Let me ask you guys a simple question:
Why do you rom-hack?
That's a kind of interesting question. I immediately can tell you why I
started ROMHacking, but until I finished writing this post I didn't know why I still do. So thanks for asking this, because by answering I have my solid direction back.
I guess it's just a general love of Pokemon and the feeling that I can do it better and take things farther than GameFreak is willing to go. I want to make the perfect Pokemon game for me; something that I feel would be a game that I'd play and have a lot of fun with.
To be honest, Pokemon in general has started to get stale for me. I've been replaying the original Blue, Yellow, and Crystal in my spare time (the actual cartridges, I'm not emulating) and I'm glued to those more than I am the current games. There's just a magic of storytelling and attention to detail that I think the current games are missing. Features cut that should never have been cut. Content that doesn't last and isn't compelling. Completing the Pokedex is still a challenge in those games (I have a full living dex sitting in my X that I can now drop into any future game I have, so that onus is gone for me), and running around day and night through a variable ecosystem of Pokemon in Crystal has been really rewarding and great for my suspension of disbelief (and frustrating. Night, why you come so soon?). I don't have to stop the plot to go after legendaries if I don't want to. They're fun bonuses that don't feel like just
any Trainer who happened to stumble into the plot could catch. I'm not saying that the older games are perfect, far from it, but I am saying that GameFreak would do well to take what worked mechanically and plotwise and graft that magic onto the current games.
In addition, I feel like today, games have no incentive to try and keep your attention and lack content that is long lasting. I think that GameFreak, and Nintendo in general, is greatly underestimating our attention spans. They don't want to spend time and money making content that we'll skip by moving onto another game halfway through theirs. Meanwhile, the lack of meaningful content keeps me from continuing to play their games, where I would have if they brought back and expanded upon certain features like the Battle Frontier, a real Safari Zone, had fun minigames (losing the Game Corner was a big blow), or put in the extra effort to make the world more variable in general, or allow us to replay without losing important game statistics. On the other hand, the "postgame" that is there revolves around circling an island with an infuriating sand patch to slowly hatch eggs that I don't want to bother training for a metagame that is increasingly polarized around a few mandatory powerhouses. These gripes are the things that I'm rectifying.
I hack because I'm hungry for something that the official games will probably never give me within the IP that I've grown to love and has so much potential that I feel is being squandered. I hack because I want the perfect Pokemon game for me and am not afraid to get my hands dirty.
