Pokemon Gaia

I was really, really tempted to give this game a rating of five stars. I think it is a perfect ROM hack: it is polished, nuanced, and you forget very quickly that it is a ROM hack at all. There is zero jank (especially compared with Pokemon Prism ↗, a hack that I had a good enough time with but was very aggressively “a pokemon hack”, and featured moments and additions that were distinctly off-brand for the series), and the fact that this is the output of a small team is ridiculously impressive.

This is not meant to damn with faint praise, either — it is not a preamble to "despite all of that, I hated this and had a terrible time." I had a great time playing this game: more fun than Pokemon Sword and certainly more fun than Pokemon Legends: Arceus ↗. It felt like exactly what I wanted out of it — an update to the FireRed formula & engine which I love so much, with a new region and harsher (but not unreasonable) difficulties. The story was perfectly simple-but-not-idiotic. The writing nailed it; quippy one-liners but mostly staying out of the way.

If you like — or even liked — Pokémon games, I would play this one. It's a lot of fun.

The things I didn't like about the game — the things that took it slightly away from perfect — were reasonable design choices that I disagreed with. Two big ones:

• There are too many monsters now. I phrased this as a joke on Twitter, but I think it's serious; trying to catch them all just feels sisyphean when there's ten new monsters in every route and there's no obvious reward for catching them ¹, and it's hard for an Old like me to keep track of all the various types and weaknesses when the corpus is that large. Again, this is more of a series complaint than a game complaint, but still!
• Hidden Machines are... annoying. There were seven in total here, and you really need to use them all pretty consistently. It feels bad to use them. I understand introducing interesting design constraints, but this didn't force me to make any interesting moves or difficult choices — it just made me feel bad.

Those are nits, and perhaps they're too nitpicky because I have a lot of long-term feeling for this series. But all of this is to say — this game is both a huge accomplishment and a huge joy.