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The ideas are neat, the new types kinda make sense and the Pokemon added are good options. But the map is a mess, you can't fly to some areas, nearly every route has a cut bush so if you dislike Cut then be ready to have a HM slave the entire time. Some areas are very far from a Pokemon Center and one town lacks one entirely and the wild Pokemon always seem to have the ability to Confuse you along with some other status condition. That seems to be why almost every single route has Rattata, Ekans, Pidgey and other smaller Pokemon that serve as nuisances. When it's not those Pokemon, it's still stuff that just sits there throwing out status conditions to be a drain on resources.

You can sit at the casino, turbo the A button and let yourself win at the slots for like 10 minutes then throw all your coins at Rare Candy to skip grinding which you will need because after a point, the hack raises the levels of everything you need to fight in Gyms or other important areas from the 30s to 40s but the wild mons mostly stay in the mid 20s and almost always are things that give poor EXP.

The worst area I ran into was in this hack's safari zone. There's a cave that leads to Mewtwo for whatever reason. You're supposed to reach Mewtwo within the Safari Zone step limit and the encounter rate in this cave felt the worst I'd dealt with. After I got Mewtwo, I gave up. It stopped being entertaining after that tedium.

Prism is everything this game wanted to do but much, muuuuuuuuuuuch better. Just go play that. This barely has enough ''plot\'' to justify even checking it out if you wanted to see Prism's predecessor. This hack is not hard and it isn't terrible. I have played far worse but you can get what this gives done better in other projects.

Before reviewing, I want to mention I will only focus on how the hack fares in 2023, not considering its pioneering aspect in Pokémon ROM hacking. One can easily google such information if desired.

Overall, it was a fun hack. I got stuck once but the routing is mostly done well and sometimes in a clever way; it is not linear yet not overly confusing, so it was fun to explore the world. The palette choice is well done and looks pleasant most of the time. There are buildings that you can recognize as reused Silph.Co, Power Plant etc but they were remodeled significantly and were again fun to explore. The side-scrolling effect in a cave and the illusion effect in one of the gyms really added fresh air during the game play. However, it also has a lot of ugly problems.

Starting with starters, the author changed the movesets arbitrarily which lacks justification. Bulbasaur learns Sleep Powder at lvl 41 but none of its evolutions learn the move, so you cannot take both Sleep Powder and Razor Leaf which is downright ridiculous. Charmeleon learns Slash at lvl 41 but Charizard does not learn Slash while it learns Wing Attack (60 BP in this hack) at lvl 36, so again you cannot take both. All these changes are completely unnecessary and a bad joke at best.

Another problem is how bland the wild encounters are in general. Unless you go inside some specific caves or buildings, you will see the same group of Pokémon again and again until it becomes painfully boring and predictable. Sometimes new Pokémon are added, but it is more like the general scheme of encounters is intact and a few new Pokémon are added with low encounter rate. Considering the hack added a lot of Gen 2 Pokémon, it is actually quite surprising that the diversity of encounter scheme is worse than even the Vanilla game. You will see trainers have a varied set of Pokémon but it is often much later that you will finally be able to catch one by yourself, which is bizarre. In fact, I tried catching 50 types of Pokémon to get Exp.All and it took considerable amount of effort early on to even find that many different Pokémon.

As a result of such bland encounter schemes, I kept finding better Pokémon (higher lvl, evolution form) that composed my team which completely nullified raising them early on. This includes Bellsprout, Geodude, Ghastly, Slowpoke, Drowzee lines but quite honestly it includes almost all the Pokémon that you will encounter early on. I think my Seel was the only Pokémon that started at about 9lvl-ish and did not get replaced.

The difficulty is fine most of the time but it has some unexpected jumps which makes it less pleasant. A cave where wild Pokémon are about lvl 25-35 and trainers have Pokémon lvl 70 minimum, and the legendary Pokémon there knows Roar and just ends the battle in turn 1 and disappears... like why? Trainers with Dark type Pokémon are rare but suddenly a very few starts spamming them as if their only purpose is to showcase them.

The rest of the problems, I am in line with the previous reviewer. None of the added music is memorable (some downright bad). Key Items are scattered around with no rationale or rhyme whatsoever. The added types are a complete miss (Ghastly line now weak to Fire and neutral to Psychic, only to annoy you when your Gengar is unexpectedly OHKOed by Fire moves). The script of protagonist is all pointless and I would much prefer he does not say a word so that I can at least be immersed in the character. The bad script also completely ruined the final battle, even a child would be ashamed of after being pointed out for creating such a disaster.

And still, I would casually recommend this hack to anyone who likes earlier Gen Pokémon games. It was fun to play, and I am rather surprised to see how it still holds up well. It stinks where it stinks, but it is more fun than it stinks. It is something you can grab on a whim and still enjoy. There is Rijon Wiki that contains information about the changes it made, and someone even made a whole guide and uploaded on Google Docs. I recommend you to consult them when you play this hack.

I'll start with the good: The difficulty is exactly right, it was very enjoyable til the end, giving a good challenge for skilled pokemon masters. The mainline games tend to be quite easy, here I even had to train a bit. The local map design is also good, no path was boring or irritating. Had a laugh at the end at S.S. Anne.

The ok/meh. Being Red-based, it lacks quality-of-life things added in Yellow. The world-building is lacking, often there's no justification at all on why something is there. The dialog is fairly bad, like written by a 12-year old. The new types were a miss, not really good or fitting in.

The bad. It lacks polish in many ways. There's a lot of typos, overflowing text, or text that does not wait for a keypress. The town map doesn't work well, pokemon locations in the dex on it are often misaligned, many places don't have names, many places aren't reachable on the town map via arrows. The textbox border is ugly and unchangable.

I played through it on real hw (GBA SP, Everdrive GB). I hit a ton of bugs obviously caused by sloppy coding on inaccurate emulators - trying to write to VRAM outside blanking periods. Some glitched music notes too.

On the chance this will be revisited (unlikely, being 2009 orig and updated in 2014, but could happen), here's a list of bugs I hit:

• pokedex map is buggy, 60% of time it drops you out of the dex instead of showing the map
• badges are invisible
• when the enemy gets burnt/poisoned/paralyzed, during the animation, the top of your pokemon gets miscolored
• various flickers and glitched notes caused by sloppy coding
• the vending machine let me buy a 350 lemonade even though I only had 326 money
• the bird image at binoculars was blank
• cutting a bush at the first route causes a tree to become grass
• two pokemon centers are duplicated (same people inside)
• the underground path where a person says people drop items, has no items dropped
• the wave effect of psywave/night shade is badly aligned (sloppy coding)
• fallout is badly implemented, still has rage text
• when selecting cities to fly to, Azalea is only reachable one way
• the cave above the start city forgot I had solved the pushing puzzle
• ditto's transformed image often reverts back

I love this game! It should serve as inspiration to anyone who wants to keep classic Game Boy (as well as all games) alive. The over all fact is Pokémon Brown could easily make it to a cartridge. This is a excellent example of what motivation can bring you, if one is to stick to a project until finishing. Great work, I hope to see many more hacks this good in the future.