Pokemon fans excel at finding ways to replay their favourite games. Whether you’re a hardcore ranked player, a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:shiny hunter, or you play with self-imposed Nuzlocke rules to make your playthroughs more difficult, Pokemon is unlike an﷽y other RPG in the way its players iterate on the base games to extract every drop of fun possible. Or not, as is the case with my shiny hunts, which always seem to end up way ov༺er odds for a shiny Gengar that I can’t even Mega Evolve.
Then there’s the fan games and ROM hacks. These tear your favourite Pokemon games, usually old ones, into tiny pieces, and rearrange them in an order completely divorced from what it once was. Your character may look exactly like Brendan Birch, but the world he’s in resembles Tamriel more than it does Hoenn. These hacks can range from the basic – randomising encounters and forcefully implementing Nuzlocke rules – to the extreme – adding in completely new regions, stories, monsters, types, and gimmicks. The most famous is the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kaizo Nuzlocke, notorious for its intense difficultyꦓ as the trainers have the most advanced AI programmable.
However, most of these fan games follow Pokemon’s core gameplay loop. They’re RPGs. That’s where Pokemon Emerald Rogue comes in, tackling the pretenders head on to bring Pokemon to a whole new genre. If you couldn’t tell from the game’s name and this feature’s title, Emerald Rogue is a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:roguelike. And it’s really hard.
If you’re not sure what a roguelike is, think of games like Slay the Spire, Spelunky 2, and Hades. They’re games that randomly generate each dungeon crawling run, and if you die, yo🔯u start over from scratch. Some allow you to carry forward some upgrades, leading to the roguelite subgenre, but Emerald Rogue is the full shebang. You pick your starter at the beginning of your first run, and that’s the only thing you keep going forward. Any time you white out, you lose all your other Pokemon, your items, and your money. Your starter is even set back to level five.
The randomised routes don’t really resemble the Pokemon games you’ve played before, either. First, you pick a route based on the vibe (yes, really) and the potential rewards. On🧸e might be ‘spooky’ with a healing spot – a dichotomy if you need a Ghost-type encounter but have a healthy party, whereas another may be ‘corrosive’ with a shop – a tricky decision if you need items but your party already has two Ground weaknesses.
Then, you head through t🐼he area fairly normally. There are trainers to fight, items to find, and Pokemon to battle. While fainting means a Pokemon is permanently out of the game in Rogue, Nuzlocke rules don’t apply to catching, so you can check out your options before adding one to❀ your party. However, there’s a catch. There’s always a catch.
There’s no PC in this game. If you ༺want to add a Pokemon to your party, you must sacrifice another for good. Every encounter offers an impossible decision, especially when the lowliest Pokemon can come good with the right abilities and moves. Don’t underestimate anyone. Oh, and if you thought this was limited to Pokemon from the first three generations? Wrong. Pixel art Dracovish is ready to take lives and rend fishiously.
The goal of Emerald Rogue, like most Pokemon games, is to beat all eight Gym Leaders and then take on the Pokemon League. However – here’s that catch a✨gain – the order of the leaders is randomised,🤪 and you don’t find out which one you’re facing until it’s too late to change your lead. You can pay for the privilege, but with money such a scarce resource, I never take that option.
As with many roguelikes, the learning curve is steep. The early Gym Leaders are hardest, because you’ve had few☂er routes to build a balanced team and there’s a higher chance of the Leader having super-effective attacks. When you only have two or three Leaders left to beat, you can narrow down the types they’ll use. When you’re one battle away from the Elite Four and haven’t seen Flanne🥀ry yet, it’s probably worth leading with a Water-type.
Gym Leaders are difficult battles, with levels that scale to yours and always hit the level cap for that area (Kaizo players will know that well). Facing Roxanne last doesn’t mean you’ll be battling her Level 15 Nosepass, you’ll be more likely to face Tyranitar and Terrakion in a competitive sand team. You can&rsqꦜuo;t learn her team for next time, either, as it’s randomised from a huge pool of Rock-type monsters.
Like with any roguelike, there are optimal builds and b𝔉etter options – a setup move combined with substitute is a winning strategy – but there’s plenty of room for experimentation. Setting up the weather to counteract opposing team synergies is also a great option, but I’m not going to give away every trick in the book.
Pokemon Emerald Rogue has options to tweak the difficulty, the grindiness, and a host of other elements so you can create the gameplay experience you want. While I doubt Game Freak will turn Gen 10 into a roguelike, there’s a lot it could learn from ROM hacks like Emerald Rogue. The ability to toggle Exp Share would be a great start, and you probably already know my thoughts about the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:lack of level scaling in Scarlet &am🌱p; Violet. Adding Nuzlocke options also seems like a no-brainer based on how people play Pokemon in 2023. Fan games have always pushed Pokemon forwards more than the main series ever has, but Pokemon Emerald Rogue might be my f🅘avourite yet, even if it’s more difficult than facing Cynthia with just a Rattata.