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So, I'm not a difficulty hack kind of guy when it comes to RPGs. In fact, they put me off pretty hard, and that goes extra for Pokemon hacks, so normally I wouldn't have given something like this a try, but as someone who knows most of Gen 1's quirks despite being mostly casual, I thought it seemed worth a try. Now that I've finished a playthrough of it, I'd say it was actually pretty fun to go through, for the most part. Gen 1 is so simple that unless you go full kaizo design, it'll still be more than beatable even without the most meta team and strats possible, and thankfully, this definitely wasn't kaizo. I ran through it with a team of Arcanine, Victreebel, Slowbro, Clefable, Rhydon, and Kangaskhan, and while it wasn't the hardest thing, it was a decent step up in difficulty, at least until the end, when things got downright silly. I'll get more into detail on the positives and negatives, but note there'll be some spoilers for trainer teams.

Positives:

The majority of Pokemon are available very early on, as in by the time you get to Celadon and the surrounding areas of it. This lets you put together a team pretty quickly, without having the stronger mons locked behind the late game. Always something I appreciate.

A lot of areas have their layouts modified. Sometimes it's a bit pointless, and sometimes it's for the purpose of forcing encounters, but other times, they make navigation a lot less annoying, especially in cities. Going in hand with this, certain areas like Cerulean Cave and the Power Plant can be accessed and completed much earlier than normal. Combined with some other changes to progression, like going through Rock Tunnel before Vermilion, it helps make things feel a bit more fresh.

Pretty much every mon learns a few new moves that gives them more flexibility, or just makes them less annoying to level up. Some preevolved encounters will even have moves they normally wouldn't learn without a lot of extra effort, like wild Arcanine knowing Flamethrower by default, making it a genuine choice to take them in.

Beyond the early game grind that usually ends after Brock, the level curve was surprisingly balanced for me. I leveled my team evenly and stopped grinding wild Pokemon past Rock Tunnel, and the trainers of each area were usually in the range my team was at. It made for some nicely challenging encounters

You can buy TMs and rare candies from stores, and Gym Leaders now give you three copies of their prize TMs. Plus, the more useless TMs like Bide they used to give out are replaced by more useful moves.

Negatives:

After Fuschia, the levels of trainers suddenly start rocketing, with Cinnabar Gym outleveling my whole team despite them falling in line with the trainers just a few routes ago, and Viridian Gym and Victory Road becoming downright silly. The Elite 4 is the worst with it, with Lorelei having her team in the mid 80's, and ending with Blue having a team in the late 90's, peaking with a level 99 Mewtwo. Yes, he gets a Mewtwo, the most broken mon in the game that nothing besides another Mewtwo can compete with. Yes, you can get your own Mewtwo immediately after getting to Cerulean, but if you prefer to not break everything you come across in half, like me, this encounter is just absurd. Plus, the higher levels mean more of a chance of getting screwed over by random crits, which is frustrating enough even in the normal game.

On that subject, there's lots of trainers with legendaries now. Surge, Blaine, Lorelei, and even random nobody bird keepers get the legendary birds. Blue gets a Mewtwo. Giovanni gets a Mewtwo. Hell, random scientists in Silph Co get Mewtwo. Legendary spam like this already doesn't sit great with me, but throwing around Mewtwo like that is just cheap and a very uninspired way to add difficulty.

While the moveset additions are nice to make use of, pretty much every trainer mon by the late game will have movesets specifically designed to cover as many types as possible. Gonna take down that Dodrio with Rhydon? Be careful, it's got Jump Kick now. Want to use a water type against Rapidash? Better act fast, it's got Solar Beam now. Think Slowbro can wall Mewtwo? Oops, Thunderbolt. It's not a deal breaker, but it gets pretty annoying to deal with after a while.

Wild Pokemon levels don't scale nearly as much as trainers, which makes grinding feel futile past the early game, and feels like it's meant to just force you to mass buy rare candies to make up for the gigantic level jumps. In fairness, they aren't very expensive, and you'll end up making a lot more money than usual if you don't lose any trainer battles, but it still feels inorganic.

Mixed:

Almost every trainer battle is a forced encounter now. I make a point of fighting every trainer anyway, so it doesn't mean much to me, but for those who don't do that, it might feel like a slog dealing with the stream of trainers, especially when there's always a chance of them being a Cooltrainer with a full team. Also, there's some trainers that are avoidable, but placed in a way where I can't tell if being able to skip them is on purpose, or if they're meant to be mandatory, and the dev just screwed up their encounter ranges. If the dev reads this, you may want to look into those.

Pretty much all the text is rewritten, not just NPC dialogue, but flavor text for examining objects and such. Pretty much every NPC waxes on about personal circumstances and life advice. It feels like it was written with the best of intentions, and besides the occasional sentence with typos or just plain odd wording, it reads pretty well, considering the dev doesn't seem to be a native English speaker. Still, I made a point of reading all the dialogue, and it got tiring after a while, way more so than the vanilla text. Especially in the mid to late game, the trainer dialogue got very, very repetitive and low effort feeling, and some of it, especially the flavor text, feels like it was only rewritten for the sake of saying it's different, even when the end result is basically the same. All the same, rewriting a whole game like this and making everything interesting isn't something I could pull off, so I admire the effort.

There's some weird inconsistencies in regards to HM usage. Victory Road and Cerulean Cave can both be gotten through without HMs, and most instances of having to use Cut are removed, though a few trees are added to enforce the new progression. However, there's still a few places where it's enforced, namely to access the Vermilion Gym and Pokemon Tower. I've seen other hacks, namely Shin Red, modify replace HM usage in places like this with NPCs that vanish after triggering certain plot flags, and that would be a much more elegant solution than forcing you to give up a slot on Cut.

Overall, while I definitely have my problems with it, and probably wouldn't play it again, I still thought this was a pretty fun time. I'd say it's worth checking out for anyone who wants a more challenging Gen 1 experience without sweeping balance changes or full on sadistic design. To the developer, good job with this, and I hope you keep it up in the future.