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- Seen May 18, 2025
What's the issue exactly? I was able to play MoonSilver and SunGold completely. Did you patch the wrong ROM?
I just finished SunGold, right after MoonSilver, and I definitely prefer the latter. For one, Drayano's Quality-Of-Life features were kept in MoonSilver, which made grinding a better experience, though still time consuming. SunGold though, I had to use the rebattle trainer cheat, because without it, grinding would've taken a lot longer. Regular trainer rematches through PokeGear would've been a major drag. Wilds? That's the most infuriating part of this hack, the wild encounter level curve is a joke. Mt. Silver mons at a level 40 minimum? If you didn't have a whole team before say, the 4th gym, you'd have to cut corners to keep up with the buffed trainer level curve. By that, I mean that my team only consisted of 5 mons, and a sacrificial lamb, which actually helped. I barely used the rebattle trainer cheat in the Johto campaign, and used it in the Kanto part because the level curve was just too high. For the E4, it was better because it was mostly unchanged from Drayano's hack. This one has gym leaders with mixed teams, and if I went in with my team that were at least 10 levels below the E4 against mixed teams in the League, I'd suffer. At least with the E4 here, it's easier to plan and my team had mostly great coverage over each member. But the underleveled status was too much for the Kanto campaign and wild encounters were similar to vanilla HGSS, meaning they were crap, so I had to use the rebattle trainer code.
The randomized wild encounter gimmick of SunGold felt limited, like a certain amount of mons were used, whereas in MoonSilver and Drayano's hacks, it's all 493 pokemon that are obtainable. There are some mons I wish I had but couldn't, like a Chansey for Lucky Egg farming, since SunGold removed Drayano's Lucky Egg gift events. While all this gives the impression that it took me a longer time to finish SunGold than MoonSilver, surprisingly that's not the case. I finished SunGold in 20 hours according to the game. No emulator speedup. I do admit to uncapping the FPS and using those game enhancer cheats supplied in the download, same ones Drayano supplied. Same stuff used for MoonSilver, but I had a full team there and spent a little too much time farming for Lucky Eggs, that game's tougher since Drayano's hacks were used as a base. Overall it took me a little over 30 hours to finish MoonSilver, but the experience was much more fun. SunGold was aggravating. Also, Red's team doesn't feel any different in SunGold than it was in MoonSilver, and the OP gave me the impression that it would be. I was happy though that I beat Red's team without any setup move, in MoonSilver I trampled Red with 2x Dragon Dance Salamence. In SunGold, I was down to just Blastoise.
Anyway, I'll definitely replay MoonSilver, SunGold removes too much of Drayano's content, and with the other changes left in, it really exposed a major nuisance with vanilla HGSS, the damn grind. In hindsight, I probably would've finished MoonSilver quicker if I used the rebattle cheat, for Red I grinded with the cool training gauntlet in Saffron. The only problem though is that it makes training one mon at a time tough, thus the overall grinding of the team took longer. Also most of my team in MoonSilver were pseudo-legends, and their leveling rates are in the "Slow" category. Still, MoonSilver was much more fun and notably more challenging. I don't do nuzlockes by the way, SunGold definitely would've been more challenging in that format, and just speaking for myself, it would've been unplayable.
Sorry for the long rant.
