A look back at: Pokemon Red Fire

The name is dumb, but the premise is that this is just Fire Red but as a Kaizo hack. Though to be honest, Kaizo doesn't mix all that well with Pokemon in general, due to the fact you can just overlevel before any fight. Playing this casually, it wasn't honestly that difficult overall, and it seems to be made for the ones who use Nuzlocke challenges or otherwise. There's no walkthrough from me, due to several documents that help already been released. My team for the end was Medicham, Crobat, Marowak, Raichu, Ludicolo, and Charizard (my starter).

Red Fire has no new story. It's the same Fire Red, but made to be much more linear and much more tough, but to appease Nuzlockers, more Pokemon are available, even in cities to help out. The difficulty will scale up quite considerably in many places, after you beat a gym leader do expect trainers later on to have Pokemon of their levels or higher. And expect teams to not only expand to many members, but be very type diverse. By Celadon City, where you challenge Erika's gym, the opponents will NOT be using purely Grass type Pokemon there. And the Rocket Hideout, which you have to do AFTER the gym, the Rocket Grunts have teams of five. From then on, expect trainers to have teams of five to six, and ESPECIALLY six by the time of the seventh gym. The biggest level spike is after the last gym and before Victory Road, as the trainers there push up to the late 90s from just 70 or so. And the Elite Four and Champion all have Lv100 full teams.

Be glad there's some other things aside from using up to Gen-3 Pokemon in Kanto here. The PP of most moves is maxed out (there's actually no vitamins in this game either) and many moves' accuracies have been thrown up to 100%, which makes for more move usage. Marowak's signature moves became good as a result, and Hi Jump Kick is really useful against those weak to Fighting now. The same with Rock Slide and other such moves. There's now a Move Reminder in Celadon, which requires Big Mushrooms but those are hidden around. It's certainly a lot to take in but for very good reason. Every team's movesets have coverage of some kind, and apart from the TMs you need it just as much as well. I hate that we still need HMs to get around, like ONE instance of having to use Rock Smash to get anywhere south of Fuchsia.

Certain Pokemon in this game definitely deserve mention due to how powerful they can be. I had a Medicham on my team, and although I had to teach it Psychic it worked well using Hi Jump Kick and Rock Slide, plus having Pure Power is very important. Ludicolo is another useful Pokemon, gotten really early and has excellent typing. Most every Pokemon with arms can learn the elemental punches, the water types primarily getting Ice Punch. Opponents will have the coverage moves and other strategies like full Dragon Dance teams or Toxic/Protect to use. Some will have certain annoying Pokemon like Wobbuffet. Speaking of which, um, you can only get 300 Pokemon maximum, there's no breeding in this game, no Ditto, and although you can get a few evolved Pokemon like Tentacruel, you can never get their base forms. So clearly this was not meant for Pokedex completionists, but for those who really like battle challenges.