mechanics in 1992 with Dragon Quest V
Not sure if that one counts, but the spinoff dragon warrior monsters was definitely made as a "pokemon clone". But the breeding is unique and i enjoyed it
I love how SMT was actually about beating up and enslaving Satan and pals, but that's what Pokemon got blamed for. Atlus got away with the perfect crime
It's a shame that Animorphs game turned out so badly. From what I understand the developers wanted to do a lot more with it, but the company that hired them just took the alpha build and threw it out the door.
@@doopness785 i played it on my VBA emulator the other day cause i wanted to check it out even though i knew how bad it was. i beat the game without using Genie codes in a little under an hour
The telefang designs look so appealing. I'd probably have been into that as a kid. Clearly the artists put a lot of effort into their weird clone game.
To summarize Animorphs basically multiple children were forced into a intense and life scarring war between slugs that hold humans hostage in their own bodies and deer people. They talk about themes of genocide, judging a creature based on its race, and the battle keeping your humanitiy both as an animal or as a human doing fucked up shit. I'd recommend you check it out considering how weirdly real they make some bits. Plus theres books where the Hawk Tobias murders Hitler, the black girl of the group Cassie attacks two guys who call her the N Word as a Polar Bear, and other goofy shit.
Those weird bits about Cassie and Tobias actually happen in the same book, but point still stands. As there's another where it's revealed that broccoli is actually an alien species, that the alien artifact held in Area 51 is actually a toilet, and my favorite in "Being adult, but still being for kids", from the book "Visser" where Visser Three gets a former Yeerk controlled human to testify in an alien court by "promising him a bottle" (exact words).
As an 80s kid, I constantly mistake Fighting Foodons for Food Fighters, which was a bizarre action figure line that was basically "What if junk food sprouted arms, legs and faces and had guns?"
Nowadays it's kind of rare to see games taking chances in this genre, we still have some that are really fun like Temtem, Monster Hunter Stories 2, Yokai Watch 4 and Shin Megami Tensei but it's definitely much rarer to see than it used to be .
SMT is much older than pokemon, but they also did a pokemon ripoff called devil children, or demikids in america. Idk why they thought making a game about children summoning demons until they fight satan would be a hit in America though.
...No, it isn't. With the coming of social media and how Pokemon dropped the ball in recent years there's been an interest in fans wanting to branch out and try other series. Nexomon got over a million downloads on mobile way back in. 2016, which was enough to spawn a sequel for consoles, dlc, a port of the original game, and a third game in the series is in the works. Coromon was released for Steam/Switch and is planning a mobile release, with dlc for more monsters and content. The dev wants to turn it into a series. Monster Crown was released and has a Kickstarter for a tcg half funded in 3 days. Monster Sanctuary was released and the devs behind it are releasing a new monster tamer IP. Beehive Studios, the dev team behind Pokemon Zenoverse is releasing Lumentale next year. Cassette Beasts is due to launch this year. Digimon is seeing a revival in the west with new games, ports of old ones, and it's tcg being number 3 on the market as of now for 3 years. The. English dub for the 2020 anime reboot is due in a few months. Monster Rancher got the first two games ported to Switch and got a new game last year. Dragon Quest Treasures just released last year. Then there's all the other Mon tamers tbr like ReLegends, Essentures, Palworld, Dokivi, and more. The genre is getting more attention than it ever has.
Telefang also had a friendship and monster personality mechanic. The personality mechanic dictated that a Denjuu could get late into battle, attack on itself, etc. And also, the music was composed by the same composer aa Castlevania I NES.
Speaking of Pokemon clones localized by 4kids, there was also Dinosaur King which was made by Sega. It was originally an arcade game but it also got a DS game that is literally just Pokemon. However the game takes the RPS aspect of Pokemon a little too literally and it's battle are just RPS against a computer.
@@fulmgusgrukini4727 If you win RPS you deal damage, if you tie both players deal damage and if you lose only you take damage. In the early game the AI will literally tell you what move it will make but later on they just stop telling you and you have to just get lucky.
@@fulmgusgrukini4727 Ever played the Mesuking minigame in Yakuza Kiwami 1? Memories are fuzzy, but basically and as I remember it, each dinosaur had one preferred move from Rock / Paper / Scizzors. You would somehow adquire new dinosaurs with different preferred moves, HP and potencies. It was kinda fun in a "what the hell am I playing" novelty kinda way.
Given what Pokemon has become without healthy competition, I wish that a few of these had thrived just so that there was something to force them to do better, and also add more variety for those of us who love Monster Collection Games. I feel like Telefang could've become something truly delightful if they'd gotten a chance to incorporate some modern smartphone tech into the gameplay.
For an insignificant amount of time and only in a single country. It was powerful enough to make the rotom dex and the anime section of Alola steal its school premise, but that’s it.
Pretty sneaky using Dragon Quest Monsters in the thumbnail when a ton of Pokemon's development and monster designs drew inspiration from Dragon Quest games like DQ5 which had monster collecting before Pokemon.
Pretty much yeah. The devs even said the whole link cable trading mechanic was added because one of them wished they could do so playing DQ back in the day and wishing his friend could have traded him a rare item he was trying to get in his own file.
@@realsgtstupid Oh, actually upon checking I was thinking of the 2016 run, and edited my comment to reflect that. Tbh I actually haven't watched any GDQ since 2017 so I'm not sure why I thought the 2020 run was what I was thinking of.
Dude really came out here and said he didn’t read the most insane book series from the 90’s ever. A kid becomes a bird forever and they commit several war crimes. And on the same note of forever bird transformation they forced turn a kid into a rat and left him on a trash island to die.
a couple of things about these games that i think is interesting: •fighting foodons was actually originally a manga (still very heavily borrowing from pokemon) a whole year before the gbc games. there’s also a game for bandai’s wonderswan, a handheld actually developed by gunpei yokoi after he left nintendo. •limited edition copies of telefang contain a special accessory called the “power antenna.” a functionally identical accessory called the “bug sensor” was made for another one of smilesoft’s pokemon clones, network adventure bugsite, and an updated power antenna for the gba was made for telefang 2. all of them are simply lights that plug into the link cable port and flash when you get a call (or use the ingame “bug sensor” in bugsite). there were even plastic shrouds for the original antenna that looked like specific denjuu, and the 2nd version had stickers in a manga magazine where a telefang manga was published (and also the fighting foodons AND robopon manga, coincidentally). •the original robopon games were some of the only original game boy games to have infrared INSIDE the cartridge. through a feature called “gb kiss” (a feature mostly seen in hudson soft games that even allowed the game boy to connect to the internet using a pc, including the japanese version of the pokemon tcg game), you could do various random things, such as upgrading a robopon’s stats or open a chest in the overworld by pointing a tv or vcr remote at the game boy cartridge. that’s it.
10:22 So, it's just Digimon World, then? Because that game starts with the player being transported to the Digital World where digimon live, and being given a partner to raise by Jijimon, who asks you to help bring back all of the digimon who lost themselves and fled File City.
One of the most memorable pieces of media I had as a kid was the FoxBox (what 4Kids originally was) promotional CD, and the only thing I remember from it vividly was loving the Fighting Foodons intro on there. Just the intro. I never saw it ever being played on TV for some reason. My friends loved the intro too. We loved it so much that we saw a Fighting Foodons episode once somehow and it blew our minds. Never watched it again though. Funny enough, as a lifelong fan of Pokémon I never knew it was a Pokémon clone. I don’t get it as an adult relistening to it but that intro by itself was so good as a kid I’ve always remembered it. You just had to be there I guess.
Speaking on RoboPon's developers: Red Entertainment would later team up with Nintendo SPD's Hitoshi Yamagami (A producer for Intelligent Systems, Game Freak, and Monolith Soft, notable for working on Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, and Xenoblade Chronicles), to make Fossil Fighters, which in my opinion and many others is a really good monster collector game. As for Hudson Soft, they have a weird habit of making one game and then making a clone of that game under a different IP. Case in point, Hudson Soft worked on both the Mario Party series and Sonic Shuffle. Atlus is, well, Atlus. SMT, Persona, and a whole bunch of beloved RPGs fill their catalogue (and the 3DS eshop). If you own an RPG on the 3DS, there is a solid chance it was made by Atlus. Owned by SEGA. To my knowledge, they all have worked with and held good relations with Nintendo. Strange world, huh?
To be honest, Nintendo and SEGA have been on good terms ever since SEGA quit trying to make game consoles. Seeing a SEGA company working with Nintendo isn't really a big surprise since SEGA themselves have been buddy buddy with Nintendo since the Gamecube/GBA.
@@cannon9009 I forgot to mention that SEGA didn't own Atlus at the time, but SEGA and Nintendo have indeed been on good terms for quite a while now. Still waiting on the next Summer/Winter Games crossover.
Holy shit, RED was behind Robopon and IS helped with Fossil Fighters' development?! That's honestly incredible. But now I'm holding out hope in vain for a Fossil Fighters revival, again...
@@bluetimesskyrii The second game, Fossil Fighters Champions, is still a solid game with some cool additions. The third game, Frontiers, is... different.
@@The_Great_Butler Yeah, Frontiers killed any hope for this series. Huge shame, because I loved the original game and Champions. I'm super high on copium for Fossil Fighters but maybe a remake of the first two games or a complete reboot separate from Frontiers could save it..
In Telefang the monsters appear anywhere that isn't close to a house, not necessarily inside the tall grass. Pretty much how random encounters in other rpgs work. Btw! Signal doesn't affect anything in the game actually 😂 the monsters take more or less time to arrive depending on WHERE you befriended them
Pokemania was absolutely insane back then, basically every company wanted to get on the money train without putting nearly as much effort into actually making it as good as Pokémon
It’s what happens when you throw your hat in the ring, without understand how the game works. They just see “150 monsters! Collect them all!”, and think that’s all that they need, ignoring all the clockwork and magic behind that premise
Did you know that Robopon 2 hit different because it was done by team Quintet under Red Entertainment's wing? Not only that: Quintet infused Robopon 2 with direct inspiration and even core elements from their SNES game called Robotrek (Slapstick in JP), which ironically Gamefreak blatantly cloned Robotrek in order to create Pokémon. Also, because of this, Robopon 2's development is a deepdive into the rabbit hole of sorts. MagicMush thinks that Nintendo did nothing against them, but in fact they did: they nintendo-ninja'd Quintet in the yakuza way, to the point of even the lead dev and designer Tomoyoshi Miyazaki going missing.
Cool to know, that would explain 2s amazing emotional theme and all the weird stuff like the Alien love story and sadistic circus ring leader kappa exploitation
Pokémon may be in part based on bug catching, but it’s also based on kaiju media, very specially the capsule monsters from the Ultraman franchise, I always wished Ultraman had a Pokémon clone because Ultraseven is basically already a Pokémon trainer lol, would have worked well especially with Ultraman having such an iconic kaiju roster in Japan
I loved robopon as a kid, probably because of how much of a ripoff it was down to the red cart( I had Pokemon red). unfortunately it is one of those carts that had a battery(for base building and other timed stuff) which means my copy is p well unplayable now that the battery is dead :(
Fighting Foodons, Up to this point I chalked all the promos I saw for it up to a childhood pseudo-acid trip. I'm genuinely shocked to find out it was real.
My sister and I watched fighting foodons when we were kids, and I remember we both hated it. We watched it because it came on before Pokemon, not because it was good.
Anyone else play Telefang a lot as a kid but only get 2 hours in before the rom crapped out and you had to restart? Took me a while as a kid to realize that wasn't normal haha. Pretty sure my pirated Pokemon Jade and Diamond from the Philippines had no save batteries.
For anyone curious, Animorphs is so much more than aliens and kids who turn into animals. It's a deep look at trauma, the ethics of war, gray morality, racism, slavery, consciousness, and so much more. It is absolutely brutal, bloody, and gory, but it never glorifies it. One of the main themes of the series is how there is no such thing as a good war, even when war is necessary, and even in a war with a clear cut "good side" and a "bad side" the good guys do bad things and some of the bad guys are good people who have been brainwashed and convinced they're fighting for the right side. There is an entire book focusing on the ethics of chemical warfare, and by the end of the series the Animorphs are war criminals by definition. There are hints of PTSD in these children, and they all cope differently. The series even examines ableism, on a few different occasions. In one occasion the ableism is aimed at a pair of gay Andalites (the "good guy" aliens that fight the same aliens the Animorphs are fighting and gave them their power), one of whom is missing his tail ( which is a symbol of honor for Andalites) and is allergic to the morphing technology which could heal him, while the other is dying of a disease that's clearly an AIDS allegory. This book also touches on homophobia as much as they were allowed to by Scholastic in the 90s. Then near the end of the series there is a whole storyline about the Auxillaries, which I won't spoil as it's vital to the final arc of the series. Admittedly, this storyline is a little controversial and for good reason, but I feel like it's done in a way that, like certain other actions of our heroes, is not meant to be celebrated but rather condemned as another example of the "good guys" doing the wrong thing and being flawed human beings (plus one hawkboy and one blue centaur alien).
Yet the video game is nothing but a Pokemon clone with animals. If you want a BETTER game that involved collecting and battling animals with superpowers (that are based on real life animals), try Animal Kaiser instead.
You need to play Yo-Kai Watch for the 3DS, it has solid gameplay for a Pokémon clone but the story is utterly baffling on so many levels. The final boss is a giant squid who’s also a politician, named Chairman McKraken (if that gives you an idea of the tone)
it's even funny sometimes how many Pokémon clones are out there and we'll never know about, I mean, imo nowadays is when they're most coming out tbh, there are many pokemon clones out on Steam, and a big chunk of them seems actually good and stinky ape lavender town on the end really got me
23:10 There are actually two more Pokémon clones on the N64, Onegai Monsters and Zool : Legend of the Magical Beast Charmer. Onegai Monsters has over 500 monsters to train and send out to explore the world! Other than that, Shiren the Wanderer 2 is the best RPG on the N64.
The info about that guy from smilesoft is near scrubbed… rocket company was still ram by him. Iida Shuhei was producing childrens games with rocket again by 2006. Friendly reminder that Japan doesn’t tend to punish those crimes properly…
Nice to see I'm not the only one who thinks the Fighting Foodons/Bistro Recipe designs genuinely look pretty rad. Anime was insane though, I couldn't get into it at all and that's saying something. Would be nice if they found the full series in Japanese.
As someone who loves monster collecting and taming games that came out around the time of or after Pokemon's release like Digimon, Medarots, Monster Rancher, etc I love games like Robopon, Telefang and so many others. So I love watching videos like this.
Okay I gotta admit I love Telefangs idea. Imagine your in a life or death battle and you call back up only for them to call a minute later going “Sorry I forgot to turn the tv off at home so im running a little late
14:25 you just resolved one of the mysteries of my life, I always thought that Pokémon Diamond I played as a kid was in fact just a fever dream, never happened cuz it was so dang weird. I really thank you, it's silly but I always thought it wasn't real, but now I know it was :D
By far the most interesting thing about the Animorphs game was the team that worked on it - I'm sure you haven't heard of Grady Sain, one of the lead designers hired for it, but look up his utterly surreal and nightmarish "Banjo Gyro" shorts and you'll get it. That team was one of the weirdest artsiest people in gaming and it's insane that they got hired to do a boring Pokemon knockoff. They worked with the Church Of The Subgenius, Negativland, Tony Fucking Hawk, The Jesus Lizard, Boredoms, it''s insane. Real rabbit hole if you're a fan of artsy punk music like myself.
Magi Nation is such an interesting case. It's not a blatant ripoff but it was clearly trying to cash in on the pokemon hype. I enjoyed my time with it but it was the most "its a game" of all the games
I have to disagree with you on that point. While it is definitely derivative of Pokemon, the gameplay mechanics and battle structure are totally different, and blows Gen 1 and 2 out of the water in terms of intention. We all know what a nightmare Psychics are in Gen 1, and the laughable attempt at balance with steel and dark in Gen 2 is an illusion of depth. Magination had 4-on-4 battles with the actual ''trainer'' also having a turn to fill in as a support or offensive role. The puzzles have so much more thought put into them over something like RBYs Team Rocket slide tiles, and the story as a whole is just so much more fleshed out than even modern Pokemon entries. The closest one in tone would probably have to be Colloseum, a title often lauded as one of the best games in the franchise. The graphics are better, sprites more expressive, the music is more complex and atmospheric (though Pokemon has many undeniable standouts), I could just keep going off listing the differences when it would be easier to note that the only similarities between the titles is a collection aspect of minions, and travel from one region to others. I would honestly say that the only reason Magination didn't take off where rudimentary Pokemon did is the much more friendly design of monsters which made it appealing to kids when Magination was geared more for teens and grimdark edgelords, and Pokemon being backed by the monolithic Nintendo marketing team. But to call it ''a game of all times'' is a total misuse of the meme, it's a genuinely good RPG.
I'm still sad that Robopon died off. I enjoyed it. Also fun fact about Fighting Foodons. The cat-girl villain, Clawdia? She's actually a human that got corrupted and turned into a cat-girl, and at the end of the series was reverted back to being a human and one of the heroes.
One of the strangest Pokemon clones I know of it is the Taiwanese Shui Hu Shen Shou (or Water Margin Sacred Beast) , a loose adaptation of the ancient chinese novel 'Water Margin', where the monsters are based on the book's 108 heroes. It's actually pretty good, at least according to my chinese speaking friends, and it has great graphics and decent music for a GBC game, even though it is very glitchy
I remember reading old Nintendo Powers back in the day and apparently Looney Tunes even tried their hand in it? They weren’t one for one, rather platformers with a top down perspective. But the collecting, linking and trading is still there. They were called Looney Tunes Collector: Alert and Marvin Strikes Back.
My favorite at the time was Dark Arms on NeoGeo Pocket. It marketed itself as a monster collecting kinda game on the back of the box to cash in, but really wasn't. Instead it was a super dark Crystalis/Zelda kind of thing with a fantastic SNK art direction, killer 8bit soundtrack, and a neat capture system where you can steal souls to power your weapons. Fairly short game even for the time, but it was super memorable. I'd love to see a follow up, it'd look incredible as a modern third person 3D title.
Tbh I loved telefang. I nearly completed it despite coming into it thinking it was pokemon diamond and jade (yeah the bootlegs) but there was an emulation problem. The game refused to save past a certain point. Meaning I got to the end and just before the final 2-3 bosses, the game ignores any save and resets back to where you were. One time it literally wiped my save data. Granted it was a bootleg but it was the only way to play it in english at the time and I loved it. It was also my first bootleg I ever tried, so it was cool to see.
I think the Animorph-based Pokemon clone had an interesting concept where you are collecting morphs from creatures that you can transform into and fight other people who also transform into other creatures. Maybe you aren't just morphing into another species version of yourself but as a clone of the individual creature that you are copying the form from which have their own individual stats, levels and even characteristics differ a little from other individuals within the species. It fits well with a spiritual or sci fi setting.
I'd still like to point out that SMT was pokemon before Pokemon existed. Granted, you're going out to murder capital G god joined by a team of demons that reflect various OTHER gods, deities and various other such things, but it was probably the biggest contemporary to Pokemon. It wasn't until after Pokemon came out that THEY tried to make a side series more along the lines of Pokemon, but it kinda just...faded away. The only one we really got state side was Demi Kids Light and Dark versions.
I was gifted the mobile fang game. It was a black cartridge and it was either under Pokémon Diamond or something to that effect. Mind you this was probably 2003. I was blown away. I wonder if I still have it around 💭
I played roms of Pokémon back in the day before I had them for the game boy. I had Telefang (which was poorly translated and referred to as Pokémon Diamond as you said) and had fun playing it. Oddly nostalgic for it haha
Tbf to the DQ Monsters series, monster catching in Dragon Quest started with DQV in 1992, 4 years before Pokemon. So basically they're expanding on mechanics that were in a game we didn't get over here and then we see the results and say "you just copied pokemon 😠"
24:13 - Thankfully, Scarlet & Violet got fixed overtime with updates, and is no longer the state it was at launch. Plus, i never experienced ANY of the glitches people were posting about in my own game ever.
This also started the scourge that is the double release format. Two games released on the same day that are basically the same and could have been combined into one. Games that have no business using this model dove head first, often to their detriment with cannibalized sales and low review scores citing the incomplete nature of both releases.
Funny thing about Animorphs for the Game Boy is that fast forward to the 2000s and 2010s, Bandai Namco made a monster (and card) collecting and battling game featuring animals for arcades. It's called Animal Kaiser (I've played it, and it was very weird, but fun).
Robopon was made by Hudsonsoft, one of Nintendo's old Second Party devs; they made most of their big games for Nintendo Systems, so it makes sense that their take on pokemon, robopon would look nearly identical. Nintendo let this slide because they were friends with Hudson & only released on their hardware.
This is an somewhat old video but i wish you had dig into robopon just a little bit further to find out about the manga. It's an experience, to say the very least.
The case with Robopon reminds me, funny enough, of something that was happening around the same time, the case with Tear Ring Saga, a game where Nintendo actually persuade legal action (probably because they were convinced Kaga was using Fire Emblem's IP content in his game); the fact that Nintendo wasn't able to kill off TRS and the only part where Kaga lose was about stuff that was actually (and considering the context, it was probably accidentally) breaking copyright laws has validated the existence of spiritual succesors (which pretty much all of Kaga's games after leaving Intelligent Systems are) and other kinds of games that share gameplay mechanics. I wonder if this had something to do with why Nintendo never searched legal action against Robopon...
If you only played emulation for the original Robopon l, the cartridge is really interesting with a built in speaker for timed events that would progress even when you weren’t playing the game and an infrared port so you could trade with friends no matter what gameboy they had
FYI, Megami Tensei (the old mothership series of Persona) was probably the first major video game at the time to have monster collecting mechanics. But the game never made it outside of Japan, due to religious sensitivities in the west at the time. (Because, just as the game mechanic suggests you have to "befriend" devils to beat the game and that made certain people upset) The monsters were actual mythological monsters (zombies, ghouls, werewolves, a wide variety of demons, etc etc) One thing set it different from pokemon is that, these monsters didn't appeal to the mass audience as well as Pokemon did, and although the artwork is solid the concept of these mythological monsters just aren't really original. And also the older Megaten games were difficult as hell lol, definitely not a game "for everyone" While pokemon had very unique and amiable monster designs, the game itself was easy to understand and easy to pickup, a game for everyone, that has won pokemon such a huge popularity among younger players and adults alike. And then there was Dragon Quest V also introducing a monster collecting mechanism before Pokemon did. It was a selling point for DQV but not the main purpose of the game, the monsters only act as the main character's side kicks, just a fun add-on to the main game, the monster roster wasn't plentiful, there was only a limited number of monsters that can actually be added to your team. Also it wasn't well balanced, in the endgame all your human characters basically overpowered the monsters, leaving your monsters just playing some auxiliary roles.
Re: Fighting Foodons -> In the late 90s and early 2000s, a lot of companies thought that anything Japanese would be successful in the US because of Pokemon. There was an insane amount of utterly bizarre anime, manga, video games, card games, etc..... brought over at the time, many of which did terribly in Japan to begin with but were cheap to buy the rights for.
I didn't read TOO many of the Animorphs books as a kid (maybe 3 or 4, they're pretty short books), but I believe being unable to transform into other animals mid battle is their way of adhering to the transformation lore. Now, I might be remembering wrong, but I'm pretty sure in the books once a character transformed, they couldn't change back for a set amount of time, like an hour or two.
I played Mobile Phone Beast on some bootleg multi-game GBC cart in, I believe, 2002. I had only a faint memory of playing it on some neighbor girl's GBC while we were waiting for the bus. That's wild to finally find out what it was after all these years
THANK. GOD. YOU DIDN'T TALK ABOUT DIGIMON IN THIS VIDEO. I like both the series, they have their traits. But I think the reason was for not including it was because Digimon was a fork of tamagotchi rather than a pokemon clone. But the two tend to overlap because of their coincidental similarities, and i love it for that.
Fighting foodons feels like a parody of Pokemon you'd see for 20 seconds in a different show
Fighting Foodons is the Simpsons reference of Pokémon clones.
Um, wasn't that the whole point?
That show felt a bit like a dream. I think about it from time to time and watch the 4Kids opening with my brother
Saturday morning cartoons in the 2000s
I actually remember fighting foodons cos the theme song stuck in my head after hearing it.
I don't know why, but somehow Pokemon saying their names seems fine, but the Fighting Foodons saying their names like "BEEF STEAK" just seems so ridiculously hilarious
I'm not sure about this, but probably that might have been the localizers fault (?)....... I don't know, could be 🤷
@@gustyko8668too wacky
4Kids often got rights to anime in bundles rather than individually.
That's also how they got stuck dubbing One Piece.
That makes sense.
They also didnt know much about one piece and thought it was much more American childhood friendly lmfao
Same with a lot of the companies that released anime at the time. ADV and Software Sculptors ended up being pretty bad at giving us "shovelware anime", like Ghost Stories which they got in a bundle and was allowed to do anything they wanted with it as a blessing from the studio because it was so unpopular in Japan in its original version.
Let me just dispel that myth, the original JP version of Ghost Stories did just fine and was not unpopular in the slightest; the director of the dub I guess just wanted to go crazy go nuts.
@@BBHood217 Ghost Stories did seemingly well in Japan.
It was the more faithful Animax English dub in SE Asian countries that did poorly.
Animorphs is the Brave Little Toaster of book series. It looks like a typical kids series to keep your elementary schoolers entertained for an hour, but if you actually read it you’ll find a truckload of insane creative decisions and nightmare fuel that leaves you wondering who in their right mind was writing it.
Brave Little Toaster fucked me up as a kid ngl
And honestly, that's part of why it was such a good series. Because it's not afraid to touch darker topics, it was able to ask questions and make examinations and observations a lot of children's media still can't, and I firmly believe that because of that those kids that grew up reading the books are better people for it.
The first half of animorphs was written by Katherine and her husband, the second half was mostly written by ghostwriters under Katherine's direction. I love always loved her rule for writing the series: write yourself in to a corner and then ask "how would each of the kids solve this problem".
Yesss, I'm actually reading the series for my gf who grew up a huge fan of them rn and wow. The amount of disembowlment, genocide, and resulting ptsd is insane.
I cannot believe I never picked them up in the 90s, but then I don't know I'd have believed any descriptions of it had I been told.
Dude the author's other series includes a pregnant lady who goes through hyper sleep and ends up with an eyeless baby which murder powers.
I know kids who played Robopon. It was literally a playground debate and I remember getting pissed at recess cause there were like 3 kids who swore it was better than Pokémon because "Robots are cooler than turtles"
F**k you Jason, Nick, and Matthew. I have NOT forgotten
Edit - The more I watch the video, the more I can't believe that was an actual argument we had. I'm honestly shocked there was even 1 kid who had Robopon, let alone 3
There are many therapists out there who would love to know more.
Well dragons are cooler than robots, so...
Haha I was going to comment and see if anyone had heard about Robopon. I really enjoyed it as a kid. Sure, I liked Pokémon better, but it was still cool. (Even if I didn’t understand the type match-ups whatsoever, lol).
I played a bootleg “Pokémon” game on an emulator website when I was a kid called “Pokémon sun” and it was just robopon but if you lost the game crashed
But idk they both have their charm
Fighting Foodons: That one show you can never talk about in public without most people assuming you were either having a serious nightmare or on a ton of drugs.
True.
FRIED RICEAAA
animorphs is a story about child soldiers and the horrors of war
So it’s basically metal gear solid
Animal war. Animal war never changes
@@vwtsAnimal war. Animal war never changes. In the year 1996, my father, serving in the animal army, wondered when he’d get to go home to his mom and the brother he’d rarely seen. He got his wish when the US ended World War III by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I can't believe this comment isn't actually joking, it's the real deal. Animorphs is actually about that.
@@ochuspin so basically Naruto
Telefang was a very Japanese thing. Not only flip phones were extremely popular there, appearing in all kinds of pop culture series including Pokémon itself (what did you think the PokéGear was?), they stood up against smartphones a lot longer there due to incorporating some of their innovations (Japan had flip phones with apps, touch screens and enough memory to access the internet and run games)
It's still fun though. I played a fan translated version of the first game and I really enjoyed it.
@@richardadamson1438I think I might have played it a long time ago, but for some reason it was labeled as pokemon yellow??? Probably the same translation.
Not only thay, Crystal later had mobile phone options planned.
Cool
@@user-burner there was a horrible translation called pokemon diamond and jade so that might be at least close to what you played.
The lack of door sprites is bad, but an rpg game using a password system is inexcusable.
Somehow it was always the licensed games that cheaped out and forced you to use passwords instead of giving you a battery to save. Nick games on GBA always did this.
Freeze Frame Frenzy was one of the few exceptions though.
Remember Battle for Volcano Island actually having a save system.
If you wanna get technical, Megami Tensei was one of the first monster capturing game and also Dragon Quest had monster capturing mechanics in 1992 with Dragon Quest V
Yea but I think he means like the reason these were made was to rise the Pokémon wave
Not sure if that one counts, but the spinoff dragon warrior monsters was definitely made as a "pokemon clone". But the breeding is unique and i enjoyed it
@@uhjjju7778DQ Monsters > Pokémon
I love how SMT was actually about beating up and enslaving Satan and pals, but that's what Pokemon got blamed for. Atlus got away with the perfect crime
@@uhjjju7778 I remember really liking that game a lot
It's a shame that Animorphs game turned out so badly. From what I understand the developers wanted to do a lot more with it, but the company that hired them just took the alpha build and threw it out the door.
I didn’t know that
This seems like an interesting story. Got a source? I'm interested to read up more on it
Makes sense seeing how short that game is
Sounds like Ubisoft in general, even to this day.
@@doopness785 i played it on my VBA emulator the other day cause i wanted to check it out even though i knew how bad it was. i beat the game without using Genie codes in a little under an hour
The telefang designs look so appealing. I'd probably have been into that as a kid. Clearly the artists put a lot of effort into their weird clone game.
To summarize Animorphs basically multiple children were forced into a intense and life scarring war between slugs that hold humans hostage in their own bodies and deer people. They talk about themes of genocide, judging a creature based on its race, and the battle keeping your humanitiy both as an animal or as a human doing fucked up shit. I'd recommend you check it out considering how weirdly real they make some bits. Plus theres books where the Hawk Tobias murders Hitler, the black girl of the group Cassie attacks two guys who call her the N Word as a Polar Bear, and other goofy shit.
Is this a copy pasta or a joke or are you being deadass?
@@HeftyDan Ive never read animorphs but ive heard quite a bit about it from others and i am willing to bet all of this is true
Those weird bits about Cassie and Tobias actually happen in the same book, but point still stands.
As there's another where it's revealed that broccoli is actually an alien species, that the alien artifact held in Area 51 is actually a toilet, and my favorite in "Being adult, but still being for kids", from the book "Visser" where Visser Three gets a former Yeerk controlled human to testify in an alien court by "promising him a bottle" (exact words).
As an 80s kid, I constantly mistake Fighting Foodons for Food Fighters, which was a bizarre action figure line that was basically "What if junk food sprouted arms, legs and faces and had guns?"
I remember Food Fighters from a Robot Chicken skit, where Private Pizza remembers his first kill against one of the Refrigerator Rejects.
Nowadays it's kind of rare to see games taking chances in this genre, we still have some that are really fun like Temtem, Monster Hunter Stories 2, Yokai Watch 4 and Shin Megami Tensei but it's definitely much rarer to see than it used to be .
SMT is much older than pokemon, but they also did a pokemon ripoff called devil children, or demikids in america. Idk why they thought making a game about children summoning demons until they fight satan would be a hit in America though.
...No, it isn't. With the coming of social media and how Pokemon dropped the ball in recent years there's been an interest in fans wanting to branch out and try other series.
Nexomon got over a million downloads on mobile way back in. 2016, which was enough to spawn a sequel for consoles, dlc, a port of the original game, and a third game in the series is in the works.
Coromon was released for Steam/Switch and is planning a mobile release, with dlc for more monsters and content. The dev wants to turn it into a series.
Monster Crown was released and has a Kickstarter for a tcg half funded in 3 days.
Monster Sanctuary was released and the devs behind it are releasing a new monster tamer IP.
Beehive Studios, the dev team behind Pokemon Zenoverse is releasing Lumentale next year.
Cassette Beasts is due to launch this year.
Digimon is seeing a revival in the west with new games, ports of old ones, and it's tcg being number 3 on the market as of now for 3 years. The. English dub for the 2020 anime reboot is due in a few months.
Monster Rancher got the first two games ported to Switch and got a new game last year.
Dragon Quest Treasures just released last year.
Then there's all the other Mon tamers tbr like ReLegends, Essentures, Palworld, Dokivi, and more. The genre is getting more attention than it ever has.
Palworld proved that it can still work with the right mechanics and enough effort to make a good game.
Isn't Yokai Watch dead? Like even in Japan
Telefang is half sliding into monster DMs and half listening to your employee's excuses about being late for work.
True
Telefang also had a friendship and monster personality mechanic. The personality mechanic dictated that a Denjuu could get late into battle, attack on itself, etc.
And also, the music was composed by the same composer aa Castlevania I NES.
Speaking of Pokemon clones localized by 4kids, there was also Dinosaur King which was made by Sega. It was originally an arcade game but it also got a DS game that is literally just Pokemon. However the game takes the RPS aspect of Pokemon a little too literally and it's battle are just RPS against a computer.
can you elaborate on that dinosaur king game part lol, Im curious as to how a pure rps v cpu experience would look like
NO FUCKING WAY!!
I HAW THIS GAME🤣🤣
@@fulmgusgrukini4727 If you win RPS you deal damage, if you tie both players deal damage and if you lose only you take damage. In the early game the AI will literally tell you what move it will make but later on they just stop telling you and you have to just get lucky.
Honestly, Dinosaur King felt more like it was ripping off Digimon than Pokémon.
@@fulmgusgrukini4727 Ever played the Mesuking minigame in Yakuza Kiwami 1? Memories are fuzzy, but basically and as I remember it, each dinosaur had one preferred move from Rock / Paper / Scizzors. You would somehow adquire new dinosaurs with different preferred moves, HP and potencies.
It was kinda fun in a "what the hell am I playing" novelty kinda way.
Fighting foodons theme song is seared into my brain for all eternity
The Japanese opening was actually awesome!
I never watchd the show myself but the opening played at the beginning of a Yugioh DVD i had as a kid so it's been stuck in my mind for years.
@@Klonoahedgehog I did, but I don't really remember the show. Also, I tried to watch the show years later but I couldn't get past the first episode.
@@KlonoahedgehogAnd now Yu-Gi-Oh! has evolved its own Hungry Burger into an entire Fighting Foodons archetype (Nouvelles). 😂
Given what Pokemon has become without healthy competition, I wish that a few of these had thrived just so that there was something to force them to do better, and also add more variety for those of us who love Monster Collection Games. I feel like Telefang could've become something truly delightful if they'd gotten a chance to incorporate some modern smartphone tech into the gameplay.
Wasn't Yokai Watch like, actual Pokemon competition? Like, they fell but they had an opportunity
For an insignificant amount of time and only in a single country. It was powerful enough to make the rotom dex and the anime section of Alola steal its school premise, but that’s it.
at this point arguably the only competition Pokemon has is Palworld
Pretty sneaky using Dragon Quest Monsters in the thumbnail when a ton of Pokemon's development and monster designs drew inspiration from Dragon Quest games like DQ5 which had monster collecting before Pokemon.
Pretty much yeah. The devs even said the whole link cable trading mechanic was added because one of them wished they could do so playing DQ back in the day and wishing his friend could have traded him a rare item he was trying to get in his own file.
Why do DQ fans seem to mention this every five minutes?
@PelinalDidNothingWrongBecause it's true and most people are unaware of this
The best thing to come out of the Animorphs game is the AGDQ 2016 run of it. Genuinely one of the funniest GDQ runs I've ever seen.
You sure? I thought GDQ banned comedy years ago.
Jokes aside you've piqued my interest.
@@realsgtstupid Oh, actually upon checking I was thinking of the 2016 run, and edited my comment to reflect that. Tbh I actually haven't watched any GDQ since 2017 so I'm not sure why I thought the 2020 run was what I was thinking of.
That run was so heavily cursed. It’s my favourite GDQ run ever, and up there with some of my favourite Big Bad Gameathon runs.
Lion nooooo 😂
"I dropped out of college for this"
Dude really came out here and said he didn’t read the most insane book series from the 90’s ever. A kid becomes a bird forever and they commit several war crimes. And on the same note of forever bird transformation they forced turn a kid into a rat and left him on a trash island to die.
a couple of things about these games that i think is interesting:
•fighting foodons was actually originally a manga (still very heavily borrowing from pokemon) a whole year before the gbc games. there’s also a game for bandai’s wonderswan, a handheld actually developed by gunpei yokoi after he left nintendo.
•limited edition copies of telefang contain a special accessory called the “power antenna.” a functionally identical accessory called the “bug sensor” was made for another one of smilesoft’s pokemon clones, network adventure bugsite, and an updated power antenna for the gba was made for telefang 2. all of them are simply lights that plug into the link cable port and flash when you get a call (or use the ingame “bug sensor” in bugsite). there were even plastic shrouds for the original antenna that looked like specific denjuu, and the 2nd version had stickers in a manga magazine where a telefang manga was published (and also the fighting foodons AND robopon manga, coincidentally).
•the original robopon games were some of the only original game boy games to have infrared INSIDE the cartridge. through a feature called “gb kiss” (a feature mostly seen in hudson soft games that even allowed the game boy to connect to the internet using a pc, including the japanese version of the pokemon tcg game), you could do various random things, such as upgrading a robopon’s stats or open a chest in the overworld by pointing a tv or vcr remote at the game boy cartridge. that’s it.
10:22 So, it's just Digimon World, then? Because that game starts with the player being transported to the Digital World where digimon live, and being given a partner to raise by Jijimon, who asks you to help bring back all of the digimon who lost themselves and fled File City.
I was about to say. The game plays nothing like Digimon World, but the premise is exactly the same.
One of the most memorable pieces of media I had as a kid was the FoxBox (what 4Kids originally was) promotional CD, and the only thing I remember from it vividly was loving the Fighting Foodons intro on there. Just the intro. I never saw it ever being played on TV for some reason. My friends loved the intro too. We loved it so much that we saw a Fighting Foodons episode once somehow and it blew our minds. Never watched it again though. Funny enough, as a lifelong fan of Pokémon I never knew it was a Pokémon clone.
I don’t get it as an adult relistening to it but that intro by itself was so good as a kid I’ve always remembered it. You just had to be there I guess.
Speaking on RoboPon's developers:
Red Entertainment would later team up with Nintendo SPD's Hitoshi Yamagami (A producer for Intelligent Systems, Game Freak, and Monolith Soft, notable for working on Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, and Xenoblade Chronicles), to make Fossil Fighters, which in my opinion and many others is a really good monster collector game.
As for Hudson Soft, they have a weird habit of making one game and then making a clone of that game under a different IP. Case in point, Hudson Soft worked on both the Mario Party series and Sonic Shuffle.
Atlus is, well, Atlus. SMT, Persona, and a whole bunch of beloved RPGs fill their catalogue (and the 3DS eshop). If you own an RPG on the 3DS, there is a solid chance it was made by Atlus. Owned by SEGA.
To my knowledge, they all have worked with and held good relations with Nintendo. Strange world, huh?
To be honest, Nintendo and SEGA have been on good terms ever since SEGA quit trying to make game consoles. Seeing a SEGA company working with Nintendo isn't really a big surprise since SEGA themselves have been buddy buddy with Nintendo since the Gamecube/GBA.
@@cannon9009 I forgot to mention that SEGA didn't own Atlus at the time, but SEGA and Nintendo have indeed been on good terms for quite a while now. Still waiting on the next Summer/Winter Games crossover.
Holy shit, RED was behind Robopon and IS helped with Fossil Fighters' development?! That's honestly incredible.
But now I'm holding out hope in vain for a Fossil Fighters revival, again...
@@bluetimesskyrii The second game, Fossil Fighters Champions, is still a solid game with some cool additions. The third game, Frontiers, is... different.
@@The_Great_Butler Yeah, Frontiers killed any hope for this series. Huge shame, because I loved the original game and Champions. I'm super high on copium for Fossil Fighters but maybe a remake of the first two games or a complete reboot separate from Frontiers could save it..
Atlus was doing it before Game Freak lol
Creating something does not equal popularizing it
The video is about clones,so being the original kinda counts in there, I guess. @@liammcnicholas918
"The name is Clawdia"
of course it is
In Telefang the monsters appear anywhere that isn't close to a house, not necessarily inside the tall grass. Pretty much how random encounters in other rpgs work.
Btw! Signal doesn't affect anything in the game actually 😂 the monsters take more or less time to arrive depending on WHERE you befriended them
Pokemania was absolutely insane back then, basically every company wanted to get on the money train without putting nearly as much effort into actually making it as good as Pokémon
It’s what happens when you throw your hat in the ring, without understand how the game works.
They just see “150 monsters! Collect them all!”, and think that’s all that they need, ignoring all the clockwork and magic behind that premise
It's funny how simple the concept of a monster catching game is given how many studios have attempted it and failed.
Sounds like the live-service craze of today.
And now TPC does it by rushing the mainline pokemon titles out the door
Did you know that Robopon 2 hit different because it was done by team Quintet under Red Entertainment's wing? Not only that: Quintet infused Robopon 2 with direct inspiration and even core elements from their SNES game called Robotrek (Slapstick in JP), which ironically Gamefreak blatantly cloned Robotrek in order to create Pokémon.
Also, because of this, Robopon 2's development is a deepdive into the rabbit hole of sorts. MagicMush thinks that Nintendo did nothing against them, but in fact they did: they nintendo-ninja'd Quintet in the yakuza way, to the point of even the lead dev and designer Tomoyoshi Miyazaki going missing.
Cool to know, that would explain 2s amazing emotional theme and all the weird stuff like the Alien love story and sadistic circus ring leader kappa exploitation
That also explains the font choice in Robopon 2- that Quintet font is unmistakable.
Didn’t know Animorphs had a Pokémon clone. That actually is a good idea. Too bad the rest of the game isn’t.
Pokémon may be in part based on bug catching, but it’s also based on kaiju media, very specially the capsule monsters from the Ultraman franchise, I always wished Ultraman had a Pokémon clone because Ultraseven is basically already a Pokémon trainer lol, would have worked well especially with Ultraman having such an iconic kaiju roster in Japan
Doesn't Ultraman have a Monster Rancher game now? Pretty recent even.
@@elneco4654 there's a game where I can raise Pigmon, who was popular among the girls, that died on September 4, 1966?
@@cutsleeve117 Correct, Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher. Sadly it's on Switch only.
I loved robopon as a kid, probably because of how much of a ripoff it was down to the red cart( I had Pokemon red). unfortunately it is one of those carts that had a battery(for base building and other timed stuff) which means my copy is p well unplayable now that the battery is dead :(
Run that ROM brother
Never too late to learn how to replace those batteries, it's a handy little skill to have.
Those batteries are absolutely replaceable. It's not hard to learn how, either! :)
"Translate these runes from the moon" killed me 😂
Fighting Foodons, Up to this point I chalked all the promos I saw for it up to a childhood pseudo-acid trip. I'm genuinely shocked to find out it was real.
Fighting Foodon’s was definitely someone’s furry awakening
Yeah, mine
I ❤ MAGICMUSH
I don’t
I don't
I do
I do
I doon’t
Fighting Foodons walked so Bugsnax could run
My sister and I watched fighting foodons when we were kids, and I remember we both hated it. We watched it because it came on before Pokemon, not because it was good.
Anyone else play Telefang a lot as a kid but only get 2 hours in before the rom crapped out and you had to restart? Took me a while as a kid to realize that wasn't normal haha. Pretty sure my pirated Pokemon Jade and Diamond from the Philippines had no save batteries.
Same experience here. It's the way I discovered savestates. :D
For anyone curious, Animorphs is so much more than aliens and kids who turn into animals. It's a deep look at trauma, the ethics of war, gray morality, racism, slavery, consciousness, and so much more. It is absolutely brutal, bloody, and gory, but it never glorifies it. One of the main themes of the series is how there is no such thing as a good war, even when war is necessary, and even in a war with a clear cut "good side" and a "bad side" the good guys do bad things and some of the bad guys are good people who have been brainwashed and convinced they're fighting for the right side. There is an entire book focusing on the ethics of chemical warfare, and by the end of the series the Animorphs are war criminals by definition. There are hints of PTSD in these children, and they all cope differently. The series even examines ableism, on a few different occasions. In one occasion the ableism is aimed at a pair of gay Andalites (the "good guy" aliens that fight the same aliens the Animorphs are fighting and gave them their power), one of whom is missing his tail ( which is a symbol of honor for Andalites) and is allergic to the morphing technology which could heal him, while the other is dying of a disease that's clearly an AIDS allegory. This book also touches on homophobia as much as they were allowed to by Scholastic in the 90s. Then near the end of the series there is a whole storyline about the Auxillaries, which I won't spoil as it's vital to the final arc of the series. Admittedly, this storyline is a little controversial and for good reason, but I feel like it's done in a way that, like certain other actions of our heroes, is not meant to be celebrated but rather condemned as another example of the "good guys" doing the wrong thing and being flawed human beings (plus one hawkboy and one blue centaur alien).
...Holy moly.
If I ever decide to give books a chance I'll be all over this.
Yet the video game is nothing but a Pokemon clone with animals. If you want a BETTER game that involved collecting and battling animals with superpowers (that are based on real life animals), try Animal Kaiser instead.
You need to play Yo-Kai Watch for the 3DS, it has solid gameplay for a Pokémon clone but the story is utterly baffling on so many levels. The final boss is a giant squid who’s also a politician, named Chairman McKraken (if that gives you an idea of the tone)
Laughed when the "that was not a moan of pain"
*T H A T W A S N O T A M O A N O F P A I N*
Quote of the year 😂
it's even funny sometimes how many Pokémon clones are out there and we'll never know about, I mean, imo nowadays is when they're most coming out tbh, there are many pokemon clones out on Steam, and a big chunk of them seems actually good
and stinky ape lavender town on the end really got me
Love your videos mate, keep up the great work ♥️
12:02 Looks like a failed Mew experiment from Cinnabar Island
23:10 There are actually two more Pokémon clones on the N64, Onegai Monsters and Zool : Legend of the Magical Beast Charmer. Onegai Monsters has over 500 monsters to train and send out to explore the world! Other than that, Shiren the Wanderer 2 is the best RPG on the N64.
Did you know that Sanrio and Hello kitty are the fuckin same thing so you could’ve omitted that part completely.
Forgive me sanrio-sama I kneel
@@magicmush1998 hey a cuss word for a cuss word and the world goes on. no offence intended.
The info about that guy from smilesoft is near scrubbed… rocket company was still ram by him. Iida Shuhei was producing childrens games with rocket again by 2006. Friendly reminder that Japan doesn’t tend to punish those crimes properly…
Nice to see I'm not the only one who thinks the Fighting Foodons/Bistro Recipe designs genuinely look pretty rad. Anime was insane though, I couldn't get into it at all and that's saying something. Would be nice if they found the full series in Japanese.
As someone who loves monster collecting and taming games that came out around the time of or after Pokemon's release like Digimon, Medarots, Monster Rancher, etc I love games like Robopon, Telefang and so many others. So I love watching videos like this.
Okay I gotta admit I love Telefangs idea. Imagine your in a life or death battle and you call back up only for them to call a minute later going “Sorry I forgot to turn the tv off at home so im running a little late
14:25 you just resolved one of the mysteries of my life, I always thought that Pokémon Diamond I played as a kid was in fact just a fever dream, never happened cuz it was so dang weird.
I really thank you, it's silly but I always thought it wasn't real, but now I know it was :D
By far the most interesting thing about the Animorphs game was the team that worked on it - I'm sure you haven't heard of Grady Sain, one of the lead designers hired for it, but look up his utterly surreal and nightmarish "Banjo Gyro" shorts and you'll get it. That team was one of the weirdest artsiest people in gaming and it's insane that they got hired to do a boring Pokemon knockoff. They worked with the Church Of The Subgenius, Negativland, Tony Fucking Hawk, The Jesus Lizard, Boredoms, it''s insane. Real rabbit hole if you're a fan of artsy punk music like myself.
what was their involvement with negativland exactly? love that band.
@@plexureiscool I think it was mostly the late Don Joyce, who iirc guest starred on his short Duelin Firemen.
The Fighting Foodons opening unlocked a memory, holy shit.
I loved fighting foodons, even the theme song was great to me. Legit one of my favorite shows back in the ol 4Kids days.
Magi Nation is such an interesting case. It's not a blatant ripoff but it was clearly trying to cash in on the pokemon hype. I enjoyed my time with it but it was the most "its a game" of all the games
I have to disagree with you on that point. While it is definitely derivative of Pokemon, the gameplay mechanics and battle structure are totally different, and blows Gen 1 and 2 out of the water in terms of intention. We all know what a nightmare Psychics are in Gen 1, and the laughable attempt at balance with steel and dark in Gen 2 is an illusion of depth. Magination had 4-on-4 battles with the actual ''trainer'' also having a turn to fill in as a support or offensive role. The puzzles have so much more thought put into them over something like RBYs Team Rocket slide tiles, and the story as a whole is just so much more fleshed out than even modern Pokemon entries. The closest one in tone would probably have to be Colloseum, a title often lauded as one of the best games in the franchise. The graphics are better, sprites more expressive, the music is more complex and atmospheric (though Pokemon has many undeniable standouts), I could just keep going off listing the differences when it would be easier to note that the only similarities between the titles is a collection aspect of minions, and travel from one region to others. I would honestly say that the only reason Magination didn't take off where rudimentary Pokemon did is the much more friendly design of monsters which made it appealing to kids when Magination was geared more for teens and grimdark edgelords, and Pokemon being backed by the monolithic Nintendo marketing team. But to call it ''a game of all times'' is a total misuse of the meme, it's a genuinely good RPG.
Wasn't Magi Nation more inspired by Magic: The Gathering?
Atlus didn't make their own monster games to capture the pokemon market, SMT was pokemon before pokemon lol.
True, though they did release the spin off series "Devil Children" which clearly tried to compete with the Pokemon/Digimon craze.
I had a Looney Tunes game that was a mix of Pokemon and Zelda . It was surprisingly good
I'm still sad that Robopon died off. I enjoyed it.
Also fun fact about Fighting Foodons. The cat-girl villain, Clawdia? She's actually a human that got corrupted and turned into a cat-girl, and at the end of the series was reverted back to being a human and one of the heroes.
One of the strangest Pokemon clones I know of it is the Taiwanese Shui Hu Shen Shou (or Water Margin Sacred Beast) , a loose adaptation of the ancient chinese novel 'Water Margin', where the monsters are based on the book's 108 heroes. It's actually pretty good, at least according to my chinese speaking friends, and it has great graphics and decent music for a GBC game, even though it is very glitchy
I remember reading old Nintendo Powers back in the day and apparently Looney Tunes even tried their hand in it? They weren’t one for one, rather platformers with a top down perspective. But the collecting, linking and trading is still there. They were called Looney Tunes Collector: Alert and Marvin Strikes Back.
That cat girl had to be voiced by Veronica Taylor LMAO
My favorite at the time was Dark Arms on NeoGeo Pocket. It marketed itself as a monster collecting kinda game on the back of the box to cash in, but really wasn't. Instead it was a super dark Crystalis/Zelda kind of thing with a fantastic SNK art direction, killer 8bit soundtrack, and a neat capture system where you can steal souls to power your weapons. Fairly short game even for the time, but it was super memorable. I'd love to see a follow up, it'd look incredible as a modern third person 3D title.
telefang looks charming as hell actually
I love this guy.
I have been binge watching his videos like a week ago.
God, I need to go outside
Tbh I loved telefang. I nearly completed it despite coming into it thinking it was pokemon diamond and jade (yeah the bootlegs) but there was an emulation problem.
The game refused to save past a certain point. Meaning I got to the end and just before the final 2-3 bosses, the game ignores any save and resets back to where you were. One time it literally wiped my save data. Granted it was a bootleg but it was the only way to play it in english at the time and I loved it.
It was also my first bootleg I ever tried, so it was cool to see.
Also, the president of the company that made Telefang was arrested for....child prostitution? Wow, that became dark all of a sudden.
I think the Animorph-based Pokemon clone had an interesting concept where you are collecting morphs from creatures that you can transform into and fight other people who also transform into other creatures. Maybe you aren't just morphing into another species version of yourself but as a clone of the individual creature that you are copying the form from which have their own individual stats, levels and even characteristics differ a little from other individuals within the species. It fits well with a spiritual or sci fi setting.
I'd still like to point out that SMT was pokemon before Pokemon existed. Granted, you're going out to murder capital G god joined by a team of demons that reflect various OTHER gods, deities and various other such things, but it was probably the biggest contemporary to Pokemon.
It wasn't until after Pokemon came out that THEY tried to make a side series more along the lines of Pokemon, but it kinda just...faded away. The only one we really got state side was Demi Kids Light and Dark versions.
amen my dude 🙏 every concept copycat deserves shaming until they pull it off better than the OG huh? rip to all my Megaten fans :')
A "foodon" sounds like something you'd get if you liked food a bit TOO much.
I was gifted the mobile fang game. It was a black cartridge and it was either under Pokémon Diamond or something to that effect. Mind you this was probably 2003. I was blown away. I wonder if I still have it around 💭
I played roms of Pokémon back in the day before I had them for the game boy. I had Telefang (which was poorly translated and referred to as Pokémon Diamond as you said) and had fun playing it. Oddly nostalgic for it haha
Mobile Phone Beast Telefang crawled so Cassette Beasts could sprint.
I don't remember ever watching Fighting Foodons, but I have some really vague memories of the theme song, that fried rice creature, and the catgirl.
Tbf to the DQ Monsters series, monster catching in Dragon Quest started with DQV in 1992, 4 years before Pokemon. So basically they're expanding on mechanics that were in a game we didn't get over here and then we see the results and say "you just copied pokemon 😠"
24:13 - Thankfully, Scarlet & Violet got fixed overtime with updates, and is no longer the state it was at launch. Plus, i never experienced ANY of the glitches people were posting about in my own game ever.
10:35 WAIT A DAMN SECOND THATS JUST PULLING FROM DIGIMON!
This also started the scourge that is the double release format. Two games released on the same day that are basically the same and could have been combined into one. Games that have no business using this model dove head first, often to their detriment with cannibalized sales and low review scores citing the incomplete nature of both releases.
At least Demikids utilized its roots in the MegaTen franchise to make the two versions put you on either side of the series' two warring factions.
Funny thing about Animorphs for the Game Boy is that fast forward to the 2000s and 2010s, Bandai Namco made a monster (and card) collecting and battling game featuring animals for arcades. It's called Animal Kaiser (I've played it, and it was very weird, but fun).
Robopon was made by Hudsonsoft, one of Nintendo's old Second Party devs; they made most of their big games for Nintendo Systems, so it makes sense that their take on pokemon, robopon would look nearly identical. Nintendo let this slide because they were friends with Hudson & only released on their hardware.
Love all the little Futurama references
This is an somewhat old video but i wish you had dig into robopon just a little bit further to find out about the manga. It's an experience, to say the very least.
The case with Robopon reminds me, funny enough, of something that was happening around the same time, the case with Tear Ring Saga, a game where Nintendo actually persuade legal action (probably because they were convinced Kaga was using Fire Emblem's IP content in his game); the fact that Nintendo wasn't able to kill off TRS and the only part where Kaga lose was about stuff that was actually (and considering the context, it was probably accidentally) breaking copyright laws has validated the existence of spiritual succesors (which pretty much all of Kaga's games after leaving Intelligent Systems are) and other kinds of games that share gameplay mechanics.
I wonder if this had something to do with why Nintendo never searched legal action against Robopon...
If you only played emulation for the original Robopon l, the cartridge is really interesting with a built in speaker for timed events that would progress even when you weren’t playing the game and an infrared port so you could trade with friends no matter what gameboy they had
The denjuu telefang one lol, I actually bought those games, totally different but I still found em enjoyable.
FYI, Megami Tensei (the old mothership series of Persona) was probably the first major video game at the time to have monster collecting mechanics. But the game never made it outside of Japan, due to religious sensitivities in the west at the time. (Because, just as the game mechanic suggests you have to "befriend" devils to beat the game and that made certain people upset)
The monsters were actual mythological monsters (zombies, ghouls, werewolves, a wide variety of demons, etc etc)
One thing set it different from pokemon is that, these monsters didn't appeal to the mass audience as well as Pokemon did, and although the artwork is solid the concept of these mythological monsters just aren't really original.
And also the older Megaten games were difficult as hell lol, definitely not a game "for everyone"
While pokemon had very unique and amiable monster designs, the game itself was easy to understand and easy to pickup, a game for everyone, that has won pokemon such a huge popularity among younger players and adults alike.
And then there was Dragon Quest V also introducing a monster collecting mechanism before Pokemon did. It was a selling point for DQV but not the main purpose of the game, the monsters only act as the main character's side kicks, just a fun add-on to the main game,
the monster roster wasn't plentiful, there was only a limited number of monsters that can actually be added to your team.
Also it wasn't well balanced, in the endgame all your human characters basically overpowered the monsters, leaving your monsters just playing some auxiliary roles.
Fossil Fighters is one of my favorite pokeclones, along with Yokai Watch
you got an amazing future on this platform keep it up
Thank you so much for fighting foodons i don't think it ever aired in Australia so i never saw it, but oh my god the sprites from the game are amazing
Robopon: what’s even funnier for me is I distinctly recall a mini strategy guide in Nintendo Power.
1:54 I’ll never know what we’re asking legislature $125 million for :(
He has the sources on the description
Re: Fighting Foodons -> In the late 90s and early 2000s, a lot of companies thought that anything Japanese would be successful in the US because of Pokemon. There was an insane amount of utterly bizarre anime, manga, video games, card games, etc..... brought over at the time, many of which did terribly in Japan to begin with but were cheap to buy the rights for.
5:33 They are not even trying to hide it, aren't they.
I didn't read TOO many of the Animorphs books as a kid (maybe 3 or 4, they're pretty short books), but I believe being unable to transform into other animals mid battle is their way of adhering to the transformation lore. Now, I might be remembering wrong, but I'm pretty sure in the books once a character transformed, they couldn't change back for a set amount of time, like an hour or two.
It’s not really mid battle, they morph before they fight.
@@ChicagoMel23 It's like you didn't even read my comment at all.
You unlocked deep memories with fighting foodons.
I played Mobile Phone Beast on some bootleg multi-game GBC cart in, I believe, 2002. I had only a faint memory of playing it on some neighbor girl's GBC while we were waiting for the bus. That's wild to finally find out what it was after all these years
Keep up the content Sneed (formerly Chuck).
THANK. GOD. YOU DIDN'T TALK ABOUT DIGIMON IN THIS VIDEO. I like both the series, they have their traits. But I think the reason was for not including it was because Digimon was a fork of tamagotchi rather than a pokemon clone. But the two tend to overlap because of their coincidental similarities, and i love it for that.
That's okay, not every monster collecting game is a "Pokemon clone"; just like not every fighting game is a "Street Fighter clone".