A look back at: Pokemon Gaia

So I did manage to finally finish this rom hack, even though frankly it should have been a lot sooner, I was quite wrapped up in a lot of other things while playing it. That being said, this is so far my favorite rom hack because content-wise, it delivered tremendously. Remember when I said the Dark Rising games overwhelmed me with all sorts of new stuff? Well Gaia does all this, so much more, and keeps the difficulty rather tame! The story is actually well-written, you get access to mostly every single mon up to gen-6, and even abilities and moves of the future gens are put into this Fire Red hack. I often found myself standing in the same locations trying to get everything I could, and managed to get over 600 mons owned by the end of it all. There's perhaps a few loose ends such as hatching special eggs and maybe a few other things missed, but I don't care, there's not much in post-game content in Gaia and for once I'm glad for that.

Interesting that the Regi mons tend to have some sort of role in most of these rom hacks I'm playing, particularly Regigigas who was pretty much the focal point (having been on the box art and all too). Resolute I remember Wind tried to use Regigigas, and Brandon in Dark Rising 2 had the full team to use as enemies. It sucks you can't actually catch them in this version, though oddly, the three main Regis are listed as owned once you use them in the "dream" battle sequences. Kinda weird. Only legendaries able to be caught are Deoxys and Rayquaza, but I'm not really complaining ever since those stupidly well-hidden legendaries of Altair and Sirius last year took up a lot of walkthrough time. HMs were actually quite frequently used which is one mark against it, and even Dive found its uses often (heck there's even trainers underwater now). Apart from post-game most trainers don't have above Lv60, a decent curve to end on more or less. Having to remember all the current ways to evolve mons (yes, even those who have different evolution methods introduced in Gen-4+) as well as figure out how to evolve the current sets (and even breed them since some first forms aren't available in the wild, and yes trade evolutions evolve by level or sometimes by stone) was quite a challenge. There's also an actually decent bug-catching contest where I savescum to get some more evolution stones and such. There's more than enough to overwhelm me with Gaia, but it sure did its thing and managed to be the best ROM hack I played in 2020.