A look back at: Pokemon Dark Crystal

Walkthrough here.

It's only been three days, but I'm done with another ROM hack, this time an unfinished beta. One thing to note is that there's just a ton of unfinished ROM hacks out there, and many have a ton of stuff advertised, yet not fully implemented. This one, well, it's a bit like an unfinished version of Gaia, which was mostly finished in that case. Dark Crystal features mons, moves, abilities, and mechanics up to Gen-6 for an Emerald hack, yet not everything is totally complete (the repel system is supposed to be the Gen-5 repel system for instance, but isn't included as of yet).

Nevertheless, this one certainly caught my eye with what it offered. And the beta shows just enough for me to see this is as something that if ever finished, is sure to be a lot of fun to play. Chaos Rush, the author of Dark Violet which I did my previous walkthrough on, had a hand with the sprites, and several other major names in the community also had some of their stuff implemented here and there. The beta goes past the first badge and ends at a cave after it, but there was enough to last me a few days of playing this hack and get as much info on it. The mission system is probably the biggest thing of note, it's somewhat similar to Dark Cry: The Legend of Giratina's, except all the missions are done from a specific board and not from NPCs. Though I guess if there's one thing to change, is it really necessary that after accepting the mission, you gotta find the person giving the mission to actually start it? Still, the rewards here are interesting, more than just money because you can get certain items and it's possible to repeat these missions.

So yes, Dark Crystal is intriguing, but naturally is going to have room for improvement. This hack by the way has nothing to do with the original Crystal.

A look back at: Pokemon Dark Violet

Walkthrough here.

Yep, another reimagining of Kanto. These reimaginings of things shouldn't be taken lightly, as they are fans making a better representation of the original games. And Dark Violet is the usual Kanto playthrough but with a number of twists. Having new moves from Gen-4 and Gen-5 is very, very nice, and some of the TMs got redone for that. Though TMs aren't actually reusable though. The music was redone, as was all the spriting, though having to have the sprites be of the R/S/E kind even though FR/LG worked just fine is odd. Progression is MOSTLY what you would expect for a Kanto game, with a few twists and slightly more linearity due to several...excuses as to why you can't go to a certain route. A rampaging Gyarados destroying bridges, or a Shellder giving bikers some trouble. Funny excuses. Also there's some small comedy in the beginning towns and a few references to the Mother franchise which were nice.

Adding new rivals in the opposite gender counterpart Red/Green as well as Kamon (folks know him as the G/S/C/HG/SS rival Silver) was interesting. Adding Archer and Ariana from HG/SS gave a bit more fluidity with known characters going from unknown to known. Adding Pokemon from Johto (like Sunflora), Hoenn (like Altaria), and Sinnoh (like Bronzong) was also interesting, plus getting the trade evolutions through new kinds of stones instead of something like friendship or level up was wonderful. You definitely can get all 210, yes 210, Pokemon in this game. The progression points were interesting, such as the plot twist of another member of the Oak family being Viridian's gym leader AND the fifth badge you are to get, plus entering the Cerulean Cave and incorporating Mewtwo into Giovanni's main plot were cool. Watching Kamon try to play the part of the renegade of Team Rocket against the others in the organization was interesting, and he sticks to his jerk-like character the entire time as opposed to every other major character. This hack certainly got dark when a Marowak was murdered by Rocket grunts, and tied into the Pokemon Tower quest well.

If anything needed work here, I'd say it's the post-game. The Battle Maze is interesting, as is going to a mountain to catch Heatran. The place is honestly way too small, and two towns aren't that useful overall. Still, a reimagining of Kanto worked out well enough for this hack and I enjoyed things here.

A look back at: Pokemon Dark Cry: The Legend of Giratina

First off, here's my walkthrough of the whole thing. Gotta include it here and in my walkthroughs page since GBAhacks is gone now. And now we get to this hack and I made a mistake because I was trying to get Pokemon Dark Cry, not Pokemon Dark Cry: The Legend of Giratina. I'm going to have to find that one at some point, they're both completely different hacks, and I ended up playing the one where Giratina had the major role.

I think it's a fantastic idea to have the automatic level cap increase. It prevents the annoying grinding of having to get stronger to beat a trainer who would be on the level of Whitney and her Miltank (to use an allusion of some kind). The only thing to really scale your levels to are the wild Pokemon on routes. Sadly, not all mons are available in this hack, this was in a beta version and Hacksrepairman deserves some credit for fixing notable issues, but the hack is still not complete and it doesn't have a notable post game. But enough of that, I'm still on positives, and I do say that the idea of a good and an evil route is interesting, even if the gaps for changing karma are a bit wide, there's some way to change the way things go. Either you're a good person who will stop Giovanni and Giratina, or a bad person, possibly even worse than Giovanni, letting Giratina swallow others in darkness and catching it yourself afterwards. Yeah, you can basically usurp Giovanni in this game as Team Rocket's leader.

But now to the rest. The idea of day/night is implemented very loosely, and Route 601 and a few missions are the only things that deal with nighttime well. Everything else just doesn't use it. The PokePaper which you can buy in towns can have interesting ideas, but most are just "this trainer wants a rematch" and you don't really get much out of it in general. The missions all are attempts to make something interesting to get the Trion Token commodity, and they can be interesting or noninteresting. Stuff like the hide and seek family, the witcher things (and even then this one kinda sucks because you're supposed to play minigames in a special building, but it's still under construction and you get the items anyways) and having to have a package delivered in time are great. Then you have the simple "trade x for y" missions which are okay. I do like the idea that the third town in the game is where you exchange your tokens so you can get stuff like Eevee or Rare Candies, not to mention a certain mission in the same town is considered a daily mission, but you gotta basically grind said mission to get Pendular, who requires 660 of those things to get. And if you're looking to get other stuff, those tokens, well, it really is a lot like being addicted at an arcade. Fun stuff when it's fun, but there's definitely loads to improve on.