Nightmare Fuel / Pokémon Reborn

Just one of the PULSES this game has to offer.

Unmarked spoilers ahead

• The attack at the beginning of the game. It drives home to you just how much darker this will be than the main series.
  • And just to hammer the nail in further, one NPC asks you if you were on the train and says "so was my fiancee" before awkwardly ending the conversation. If that was too subtle, in earlier episodes she said "you were the lucky one" as well.
• Dr. Sigmund's Orphanage of Fear. All the kids there are terrified and cannot wait to turn eighteen, because he won't let them be adopted and won't let them leave until they're legal adults. Why are they afraid? His "therapy" sessions basically amount to Electric Torture.
  • Heather ends up there after her father dies, and he immediately marks her as his next "patient". As if she hasn't been through enough. Made even worse since Corey asks you to look after her, and you failed.
    • His speech when he seizes her is even worse. Despite Heather's repeated refusal to go anywhere with him, he essentially kidnaps her, sounding the whole time like a child molester about to drag her into his white van. It gets a lot worse after Saphira's Gym battle, when she tells the player that Connal raped her while seemingly out of his mind with grief.
  • The scariest thing about Dr. Connal is not the torture he puts his patients through, but rather, how monolithically certain he is that he is doing the right thing. The man is insane enough to think that he's torturing those children for their own good!
    • This ultimately turns into a Tear Jerker when you learn that according to one of the interviews on the forum back when the real-life Reborn league was running, his sister (who was suffering from depression) committed suicide, and electroshock therapy could have saved her. This was later shown in a post-game quest.
• Talk to people in the Obsidia ward during the attack. One crying girl will be too afraid to go outside because the street collapsed beneath her boyfriend's feet while he was walking next to her. Luckily, he survived, and once you get access to the depths of the Railnet system you can rescue him and reunite him with his girlfriend.
• On the story path where you unveil Corey as a member of Team Meteor, when you confront him in his gym, he angrily calls you out for completely destroying his already rocky relationship with Heather... and floods the room with gas. Fortunately, all it does in-game is create a new, harder field effect for the battle against him, but the message is taken: Corey wants you dead, and while he's at it, he wants you to suffer, This is no longer the case in episode 19 however as he doesn’t attempt to kill you regardless of the story route with the battle being him testing you instead.
  • In the Mod Pokémon Reborn Hardcore, things get even worse. After his death, you can start a sidequest in which his ghost tells you to meet him in the place where you outed him, and tells you to "bring the ring". When you go there, he chews you out for bringing his own ring (used to catch his Pokémon) instead of Heather's Ruby Ring, and reveals the main purpose of bringing you here was to kill you. When the Player Character tries to run, they get cornered by the remains of his team, and Corey summons a swarm of Koffing to kill you with corrosive mist, attempting to murder you with his patched-together team! Somewhat mitigated in the end with The Reveal that it's not actually Corey's ghost, but his Haunter, who blames you for its master's death and wants revenge.
• Shade's gym. It's an old power plant with no power, so it's pitch black inside, except for the occasional flicker. The music there is a low, menacing tune similar to what you find in Lavender Town and doesn't change when you encounter wild Pokémon. To get to Shade, you have to stumble your way through the darkness, lowering the doors with terminals, and every time you activate a terminal you see how someone died. One girl getting attacked by a Garchomp, another being decapitated, Corey committing suicide...and the less said about Shade himself, the better.
  • And then there's the fact that his Gengar is named after Corey, whose body he collected.
  • Those "visions"? Those don't show how someone died, they show how someone will die. The girl being killed by a Garchomp is Kiki, who is indeed decapitated by Solaris's Garchomp while trying to stop him from erupting the volcano. And later on you have to see Amaria jumping down a waterfall because Titania admitted to faking being in love with her, ironically to help her with her apparent depression.
  • This is mitigated, however, by the fact that Shade's the closest thing this game has to a Big Good. Cut dialogue implies that he helped Luna avoid El, Anna says he's really nice, and it's implied that the screens are just his way of warning you about the deaths, rather than threatening you.
• The PULSE machines. Just three of those things were able to destroy half the city with just Tangrowth. Imagine what one could do with, say, a Gyarados or a Tyranitar. Or even better, imagine what a whole army of Pokémon hooked up to those things could do.
  • The current release has one hooked up with a Clawitzer. Y'know, the tiny shrimp with a freakin' Howitzer cannon for an arm?
  • Made even worse since while the PULSE machines greatly enhance the Pokémon hooked up to it, they also do...horrible things to their bodies. It's implied the Pokémon are fully conscious and unable to stop attacking, too.
  • The prototype pulse machine forcibly evolved a Magneton into a Magnezone, which isn't all that horrifying except for the fact that in the pokedex, it is said to be impossible to do artificially. Its creators, on the other hand, went through the exact same process, becoming ZEL.
• In the Byxbysion Wasteland, you get this message at the start of every battle: The waste is watching...
  • Using a move of the same type as the field usually strengthens in, with the game saying "the murk added to the attack" (or something). Use a Poison-type move in the Wasteland, and the game tells you "the waste joined in the attack". That place is alive, and it's not friendly.
  • As it turns out, after exploring the Wasteland's Underground system, you come across Mr. Bigglesworth, a Garbodor who greets you in an eerie manner. In the same room, you find a non-functional PULSE machine, suggesting that the Garbodor was used to create the Wasteland.
• Solaris.
  • He's smart, cold, calculating, and has no qualms ordering his Pokémon to attack and kill defenseless humans. What Pokémon is it? A Garchomp—you know, the thing that Smogon banned to Ubers for being stupidly overpowered. And the game is not shy about showing how badly an ordinary human fares against it.
  • He orders Cal to throw Kiki's Medicham in lava. Imagine how traumatizing that would be for Kiki.
  • Then there's the first battle against Solaris atop Pyrous Mountain. He says that "it won't take more than a single Pokémon to delete you". Seems like he's setting himself up to get defeated by his own hubris, right? Ha ha ha NOPE. That "one Pokemon" is his Garchomp, and it's LEVEL 75 (to put this into perspective, the highest level your Pokémon can be at the time is level 45)! Cue curb-stomp battle.
• The scariest thing about Solaris, though? HE'S JUST TEAM METEOR'S DRAGON. The true leader of Team Meteor, Lin, is arguably even worse than Solaris! During the Enemy Mine situation in Team Meteor's Tanzan Mountain base, she not only sees right through Sirius' lie that the Player Character is a new recruit, but also knows right away that you're responsible for the subsequent attack on the base by Saphira and her Steelix! To give you an idea about how feared she is: EVEN SOLARIS IS RELUCTANT TO GET HER INVOLVED.
  • Come Episode 16, we finally know why Lin is so feared: Her first direct action against your group is to kidnap you and your friends, and force you into fights in which the loser is tortured in different ways. And how does she top this? By having her Hydreigon DECAPITATE THE LEAGUE CHAMPION. That's right: Even the strongest trainer in all of Reborn is no match for Lin. And said trainer is now dead. And as a bit of Fridge Horror: She ordered her grunts to specifically leave the protagonist unharmed. It's not hard to figure out the reason.
    • Lin's fucking Hydreigon. That motherfucker's strong enough to stand up to Ame's- the Champion's- Alolan Ninetales. Which is an Ice/Fairy type. That is, it's a fucking Dragon-killer, and yet it couldn't take down that Hydreigon. And the fact that it eats Ame's head doesn't help.
    • Oh, yeah. Those methods of torture? Adrienn gets burned, Victoria gets shocked, and Arclight gets an eye ripped out.
    • Even the hideout where all of these events take place is designed to make you feel pain: The whole place is riddled with unavoidable tiles that develop electrical shocks to the protagonist every time they step on one of them. Again, they're unavoidable. And you have to step on several of them before reaching the end of the puzzle. And worse: They hurt your Pokémon too. It's very clear that Lin doesn't just want to kill you: She wants to see you suffer.
• Some of the custom shinies look a bit unnerving, for example, Aegislash, Kecleon, and Vivillon. To elaborate, Vivillon has a demonic aura around it, Aegislash is splattered in blood, and Kecleon is almost completely invisible.
  • As of Episode 16, Aegislash's shiny form is now different from the above.
• That giant fucking Steelix that causes all the earthquakes in Chrysolia. First you fall down into the Tanzan depths and after a while find Saphira at the end of a long, wide pathway. She's down a chasm and tells you a giant Pokémon is responsible for the tunnels. When you go back the way you came, giant new pathways have opened up while you occasionally hear earthquakes. Then you finally reach a certain chasm where the Steelix shows itself, and it's absolutely MASSIVE.
  • Oh, and the best part? It COMES BACK, as a surprise boss fight during Saphira's gym challenge. The large amount of attack indicators heralding its presence is bound to fill you with dread.
• At many points of the game, you'll see an Absol staring or yelling at you. Let's just remind that Absol is known to appear when a disaster is going to happen...
• The Type: Null sidequest added in Episode 17. Dear lord, the Type: Null sidequest... It esentially involves you wandering into a hidden lab on 7th Street where, after battling the head scientist there, you're tasked with fetching certain Pokémon so she can use them to put together Type: Null's main body. That's right: You're handing your own Pokémon to this insane woman so she can tear them apart and fuse them together. And two of those mons you have to hand out, Luxray and Unfezant, are fully evolved so you have to train them at least a bit before sending them off. And after you do that? Type: Null, still having the memories of the Pokémon you handed out, lashes out against its creator, killing her before deciding that he wants to kill you too.
• If you go down the story branch in Episode 17 where Lin tricks Titania into killing Taka, things for the rest of the episode start as Tear Jerker, but then quickly become equal parts that and this when you go to get Amaria's badge:
  • First, when you find Amaria in her gym, she quickly greets you and then runs off underwater. Of course, since you need her badge, you have to follow her underwater, where she eventually drops her cheerful act and traps you in an underwater room, leaving you to drown. Thankfully, Titania is able to save you, but if she hadn't come along...
  • In the aftermath of that, Amaria drops all pretense of civility and goes full-on Yandere, with nothing but pure, undiluted hatred towards the player for causing Titania to leave her (because she's forgotten your achievemets). On the story route where Taka lives, she normally maintains an attitude of faux cheerfulness, but in this route she outright makes death threats and stays in a state of Tranquil Fury for the entire battle. Oh, and the fight ends with the implication that she's going to kill herself for real this time. This is perhaps exemplified best by what she says when she sends out her last Pokémon on this route:
    Drown.
• The Glass Workshop marathon and PULSE Hypno. Not only is it able to take over up to two human minds at once, it can also control all those humans' Pokémon as well. And this doesn't just go for Cain and Shelly. It takes over you as well.
• The end of Chapter 18. The player defeats Hardy, gets his badge, the episode's over, and then... suddenly the text in the 'thanks for playing, etc.' speech slowly becomes corrupted until it's nothing but 'xxxxxxxx' over and over against a totally black screen. Then, out of nowhere, some really creepy music starts playing and the text is replaced with a strange, unidentified character speaking directly to you- not the main character, you- and calls you ungrateful, saying they've done a lot for you that you don't appreciate. They then threaten to keep you prisoner in the empty space between episodes, before letting you go... but they tell you that you'd better be grateful next time, or else.
• THE PULSE MR. MIME. It’s a Dark/Ghost Type With Wonder Guard, is only weak to fairies, and can give its ability to other Pokémon. It doesn’t even look like a Mr. Mime anymore whereas the other PULSES at least somewhat resembled the original Pokémon. Oh, and it gets worse. There’s the fact that it’s puppeteering Sigmund Connal’s mutilated body and we get a lovely look at his state as his in-battle sprite has changed to his corpse. It is never made clear who killed him, Lin or the PULSE, and though it’s implied to be the former, it is never outright revealed. Oh, and the PULSE Mr. Mime is now controlling the deceased Sigmund Connal’s Pokémon to fight for it as well. The music doesn’t help either. As awful as he was, what Connal had been reduced to here makes it hard not to feel sorry for him.
• The scene with Lin’s father is short, but its revelation of him having sexually abused his daughter is amongst one of the darkest happenings in Reborn.