Episode 0: First Contact

Mario Kart DS is certainly not my favorite game in the series, but it probably makes my top 3. My favorite will always be Double Dash for its unique driving controls that just feel so great to play. Not to mention the two characters gimmick and bunch of karts give you so much more room for self-expression when you build your team, even with fewer characters than later titles, and the Special Items add so much fun and chaos as well as some strategy when you're choosing who you're playing as. For me, the only mark against Double Dash is the lack of content: Only 16 courses and no real frills. Mario Kart DS blows it out of the water in this regard, with 32 courses and a full mission mode with boss battles, it gives you so much to do. For my money it's also potentially the best looking 3D game on the DS, and it has so many all time great tracks— Waluigi Pinball and Airship Fortress need no introduction.

While any conversation with me is at risk of devolving into discussion of Mario Kart DS at any moment and for any reason, I actually do have a good excuse to bring it up here. It was in the comments section of Big Yellow's Emmy-nominated Mario Kart DS stream VOD that I was first introduced to Star Beasts, vis a vis this unassuming comment from pidesign8664:

Glaring typo and 0 likes of this comment aside, the name of the hack mentioned here intrigued me. "Star Beasts". It didn't sound like it would be a subtitle, i.e. "Pokémon Star Beasts", so it seemed like it had to be something higher concept. That, plus it being particularly an RBY hack really intriguied me. At this point I was already tossing around the idea of doing a "Let's Play Thread" style event for December this year, and this sounded like it could be the perfect game to go into blind, if it really was as weird of an overhaul as it sounded like. (It was, on both accounts. But we'll get to that.)

The truth of what Star Beasts actually was is something I don't think I ever would've predicted. As per the hack's PokéCommunity page,

Worked on over the course of half a decade, Star Beasts is a Gen 1 dex overhaul and homage to the first generation of Pokémon games. Started as a passion project to make a playable version of Vast Fame's Shi Kong Xing Shou for English speaking audiences, Star Beasts became its own project with entirely new fakemon designs.

If you're anything like me, you thought "dude that's fucking awesome" before you ever thought "hey wait a second what is Shi Kong Xing Shou". But that second question is still something that would have to cross your mind eventually. It turns out, Shi Kong Xing Shou (or "Space-Time Star Beasts", which is probably what you actually should call the game in a vacuum, but I'm gonna keep calling it Shi Kong Xing Shou just so it's abundantly clear when I'm talking about the Pokémon hack versus the original game) is an unlicensed Taiwanese Game Boy monster-collecting game produced by the studio Vast Fame, who are evidently of some renown in bootleg gaming circles.

I'm confident that I'll be given a lot of opportunities to talk about this throughout the next 25 days, but I really do have a great fondness for both ROM hacks and bootleg games. Really, they have a lot in common. Bootlegs tend to be a subject of derision, which you can tell just by the name. Laughing at amusing unlicensed Mario games found on random Famiclones is a time-honored internet passtime. Still, while there's often a lot of humor value in these titles, I don't think they're any less worthy of genuine analysis, even praise when due, than games that are a part of the more traditional canon of the medium. When they were original titles, the developers and artists behind these games certainly put in just as much effort to create them. And even when they were hacks of existing titles, hacking a game, especially for translation, is no simple task, as I'm sure many creators of fan projects will tell you.

In some ways that's being a bit generous. Certainly many bootleg games were created simply to put another game with a recognizable character on shelves to trick potential buyers. Just as certainly, a lot of these games barely function at all. But, for one, if you really dig into the library of any game console you'll find plenty of official games that are about as fun and polished as the worst bootlegs. For another, for countless players around the world, their formative platforming memories came from Mario 4: A Space Odyssey, or their first Pokémon partner was Kuribute from Jade Version. The experiences of those players aren't any less valid than those of us who played the official titles on official hardware. It's all video games, and I think there's something weirdly beautiful about that.

I don't know exactly the impetus for Soul Valor and their team creating Star Beasts, but it's clear they have a deep appreciation for Vast Fame's work on Shi Kong Xing Shou. While the original game is certainly heavily inspired by Pokémon, it features an original roster of creatures, a unique story and characters, and distinct gameplay. If you hadn't known it was a bootleg, you'd have no reason to assume it was, which is really interesting. This team could've absolutely slapped an existing IP's name on this game and suffered no consequences. Vast Fame themselves did exactly that for several of their other games, including a Pokémon bootleg simply called "Pokémon Ruby". (And other hackers did this to Shi Kong Xing Shou later as well, with a hacked version called "Harvest Moon 6" that just changes the title screen). But their commitment to creating something original, even if it that apparently borrows some assets and code from other games, really speaks to their genuine passion and ambition.

If we're talking passion and ambition, we should turn to the more immediate matter at hand: ROM hacks. I've wanted to do some sort of article or series covering Pokémon ROM hacking on this website for quite some time. Earlier I was describing how a lot of people have genuine fond memories of playing bootleg games, and in truth I actually had a similar experience myself growing up, although it was mostly with watching YouTube videos of these hacks rather than playing them myself. Still, that's also all I was doing for every game released before Diamond and Pearl, so Pokémon Ruby Destiny, Quartz, Brown, Naranja, Ash Grey, Snakewood... They were all about as real to me as Crystal and Emerald were. There was a real sense of "anything goes" with ROM hacks back then. Everyone wanted to try and go more ambitious, with more involved storylines, more Pokémon from recent titles and/or more Fakémon. But, especially in hindsight, it all has a very charming amatuerish quality to it. You can always know "ROM hack writing" when you see it.

Really, when we think about these passion projects skirting around copyright laws to appeal to niches within niches, it's hard not to draw parallels to some of the most impressive "bootlegs" out there. The NES ports of Final Fantasy VII and Pokémon Yellow come to mind, but Shi Kong Xing Shou almost certainly fits into the same category. It feels a little silly to say a Let's Play thread has a thesis statement, but if this one does have one it's this: Bootleg games rock and ROM hacks rock too. It's all video games, so it's all art, and weird fringe art is like the coolest kind.

But I've kept y'all long enough, so let's dispose with all this preamble. I'm going into Star Beasts completely blind. I tried to avoid even looking into too much stuff about the original game so that I could be surprised by all the new critters. If you're reading this live, Episode 1 releases tomorrow!

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