Spent 8 days on this ROMHack, only using the emulator for grinding and catching, which made up a small percentage of the overall gameplay, over 80 hours for me. The majority was on the long battles, especially at the point where every freaking Team Magma/Aqua member had 6-mon teams. All the times I left to go to the Pokemon Center, whether by losing or just to heal up before the next battle, due to not buying items until the E4. That slowed down gameplay, and that was the most surprising thing about the game, and where a good chunk of the difficulty comes from, pure endurance. Also, the weather conditions often working against me, the fact that almost every trainer had a Lum Berry, so my Gardevoir's Hypnosis was virtually useless. Couple that with not having access to any setup moves, while most boss trainers have such access in at least one pokemon. Mons I dreamed of helping me due to their access to setup moves, were not as appealing. The E4 was a nightmare that I had to overcome with savestates, but I wasn't satisfied with that, so I rematched them, replacing Manectric with Metagross and that was a complete 180.
This is without a doubt the hardest Emerald hack I ever played, the longest I've spent on an Emerald hack too. I think the longest I've spent on a hack in 2019, Vega would count but I just stopped playing that out of frustration and such. At least with this game, I didn't want to give up. So it's more forgiving than Vega, but I got flashes of hardcore difficulty and some unfair stuff. Not as much as Vega though. The Trick House puzzles are mostly ridiculous, but very doable. So I finished the game, by my standards. I don't want to wait for more gym leader rematches, having already done Winona and the twins, and I'm not fussed with catching the legendaries. I got my fill of this game, and now I want to play easy ROMhacks for the rest of this month. Definitely awesome for what it is, but extremely exhausting and often frustrating.
My final team: Swampert, Gardevoir, Ursaring, Salamence, Tyranitar, Metagross. This game taught me that Ursaring was a beast, it was so over-leveled bcause I kept using it. Obviously that was neutralized by the E4. Mons I used a lot during the playthrough and eventually had to give up: Vileplume, Manectric, Donphan, Farfetch'd, Magmar, Spoink and Cubone. You can tell that the latter helped in the early part of the game but had to go.