GuestLog in

Pokémon Crystal Leaf, a Rom Hack with a VERY interesting premise - a follower player character!

Like the other reviewer says, you can now complete Crystal with one game only. This really cool extra-player-character feature certainly opens up a whole new world of gameplay; you can chat with Leaf, and even battle or trade with her!

A neat thing is that Leaf has her entirely-separate Pokémon party (though it's up to you to train Leaf as you do with Red). The follower character's Pokémon can even hold items of their own! I think you share items stored in the Bag, though. There's also a switch mechanic as well, so you can manage the two different Pokémon parties by yourself.

The chat feature is pretty cool and offers tons of potential for world-building. It seems like so far the follower typically offers advice about the current location or sometimes will talk about something in a town that you should check out. I've only run into a few issues with this hack so far, but I'd recommend it for a truly-fresh experience!

Unfortunately, as far as I've gotten today I have to say there's no follower dialogue for plot-important events, so Leaf/Red won't remark on the suspicious'???' boy lurking behind Elm's Pokémon Lab or when he shows up to challenge you. I don't know if there's going to be dialogue for later events since I've not gotten far yet.

It'd also be really neat if there was a prompt to switch between the player characters when battling plot-important trainers, or possibly have the follower say something about those events, just to make it more interesting and eventful.

Sadly, if you battle with the follower character (at least in v1.3) you WILL NOT get any experience or money, so those battles would be simply for fun.

A big issue is that the switch mechanic doesn't appear to work on real hardware, or at least it's not functional for me using a Game Boy Player. No matter how much I hold B and press Select the game refuses to do anything different (I'm only getting the prompt to set a key item for easy use via Select).

The story appears to be slightly changed at the very beginning, though no in-game NPCs acknowledge the follower character. As usual it's up to you to advance the story and deal with plot-important events.

Despite these small issues, Pokémon Crystal Leaf makes for a wonderfully fresh experience and is a technical marvel for its unique feature. It's recommended for sure!

This hack brings quite an interesting concept into the Pokémon games. Having two characters at the same time, each with its own party.

Not only that, but it effectively makes the whole Pokedex of Crystal available within the same game, while bringing a partner with you to trade Pokémon and even battle!

And even better, this brings the Follow Me mechanic from Pokémon Yellow for your partner! This is quite a nice technical hack, and an impressive one at it.

If the developer of the hack reads this, please, I encourage you to make the source code available, or at least the portion for the Follow Me mechanic, since it would be of great help for Crystal hackers, including myself!