Sorry, no walkthrough from me for this one, since one's already provided by the author and it was enough. My team for this game was Raikou, Meganium, Hitmonchan, Quagsire, Magmar, and Crobat.
Well, this was an exhausting one. Pokemon Gold Unova will likely give players a lot of expectations when they see the name of it. Ooh, I get to play through the Unova region! You're right. You are playing through the Unova region. However, it's not playing Pokemon B/W/B2/W2 in Gen-2, it's actually playing a Gen-2 game with the Unova map. Therefore, there's no Pokemon past Gen-2 here, meaning you're limited to just 251. Or rather 250, because I couldn't find Unown anywhere.
There still is plenty of interesting moments here. Quite a lot of in-game trades are here for better Pokemon, and for the most part there's no worrying about obedience since the first badge you get is actually Morty's which allows obedience up to Lv50 (plus you get Surf right away). Actually, the way the game curves is another odd point. Morty's the first gym leader, and the remaining Johto and Kanto leaders follow in a strange order (though Blue is the last, which makes sense). Or perhaps I shouldn't talk about the curve as strange, because it actually is okay, even though the game takes a long time and you eventually do battle the champion who has at least one Lv100 Pokemon, it gives ample room for developing your team properly, even by having high-level wild encounters to practice on plus rematching zones. The issue I have is that it can mean that uninitiated players will be quite surprised that all the gym leaders, plus several late-game regular trainers, have powerful competitive teams. I say that last part loosely since they usually don't have full six teams, however they can have strong movesets and even helpful held items. Those who weren't looking for challenges would be surprised, and possibly annoyed at times. Plus some trainers even have legendaries, and this isn't a randomizer.
To be fair the legendaries aren't really a problem mostly. You get one of the three Johto beasts as a starter which is great, and the optional Entralink area can have you find multiple other legendaries in the grass (need Surf for Mew, Mewtwo, and Lugia). As for other Pokemon, there's no change to the trade evolutions sadly. The author recommends the TGB Dual utility for the trade evolutions, which is iffy, and besides you can catch wild Alakazam, Golem, Scizor, etc. out in the wild. The regular starters are available in certain places, and there's several static shiny encounters. So I don't have too much trouble with the wild encounters in the game, though sadly the issue with several of them is that it can often be too late to use several Pokemon that are cool (Sneasel's another example, it's acquired in Giant's Chasm well after the last gym badge).
The other thing to criticize may just be the NPCs themselves. The trainers exhausted me by the end of the game and the sad part is there are minimal instances where you can actually skip them. Even getting out of a gate (or into a gate) a trainer (or even two) ambush you right out of the blue (and one gatehouse I remember had up to SEVEN TRAINERS IN IT). Their dialogue has its ups and downs. During the later part, there's a lot of talk about friendship which is fairly obvious. Before that, tons of trainers are rather happy to battle, even if they lose. This includes Team Rocket grunts. This game has an interesting way to deal with Team Rocket too, they still love to steal stuff and gain money which is way better than Team Plasma's original motives, and they even take over the Pokemon League. But apart from the interesting character Willius and his relationship to Bek they're just sort of there. Another criticism, there are tons of characters who know me by name, which is quite strange the further you get. Being called "boy" a lot can be annoying but I can forgive this due to Gold not having an actual female protagonist in the series yet. And the roadblocks, they really don't make sense sometimes, it's just "you can't go here until you beat the gym because I said so". The worst one is having to go ALL THE WAY BACK to Alder in order to unlock the Pokemon League, even though you have all the badges. And you get Fly about 3/4ths of the way in, unfortunately the region doesn't have Fly access for every city either, some like your hometown can't be accessed.
It's certainly worth a challenge if you just want to play Gold differently than before. But that's what it's got going for it and the name makes you think there's a lot more to the game than you'd expect. There's also Gold Sinnoh which I may try soon, probably going to be the same sort of thing there.
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