Pokemon Emerald Rogue

  

  Emerald Rogue is a Pokémon ROM hack for GBA based on the Emerald release, but with almost nothing of the base game remaining. Created by Pokabbie, the typical gameplay is transitioned 
  into a rogue-like structure, where the player sets off from a home base, encounters challenges and gym leaders, and then returns to home base having gained money and levels based on how 
  well they did. The runs function with standard nuzlocke rules, so any pokemon that faints is lost forever (or until you get back to base and search for it in the safari zone), which adds 
  a lot of extra difficulty to each run. 

  For anyone who's played through the available Pokémon ROMs more than a few times, the appeal of this should be obvious; instead of messing around with all the story stuff you can get 
  straight to team building and taking on challenging tactical battles. And the battles are CHALLENGING. The developer spared no thoughts for mercy when selecting the opponents movesets.
  Most are based on competitive templates, and some are pulled straight from the bowels of hell, such as destiny bond Wobbuffet, or final gambit Annihilape, each of which are consistently 
  able to knock out some of your most valuable Pokemon late into a run if you get even a little careless. If you get very, very unlucky, you may even meet the scumsucking bastard run ender of
  whirlpool/perish song dewgong. If you do, you have my sincerest pity.

  The advantage to all this is that you are free to come up with the most disgustingly broken sets you can imagine and run them with a clear conscience, because your opponents probably have 
  worse things up their sleeves. Doing something like that in another ROM, like Fire-Red for example, would feel unfair. Here, it's just satisfying seeing it work and overcome the BS 
  that's stacked up against you. 

  The game is fair, and does allow the tools necessary to create those teams. There are stages in each run where you can alter movesets, items, natures, almost anything you can think of 
  really.This enables a huge amount of creativity in how you build your team and respond to the various gym leaders and elite 4 members. 

  Far and away the biggest MVPs of my first successful run (with no save-scumming(PAIN)), were cosmic power/baton pass Mew, and swords dance Gliscor, each of which can singlehandedly take out
  whole teams once they get set up. Gliscor's insane ground/flying typing leaves few defensive holes, and Mew is surprisingly bulky for its stats and its psychic monotype means that only 
  dark/ghost stand a chance at stopping it. 
  
  
 

  Once you beat the game even more paths open up, and you can set your runs to be specific to a particular generation of Pokémon, and a particular set of gym leaders and elite 4 members. 
  This variability combined with the ease of the teambuilding system means there's almost limitless replay potential. Definitely worth checking this one out. 
  
  
Final Rating: 8/10