Emerald hack: Pokemon Emerald Party Randomizer Plus

A while ago, Googleben released a Pokemon Emerald Party Randomizer for the streamer Smallant, which randomizes all of the Pokemon of your party at the beginning of every battle. I have taken on his code and improved it so that the player gets a real sense of progression, and can influence a bit what moves a Pokemon can receive.

This hack should be compatible with the Universal Pokemon Randomizer, by applying the UPR first, then applying the PEPR+ patch next. However, attempts to combine other minor hacks such as physical/special split failed. Combining these hacks would require to be done via the source code.

Base Features from Googleben's Party Randomizer:

• Every Pokemon is randomized into a random specie at the beginning of each battle, with each specie having equal weight.
• Pokemons preserve their EV points, IV points, contest conditions, current HP percentage, XP percentage, shiny, pokerus and nickname across randomizations.
• Each Pokemon receive their last 4 level-up moves for their moveset.

Features added in PEPR+:

• Pokemon evolve within specific level ranges, at random. A level 5 Pokemon will always be in its first stage evolution, while a level 60 Pokemon will always be fully evolved.
• Legendary Pokemons are rarer to get when low level. They gain the same chances to appear as any Pokemon family after level 40.
• Pokemon choose from a slightly wider level-up movepool and choose from the previous evolution in case of a Stone evolution Pokemon.
• Every Pokemon has a chance to obtain an Egg move. The higher level you are, the higher the chances, capping at level 20.
• Every Pokemon can learn moves from the TM/HM you currently have in your bag. Each TM/HM you have increases the chances for each Pokemon to learn a TM/HM move by 10%, making it 100% certain to learn something if you have at least 10 TM/HM. If the Pokemon learns a TM/HM, it will choose one of the compatible moves from what you have. Managing the TMs you carry around may thus allow you to control to some degree what your Pokemon can learn, but you can't just leave one TM so that all your Pokemon learns it all the time!
• HMs can be deposited into the PC. As such, you don't need to avoid getting the weaker HMs to remove them from the possible TM pool.
• For both Egg moves and TM/HM moves, if the Pokemon already has a full moveset, it will give a score to each move according to how essential it is offensively, and replace only moves that are given the lower score, or a move of the same typing if considered better. This means that duplicate typing moves and status moves are prioritized.
• Smeargle gets an entirely randomized moveset, according to the amount of times it should have learned Sketch by its level.
• Booting up an HM randomizes the Team again, so that you don't end up stuck on islands with no Pokemon able to Surf.
• Ability is randomized.

Versions

Known issues

• There is a small chance that a non-shiny Pokemon becomes shiny for one battle.

Screens



Credits
Pokemon Emerald Party Randomizer Plus was created by me (Souma). It has been created by building upon Googleben's Pokemon Emerald Party Randomizer. This was made possible by using the Disassembly project of Pokemon Emerald, by Pret.

Googleben's Pokemon Emerald Party Randomizer:
https://github.com/googleben/EmeraldPartyRandomizer

Pret's Pokemon Emerald Disassembly Project:
https://github.com/pret/pokeemerald

Surprised that nobody has commented yet! This is going to be an absolute treat to play! Kudos to you!

I found myself trapped in the Aqua Hideout, with nobody that could learn surf, and you can't fish up anything in the water, and I already took out the 2 Electrodes. I did some cheating to get me out of there.

Oh drats, Team Aqua Hideout and similar places is indeed a problem even with the Old Rod in the bag. I'll have to see what I can do about that.

Version 1.05 has been released:

• Made the party randomize again when booting up an HM, fixing the issues of getting stuck without a Pokemon able to use Surf.

I finally beat Wallace and the Elite 4. It took at least a dozen tries because I kept rolling a bad team and I guess most Pokemon don't have great default movesets when they're in the 40s-50s. If I caught the Weather Trio and they got randomized, I would've had an easier time because they are all level 70. Anyway, for Wallace, I lucked out with Kyogre's Drizzle and Plusle having Thunder. I had a Lugia to take care of Whiscash, and Heracross took care of Milotic. Despite how obnoxious it was that winning often meant having a good team and strategy and/or being at a high enough level to get good movesets and overpower opponents, it was a very fun and unique playthrough.

One thing, might be a bug, but often when Pokemon are randomized, they end up with "No Special Ability." It seems to happen to Pokemon with only 1 ability, those with 2 abilities aren't affected.

Thanks for the feedback!

I'm going to look into the ability issue. I know that in recent generations, every ability "slot" should have been fulfilled, AKA even if a Pokemon has only one ability, that one ability fills both regular slots and the Hidden Ability slot, so it shouldn't have been an issue. This is the first gen that introduced abilities, so I guess things may work differently than what I'm used to.

I also have one more idea to ensure better movesets for each Pokemon, which I'll implement in future patches. However, given that Emerald is certainly one of the hardest Pokemon versions, it certainly is normal that you would struggle against Wallace.

I have 1 question, is there a way for you to apply like a vanilla form to this? Such as working from Ben's version but able to randomize it without any QOL such as evolution levels and such? I want to be completely random

Hi uran,

As of now, only GoogleBen's version, as well as the multiple versions PEPR+ has gone through, are available to download. If you want features from the newer versions without features from older versions, it would require to go through the source code and rewrite the code so that it does not use the older feature, then recompile everything. Else, if you want GoogleBen's version, the link to his project is included in the credits. You will be able to find his patch file inside the readme of his project.

As of now, I want to focus on completing the bug fixes and QOL changes so that the ROM hack reaches a true final version. Once that is done, I may indeed start making multiple versions with different kinds of parameters, just like certain other ROM Hacks post versions with or without the changes to Pokemon stats and movepools.

Version 1.06 has been released:

• Randomized abilities, fixing at the same time Slot 2 Ability Pokemon getting no Ability on species with only one ability.

Version 1.07 has been released:

• Reversed priority for duplicate typing moves and status moves. Duplicate moves are now always prioritized.
• Changed the algorithm for selecting moves to replace so it always chooses the moves considered the most useless.

This should make movesets more diverse, therefore lower chances of bad movesets.

Version 1.08 has been released:

• Pokemon now attempt to relearn the 5th latest level-up move, fixing a few movesets like Oddish with Sweet Scent + all 3 Powder moves.
• Pokemon that evolve by stone now also attempt relearning the last 4 level-up moves from the previous evolution.
• Fixed no-miss offensive moves being evaluated as low power.
• Small tweak to the replacement algorithm for support moves.

I use cell phone, which emulator does this rom work with?

Hi Davihay,

Any GBA emulator that can run the original Pokemon Emerald ROM should also be able to run PEPR+. I am not knowledgeable about phone emulators, but you should easily be able to find one with a quick Google search.

However, the tools that are used to patch the game are not available on the phone. You will need to patch the ROM on the PC first, then transfer the patched ROM onto your phone in order to play.

i am so sorry if i am being too inconsiderate but please could you do this for emerald kaizo. i'm itching to do that run in my youtube channel, im sure you would need permission from the kaizo game maker. but man that would be a real tough challenge. anyways i loved this i really really did :)

Hi Redashgaryblue. Sorry for the late reply.

I've just tried to see if PEPR+ was compatible with Emerald Kaizo, but unfortunately, it wasn't. As such, obtaining the source code of Emerald Kaizo would be necessary in order to be able to merge the two projects together. As he hasn't disclosed the source code, if there was any (Given the seemingly lack of core gameplay modifications, it's possible it hasn't used the Disassembly Project at all), merging the two projects together does not seem possible, at least on my side.

Can you use cheats in this like the shiny cheat?

It just shows as a document. How do I apply it to UPR?