I tried out the Blooming Silence hack jam hack and I wish the hack was better. It had really great cutscene scripting that honestly felt even more polished than the vanilla games, but a lot of it felt pretty wasted on a really weirdly done narrative. If anyone cares about spoilers for it, the hack has you playing as Arceus, who's trying to understand mortal pokemon better. It starts off well, with him meeting a Meowth who's house is a mystery dungeon, and the two have good banter as Arceus is sort of an autist who speaks in absolutes and Meowth is just baffled by him. But then once that dungeon is over Meowth disappears, then the next few parts are pretty much the same, Arceus meets new pokemon then at the end they disappear and don't remember him next time around if they show up again. The problem is Arceus doesn't really do anything the entire story. All he does is show up some place, meet people, basically just proclaim he's Arceus and other characters tell him how he can feel more mortal in about 100 textboxes more than is required. So many parts feel like Arceus or another character says something and gets their point across, then the next 10 textboxes are them rewording that one thing. And the entire time the hack is trying to be philosophical about gods and what it means to be one while trying to tell an honestly extremely simple story (God figures out if he loses some of his powers, he learns what it's like to be mortal.) I wish Arceus had more agency in the story, the only time he actually does really anything instead of just being an onlooker is in the final boss fight where he fights a shadow version of himself in a very forced scene, and by that point all of the side characters you might actually care about since they have fun banter are completely gone and you just have this boring brick wall of a character who's done nothing up until this point that you're supposed to feel something for.

1/2