Hardest rom hack ?

Whats the hardest pokemon rom hack ? Preferably, gba.

Dark Rising 1 and Pokèmon Fire Red Extreme

I would tentatively nominate Blue Kaizo and Crystal Kaizo. If nothing else, they at least use map design to create difficulty, rather than being focused almost solely on the battle engine.

I'm not sure Dark Rising is a good candidate; it has a level curve like a cliff face, sure, but that doesn't actually make the game hard—it just means you have to hold the turbo key and run back and forth a lot in the grass grinding out levels until you're closer to level parity, at which point there's no challenge because the game hands you all the tools you could ever want for cracking it over your knee, from earlygame weather inducers to lategame Perish Song and Destiny Bond.

For comparison, the very first gym in Vega.

Also think that snakewood is very hard!

frankly speaking theres no real "hard" romhack.
without self imposed nuzlocke esque rules, any player on any hack can eventually bruteforce their way into postgame.

if i have to really pick one, then its definitely that old emerald touhoumon another world/world link hacks. level curve borders on insanity, near 1000 bst monsters, hilarious maps like this, 1pp 100% accurate OHKO moves on bosses, etc. people who think dark rising/kaizo(who actually play that eyesore?)/snakewood are hard and never played these hacks by aichiya sanae, you are fortunate to say the least.

Murkrow said:

hilarious maps like this

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What a fun map they've got there! :D Hope the encounter rate is also high.

Missing tall grass from middle part of the route though..

Crystal Kaizo (insane)
A very old one or one that people don't know much about would be rijonAdventures X version.

Pokemon_Flora_Sky

Imo there is no hardest rom hack in gba anyway.

In any game (GBA) you can PC spawn anytime, anywhere just write states (Shift + F1-F12 or Shift + FN + F1-F12 on VBA). Oh my Pokemon got poisoned SPAWN time. My move missed, PC SPAWN time. Couldn't catch that Pokemon, no I'm not going to weaken the Pokemon to catch it just spawn one ball 30 times to catch the Pokemon.

I hope one day someone finds a way to disable pc spawning in a hack (also the cheat codes). So the game can really be enjoyed.

Bulbadon said:

I hope one day someone finds a way to disable pc spawning in a hack (also the cheat codes). So the game can really be enjoyed.

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Cheat code input/save states are features of the emulator, not the hack ROM. all the popular GBA emulators out there show such features, therefore theres no way you can stop players from using cheats.

also even somehow you block save states/cheat codes (like how red/crystal disassembly hacks stop the normal cheat codes from working, though save states still work as normal) ,
cheaters are cheaters, they WILL still find ways to cheat.

You can edit the save file and boost your pokemon with perfect IVs/EVs in an instant or even give them illegal moves
you can use cheat engine to super speed up the game
or can you even edit the hack game directly and remove restrictions set by the hacker etc
all these you can do even in RXMP pokemon games.

in the end, any pokemon rpg hack is still a single player game, its up to the player and their discipline to decide how they want to play. If players want to use rare candy cheat or save game edit their mons secretly giving them perfect stats in their youtube LP nuzlocke run and pretend its legit, thats their prerogative and theres nothing you can do to stop it.

Murkrow said:

Cheat codes/save states are features of the emulator, not the hack ROM. all the popular GBA emulators out there show such features, therefore theres no way you can stop players from using cheats.

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I know that, I just said I hope it's possible one day. We've come a long way in rom hacking, ASM hacking then C hacking. Implementing mega evolution. I hope it can be done one day.

And also like you said disassembly can be done. Maybe we'll find a way who knows.

Also if cheaters find a way to edit the restrictions that's up to them I think most people wouldn't try to do that.

Bulbadon said:

Also if cheaters find a way to edit the restrictions that's up to them I think most people wouldn't try to do that.

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You underestimate cheaters lol. vastly.
btw there are people that think they are not cheaters, then if you get the chance to watch them play in person you can find them abusing save states like no tomorrow and these people somehow don't see anything wrong with it.

personally im fine with cheaters, let them play whatever they like to.
the only thing i hate are those cheaters that seek and play "challenging" hacks like DR and Kaizo, cheat their way through then pass it off as a legit accomplishment. yeah horrible looking mazes are fun too when you can play them at 5000% speed with wall through walls cheat.

Bulbadon said:

Imo there is no hardest rom hack in gba anyway.

In any game (GBA) you can PC spawn anytime, anywhere just write states (Shift + F1-F12 or Shift + FN + F1-F12 on VBA).

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I mean, you cant really judge the difficulty of a ROM Hack by whether or not you can break the game by cheating. If you can beat the original Red Version by hacking it, giving yourself a perfect lvl 100 team right out of pallet town with all hm's and badges, and teleporting to the Garry fight, that doesn't make the game easy, it makes you a cheater. It has absolutely no impact on whether or not the game itself is difficult.

To weigh in on a discussion about Rom Hack difficulty with "They are all easy because I can hack them" is sort of asinine.

Wanna_B_Spaghetti said:

I mean, you cant really judge the difficulty of a ROM Hack by whether or not you can break the game by cheating. If you can beat the original Red Version by hacking it, giving yourself a perfect lvl 100 team right out of pallet town with all hm's and badges, and teleporting to the Garry fight, that doesn't make the game easy, it makes you a cheater. It has absolutely no impact on whether or not the game itself is difficult.

To weigh in on a discussion about Rom Hack difficulty with "They are all easy because I can hack them" is sort of asinine.

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PC spawning is not cheating its a feature of the emulators.....

Bulbadon said:

PC spawning is not cheating its a feature of the emulators.....

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But not a feature of the game itself.

Bulbadon said:

I know that, I just said I hope it's possible one day. We've come a long way in rom hacking, ASM hacking then C hacking. Implementing mega evolution. I hope it can be done one day.

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Making it impossible to use gameshark and action replay codes designed for the original unedited rom file (for instance Firered 1.0) is totally possible. And as a hacker by doing so you can prevent most (maybe over 99,9 %) of players from using cheat codes while playing the game. However, it's practically impossible to make it so that some other gameshark codes wouldn't achive the same or similar effects as the ones for the unedited rom file.

As an example, the level modifier code for FireRed is "33007CF0 00XX" which basically means that "replace the value in address $33007CF0 with 00XX" (at least, I think that's what it does). As a rom hacker, you can modify the game to store the level of the encountered pokemon elsewhere - let's say in address $3B008D2A. Now the original gameshark code for FireRed doesn't change the level of the encountered pokemon but code "3B008D2A 00XX" instead does.

Okay - there we have a solution to the problem. Now no one can edit the level of the encountered pokemon in a hack we're making.. right? Not really as someone who is at least almost as smart as the hacker can figure out where the hacker has stored information about the level of the encountered pokemon. And if (s)he is an "evil" person, (s)he will publish this information to others as well.

So it's not really worth spending time making it impossible to cheat in a hack of yours. It first of all takes time (except for disassemblies but that's a totally different story), but second isn't really worth it in the end. Like others have also pointed out - why bother preventing some cheaters in doing something? As a hacker you're probably more interested in designing a hack both for yourself but also others who play game with the rules given by the hacker (= don't cheat). I personally don't care less about players who cheat and hence accomplish something that I have intended to be impossible to be done. Although it's worth to take these into account at least one way or another. After all, you may accidentally program a glitch in the game which would put the player in a situation like this even when not intended.
In Dark Energy there is for instance a PC where you need to input a long confirmation code to access the inner parts of an abandoned research center. The code can be acquired later in the game when you're supposed to go there, but you can reach the PC earlier and try inputting the code already then. It's practically impossible to guess what the code is, but if you're playing for the second time or have looked up the code by googling, there has to be some kind of a backup script that is run when you try to enter the research center, and you're not supposed to get there yet. If it didn't matter that you could reach it earlier, it wouldn't be needed, but here I kinda had to program a "secret" security script.

Okay - that post turned out pretty long. But to put it in short - you can have some protection by for example changing the addresses where data is stored in ram and thus make it impossible to use gameshark codes designed for the original unedited rom file, but even so, you can't (easily) make it impossible to use the same codes with different address parts either way. And like others have pointed out as well, it's not really worth it trying to protect against others hacking the game unless you for some reason have a very good reason behind doing so. Protection against glitches or unwanted situations that could clearly be accessed through some chain of events is a totally different thing though.

Im currently playing pokemon glazed and i need at least 2 hours to train my party.And it's glitching so much and im stuck.

Pokemon Hyetology was a pretty tricky hack - especially the beginning of the game! If you would like to see a runthrough of the ROM hack, check out my channel!

Youtube - Joshkeeno

Bulbadon said:

PC spawning is not cheating its a feature of the emulators.....

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So are cheats. If it was not a feature of the base gameboy advance, i consider it cheating.