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.