From left to right: Bucket, Poki, Soup, Marble, Bubbles, and Goopy :)
I’m playing the following following platinum rom hack, so its been fun having my Pokémon follow me around.
Just beat the elite four so now I’m probably wrapping up my time with the game, and will eventually move on to gen 5 (I’m playing through each gen moving through the regions, I’ve not really played any modern games so I’m looking forward to trying them :)
Drayano made a series of rom hacks for pokemon that, to be frank, are better than the originals. Would highly recommend if you’re interested in adding a little spice to your next game
This is my first playthrough with most of these games, so I’m tending to pick stuff thats very vanilla+ or just focused on quality of life, to cut down on some of the tedium and frustration that Pokémon often comes with
I’m not sure if I’ve maybe played one of his hacks so far, but I wish he had patches that didn’t make the difficulty changes and stuff if I don’t want them, I think he usually hasn’t had that as an option
I still need to sit down and investigate what if any ROM hacks I might wanna pick for gen 5, his will be one I take a look at. Plus I need to go double check which games I was gonna play, I think I was planning black and white 2, but have to go look stuff up and ask my friend who’s a huge Pokémon nerd her thoughts
(I nearly broke my run with a cheat to give myself max TMs at the end cause I think the game is better when you can play with designing your team- the cheat overwrote all of my HMs without me realizing, and I deleted waterfall off my Pokémon who knew it. Off the top of her head she was just like “oh seaking learns it by level up at 40 if that helps”, I was so glad I mentioned to her I might have fucked myself over completely on a whim while texting lol. So I have a seaking named escalator now 😌)
It’s true that noat of his romhacks are at the very least slightly harder than their original counterparts, but the one I’d still recommend is sacred gold/storm silver
My sense of difficulty is a bit skewed as I tend to mainly do hardcore nuzlockes, but I recently played through storm silver normally and it was a blast. The gym leaders needed a bit more thought when fighting as each of their pokemon were more powerful, but my ragtag group of 6 I ran with only ever failed once in the whole playthrough, and that was against the elite 4 (so somewhat expected)
Speaking of gen 5, here’s a very strong sun team I’ve crafted up in Volt White 2 Redux: Sunflora with Drought for setting up sun, Sawsbuck as my Chlorophyll sweeper, Volcarona as a Quiver Dance sweeper, Victini as a Choice Scarf revenge killer and scout, Excadrill for rapid spinning Stealth Rocks away and tanking hits, and Emolga for paralyzing threats and abusing Volt Switch. Even the water gym didn’t stand a chance!

I really like really like the names Macarona and V
That sounds like a blast! I’m not a super competitively knowledgeable player, this was actually my first platinum playthrough. Technically I started black or white when I was a kid, but I burned out and set the game down pretty quickly. I love Pokémon on paper but find a lot of the gameplay a bit tedious honestly 😅 I play mostly cause I fall in love with the Pokémon designs and the games are how you get to engage with them. Battleing is fun though.
I had fun using curse and stalling my way through the elite four though lol. Except the fire guy, garchomp with earthquake one-shot all of his Pokémon which was kinda funny 😅
VIDEO GAME
https://pkmnclassic.net/ in case you want to do DLC events, GTS, and other wifi features.
Have fun with gen 5.
I love how so many of these old games has custom servers up and running. Metroid Prime Hunters apparently has a thriving community too (though I left the biggest discord as soon as I joined because it looks the lead admin is literally a DHS nazi 💀)
The bigger hurdle really is the DS’s wifi compatibility since WEP is so outdated and insecure. I haven’t actually messed with it in ages, but seems like hotspots are the way to go and are super easy to set up on linux, so maybe I’ll dust mine off and give that a try.
Yeah I used to do it through my mobile hotspot, but Android dropped support for 802.11b, so now I gotta use my PC.
On the other hand, I think emulators like MelonDS have an emulated network passthrough which makes it super easy to use.
That’s sick as fuck, thanks for the link!
I’ll have to figure out what exactly that enables and how to set it up but it looks neat! If its just setting the DNS like the page says that seems super duper easy
That is so cool!
What’s the rom hack? Gen 4 is one of the few Pokemon gens I haven’t played and I’ve wanted to do it with a Rom hack that fixes some of the old issues with it
The ROM hack I’m playing is just following platinum. I don’t remember what quality of life changes there are, but it adds your Pokémon waking behind you like in HG SS
This is my first play through, so I wanted something focused on quality of life stuff, or that could be described as vanilla+
https://pokehacking.com/fangames/following-platinum/
(Having looked at the link now I don’t think it adds any quality of life stuff, and I just REALLY wanted my Pokémon to follow me. I think renegade might have a version based on following platinum though? It makes more changes like difficulty though)
Renegade Platinum’s the way to go. There’s much more pokemon variety, the trainers are stronger and smarter, and there’s plenty of QOL fixes that make it feel more modern.
I’m a big fan of Marble
The clear blue layer around his orange body kinda reminded me of a marble :3 I struggled with what to name him for a while lol 😅 But I’m happy with what I landed on ☺️
Sorry for the crappy offset picture lol, I was just grabbing a pic for myself to remember my team by while watching, I hadn’t intended to post it anywhere
I probably should have at least cropped it lol 😅
I love the nicknames!
Thanks lol, thats always one of my absolute favorite parts of Pokémon ❤️
Nice, earlier this year I wanted to to likewise but with Professor Oak challenges, which is get every Pokemon as early in progression we possible. I did it on Blue but it was quite miserable grinding lvl 36 Blastoise fighting only lvl 6 stuff prior to the first badge.
Suffice to say I took a break after that, but I’ll hit Silver next. Fast forward on emulation was a godsend, as well as achievement tracking for keeping track of how many more I had to grab before the next badge (it got really weird because you can skip Lt Surge and just keep going without the HM lol)








