Pokemon Phoenix Rising is a fan game that is under the released demo category on the Pokemon community forums and for the longest time was one of the most anticipated fan games, however time and circumstances have hampered its development. So chapter 1 of this game has been out for years with no update or continuation. It was meant to be a choice based Pokemon game with emphasis on story and despite crashes and bugs what I played was fun.

Now the creators of this fan game have stated that with Nintendo being more malicious than usual with their properties have stopped development. Which is understandable, but Nintendo really only goes after fan projects if they make money. Nintendo already likely knows about most of these projects and most fan games, including this one, are free and Nintendo is always malicious so the statement on the games cancellation really makes no sense.

Now technically the game isn’t cancelled, but the creators have claimed they want to change the title, gameplay, and other properties to distance from Pokemon, making me wonder if at that point why not just make your own game and cancel Phoenix Rising directly. Part of me wants this game to release fully under the original direction, but this is not the first time something like this happened some cancelled fan games get picked up by other developers and I hope that is the case with this one or that the original developers can work on something else they are more comfortable with or both, but more likely the game will get buried and forgotten which would be a tragedy considering the potential this game once had.