Why Was the Future So Loved?

Hi guys! With Retro still in development and more updates being talked about, I had a thought last night. One of those thoughts when you’re trying to sleep but your brain is like “nope”. It was why the Future was so great in the first place?

In early-2011, FusionFall finally received its first and only long-awaited expansion. It was hardly an expansion really and more of a replacement with a few small updates such as Nanos but shush. This update replaced with the Future with the shorter, still kinda cool Academy. The Academy took place in the Null Void for basic training, Providence HQ’s Petting Zoo for advanced training and Mt. Neverest for the graduation.

It was still nice in a way. It showed Cartoon Network was still capable of making new things ater Grigon left the scene sometime in 2009 and brought back a lot of NPCs previously only seen during the 2010 Birthday Bash such as Fred Fredburger and Major Glory. However, it was still met with… unfavourable views, from myself and many other veterans of the game because, as I said, it removed the Future.

AND here is where we get to the point. Why was it loved so much compared to the Academy? Why are we happy the Retro and Legacy teams are bringing back the Future? There are a variety of reasons actually, so let’s go through them, shall we? In no particular order…

The Story

(Ugh WordPress just gets worse and worse sometimes…) Long ago in a distant land time, there were cutscenes. Yeah… that’s not all by the way. As some of you may know from Retro, the game started with you, the hero, participating in Dexter’s recent time machine experiment. The experiment is going well, until Dex’s hapless sister Dee Dee sneaks in and screws it up, flinging you further into the future than intended. The future being apocalyptic. You suddenly went from a nice, sunny day, to utter destruction. The skies as green as the aliens invading. Yes; aliens. Planet Fusion had arrived in your absence, raining green, glowing egg-sacs known as terrafusers.

These things do more than spew out Fusion Spawns; they ooze out acidic, poisonous Fusion Matter, tearing the Earth apart bit-by-bit. You arrive in Tech Square, confused, bewildered as to what’s going on. Ben Tennyson and Numbuh 5 find you and take you up to speed. Numbuh 2 then needs your help retrieving a transmitter and soon, you find yourself saving Dexter from a Fusion, thus giving you your first Nano, Buttercup. Not long after, Tech Square falls to Fuse. This all seems like too much to take in but you get your chance to get your bearings as Numbuh 2 sends you to Sector V. Your mission; rebuild the time machine that brought you here. With Dexter gone, it’s up to Mandark and Numbuh 2, with help from Eddy, Eduardo and more.

On your journey through the ruins of the suburbs, you learn more about what is at stake here and how urgent it is to go back to the past. As you eventually step into the newly-rebuilt time machine, you get to say good-bye to all who have helped you. You feel a slight worry about them. You’re going to the past to save them from all this but you can’t help but think what might happen to them while you’re gone. Time is a strange concept.

The Academy on the other hand… is more simple. Fuse has already been defeated so many times that this apocalyptic future no longer exists. You are now but a simple soldier, training through the Academy to learn how to beat Fuse, defeating a few Fusions along the way.

The Length and Features

The Academy. This usually took around an hour to beat, maybe half that. This might not seem so bad, but the Academy had so little to actually do. Do a number of missions, beat a few Fusions, ride Lady Rainicorn to Sector V. The Future took as long as a whole weekend, and that’s if you had no life like me anyway.

It’s true; longer doesn’t always mean better. You might be watching a movie but wishing it would just end because it’s 3 hours long or something, but the Future was so long because there were so many things to do. It had a lot of things you would find in the Past such as Monkey Skyway Agents, S.C.A.M.P.E.R.s, Croc Pot, etc. These were all there to introduce you to the features in the Past and to get you used to them. Not to mention there were so many missions.

The main story of recreating the time machine, which acted as the first Guide quests, being handed out by Computress, the introduction to the Ben 10 Adventure quests, which saw you helping Vilgax (which would later be important to the Adventure in the Past), Numbuh 2’s, Eddy’s and Eduardo’s Nano missions, and more. You could explore parts of the Suburbs which you would later revisit; Sector V, Pokey Oaks, Peach Creek, Goat’s Junk Yard, Candy Cove, Genius Grove and of course, Tech Square, albeit only in the Future. You might even uncover some things such as how the wormholes in the Past actually grew in size over time (the one in Genius Grove being the largest), the fountain in Genius Grove that only ever was in the Future and some people even managed to glitch through the invisible wall at Candy Cove and enter what was the Sweet Revenge Infected Zone… or what was left of it, anyway. All this was enough to keep you occupied and have fun!

The Golden Age…

And the final reason many people held the Future in so high regard… because it was considered the golden age of the game, especially the first year of release; 2009. Updates were just about every month, or at least they felt like it. Whether it was an actual in-game update like new missions or a simple contest like that one time the FF team had an art competition.

The events were immense fun. Unfortunately I was not able to participate in many of them in the Past. All events were in both time periods, but there were usually a lot more to do in the Past. For instance, the Easter event of 2009 had the players go through newly-opened Fusion portals. These portals sent you to Fusion lairs, only instead of enemies, there were Coco’s eggs. Most of them were bad but some had cool, rare items. However only one was in the Future, many more in the Past. But was it still fun? Heck yeah!

And probably the main thing in this section, for me at least, were the Nanos. The 2011 expansion changed how gaining Nanos worked. Instead of being given a Nano mission each time you leveled up, there would be a number of Nano missions available to you at different levels that you may receive from the respective NPCs. The level cap was still 36 however and some Nanos were only available through codes. Even the Ice King was originally a code Nano but was given a mission of his own. I… did not like this much.

It made the whole Nano system seem more of a novelty than giving the feeling you’re actually getting stronger. The code Nanos were all right (save for Gumball and Darwin, who had only one emotion and were terrifying) but nothing beat the feeling of victory when you get a new Nano after defeating a Fusion and levelling up. It would have made a much better expansion if the game raised the level cap a little and added new missions to suit it. Beggars can’t be choosers, I suppose. But the point is, all the good stuff was pre-2011. Sure, we had new Nanos and the Unstable Nano (which was stuck at Van Kleiss because CN lost interest again), but… the Future era was just so amazing.

So… tl;dr: the Future was loved because it made the game bigger, longer, gave it an actual story and it was more fun.

*Whew* I don’t know if that was longer or shorter than I expected, but there’s my thoughts. Do you agree? Disagree? Did I forget something? I mean no one comes here anymore but ya know. 😛

Anyway, cya!
~Oliver Zombieweasel