A look back at: Rijon Adventures

Mods for games either fall into one of two categories in my opinion. There are those that are simply new levels with marginally new gameplay, and then there are full-fledged mods that make things significantly different from the base game. In the case of Rijon Adventures, to me it felt like the former. Being already familiar with the landscape in Pokemon Brown is one caveat, but at least Brown was able to give much more than its Gen-1 stuff, making it a pretty superior ROM hack for Red. For this Fire Red ROM hack, we're treated to the same Rijon setting done Gen-3 style, new trainers, Pokemon up to Gen-3, yeah pretty nice.

I should probably expect that sort of thing for the "new level only" ROM hack to be honest, but what really makes me like the previous two ROM hacks were the post-game content. Especially in Prism. Here, there was plans for South Rijon to be explored, but not only is the National Pass you get at the end invalid, it's also a meaning that the South Rijon area can't be reached legitimately. Another location off? Hardnook Cave, where you can supposedly get Mewtwo but the entrance to the cave ain't anywhere in particular. It really sucks that some particular things were blocked off behind the post-game barrier, most notably getting the Togepi Egg and the Super Rod. That's quite disappointing.

And yeah, I did use the Walk Through Walls Gameshark code to explore these areas I never could reach. Notably the area behind the Seneca Cavefront has loads of trainers, all with around level 20 Pokemon, but that's all it has and you can't enter any buildings (the cave itself being blocked). There's some people in the northern half of Goldenrod City which is inaccessible but that's about all there is to that area. Finally the entire South Rijon area has names and trainers, but they are all taken from Sevii Islands trainers and they haven't been designed, so it's quite obvious there's a lot of work to do for this, assuming it will ever get worked on I suppose. Also Trainer Tower? Exactly the same as in FR/LG. EXACTLY.

I guess the last thing to take note of is the discrepancy that you are the son/daughter of the previous protagonist, Brown. Except he's referred to as Red, sadly. Green is also not only male, but the rival of Brown/Red here, when canonically in Brown he was always Mura. At least Professor Tim is here, and a neat sub-plot could be done regarding him. I mean, it's all okay, there's some cute things here and there like having both Brendan and May from R/S/E and all, but it's just not really as exciting as I hoped.