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.