And I have finished another ROM hack dealing with zombies and approaching apocalypses. All after I had decided to click for a random hack. Glad that feature was implemented, makes things a lot more fun! And here we have Stigma, which is a strange hack based on creepypastas, glitches, and lore. Storywise, it's great, gameplay-wise, I'd say it's average.
Gotta love the story of actually saving the world from an actual threat which would destroy all of Kanto, with all these infected trainers plus infected Pokemon. Due to the mechanics, said infected Pokemon can't be used by you, so that's somewhat similar to Snakewood. The hack certainly has the edginess feel in the dialogue, some memes are around, but there's some dynamics in the main characters which were interesting to see. The church isn't all it seems, the burglars are ridiculous, the police are jerks, and Team Nihilus is appropriately annoying with their edginess, their usage of Dragon types near the end, and their overall presence. Overall, the plot certainly involves MissingNo, Team Nihilus' goal, but it seems that the only thing the big bad guy ever wanted was to destroy and recreate from nothing, a bit like Thanos if you will. It certainly went crazy once this was revealed to the others, who just wanted a better world and such. High marks there.
Though there's a bunch of other things that were awkward. Why were Pokemon protagonists gym leaders? They at least had some role and appropriately used Pokemon from their home regions. The changes to the routes were nice, but some areas I have noticed were unchanged from Fire Red (namely you can fish for Skorupi which replaces Krabby on Route 21, as well as Turtwig and Grotle on One Island, which wasn't supposed to be the case). There's a number of glitch hidden items too, and not nearly enough Pokemon. I believe the most you can catch from the entire game is 143, so this excludes specific ones such as the infected Pokemon and a bunch of others that you just don't have access to like Salamence or so. I like the idea of purchasing starters from shady characters, actually purchasing them for that matter, even if you can get only one for each regional starter it adds to variety. HMs aren't used too much aside from Surf, another greatly appreciative thing. You don't get Rock Smash though, Strength requires a huge fetch quest, and Fly is in an easily missable optional point.
But overall, for a simple (or actually not so simple, there's some puzzling moments) ROM hack in 2019, it delivered quite well. If you wanted to know what my main team was, I had Magmortar (my starter), Crobat, Swampert, Raichu, Conkeldurr, and Lilligant, plus a Haxorus for the Nihilus Elite members. For these apocalypse hacks, my best Electric type tends to be something from the Pikachu line for some reason which is interesting. I had a Pikachu in Snakewood and then later when I played Altair, Sirius, and Vega I had the alternate Pikachu evolution Machu.
