A look back at: Pokemon Ash Gray

Ah, it's been awhile since I talked about another rom hack, and I beat this about a month ago yet still haven't posted a look back. Whatever. Ash Gray is one of the more notable Pokemon rom hacks due to its stunning dedication to the anime plot. Almost every episode is covered, including the first two movies, and it unfortunately still isn't finished because once I got done with the second movie plot, it ended there. There's just doses of familiarity wherever you go in Ash Gray. Routes and cities are modified to look like their anime counterparts, so in other words places like Pallet Town are much larger. Then you get all the routes and the events that happen. So much dedication!

And even with this dedication to the anime plot, you can always take sidetracks and do stuff like oh I dunno, catching Pokemon Ash never caught and training them, as well as actually beating the Pokemon League and the Elite Four (this will of course require amazing setups and everything, because they made this place an ACTUAL challenge, can only bring three mons + no healing items). Then it goes to the Orange Islands where you can Surf and such. While Misty and Brock/Tracey don't actually tag along with you everywhere you go, when the plot demands it, they show up for those premiere episode plots. And so does Team Rocket in LOADS of places. Admittingly these guys could get on your nerves, but that's kind of their whole point.

While you can always derive from the main plot by not using Ash's main team, or doing stuff like evolving Pikachu or Squirtle, getting fancy rewards for doing so is pretty cool. The idea of unwinnable fights is not something Pokemon games could actually employ well, but I'm grateful that there's still possibilities of winning those fights (let's say you over-level in Viridian Forest before battling Brock's Lv14 Onix the first time). There's still a few glitches, perhaps one of the more horrendous things is when I lost the Pokemon option in the menu one time for revisiting an area I probably shouldn't have. No HMs is a huge plus, but it would've been better if I got the climbing kit before Orange Islands since you can't go back to Kanto in this hack, sadly.

As I did with Victory Fire, here's a walkthrough I made. As you might expect, I made it because other walkthroughs for them were sadly incomplete. And this will be incomplete too should the creator make a new patch and all. But overall this was quite an enjoyable trip down memory lane from a game perspective.