And here's something that isn't involving Pokemon but has Touhou characters as the Pokemon, with a handful as the trainers. Really interesting. Of course, this little version here actually doesn't change the base game of Pokemon Ruby apart from those things. My final team was LFlandre (Fire/Dark), LSuwako (Water/Ground), EHatate (Psychic/Flying), LYuyuko (Ghost), LSakuya (Ice/Steel), and EShou (Electric/Rock). Some may recognize the names but why do they have L and E in front of them? You'll see. And by the way, have an EXTENSIVE GUIDE, one with the Touhoumons listed, new moves, abilities, a brief walkthrough, and trainer info all in one.
So the Touhoumon are interesting, and I'm glad they retain their overall name and status as specific Touhou characters as they evolve so to speak. I guess C is for Chibi, then you have the normal, non-prefix character, then E (dunno what this means) as the more advanced form. Some alternate forms exist, some characters have L when they level to Lv75, I assume it stands for legendary? Some have F, or EA, or SS (I assume this is swimsuit cause they all look like they wear swimsuits), A (angel), DE (demon), you get the idea. Some of the alternate forms do require stones to evolve.
Well really the Touhoumon are all I can really discuss for this hack as the base game and the plot remains totally the same. There's a few design differences in some cases, like Route 2 (Route 102) looking entirely different, and the Trick House now requiring Waterfall to access and seeming largely post-game as the trainers there all are unique. But as usual, there are still flaws with the game and I'll list them below. Unordered this time.
- There are still mentions of Pokemon in the game despite the Touhoumon replacing them.
- The rival character in dialogue still mentions Brendan/May instead of becoming Renko/Merry.
- Cut is, sadly, a necessary HM. This is mitigated however by the fact that it now is a 100% accurate Steel type move. And you know what? Some types got changes to their viability, like Ice resisting Ground, Rock not being weak to Water or Ground, and Steel just being surprisingly good; sure it's not resistant to Grass or Psychic but it gained a lot of good moves and is now super effective against Dark. This is handy for Ghost/Dark types who now have a weakness in Steel.
- The north side of Route 15 is off-limits completely. Why? No reason to have an invisible wall where I can surf.
- For that matter, you can't head to Route 26 via Route 24 and vice versa. To get to Route 26 you have to enter from Route 27, which I don't like.
- Several fixed encounter Pokemon, like the Wynaut egg, Castform, invisible Kecleons, and the legendaries will seem a bit awkward given the forms that they have when you encounter them. And a bit underwhelming when you find out that DERemilia is the Rayquaza encounter, especially if you ALREADY got a DERemilia!
- There are Z variants of Touhou, but for some weird reason they're all in the Transport Ship (Abandoned Ship) as fishing encounters. Trying to catch these glitches the game. Vocaloid characters are also present as fishing encounters in Lunar Falls' (Meteor Falls) first floor but they also are messed up. The whole thing seems awkward.
- At times, Slateport's PokeMart freezes the game. I did save and reload and can access the mart then but after a while it doesn't seem as usable.
- Yes, you can buy evolutionary stones at certain places, but my biggest issue of all is the Sun Stone. You can get it early at Petalburg, it costs a hefty P9000 at that point, but due to the way Petalburg's mart works, after some time (I assume after the fourth badge), one item is no longer sold, and that item ends up being the Sun Stone. After that, there's only one other Sun Stone in the game to get in Mossdeep City, and no you can't farm the Solrock replacement for Sun Stones cause it's not catchable in the wild here. And then yes, there are plenty of alternate forms that require the Sun Stone. Kind of bad when you want to try the A forms of Touhoumon and have to farm money early before the Sun Stone becomes permanently gone.
Even with these flaws though, I can easily appreciate this entire game for what it contains. No new plot, but it's not necessary. Touhoumon are interesting and also helping out are the increases in difficulty that don't go too far. Almost every one of them is accessible, but I did a lot of data mining to find out some things just aren't programmed to appear or will glitch the game.
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