A look back at: Pokemon Adventure Yellow Chapter

Welp, that was fast! I wasn't expecting to be done so soon with a ROM hack, but that's what happens when I play a beta of a demo. I was really hoping there would be much more than this, considering this is the first time I play one of the manga adventure ROM hacks. Though I did touch Red Chapter first, I saw that it was still continuously being worked on, so I left it at that until I know for sure when it's done. And maybe when it does finish all the way they could consider working on Blue, Green, Yellow, and Gold chapters. Well, not really, since the creators are planning to turn these into PC fangames.

So Yellow chapter. It's only got like one volume of the game installed, with Gen-4 sprites that are okay I guess. But the sprite work is awkward at times, the trainer card looks super glitchy, and when you can finally run in the hack, you look like you're spinning like in the Sound of Music. So yeah, Yellow Chapter is quite unpolished, and it ends after the event with Lorelei in the Viridian Forest. It's nice to meet familiar characters at many points, including Red at the beginning, both a young and an old Prof. Oak, and also helping out Bill, not to mention that the Elite Four are made as villains. I'm not really familiar with the manga at all, so I read some summaries which helped in playing this particular ROM hack.

And because there's not much, there's also not much in gameplay. Most areas are easy, the highest level opponents will have their mons at Lv8, and there are a few interesting moments where you find wild Pokemon that are fought as trainer battles. Namely the Pinsirs and Beedrills during the chase away from Lorelei, as well as the one Seadra battle where Yellow manages to catch the Seadra. For a challenge, there are two places to grind. First, you get the Super Rod, but can't use it at the ponds. You can, however, fish in Pallet Town's ocean, as well as Route 21, for some of the high-level mons to battle such as Horsea or Gyarados. With Pikachu's Light Ball, these encounters aren't actually as tough. The grass at Route 21 has Lv20+ Tangela, also real tough but worth a challenge to grind. That said, the game becomes impossible to lose just by grinding here, but eh, I felt like it. Made the experience a bit more interesting.

Still, wasn't expecting to be done so soon with a beta like this. There's not much of a walkthrough here, but oh well, I did everything I could.