A look back at: Pokemon Azure Horizons

Team: Quagsire, Aggron, Clefable, Crobat, Ampharos, and Infernape (starter). These being Pokemon I have used a number of times (or just twice in Clefable's case), so these end up being the ones I tend to gravitate to in terms of what we have.

Well, Azure Horizons is alright to me. I would say it's a hack in a similar form to (Blazed) Glazed or Dark Cry, it uses new mons (up to Gen-4 in this case though), new character sprites, new story, new gym leaders, new evil team, and new region, and melds things properly. This is something I tend to think of when I think of decent ROM hacks due to it having these things. I am of course not insinuating that ROM hacks that keep the base region or story the same are bad though, it's just sometimes you want more than just going through the Kanto region again, and this delivers quite fine in that regard.

And luckily, I did use Allen's walkthrough to get through this one, but due to the fact that it was of an older version and that Hacksrepairman had a new patch and there was a new update and all that, many parts were modified. I took it upon myself to document any changes and Allen will probably get to them when he modifies the walkthrough he made, it must have been a coincidence he was getting to modifying his walkthrough around the time I played Azure Horizons. And well, it's worth noting that this is the second ROM hack I played that actually had Gen-9 mons in them (Nameless was the first, the author added Farigiraf, Archaludon, and Koraidon in the complete release). And while the old walkthrough states that stuff involving Team Tundra and Leon were left unfinished, the new update does in fact finish them, giving a new leader (Frost, doubling as champion of the region), making Leon a secret Elite Four member, making Wallace more important, and even offering a post-game battle facility (just a house). Plus new legendaries.

My gripes come from not being able to get certain mons due to bugs or things like that. Shedinja somehow didn't come to me after I used the method when evolving Nincada. Croagunk, for some inexplicable reason, evolved into Bulbasaur. And I tried breeding Manaphy to get Phione and got another Manaphy. These are small hiccups though. It can be argued that Team Tundra kinda sucks since they just want Suicune to help...only Ice type Pokemon? Sure, but for one Suicune is already the mascot of Crystal so has already seen canon prominence and two I can actually argue that there should really just be more Ice types available. Tundra grunts aren't bad though, and have surprisingly varied teams. Overall though I liked Azure Horizons for what it has.