Yeah thats very fair. My impression is that Draynos hacks are usually not brutal, but there’s no version that doesn’t patch difficulty so if you like the challenges you either play with higher difficulty or you pick a different patch
I want more vanilla+, so I’m usually a tad bummed about that, but people regard his hacks really highly, even if theyre less what I’m looking for :)
and this option from the thread, which is compatible with following platinum if you wanted quality of life, plus your pokemon following you :) (frankly I really wish I had played this instead 😅)
I think I was mistaken that renegade is compatible with following platinum, here’s it’s page if you’re interested in something that makes more changes and adjusts the difficulty curve :)
Honestly I largely did too, I pick my favorite designs from each gen and make a team with them, but it worked out okay! I considered chimecho but I mostly just adore chingling and it’s way too weak to battle with. I also considered using trash wormadan; steel and bug are my favorite types, but it’s not that compelling of a design, and it’s not very good 😅. I’d love to include it on a team someday though
The fact that you get locked into combat as soon as you step into the room with her (unlike all the elite four) nearly completely fucked me over, but fortunately I was able to stall and item spam all my Pokémon back to full health 😅
I tend to really like building teams that can beat stuff a lot stronger than me, so curse on spirit tomb, toxic on toxicroak, and gastrodon and bastiodon to wall did a lot of work 😅 I think I used curse to beat like three of her strongest Pokémon lol. Its such a dumb move, I love it so much.
It was definitely hard though, and item spam is kind of a cheesy way to beat stuff
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 😌)
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 😅
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 ☺️
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+
(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)
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
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
Oh nice! I use firefox on mobile so I can still use extensions (just have to enable developer settings), but that’s super handy for folks who don’t have that option!
You might like the indie wiki buddy extension, it can automatically redirect you to a independent wiki when you go to fandom (if there is one), remove fandom search results, and redirect you to a ‘breeze wiki’ page if there’s no fandom alternative
(Breeze wiki is an alternative frontend for fandom, much like invidious for YouTube. It guts all the ads and banners and garbage, and gives you a much simpler wiki page)