Discovering Pokémon romhacks

I always knew people were modifying ROM dumps of various video games, but in the past year, I discovered that I severely underestimated how plentiful they are. I knew of some of them and even played a couple, but I didn't know much about the topic otherwise.

I don't remember how that changed. Maybe it was because I played Pokémon Clover, the 4chan mod, and an NPC in there recommended some other romhack, which got me digging into the topic.
Soon, I found myself inundated.
Mods galore! Small ones, large ones, some ambitious, some clearly just made for a laugh. But the biggest surprise for me was how much love and effort people were putting into some of them.

Consider two examples: Clover and Moémon, both mods for the very popular Fire Red edition.
Pokémon Clover is a game that was conceived on 4chan. It starts basically identically to the base game, Fire Red - except all the Pokémon were changed to exactly the kind of irreverent, often offensive designs you'd imagine after hearing the game was designed on 4chan. But after a short while the game starts diverging from the original more and more; it breaks your expectations and manages to make fun of you for falling for it.

Mega Moémon FireRed is completely different: in it, Pokémon are essentially the same, except their visual designs are replaced with moe (cutesy) characters. And the move-sets are updated to match newer generations. And hundreds of creatures, only available in subsequent games, were added. And...

What do both of these have in common?

I underestimated them. I expected both to just be joke games that took a funny premise and re-skinned the game. I expected to play them for a couple hours and be done with it. But the more I played, the more I realized there's much more to them than that: they clearly were designed by people who loved the originals and spent a lot of time thinking about how to make them better. Tweaks to gameplay, various updates and fixes, quality-of-life additions, new mechanics, the list goes on.

I've played all of the official, core series Pokémon games starting with the first generation, all the way up to Sun/Moon, the last games to come out on the 3DS console. Same as many other fans, I found myself wishing Nintendo would do something interesting with them. Maybe a less infantile/braindead plot for once? Even kids could handle that. Or some effort to improve the UX? Deviate from the standard in any way, even as optional game modes? Anything?
Even as it became obvious no such thing was going to happen, I planned to buy the Switch to try the newest games for myself. But after seeing some gameplay and reviews online, I hesitated; and after reading many news articles about Nintendo's user-hostile actions, I decided to skip it entirely and not bother anymore. It's now clear that rather than making the games better, Nintendo will try grabbing as much as it can, and go after the fans for doing things like organizing tournaments or streaming games. (I still fail to see how that helps their bottom line.)

No more Pokémon games for me, after some twenty years. End of an era.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that some of the people who felt the same way I did actually went ahead and made games just like the ones I wished Nintendo would release.

Small mods. Complete reworks. New stories in old settings. Completely new worlds. Updates to gameplay and user experience. There's something for everyone.
I may not be coming back to the new slop GameFreak is pushing out, but it seems that I will not be running out of Pokémon games, either.^[1]

Hacks of note

Now here are some more hacks that I found interesting, for one reason or another.

• Fire Red 150 Edition - a small mod that only changes FR so that you can get all creatures without trading.
• Rocket Edition - a story of a Rocket grunt who's finding his place in the world and in the Rocket organization. The world and monsters are largely unchanged, but the story is completely different; you start in a different city, and see the events of the original FR from a different perspective.
• Stranded - you crash-land on an island and have to survive! A new environment and interesting survival mechanics.
• Snakewood - a more bleak setting with some Pokémon zombifying, set in a completely reworked world. I couldn't get too far in the game, but I'm not sure if that's because I did something wrong, or the mod was buggy.
• Black - the name is a bit confusing because there also is an official DS game called Pokémon black. But this is a mod for the original Red version of the (black and white) Gameboy. It's based on an internet creepypasta. There only is one gimmick, but it makes it possible to beat the game in a couple hours.

I had a few months' break from playing, but I wonder what I'll find next.