Let's Play! Join me on a journey through the adventure that's changed my life

[bdt2002]

After five long years and my entire college experience, the time has finally come. I've been waiting a long time for this, and the wait is finally over.

Pokémon Ranger: Guardian Signs was the first Pokémon game I ever played, and there is a genuine argument to be made that this is my favorite video game ever released. 15 years ago today, this game was released in my home region of North America, and for as long as I can remember this game has served as the primary catalyst for my dream of finding my place in the greater Pokémon fandom. It is because of this game that I truly became a Pokémon fan to the extent that I am today, and it is because of Pokémon that I've met and maintained some of the most treasured friendships I've ever had to this very day. It is true that I may have been introduced to the trading cards first before the games, but this game alone has left a greater impact on my life and on my personality that no other piece of media has ever come remotely close to matching. It wouldn't be an inaccurate statement to claim that I love this game as much as a parent loves their own children. My affection game was even so strong at one point that Pokémon was one of the things keeping me grounded in reality and keeping me from wanting to make some very bad decisions during a brutal stretch of my life a couple of years ago.

I've wanted to play through this game online for the community as long as I can remember, and in more recent years I discovered a passion and talent I had for the creative arts. More specifically, my interest in creative writing. I still have all of the information of scrapped plans for a Pokémon Ranger fanfiction going as far back as this game's 10th anniversary in 2020. The timing was perfect- I was graduating high school, the pandemic gave me a surplus of free time to work on my project, and the alternative in 2020 was continuing to try and find a reason to want to play my least favorite core series games in the series in the form of Sword & Shield. For the first year of development and writing, everything was going according to my plans for a full, true Let's Play on the Forums and for my fanfiction. But just like that, everything came to a screeching halt. Remember in the last paragraph when I said I went through a brutal stretch? Yeah, so about that. 2021 wasn't just a bad year for me relative to the other years in my young life at that point. Everyone had good years and bad years after all, and even with 2021 accounted for I would still say the quality of my life has been very strong. That being said, there is no doubt in my mind that 2021 and especially the second half of that year left me with traumatic scars that still haven't healed. I won't dive into the details here, but I put my plans for this game, and for the community, on permanent hiatus, threatening to quit supporting the franchise entirely due to the extremities of the negativity of my personal life at my time and the Pokémon fandom at large. You may have even see my wrestling with this conflict over the past year or so.

It's taken me until 2025 to finally recover some form of emotional stability in my life and regain the courage to give this another shot. I had initially planned this Let's Play thread for 2024, but I delayed the project for an extra year so I could focus on other things, including but not limited to my college graduation, my first actual career job search that took until January of this year by the way, and the announcements of both Pokémon Legends ZA and the Nintendo Switch 2. More recently I also happened to have a terrible day on my yearly Espeon-themed holiday of mine. But after five long, tiring, exhausting, yet incredibly rewarding years, I feel like I'm finally ready to give this another shot and take back control of my mental wellness in the process. I have made my decision. I want to be a positive person again- and this is how I plan on making that happen.

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It is worth noting that this Let's Play is going to be a bit different than what you might be used to. Before we begin, I want to give a massive extension of gratitude to the user, WarriorGallade for their help and motivation for me to finalize this project, as well as their extensive work on their thread for this game's Wireless Multiplayer Missions. I normally don't do this on the Forums, but I would strongly encourage you to check out their posting activity because it's very high quality, I must say. The other thing I wanted to mention is that I do not currently have any way of providing authentic Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS game footage and screenshots. At least, not yet. Situations like this are a major reason why I want Nintendo DS games playable on the Switch 2 in the future, since screenshots from the System Storage can actually be transferred to a mobile phone device. For this reason I will be treating this less like a traditional Let's Play and more like a live commentary of the game that I'll be splitting up into different Parts, sharing my thoughts on the different parts of it, my likes and dislikes, memories, improvements I would have made, all of it. This might be my most nostalgic and maybe even my single favorite video game of all time, but that doesn't mean this game is a perfect 10 out of 10, and I'm going to be bringing attention to both the good and the bad moments.



I don't know just yet what my posting schedule will look like for this, only that I am incredibly excited to finally be launching this project after what genuinely feels like an eternity. I absolutely adore this game if you somehow couldn't tell, and I almost don't want to see the Pokémon Ranger games make a comeback because I might actually fall into cardiac arrest for real if that happens. The last thing we need is for this game to get a remake and me not be able to play it, after all. I look forward to seeing you in my next post in this thread as we begin our adventure in the Oblivia Region. Take care, everyone, and have a great rest of your night. I'll see you in the Prologue, where I'll be going over the very beginning of the game and any Q & A you might be interested in. Feel free to post at any time in between new updates!

 

[az]

good luck and remember to get the potion from the pc

 

[bdt2002]

Prologue: The Third Best Opening of Any Pokémon Game

As we boot up the game for the first time, we see a strange figure being drawn on the Touch Screen with the famous Capture Styler before catching a glimpse at some Pokémon living in the ocean near some undersea ruins. As the camera pans upward, you may also be able to spot a familiar looking shadow in the distance. The camera surfaces above the waves as we see Latias and Latios flying together as the sun appears shining on the horizon. And then, we are immediately hit right in the feels with a new remix of the Pokémon Ranger opening theme from the first two games:

Beginning a new save file, the first thing the game asks us to do is decide if we would like to play as the male or female protagonist character, just like we see in the core series games. Whenever I play this game, including for this thread, I elect to play as the male protagonist for reasons I'll explain momentarily. There is no "Welcome to the world of Pokémon!" speech in this game, which I'm prersonally okay with because let's be real, most of that is just mashing the A button through text boxes. Our Pokémon Ranger character gets shrunk down to size and does a neat pose before the screen fades to black. Nothing completely unusual so far.

We begin our adventure high in the skies above the Oblivia Region. Huh. The word "Oblivia" sounds familiar for some reason. I wonder if any other Nintendo games also used that name for a world map... in any case, quite literally right away the stage is set for one of the more unique opening sequences of any Pokémon game off the top of my head. The music is calming, the Pidgey are flying together, there's a Latios being shot at and chased by people on hovercrafts... wait, what?

So here's the thing about this game, right. The first two Pokémon Ranger games have a lot of mandatory tutorial moments in the early-game. It's not a deal breaker or anything, especially when Shadows of Almia introduced a completely different capture system from what the first game used. I personally welcome the change because the old system in Pokémon Ranger is infuriating at times. But more on that in a little bit. For now, we need to do something about these suspicious people. And right on cue, we hear the cry of a Staraptor as the Pokémon Ranger motif plays and I fly into action! We also get our first taste of one of the most popular songs from Guardian Signs here. Trust me, we'll be hearing this banger more than once during our adventure:

The people riding their hovercrafts recognize me by the red goggles and the yellow scarf I'm wearing as a part of my uniform, but all the indication they really needed that I'm a Pokémon Ranger was being able to see my Capture Styler. We'll get to see what this thing does in just a second, as they send out a Pidgey to attack me with. The game instructs us to "capture" the Pidgey in order to calm in down as we enter the first battle of the entire game. The game instructs the player to draw loops on the DS touch screen around Pidgey with the stylus, and here we see the core gameplay aspect of the entire trilogy. For those unaware, the Capture Styler is a tool used by Pokémon Rangers to help befriend Pokémon. Each game handles captures differently, but in Shadows of Almia and Guardian Signs, successfully drawing loops around Pokémon will fill up points in what we later learn is called the Pokémon's "Friendship Gauge". They're basically a fancy term for reverse health bars. The line that appears on the screen when you try to capture Pokémon can be attacked, however, and your Capture Styler will take damage if that happens. It's actually impossible to get a Game Over against this first Pidgey, which I suppose isn't that big of a surprise. Once the Pidgey has been calmed down, we'll also see that I have gained some experience points for successfully completing the capture. If we collect enough experience points, we can level up our Styler and what that does is gives us more Styler HP and makes our capture loops slightly stronger than before. In the first Pokémon Ranger game the caoture system is completely different, as I hinted at earlier in this post; in that game you have significantly less Styler health to work with and instead of the Friendship Gauge, every species of Pokémon in the game has to have a consecutive number of loops drawn around them in a row without the Styler leaving the Touch Screen or taking damage, at which point you'll have to start over again. From what I've observed in the community, the large majority of Pokémon Ranger fans tend to prefer the Friendship Gauge system over the required loops mechanic. Finally, Pidgey gets registered to something called our Browser, which is effectively Pokémon Ranger's answer to the PokéDex in all of these games. We'll learn more about Poké Assists and Field Moves later. Brief side note here, but as I was working on this thread, I received word that the field moves in Pokémon Legends ZA may work more similarly to Pokémon Ranger's Field Moves than your usual HMs and the like, which I'm excited for if that's true.

Distracting these guys for long enough with our Pidgey capture allows Latios to escape their chasing him, and the guy on our left mentions how he was surprised to see someone pull off a midair capture, which is notable since this was the first and only Pokémon Ranger game to feature open-ended exploration of the skies and, by extension, captures that take place in the sky. If anyone else has picked up on this yet, yes, there is a very, very high chance that this game served as the inspiration for Soaring in Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire four and a half years later, though this popular fan theory has not been officially been confirmed by Nintendo, Creatures Inc., or Game Freak at any point to the best of my knowledge. What I'm more concerned about right now is how they just said the region is very peaceful and that they don't want anything getting in the way of that before proceeding to shoot at me and my Staraptor with a plasma gun. More specifically, the weapon they call a Plasma Cannon and had been attempting to shoot down Latios with earlier. Yeah, this is one of those openings. And it only gets better from here.

The suspicious duo asks if we can dodge their double-team attack, and we get to try out manually controlling our character and flying around the Touch Screen. Thankfully, even if you take the most amount of damage possible from Pidgey and get hit by all five attacks the Plasma Cannons can shoot at you, it is still impossible to get a Game Over here. The battery life for their Plasma Cannons quickly runs out, which may explain why they each only had five shots left per person, and in a rare moment of personal accountability in Pokémon games we hear the person on our right hand side admit scaring their target, Latios, with wild firing may not have been the brightest idea they've had. Out of options, she suggests ramming themselves into the player to take us out that way.

Hmm. You know, it sure would be a shame if Best Girl had something to say about that.

Just like our entrance, we hear another Staraptor behind us, this one being piloted by a second Ranger that's either named Summer or Ben. With another click of the A button, we find this is the other gender protagonist character- the girl's canonical name is Summer, and the boy's canonical name is Ben. Speaking of which, remember when I said I would explain why I play as the male protagonist? I have an incredible story here. You've probably noticed that we haven't actually gotten to pick our character's name just yet, and we will get to that eventually. However, I did not realize at first when this game came out in my home region of North America that the protagonist's canonical name was Ben. At the time, I was under the impression that the protagonist's name was preset to the name of the owner of the Nintendo DS you're using. You guys getting to learn my first name (and even then that's just the shorter version) is Ben is the full extent of my personal identification I am going to share on this platform. The important part is that here I was, my first Pokémon game ever, leaning the protagonist shared his name with me, and his counterpart is even named Summer for good measure. For context, the names "Ben" and "Benjamin" share association with the summer months, more specifically July, and would you believe it, not only was I born in July in real life, but adding even more to the coincidence, the official birthstone of the month of July is the Ruby, which happens to be the same version of Hoenn that Latios appears in. If anyone's curious, the Sapphire belongs to September and I believe the Emerald belongs to... May... ha ha, I see what they did there. So, uh, yeah, that right there's about four different pieces of evidence to suggest that I was destined to play, and start with, this game somehow. It's fine if you don't, I won't judge anyone for their own belief systems, but I've always been a fan of and believer in supernatural miracles and predestined things we can't fully explain. I fully believe I was meant to experience this game, and at one point I even thought this game was literally made for me. And I still have about five other pieces of evidence I haven't mentioned!

...what was I talking about? Ah, that's right, Best Girl. Summer's not having any of their crap, and all of a sudden these suspicious people are backed into a corner. Their words, not mine- the Plasma Cannon batteries are dead, Rangers keep popping up, and she hates to say it but they may have to retreat. But just before they can, we get ANOTHER character introduction out of nowhere as a sudden voice says they have one more on their side now too. Another man shows up on his own uniquely covered red hovercraft and starts absolutely aura farming on our heroes:

The guy on our left hand side immediately identifies this man as their leader and tells him we're Pokémon Rangers. No sh**, Sherlock. He's able to see that himself, thankfully, but he also mentions this is the first time he's seen flying Rangers. He follows this up by starting to bad mouth me and Best Girl, making remarks about us being showing off brats putting on airs. Summer makes the mistake of retaliating back at him saying he's the leader of a team that can't handle those same "brats", and to no one's surprise he's not taking that very well. In fact, he takes Best Girl's rage bait so hard that he not only describes the consequences for mouthing off to him, but actually demonstrates it. He has just the sport for a tough-talking brat, he claims, and... well... how can I say what I want to say next...? If you already know, you know, but just in case you don't, lets just say that skydiving without a parachute was my first introduction to shipping. This man fires up his Plasma Cannon and aims it directly at Summer, and in that moment she's completely terrified...

...but wait. What's wrong? Best Girl's still here. "What happened?", she asks. And where the heck did we go? Don't tell me... the man explains that sacrificing oneself to save another is incredibly bold, and that Summer should at least thank me for saving her life. Yep. That explains that. This sequence of events has been done to death in Pokémon Ranger fanfictions, and I'm just going to break through my shyness and come right out and say it- this is my favorite ship in all of Pokémon and it's not particularly close. Actually, I'll take that one step further- in the past, I've told people that I've rarely, if ever, had a fictional crush, and that I've only ever been interested in someone in real life a total of... twice. That's it. I've never been one to care about love and relationships, I say. Yeah, well... I lied. All the way back in the first post of this thread, I mentioned my own fanfiction that I had since scrapped, in a way replacing that with this thread nowadays. I don't care how shy I feel to say that. Summer was my first and, depending on who you ask, only fictional crush I ever had, and there are absolutely romantic undertones between Ben and Summer in this game resembling other popular Pokémon ships. I suppose it would have helped to clarify that this fanfiction was going to be a self-insert story with me as Ben if that wasn't already obvious. In any case, Best Girl's even more scared now, this time for my sake, and the man nonchalantly responds by pointing out how lucky she seems and that they might make Summer into their lucky charm. Well, f***. I think I know what that means. And of course the screen fades to black, because why wouldn't it?

We actually get to see the player character falling out of the sky, although I do think they used a silly animation for that scene, before crash-landing into the ocean, thankfully still alive. Our Capture Styler falls off of our right wrist from the impact, and as luck would have it a wild Mantyke swims along and happily picks it up. Mantyke is adorable, but we need our Styler back, and the player is given a prompt to flip their Nintendo DS sideways for a new minigame Guardian Signs offers- underwater chase sequences. They're similar to the sky events, and you can gradually speed up and catch up with whatever it is you're chasing and is sending attacks back you to damage and slow you down. It's gimmicky, I'll admit, but it adds some flavor to the underwater gameplay we'll see more of in this game. Once we catch up to Mantyke and it gives our Capture Styler back (we don't even have to capture it), we pick up the Styler on some undersea ruins- the same ones from the intro cutscene for the game, you may notice. These undersea ruins will certainly serve an important role later in the narrative, right? There's no time to think about this, though, as a massive object is approaching me and I can't exactly swim out of the way in time. If you look closely in one of the windows of this giant thing, you may be able to spot someone looking out towards the player... and with that, the screen fades to black one final time and asks if we want to save the game.

Can I just say... wow. What a start to this game. This is up there with both of the GameCube games for the best opening to any Pokémon game I can think of. Gone are the drawn out mandatory tutorials and we get straight into the action. The characters are introduced with suspense, the bad guys actually pose an active threat to the player as a person and their Ranger partner which is a nice change of pace, the bad guys' leader is already aura farming this early in and this is far from the peak of his character arc, and they had time to swiftly introduce new game mechanics while allowing those mechanics to make sense in the context of what is happening in the story. You know, the Pokémon Ranger games all have really strong character writing across the board. I wonder who worked as the story director for these games.

doing a quick Google search

This is utter insanity. This trilogy's story direction in all three games was led by a person named Akihito Toda. If you're a fan of The Legend of Zelda, that name might just sound familiar to you, because this absolute Chad worked on all three of these games, practically vanished from writing direction for seven years straight, and came back out of nowhere and casually dropped the entire story direction of Breath of the Wild like it was nothing. I knew there was a reason I thought Breath of the Wild had a better story than Tears of the Kingdom. In our first true Part of this thread, we'll be exploring the first area of the game and be introduced to what I have deemed the single greatest character in all of Pokémon. Stay tuned, everyone. These are going to all be super long, aren't they...