FireRed hack: Pokémon FireRed: Challenge Mode

[El Diabeetus]

Hack Name:

'Pokémon FireRed: Challenge Mode'
(This is the actual titlescreen, I wanted it to look more like the style of the Japanese logo.)

Hack of:

Introduction:
I'm SSJ4 Furanki and this is a minor hack of FireRed to make the game tougher, un-censor things, some small but possibly noticeable changes, this is also being done to help me practice hacking more for whenever I release DarkCopper into the Hack Showcase again, but, I'm gonna wait until I at least have a beta to do that.

Storyline:
The same story you played in FireRed and LeafGreen, with minor changes and stronger teams, its meant to be a new experience with a familiar story. This challenge mode version was inspired by playing through Black 2 and White 2's challenge mode (on the Japanese version).

Features:

- Everything I can possibly de-ALL CAPITALIZE, I will (And for the most part I already have. I'm about 90% done with all the text in the game.)
- Maybe Day and Night (Not sure if I wanna implement it, though it's totally possible)
- Attacks have been brought to B/W standard (power/accuracy/physical/special/status split wise)
- Stronger trainers, new wild Pokémon (in other words a 386 hack too.)
- GB Player, I take no credit for this. In actually, I had a clean ROM that I patched RichterSnipes GB Player/Extras patch from mid-August. So, basically it everything I added got changed after that. I wanted to use this patch he did as the first base, 'cause I wanted to make this FireRed patch also feel more of a remake like HG/SS that what the original FR/LG did.
- De-censorship (no more 'coffee' excuse in Viridian city, the Pokémon tower dialouge was reverted to its Red/Blue incarnation, Gambler not Gamer, etc.)
- Some Trainer Classes re-named or updated/reverted (based on each case basis, example Cooltrainer -> Ace Trainer, Gamer -> Gambler, etc.)
- Since the Japanese version used Yen/En (円), I made the money symbol in this the American dollar ($) rather than the Poké Dollar symbol.
- Not sure where it would be located, but, if I could get rid of the 'HELP' menu, I will. It personally annoys the hell out of me and I'm sure anybody playing this hack is familiar with Pokémon.
- All Trainers will receive DS-style sprites for in-battle, as will the Pokémon. It will not show up in Beta 1 (except for Gym Leaders, Elite Four, Red/Green/Blue, they've already got sprites re-programmed in.)
- Running Shoes in buildings, Pokédex text spacing glitch fix, trainer facing glitch fix, etc. are all implemented.
- Deoxys, Lugia and Ho-Oh will be easily reachable, once you give Celio the Ruby and Sapphire, I will have him give you the Aurora and Mystic Tickets. Faraway Island has been put in, but, I haven't programmed Mew's battle in yet. I will be making use of the unused maps for any potential new areas.
- Regular trainers have an AI setting of anywhere between 150-200 and the Gym Leaders/Elite Four/Champion have one of 255, so basically I'm making FireRed actually hard this time.
- In every area I put Pokémon that seem to fit the area, but the 1% you have of running into a rare Pokémon is a Pokémon that you wouldn't expect. Such as Route 1 having a Level 5 Pikachu or Viridian Forest with a Lv. 8 Heracross.
- All Pokémon will have a second ability possibility. So, watch out for Bruno's Blaizken, with potential Speed Boost taking effect (haven't edited Blaziken's Ability yet, actualy only got through the first 151 at this point, haha.)

Screenshots:

Brock and his new team.

Trainer Cards

Currency symbol change and some anti-censorship and if you could tell I did minor palette editing to the overworlds to give Red his classic black hair, plus it matches his DS sprite.

Showing some new Pokémon for areas, plus type graphic decapitalization.

More anti-censorship, this of the drunken old man, whoo, haha.

Showcasing Graphic de-capitalization for status problems.

Showing the DS-style trainers pre-battle.

Bugs:
Currently all bugs match the base patch from RichterSnipes, so DO NOT register the GB Player.

Credits:
RichterSnipes: For the GB Player patch, like unlimited move tutors too, etc.
Jambo51: Correct trainer facing, other ASM implementations from Richter's patch, Lv. 1 Eggs.
JPAN: Deleteable HMs.
Nintendo and Game Freak: For releasing and making the game that is being edited.
Chaos Rush: Red and Green's backsprites.
All the tool makers that made the tools that can make this possible.
(List will continue to be added as more things get implemented.)

 

[RichterSnipes]

Hey there! It's great to see there's interest in implementing my GB Player into FireRed hacks other than my own. What you're planning to do with this hacks seems quite ambitious on its own, even if it dwarfed in comparison to what you have plans for with DarkCopper. You seem to be putting tons of effort into it, especially with the de-capitalization, trainer Pokémon lineup, and move changing efforts. Overall, I really commend you for your work on this hack thus far! :)

If you want to circumvent any bugs with the GB Player or have higher-quality tracks, it might be a good idea to bring it up to my version 3.0 release. No use in keeping an outdated version lingering around in any capacity! I can help you with updating that if you need it.

- Maybe Day and Night (Not sure if I wanna implement it, though it's totally possible)

Here's some helpful advice: only include the day/night patch in the hack yourself if you plan on implementing time-based events. If you don't, people might accuse you of including a feature just for the sake of including it. That's the reason why I've never used it. If people want it, they can just patch it in on their own, it's not hard at all to do.

- De-censorship (no more 'coffee' excuse in Viridian city, the Pokémon tower dialouge was reverted to its Red/Blue incarnation, Gambler not Gamer, etc.)

If you're going the route of "de-censoring" the Gamers/Gamblers, make sure to change their message boxes, too. For example, one of them has the pre-battle message: "I'm a ramblin', gamin' dude!' when it should be "I'm a ramblin', gamblin' dude!"

- Not sure where it would be located, but, if I could get rid of the 'HELP' menu, I will. It personally annoys the hell out of me and I'm sure anybody playing this hack is familiar with Pokémon.

You do know that you can just disable the "HELP" menu in the Options menu, right? Just set the L/R function to something else.

- Deoxys, Lugia and Ho-Oh will be easily reachable, once you give Celio the Ruby and Sapphire, I will have him give you the Aurora and Mystic Tickets. Faraway Island has been put in, but, I haven't programmed Mew's battle in yet. I will be making use of the unused maps for any potential new areas.

I'm excited to see what you have in mind for event battles! I always appreciate people putting in the extra effort to make legendaries have one-off battles. Don't forget to have the game to setflags for both 0x84A and 0x84B for the tickets.

Trainer Cards

I'm actually a fan of the HG/SS sprites. Their high attention to detail and stylish poses make them quite memorable. They also tend to do so without sacrificing faithfulness to the original/canon art (save for Sabrina, of course).

That Green/Leaf sprite, though...I'm sure you're aware of what's up with it, too. Just tell me that it's not final. :P

More anti-censorship, this of the drunken old man, whoo, haha.

That new "conversation" with the old man looks hilarious! Is that how it actually was in the Japanese release?

Credits:
RichterSnipes: For the GB Player/other extras from his patch, like the correct trainer facing, unlimited move tutors, etc.
Nintendo and Game Freak: For releasing and making the game that is being edited.
All the tool makers that made the tools that can make this possible.

Just to let you know, please don't give me any credit whatsoever for the trainer facing fix. That was all Jambo51's work, all I did was include it in my hack.

I hope you have success with this side-project and that it re-invigorates your hacking skills enough to make DarkCopper what you always wanted it to be!

 

[PokemonGiratinaX]

This is the best FireRed sideshow hack I've seen! Anyway, Green's Trainer is weired. She look's FAT.

 

[El Diabeetus]

Hey there! It's great to see there's interest in implementing my GB Player into FireRed hacks other than my own. What you're planning to do with this hacks seems quite ambitious on its own, even if it dwarfed in comparison to what you have plans for with DarkCopper. You seem to be putting tons of effort into it, especially with the de-capitalization, trainer Pokémon lineup, and move changing efforts. Overall, I really commend you for your work on this hack thus far! :)

If you want to circumvent any bugs with the GB Player or have higher-quality tracks, it might be a good idea to bring it up to my version 3.0 release. No use in keeping an outdated version lingering around in any capacity! I can help you with updating that if you need it.

Here's some helpful advice: only include the day/night patch in the hack yourself if you plan on implementing time-based events. If you don't, people might accuse you of including a feature just for the sake of including it. That's the reason why I've never used it. If people want it, they can just patch it in on their own, it's not hard at all to do.
If you're going the route of "de-censoring" the Gamers/Gamblers, make sure to change their message boxes, too. For example, one of them has the pre-battle message: "I'm a ramblin', gamin' dude!' when it should be "I'm a ramblin', gamblin' dude!"
You do know that you can just disable the "HELP" menu in the Options menu, right? Just set the L/R function to something else.
I'm excited to see what you have in mind for event battles! I always appreciate people putting in the extra effort to make legendaries have one-off battles. Don't forget to have the game to setflags for both 0x84A and 0x84B for the tickets.I'm actually a fan of the HG/SS sprites. Their high attention to detail and stylish poses make them quite memorable. They also tend to do so without sacrificing faithfulness to the original/canon art (save for Sabrina, of course).

That Green/Leaf sprite, though...I'm sure you're aware of what's up with it, too. Just tell me that it's not final. :P
That new "conversation" with the old man looks hilarious! Is that how it actually was in the Japanese release?

Just to let you know, please don't give me any credit whatsoever for the trainer facing fix. That was all Jambo51's work, all I did was include it in my hack.

I hope you have success with this side-project and that it re-invigorates your hacking skills enough to make DarkCopper what you always wanted it to be!

Yeah, I went and made the Leaf sprite less fat, I knew something looked off; but, since I'm still in the state of changing things, I left it there for the time being. The new one has the same pose, base, but, I made it look more correct. Plus, trying to create a new Leaf/Green sprite is a challenge for me. Yeah, I'll update the credits to add Jambo (after this post), and anyone else in the future. Yeah, I'll make a copy of my ROM and test how the new patch of yours would affect it (for the most part I haven't copied my ROM since I haven't done anything yet that could break the game and I've learned from my previous attempt of DarkCopper (it's back on FireRed and I've had it on my computer for over a year, I've just been really lazy with that, in all honesty, I could have been done with it by now, haha.). It should work, but, just in case it would revert the de-cap, graphics, etc. So, if that doesn't work, I'll just directly ask you for help!

I know you disable the Help menu via the Options menu, but, I wanna get rid of it completely. It's pointless in this hack and I don't wanna have to de-capitalize something I don't even want in the hack, haha.

The Old Man story is more of 'my guess', I was never able to get a straightforward translation, so I went with a bunch a different translators pick out which parts made sense in each one (I even looked at the crappily translated Green, where Pokémon are called PETs, you could call it the Vietnamese Green since it's done in the same style as the infamous Crystal one, but, I checked that one since that was one of the parts that actually looked like it could pass for decent English.) and the final part, my limited amount of Japanese. I can read Katakana and Hiragana easily (but, I can't translate Hiragana), so I could tell you what it says in Japanese, but, I couldn't tell you the English translation, unless I specifically knew the word. Luckily, one of the sentences was easy to translate. I saw Washi and Hanashi in the line about the Eagle. Washi = Eagle, Hanashi = Story, and then there was the 'no' in the sentence which holds it together.

The Gambler's dialouge was already changed, that was one of the things that I remembered getting censored. The Pokémon Tower is back to its Red/Blue dialouge. I changed the Cinnabar Mansion dialouge to change pronouns to how they were in the Japanese version. There wasn't a team behind Mewtwo, in the Japanese version Mr. Fuji is the only one implied to work on Mewtwo. In Emerald the same rings true on Faraway Island, at the sign there's a message written. In the English version they got rid of the part that implies Mr. Fuji wrote it. In Japanese at the end of the message on its own line it has ...ji. Written without anything before it. The whole message is faded in both. So, parts of words are throughout the whole sign.

This helped a lot on the not so obvious changes:
https://tcrf.net/Pokémon_Red_and_Blue/Version_Differences

And thanks for the info about the flags for legendary battles! I'm not too great at scripting, but, for this project, I'm lucky that I only need limited knowledge, and I'm not gonna include day and night in that case. I have no time based events planned.

This is the best FireRed sideshow hack I've seen! Anyway, Green's Trainer is weired. She look's FAT.

Thanks, and yeah, I noticed after both you guys pointed it out! Haha! I knew something looked off originally. If it still looks too off, I'll ask someone else to take a shot at the sprite. They should have included her in HG/SS or B2/W2, that would've made my editing a lot easier, haha.

Here's the change I made to Leaf/Green:

 

[RichterSnipes]

Yeah, I went and made the Leaf sprite less fat, I knew something looked off; but, since I'm still in the state of changing things, I left it there for the time being. The new one has the same pose, base, but, I made it look more correct. Plus, trying to create a new Leaf/Green sprite is a challenge for me.

Thanks, and yeah, I noticed after both you guys pointed it out! Haha! I knew something looked off originally. If it still looks too off, I'll ask someone else to take a shot at the sprite. They should have included her in HG/SS or B2/W2, that would've made my editing a lot easier, haha.

Here's the change I made to Leaf/Green:

I understand it can be difficult to make completely new sprites. Heck, I don't know if I could do any better! However, there is something that does need to be addressed that has nothing to do with finesse.

Both playable characters in the main Pokémon games have always had the same expressions on their face, with poses to complement that. It's always been that way, from the first game both genders were available, to this one, even to today:

The only noticeable difference between the expressions of each pair is that the female character has an open mouth with a more noticeable smile. Either that, or it's lipstick, I don't know which. The point is that the expressions of the two are meant to be mirror images. Keeping Green/Leaf cheerful when Red isn't cheerful is not consistent in the slightest, among other things...

...This actually leads into the bigger issue. Something else you might notice is that all of these trainers look confident, eager, and a bit cheerful. I think your main problem is actually choosing to go with Red's HG/SS sprite. He's supposed to look ragged, experienced, and ruthless in that one. After all, he's been doing absolutely nothing but training his Pokémon to death for three years. Since this is supposed to be your telling of the events that occur right when the player character sets out on his/her adventure, and NOT after three years of seeing what the world has to throw at him/her, it seems rightfully odd for Red to already look like he doesn't give a...you know.

The Old Man story is more of 'my guess', I was never able to get a straightforward translation, so I went with a bunch a different translators pick out which parts made sense in each one (I even looked at the crappily translated Green, where Pokémon are called PETs, you could call it the Vietnamese Green since it's done in the same style as the infamous Crystal one, but, I checked that one since that was one of the parts that actually looked like it could pass for decent English.) and the final part, my limited amount of Japanese. I can read Katakana and Hiragana easily (but, I can't translate Hiragana), so I could tell you what it says in Japanese, but, I couldn't tell you the English translation, unless I specifically knew the word. Luckily, one of the sentences was easy to translate. I saw Washi and Hanashi in the line about the Eagle. Washi = Eagle, Hanashi = Story, and then there was the 'no' in the sentence which holds it together.

I honestly had no idea that the old man really was drunk in the original Japanese release. I felt that it'd be appropriate, but not actually so. TCRC certainly doesn't say anything about it, so I'd otherwise be in the dark about that. Best of luck with your translation efforts!

I changed the Cinnabar Mansion dialouge to change pronouns to how they were in the Japanese version. There wasn't a team behind Mewtwo, in the Japanese version Mr. Fuji is the only one implied to work on Mewtwo. In Emerald the same rings true on Faraway Island, at the sign there's a message written. In the English version they got rid of the part that implies Mr. Fuji wrote it. In Japanese at the end of the message on its own line it has ...ji. Written without anything before it. The whole message is faded in both. So, parts of words are throughout the whole sign.

Just out of curiosity, what is the official canon concerning this? The Japanese games hint that only Mr. Fuji was involved with the Mewtwo scenario, but the American games try to mimic the story as it was told in the anime.

And thanks for the info about the flags for legendary battles! I'm not too great at scripting, but, for this project, I'm lucky that I only need limited knowledge, and I'm not gonna include day and night in that case. I have no time based events planned.

Your welcome! And just so you don't get confused, those flags are for the tickets, not the legendary battles themselves. There's a separate set of flags for legendary battles that can be observed with the pre-existing legendary events and the headers for the maps they occur on. Oh, and the Person ID flag set for each sprite.

Flags 0x84A and 0x84B, specifically, allow the player to go to Navel Rock and Birth Island when set, respectively. The coders at GameFreak knew that people would try to activate the events by just putting the proper items in their inventories via Action Replay, so they made it so the events can only be accessed if

1) You have the proper item (Mysticticket or Auroraticket), and
2) The proper flag (0x84A or 0x84B) is set.

Otherwise the game will act as if you don't have the the ticket at all, and it won't let you go to the event destinations. This is a problem that can be seen with some of the earlier 386 efforts, where the hackers just let the players buy the tickets from Poké Marts. Buying them from there won't set the flags, and will therefore make them useless.

 

[El Diabeetus]

All awesome points, but have been edited here to make it take less space.

Alright, I got what you mean about the trainers now, I'm going to keep the base pose for Red, but, edit accordingly. So, basically a determined; but, less 'I'm gonna destroy you' look in his face. Green, I'll adjust the mouth, see how it looks, if that still doesn't work. I'll use Rosa as a base and heavily edit that into Green (already showed you some of the progress on Green's sprite in the Visitor Messages on our profiles.) So, at this point I fixed the awkward Green sprite problem.

In regards to Dr. Fuji, I believe the canon is the original Japanese one, the English mimicing the anime makes no sense as the games and anime only barely resemble each other (plus, the dub of the Mewtwo movie is probably the most re-written script in the history of English Pokémon. In the original Mewtwo was questioning his exisistance rather than the "DERP HERP I WANNA TAKE OVER ZIE WELT, HAHAH". Yeah, the old man censorship people tend to look over and for whatever reason no one added that to TCRC. Thank you for the ticket explanation as well, I would've never known that had you not said that.

I went and made the font the one from HG/SS for the most part, I also changed Red's back, I originally made one myself. But, this one looks a lot better:

So, credit to Chaos Rush for the Red and Green backsprites, even though I haven't edited in Green's new one yet, I also attempted her's, but, once again Chaos Rush's looks better. Only thing I edited on the sprites is giving Red his black hair back.

 

[Hacker Bisharp]

Where is the link for the download?

 

[Lucasbrawl]

I might give this one a try. Seems pretty interesting.

 

[El Diabeetus]

I've managed to find out what that old man actually says, so I will edit that. And progress had been slow since I've been alternating between this, DarkCopper and a full decapitalization patch of Emerald (so near everything, as much text I can find and I've already decapitalized all graphics that needed decapitalization).

And even though I mentioned it on the previous post, here's Green's current sprite:

 

[Shangahyando]

So sad that there were no updates for a longer while, are you even working on it yet?

 

[CelticsPhan]

I know I'm bumping an older thread but I also want to know if OP has made any progress on this since the last update.

 

[Gorrioncillo]

i join to te request, are you still working on this hack, i really want to play it, where is the link to download the patch??

 

[El Diabeetus]

Unfortunately it's starting to glitch up too much (Cinnabar doesn't work anymore). So, I think I'm calling it quits for this side hack. I'm currently doing one to 'Delocalize' it.