Title.
Pokémon’s too easy to be fun anymore, but Nuzlockes don’t work for me for a number of reasons. So I figured I’d play one of those romhacks that redesigns trainer teams – That way I could play the game normally but also would have to use my brain.
Any base game will do, although I’m not too fond of Gen4 because of how slow Gen4 pokémon games tend to be (gen5 is the prettiest, ofc)
I’ve been playing Eternal X which I’ve found fun. It’s what X and Y should have been which is to say it’s still fairly vanilla Pokemon with just enough tweaks to really help bring a lesser appreciated generation more up to speed.
Pokemon Unbound is a gen3 romhack with updated mechanics and pokedex up to gen 7ish. When you start, it gives you 3 different options to make the game more challenging (difficult, expert, and insane). It also gives other options, like level caps for each gym, randomized abilities, and a “scalemons” option where every fully evolved pokemon has 600 base stats. I just recently did a run with scalemons and random abilities at the expert difficulty, and it became a really fun challenge of crafting a different team to beat each gym leader. And since I wasn’t doing a nuzlocke, the cost of failure and trying again was very low. Lots of side missions and postgame content too.
This game has somewhat spoiled me, in that I wish every other romhack I play had some of the things Unbound has
It’s not a romhack but I’ve really been enjoying pokerouge, I’ve found it pretty challenging. It’s a browser game. https://pokerogue.net/
radical red is pretty choice, as well as any drayano hack. there are text and guage animation speedup codes available for gen 4 games to help mitigate the slowness.
I’m almost done playing Pokemon Odyssey, it probably isn’t as hard as hacks like radical red or kaizo emerald but it is definitely a lot more challenging than any original game. Unfortunately it’s only ~75% complete right now but it’s definitely one of my favorite hacks already
