FireRed hack: Pokémon Unbound [COMPLETED]
- Thread starter Skeli
- Start date
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use mGBA version 0.9.X
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- Seen Jun 8, 2022
Are there any in game consequences for using cheats because I'd love to mess around with all these generations?
Teanz Gamer
Traductor de Videojuegos
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Skeli!
I'm looking for spanish version of Unbound.
I thought it was already translated. I'd like to do it on my own. Can you give me your permission?
I'm looking for spanish version of Unbound.
I thought it was already translated. I'd like to do it on my own. Can you give me your permission?
- 5
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- Seen Sep 12, 2021
Skeli, you're the best dev.
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I meant like in another hack I played I saw that if you used cheats then you would be blocked from fighting the champion and arrested in game
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- Seen Dec 16, 2022
Another bug report, but recreating it depends on RNG:
(I was fighting Collector Kobe in Dresco Town Trainer House)
Basically Kobe's Lickilicky was using moves while it was asleep. It seemingly was influenced by his Audino's Misty Terrain.
As far as I remember, I used Spore on his Exploud, which he switched out the next turn for his Audino.
I used Spore on Blissey that switch turn, which used Healing Wish beforehand. It fainted and Spore landed on Lickilicky.
The Audino used Misty Terrain, but the Lickylicky was still asleep ("SLP").
However Lickylicky used Belly Drum, which failed because of low HP.
The next turn it used Power Whip, again while asleep/"SLP".
Then I knocked it out.
Its entirely possible that I misremember the exact steps, but I am 100% sure it was marked asleep.
I'll try to recreate it once or twice and maybe take a screenshot, but since it's RNG dependent, I might not be able to in a reasonable amount of time.
Edit: Nvm, I got lucky. Here's a screenshot (hoping it works):
![Pokémon Unbound [COMPLETED]](https://i.ibb.co/bsy42Mf/Pokemon-Unbound1131-210913-223451.png "Pokémon Unbound [COMPLETED]")
(I was fighting Collector Kobe in Dresco Town Trainer House)
Basically Kobe's Lickilicky was using moves while it was asleep. It seemingly was influenced by his Audino's Misty Terrain.
As far as I remember, I used Spore on his Exploud, which he switched out the next turn for his Audino.
I used Spore on Blissey that switch turn, which used Healing Wish beforehand. It fainted and Spore landed on Lickilicky.
The Audino used Misty Terrain, but the Lickylicky was still asleep ("SLP").
However Lickylicky used Belly Drum, which failed because of low HP.
The next turn it used Power Whip, again while asleep/"SLP".
Then I knocked it out.
Its entirely possible that I misremember the exact steps, but I am 100% sure it was marked asleep.
I'll try to recreate it once or twice and maybe take a screenshot, but since it's RNG dependent, I might not be able to in a reasonable amount of time.
Edit: Nvm, I got lucky. Here's a screenshot (hoping it works):
Last edited:
Yes, it's a Healing Wish bug that will be fixed in the next update; you can follow the update process and keep track of bug fixes by joining our Discord server ??????Another bug report, but recreating it depends on RNG:
(I was fighting Collector Kobe in Dresco Town Trainer House)
Basically Kobe's Lickilicky was using moves while it was asleep. It seemingly was influenced by his Audino's Misty Terrain.
As far as I remember, I used Spore on his Exploud, which he switched out the next turn for his Audino.
I used Spore on Blissey that switch turn, which used Healing Wish beforehand. It fainted and Spore landed on Lickilicky.
The Audino used Misty Terrain, but the Lickylicky was still asleep ("SLP").
However Lickylicky used Belly Drum, which failed because of low HP.
The next turn it used Power Whip, again while asleep/"SLP".
Then I knocked it out.
Its entirely possible that I misremember the exact steps, but I am 100% sure it was marked asleep.
I'll try to recreate it once or twice and maybe take a screenshot, but since it's RNG dependent, I might not be able to in a reasonable amount of time.
Edit: Nvm, I got lucky. Here's a screenshot (hoping it works):
- 1
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- Seen Jun 26, 2023
yoyo! first time poster here--I've got RTC problems! on 3ds with a NSUI injection. The clock time displays just fine, but my in-game RTC is set at year 2255, and my .sav file is stuck there being flagged with an RTC tampering detected. I wasn't even trying to abuse or use exploits! The date on my 3ds was just wrong lol. I've got a 30 hours save that i reeeaaally don't want to start over with; is there a way to remove this flag or set my in-game time manually through hex edits? Does anyone know the offset where the date is saved in the .sav file? There was some discussion earlier in the thread, and I received some feedback, but still looking for other solutions.
Thanks! This is literally one of my favorite games of all time so far, not just pokemon lol. All the work you've put in is insane. So Thanks!
Thanks! This is literally one of my favorite games of all time so far, not just pokemon lol. All the work you've put in is insane. So Thanks!
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- Seen Nov 24, 2023
Open the start menu and press the right arrow
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- Seen Sep 9, 2023
This game looks amazing! What version of Fire Red did you use so I can get the patch working? EX: Pokemon Inclement is based off of trashman emerald so it needs that version of the emerald download
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- Seen Nov 24, 2023
1636 FR squirrels
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- Seen Mar 13, 2022
Heya, this romhack looks really cool!
So I'm trying to run it on my EverDrive-GBA X5 Mini, but the game's telling me it could not read the correct system time, and that I should enable the RTC. I've tested the RTC on Pokémon Emerald, and it's running as expected, granted I did not use Boktai to set the RTC. Would you know how I can get the game to recognize the RTC? Many thanks in advance!
EDIT: Sorry! It turns out the RTC was disabled after all. For anyone else who sees this and is running into this issue: When selecting the ROM in the bootupmenu pick "ROM settings" and set "RTC" to "ON".
EDIT: Sorry! It turns out the RTC was disabled after all. For anyone else who sees this and is running into this issue: When selecting the ROM in the bootupmenu pick "ROM settings" and set "RTC" to "ON".
Last edited:
- 173
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- Seen Feb 4, 2024
Extremely awesome hack I ever played! Now I'm looking forward newer version(s) so I can explore whole redwood forest lol
I will report some bug: Why Gastly could be poisoned by Clear Smog? Isn't poison type immune poison? And if you have >=100 same items, then go mart to sell and press down, you will see "0?" instead of cap at "99".
I will report some bug: Why Gastly could be poisoned by Clear Smog? Isn't poison type immune poison? And if you have >=100 same items, then go mart to sell and press down, you will see "0?" instead of cap at "99".
Last edited:
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Dear Unbound team,
I have finally completed Pokemon Unbound for the first time on my New 3DS (played on virtual console) and I would like to share my thoughts and opinions about this wonderful ROM hack. Hope you don't mind a bit of a longer recount from someone that's been playing the game for over a year by now (including the time spent playing BFD), and I hope you will find this interesting and possibly useful to read :)
First of all, I would like to say that this is an opinion of a "non-pro" Pokemon player. I have been playing Pokemon games, both official and fan-made ones, for several years on an on and off basis, but I have never played competitively on Showdown or participated in any tournaments. Before encountering advanced ROM hacks that, among other things, increased the difficulty curve, I only played Pokemon casually, with the latter games giving me little challenge and little incentive to keep playing them because for the most part, they were the same rehashed story and the same "choose any pokemon, do anything you want and you can still win" approach.
Battle Frontier Demo. My first experience with Unbound came in the form of the Battle Frontier Demo (BFD for short), which I began playing approximately half a year before the official release of the full game. I clocked well over 100 hours in BFD and I still turn it on from time to time when I want to have fun battling with various competitive teams. This was the first ROM hack that actually opened up the world of Pokemon strategy to me and made me consider moves such as Stealth Rock or Defog or Will-o'-the-Wisp seriously and made me actually start building synergistic teams. The fact that BFD did not require a time-consuming breeding and EV training procedure to get competitively viable Pokemon allowed me to quickly experiment with a diverse variety of team compositions. I thoroughly enjoyed the various activities, but most of all I played 6v6 (and some 3v3) singles and doubles battles and enjoyed not only every single victory, but every single defeat as well. It was back then that I first noticed the value of the custom battle engine that not only sported Gen 7 pokemon and Gen 8 mechanics, but also the improved AI that actually did things like switching and some move prediction and whatnot, making you actually feel on your toes when battling the computer (as opposed to the typical "mash the strongest attack on the current mon" strategy that works very well in official games and many ROM hacks built around the "vanilla"-ish difficulty as well). I can say that BFD has always been a lot of fun, and still is. I don't know what the plans for BFD are, if there are any at all, but in my opinion, it still deserves a place of its own even after the full game release. As an idea, if you allow me to toss one into the mix here, it might be an interesting thing to either keep the BFD alive as a separate release (if at all possible in the sense of allocating enough time and resources into updating BFD with the bug fixes and the QoL improvements from the main game - not sure how much backporting is required here) or maybe even it's possible to consider integrating BFD into the full Unbound itself as a separate mode ("Battle Frontier Mode" or whatever, similar to what's done in this respect in e.g. Emerald Enhanced), if that's possible. I know that Battle Frontier is already in the full game, but it's different - it's a part of the main world and it requires you to breed and EV-train your mon before you can actually viably compete, as far as I understand. That's really fun and interesting in its own right, but having the ability to just play the Frontier and get random Pokemon for BP and experiment with move sets and items and team compositions without having to spend many hours carefully crafting each team member is a really great and rewarding experience. I guess it's just two different experiences - similar to how PvP online Pokemon in an actual official game is different from a PvP online battle on Pokemon Showdown where you can quickly whip up any team you want and get straight into battling. In fact, BFD is so much a thing in its own right, in my opinion, that even the word "Demo" in the title is a bit of a misnomer at this point - I know it was intended to be the gameplay and engine demo before the full release, from hence the name "Demo", but at this point, I think it has outlived its purpose and role as a demonstration, and has all rights to be called a game of its own - "Pokemon Unbound: The Battle Frontier" or something along those lines, haha. At any rate, enough about the BFD, let's talk about the main game.
Main story. I started playing Unbound in December 2020 with the first full release, and I can say that I was really happy to see that I'm presented with a difficulty level choice. I don't remember what the difficulties were originally called (I think there was a bit of a change in names across the updates), but I decided to have my first playthrough on "Difficult", which is a step up above Vanilla. The first thing I noticed about the main campaign is how well the game world was thought through. It was a completely custom region, with all-new characters and stories, and a *lot* of attention went not only into polishing this world visually but also thinking the story through. On the surface, it looks like a classic Pokemon story - you have all the necessary elements here - a Pokemon professor giving you your first pokemon, a journey that takes you through 8 gyms to obtain 8 badges, challenging the Pokemon League and becoming the champion, and, of course, an evil plot to unveil and thwart as you go along. Yes, it may be a classic Pokemon story, but the way it's presented is really detailed and unique, in my opinion - it's not cliche, it's very well written, with a lot of attention paid to characters (that actually makes you think about those characters and care for what happens to them), and thus the world rather alive and believable. And yes, the graphical presentation is top notch for a GBA hack - bigger sprites and diverse tilesets make Unbound the most beautiful ROM hack I personally played to date. When it comes to the diversity of things to do, I found Unbound to deliver greatly in that respect as well. I encountered well over 40 missions on my first playthrough - basically, side quests that weren't necessary for the main story but which were those extra things you could do for fun and extra reward. I only completed 18 of those at the end of my playthrough of the main story, I didn't focus specifically on them and I left most of them for the post-game (and for the future updates as well, since the upcoming update seems to advertise better rewards and better format for some of the missions I'm interested in trying, for example, the Hall of Fame challenge mission). Overall, it has taken me 62 hours 38 minutes to complete my first playthrough on Difficult, and I can say this is definitely one of the longer Pokemon games when it comes to the main story (which is a good thing in my opinion). The main campaign was long and diverse and offered enough challenges and interesting detours in order to stay fun for the entire playthrough, and in order to feel satisfying at the end when the Pokemon League was finally conquered.
Difficulty level. When I entered the Hall of Fame, the game registered me as playing "Difficult/Vanilla 1.0/1.1". I'm not sure what exactly that means, I don't remember specifically switching into Vanilla difficulty and actually playing on it (though I may have checked out the difficulty slider in the options without confirming the difficulty change, maybe that's why, or maybe it's something that reflects the change in difficulty levels across updates). At any rate, that observation is unimportant, as I mentioned, I played on Difficult for as long as I can remember, and I can say that on this difficulty level, I found the game reasonably challenging and rewarding to play. It was considerably more challenging than what you would call "vanilla/classic/casual Pokemon", especially when it came to gym leaders and various bosses (and especially the Elite Four and the Champion - that took a number of tries), and it made me actually start considering team compositions when playing the main story. Some battles were easier than others and some were rather hard and required strategic thinking and a change in Pokemon move sets and/or items. I didn't specifically EV train or breed for IVs - probably that would have made this difficulty a lot easier if I did - but I found the game satisfying and rewarding without breeding/maxing out EVs when played on Difficult. I haven't experimented with any of the higher difficulties yet, I'm more than sure that I'm not ready for Insane, but I do want to experiment with Expert eventually. Pretty sure I will need to breed/EV train there to have a chance to succeed though. Overall, once again, Unbound excels in the difficulty scale, offering a variety of options for all skill levels, from "vanilla A-mashing" to mind-wrangling Insane where you can expect to lose a lot even with a fully trained team.
Longevity. One more thing that, in my opinion, reflects the scope and the value of Unbound is the sheer amount of options you have, especially in the post-game. I only barely started experiencing the post-game and I already feel that it'll probably take a couple hundred hours for me to go through everything the game offers. First off, there's the Battle Frontier which I already mentioned - with its variety of formats and activities you can participate in - and that alone, together with breeding and EV-training the mon for it, can be a time sink and consume dozens and hundreds of hours. Then, there are the missions, some of them unique to the post-game - as far as I know, there are approximately 80 of them at the moment, some of them can't yet be completed until the game world is completed in a future update, but most of them are finishable. All of this combined, together with all the various other options you're presented with (New Game+ at different skill levels, Randomizer, etc.), make Unbound one of the most replayable ROM hacks made thus far, in my opinion. In fact, there's no reason not to revisit the hack time and again - there is pretty much something to do at any given point (even when you exhaust all the possibilities and all you're left with is the Frontier), and more missions and side stories are apparently in the works at the moment for the future update.
Setbacks. I have to admit that, while playing Pokemon Unbound, I had several instances during the playthrough where I had to stop playing the game for a while. Now, I have to say, that objectively this most certainly has nothing to do with the game itself, and probably it just reflects the way I personally feel about certain things subjectively, so please don't take this as an unduly critical observation. First off, I sort of wish there was a way to tweak the difficulty level of some of the bigger and more difficult puzzles in the game, like there is a way to tweak the overall difficulty of the game. I found the Distorted World puzzle to be taking quite a bit of time, and I actually had to stop playing for a few days and get back to it later in order to feel "refreshed". However, I can't say it was overly frustrating or difficult - just took a while and required some experimentation and redoing things a few times repetitively to get to where I needed to get. Lacking any other form of activity or things to do in that area of the Distorted World, it sometimes started to feel mildly boring and that's why I had to stop for a while in order not to feel burned out on it. The other puzzle that actually had me check out the YouTube video was the Victory Road ice puzzle. I know it's meant to be the hardest puzzle of the game, but after a couple days of on and off experimentation and writing down possibilities I felt like I was about to give up on it completely, and the other alternative was apparently to pay up 200000 pokedollars (which required grinding), so I just went ahead and looked up the solution online. I guess that if there was an "easier" version of the puzzle, perhaps, it would have been not as frustrating for someone who's not so much into puzzle-based gaming, but... like I said, it's just my subjective experience. I have to say that the puzzle itself is very well made, by the way, and offers a lot of challenge as it is most certainly designed to do. Also, all the other puzzles, including all the gym puzzles, were just the right difficulty for me, and I've never felt, at any other moment in the playthrough, the necessity to give up playing because of the puzzle or the desire to look up the solution online.
The other subjective setback that in my opinion deserves a mention are the experienced bugs and minor game/QoL issues. I spent most of my time playing the game on version 1.1.3(.1), where the ROM hack is currently at and has been for almost the entirety of 2021 so far. On the one hand, I can say that the experience I've had has mostly been glitch-free, and I can commend the team on releasing a game that's most certainly more polished than many commercial titles out there. On the other hand, whatever issues I did face (some of them very minor, some of them are AI exploits, some of them actual game issues, one of which actually made me think that I may have an unbeatable save on my hands - I don't remember the details since it was a while ago, but there was a character that didn't advance the plot dialog, luckily, the reload fixed it). Now, you might wonder why I even bring up bugs here in setbacks because, well, any game has bugs, and many games (and many ROM hacks) have far more bugs than Unbound does. The only reason I bring it (and completely subjective again, mind) is that over the last 9 months or so, I encounted probably a few dozen of these little things and I went over to Discord to report them, but before I did, I checked the fixed issues list and I noticed that pretty much every single time, something I encountered and wanted to report was already reported by someone else and already fixed for the upcoming patch. In fact, by now there's a list of nearly 250 bugs and exploits listed as fixed internally, but sadly, none of those fixes were made public yet since the upcoming patch is taking longer to complete (I imagine it will be the world expansion for the Redwood Forest?.. That's my guess anyway). Trust me, I understand full well why it is so - there is likely no way for the team to branch off Unbound to provide a "bugfix and QoL-only" release path that would allow to release bugfix patches for the game on a more regular basis while working on a bigger project, and all the bug fixes and QoL improvements go together in one development path with all the ground-breaking, new developments and the world expansion that are currently being developed. In fact, maybe it's also the same reason why BFD hasn't been updated for a long time as well - there's no easy way to backport bug fixes and minor tweaks to it without having to spend considerable time and effort on it, possibly rewriting and adapting things. Therefore, what I'm saying here is just wishful thinking - I just sort of wish there was actually a way to "split off" bug fixes from the bigger developments, and I sort of wish there was "1.1.4" and "1.1.5" to clean up those issues and exploits based on the fixes that are already implemented somewhere in code and maybe provide some minor QoL improvements while working on the big expansion patch. But once again, it's a non-commercial hobby project, where the team works entirely in the time frame and within the constraints of the workflow allowed by the real life and work of each participant, so my observation shouldn't be treated as any attempt at a reproach or anything like that.
I apologize if anything in my recount might seem or feel critical - I'm a part of a dev team for a relatively big non-profit fan game project as well (Forge, if anyone is curious - a non-profit fan made Magic: the Gathering game, been a developer and maintainer for over 10 years), so I know full well both how much effort and time go into projects like that and how you have to balance real life and hobbies in order to actually find the time necessary to develop a big project such as Unbound. Therefore, please don't take anything I wrote in here as unwarranted criticism or pressure, that certainly wasn't intended. I wish the entire dev team the best of luck in the ongoing effort to complete an upcoming big update, whenever it may come, and I'm looking forward to revisiting Unbound again in the future and keeping playing it when the time allows me, in all its different forms and modes. Thank you very much for an amazing and unique project!
I would like to wish the Unbound development team lots of luck and determination on their current effort to complete a big patch that will make the game, I'm sure, even greater and more engaging and fun to play than ever. Judging by Discord announcements of the past, there are indeed things to be looking forward to, and I can only hope that the team won't feel burned out working on this project and will be able to see it through to completion (a bit worried here that the last gameplay-related announcement or teaser happened a couple months ago, I hope and pray it's not an indication that the development has slowed down or stopped). By the way, if you allow me one more opinion as a developer, I think that even if all those announcements already spoiled on Discord are made a part of the next release, it's already going to be a release worth far more than just a bump in the minor version number (as far as I can tell, it's planned as version "1.2"). In my opinion, those changes and a possible world expansion that might go with them deserve at least the title of "2.0", and possibly even an expansion pack-like subtitle for the ROM hack itself. Since honestly, those changes are no smaller (and potentially bigger) than what some commercial games do when they release full-on expansion packs for their games that take a year or more to complete.
All things considered and no matter what may come and when in the future of Unbound, I'll definitely keep playing your amazing ROM hack for the rest of the year and into 2022, exploring new difficulty levels and options and possibilities and enjoying every moment of it. Thank you very much for a wonderful experience like no other so far in the world of fan-made GBA ROM hacks!
Kind regards,
Agetian
I have finally completed Pokemon Unbound for the first time on my New 3DS (played on virtual console) and I would like to share my thoughts and opinions about this wonderful ROM hack. Hope you don't mind a bit of a longer recount from someone that's been playing the game for over a year by now (including the time spent playing BFD), and I hope you will find this interesting and possibly useful to read :)
First of all, I would like to say that this is an opinion of a "non-pro" Pokemon player. I have been playing Pokemon games, both official and fan-made ones, for several years on an on and off basis, but I have never played competitively on Showdown or participated in any tournaments. Before encountering advanced ROM hacks that, among other things, increased the difficulty curve, I only played Pokemon casually, with the latter games giving me little challenge and little incentive to keep playing them because for the most part, they were the same rehashed story and the same "choose any pokemon, do anything you want and you can still win" approach.
Battle Frontier Demo. My first experience with Unbound came in the form of the Battle Frontier Demo (BFD for short), which I began playing approximately half a year before the official release of the full game. I clocked well over 100 hours in BFD and I still turn it on from time to time when I want to have fun battling with various competitive teams. This was the first ROM hack that actually opened up the world of Pokemon strategy to me and made me consider moves such as Stealth Rock or Defog or Will-o'-the-Wisp seriously and made me actually start building synergistic teams. The fact that BFD did not require a time-consuming breeding and EV training procedure to get competitively viable Pokemon allowed me to quickly experiment with a diverse variety of team compositions. I thoroughly enjoyed the various activities, but most of all I played 6v6 (and some 3v3) singles and doubles battles and enjoyed not only every single victory, but every single defeat as well. It was back then that I first noticed the value of the custom battle engine that not only sported Gen 7 pokemon and Gen 8 mechanics, but also the improved AI that actually did things like switching and some move prediction and whatnot, making you actually feel on your toes when battling the computer (as opposed to the typical "mash the strongest attack on the current mon" strategy that works very well in official games and many ROM hacks built around the "vanilla"-ish difficulty as well). I can say that BFD has always been a lot of fun, and still is. I don't know what the plans for BFD are, if there are any at all, but in my opinion, it still deserves a place of its own even after the full game release. As an idea, if you allow me to toss one into the mix here, it might be an interesting thing to either keep the BFD alive as a separate release (if at all possible in the sense of allocating enough time and resources into updating BFD with the bug fixes and the QoL improvements from the main game - not sure how much backporting is required here) or maybe even it's possible to consider integrating BFD into the full Unbound itself as a separate mode ("Battle Frontier Mode" or whatever, similar to what's done in this respect in e.g. Emerald Enhanced), if that's possible. I know that Battle Frontier is already in the full game, but it's different - it's a part of the main world and it requires you to breed and EV-train your mon before you can actually viably compete, as far as I understand. That's really fun and interesting in its own right, but having the ability to just play the Frontier and get random Pokemon for BP and experiment with move sets and items and team compositions without having to spend many hours carefully crafting each team member is a really great and rewarding experience. I guess it's just two different experiences - similar to how PvP online Pokemon in an actual official game is different from a PvP online battle on Pokemon Showdown where you can quickly whip up any team you want and get straight into battling. In fact, BFD is so much a thing in its own right, in my opinion, that even the word "Demo" in the title is a bit of a misnomer at this point - I know it was intended to be the gameplay and engine demo before the full release, from hence the name "Demo", but at this point, I think it has outlived its purpose and role as a demonstration, and has all rights to be called a game of its own - "Pokemon Unbound: The Battle Frontier" or something along those lines, haha. At any rate, enough about the BFD, let's talk about the main game.
Main story. I started playing Unbound in December 2020 with the first full release, and I can say that I was really happy to see that I'm presented with a difficulty level choice. I don't remember what the difficulties were originally called (I think there was a bit of a change in names across the updates), but I decided to have my first playthrough on "Difficult", which is a step up above Vanilla. The first thing I noticed about the main campaign is how well the game world was thought through. It was a completely custom region, with all-new characters and stories, and a *lot* of attention went not only into polishing this world visually but also thinking the story through. On the surface, it looks like a classic Pokemon story - you have all the necessary elements here - a Pokemon professor giving you your first pokemon, a journey that takes you through 8 gyms to obtain 8 badges, challenging the Pokemon League and becoming the champion, and, of course, an evil plot to unveil and thwart as you go along. Yes, it may be a classic Pokemon story, but the way it's presented is really detailed and unique, in my opinion - it's not cliche, it's very well written, with a lot of attention paid to characters (that actually makes you think about those characters and care for what happens to them), and thus the world rather alive and believable. And yes, the graphical presentation is top notch for a GBA hack - bigger sprites and diverse tilesets make Unbound the most beautiful ROM hack I personally played to date. When it comes to the diversity of things to do, I found Unbound to deliver greatly in that respect as well. I encountered well over 40 missions on my first playthrough - basically, side quests that weren't necessary for the main story but which were those extra things you could do for fun and extra reward. I only completed 18 of those at the end of my playthrough of the main story, I didn't focus specifically on them and I left most of them for the post-game (and for the future updates as well, since the upcoming update seems to advertise better rewards and better format for some of the missions I'm interested in trying, for example, the Hall of Fame challenge mission). Overall, it has taken me 62 hours 38 minutes to complete my first playthrough on Difficult, and I can say this is definitely one of the longer Pokemon games when it comes to the main story (which is a good thing in my opinion). The main campaign was long and diverse and offered enough challenges and interesting detours in order to stay fun for the entire playthrough, and in order to feel satisfying at the end when the Pokemon League was finally conquered.
Difficulty level. When I entered the Hall of Fame, the game registered me as playing "Difficult/Vanilla 1.0/1.1". I'm not sure what exactly that means, I don't remember specifically switching into Vanilla difficulty and actually playing on it (though I may have checked out the difficulty slider in the options without confirming the difficulty change, maybe that's why, or maybe it's something that reflects the change in difficulty levels across updates). At any rate, that observation is unimportant, as I mentioned, I played on Difficult for as long as I can remember, and I can say that on this difficulty level, I found the game reasonably challenging and rewarding to play. It was considerably more challenging than what you would call "vanilla/classic/casual Pokemon", especially when it came to gym leaders and various bosses (and especially the Elite Four and the Champion - that took a number of tries), and it made me actually start considering team compositions when playing the main story. Some battles were easier than others and some were rather hard and required strategic thinking and a change in Pokemon move sets and/or items. I didn't specifically EV train or breed for IVs - probably that would have made this difficulty a lot easier if I did - but I found the game satisfying and rewarding without breeding/maxing out EVs when played on Difficult. I haven't experimented with any of the higher difficulties yet, I'm more than sure that I'm not ready for Insane, but I do want to experiment with Expert eventually. Pretty sure I will need to breed/EV train there to have a chance to succeed though. Overall, once again, Unbound excels in the difficulty scale, offering a variety of options for all skill levels, from "vanilla A-mashing" to mind-wrangling Insane where you can expect to lose a lot even with a fully trained team.
Longevity. One more thing that, in my opinion, reflects the scope and the value of Unbound is the sheer amount of options you have, especially in the post-game. I only barely started experiencing the post-game and I already feel that it'll probably take a couple hundred hours for me to go through everything the game offers. First off, there's the Battle Frontier which I already mentioned - with its variety of formats and activities you can participate in - and that alone, together with breeding and EV-training the mon for it, can be a time sink and consume dozens and hundreds of hours. Then, there are the missions, some of them unique to the post-game - as far as I know, there are approximately 80 of them at the moment, some of them can't yet be completed until the game world is completed in a future update, but most of them are finishable. All of this combined, together with all the various other options you're presented with (New Game+ at different skill levels, Randomizer, etc.), make Unbound one of the most replayable ROM hacks made thus far, in my opinion. In fact, there's no reason not to revisit the hack time and again - there is pretty much something to do at any given point (even when you exhaust all the possibilities and all you're left with is the Frontier), and more missions and side stories are apparently in the works at the moment for the future update.
Setbacks. I have to admit that, while playing Pokemon Unbound, I had several instances during the playthrough where I had to stop playing the game for a while. Now, I have to say, that objectively this most certainly has nothing to do with the game itself, and probably it just reflects the way I personally feel about certain things subjectively, so please don't take this as an unduly critical observation. First off, I sort of wish there was a way to tweak the difficulty level of some of the bigger and more difficult puzzles in the game, like there is a way to tweak the overall difficulty of the game. I found the Distorted World puzzle to be taking quite a bit of time, and I actually had to stop playing for a few days and get back to it later in order to feel "refreshed". However, I can't say it was overly frustrating or difficult - just took a while and required some experimentation and redoing things a few times repetitively to get to where I needed to get. Lacking any other form of activity or things to do in that area of the Distorted World, it sometimes started to feel mildly boring and that's why I had to stop for a while in order not to feel burned out on it. The other puzzle that actually had me check out the YouTube video was the Victory Road ice puzzle. I know it's meant to be the hardest puzzle of the game, but after a couple days of on and off experimentation and writing down possibilities I felt like I was about to give up on it completely, and the other alternative was apparently to pay up 200000 pokedollars (which required grinding), so I just went ahead and looked up the solution online. I guess that if there was an "easier" version of the puzzle, perhaps, it would have been not as frustrating for someone who's not so much into puzzle-based gaming, but... like I said, it's just my subjective experience. I have to say that the puzzle itself is very well made, by the way, and offers a lot of challenge as it is most certainly designed to do. Also, all the other puzzles, including all the gym puzzles, were just the right difficulty for me, and I've never felt, at any other moment in the playthrough, the necessity to give up playing because of the puzzle or the desire to look up the solution online.
The other subjective setback that in my opinion deserves a mention are the experienced bugs and minor game/QoL issues. I spent most of my time playing the game on version 1.1.3(.1), where the ROM hack is currently at and has been for almost the entirety of 2021 so far. On the one hand, I can say that the experience I've had has mostly been glitch-free, and I can commend the team on releasing a game that's most certainly more polished than many commercial titles out there. On the other hand, whatever issues I did face (some of them very minor, some of them are AI exploits, some of them actual game issues, one of which actually made me think that I may have an unbeatable save on my hands - I don't remember the details since it was a while ago, but there was a character that didn't advance the plot dialog, luckily, the reload fixed it). Now, you might wonder why I even bring up bugs here in setbacks because, well, any game has bugs, and many games (and many ROM hacks) have far more bugs than Unbound does. The only reason I bring it (and completely subjective again, mind) is that over the last 9 months or so, I encounted probably a few dozen of these little things and I went over to Discord to report them, but before I did, I checked the fixed issues list and I noticed that pretty much every single time, something I encountered and wanted to report was already reported by someone else and already fixed for the upcoming patch. In fact, by now there's a list of nearly 250 bugs and exploits listed as fixed internally, but sadly, none of those fixes were made public yet since the upcoming patch is taking longer to complete (I imagine it will be the world expansion for the Redwood Forest?.. That's my guess anyway). Trust me, I understand full well why it is so - there is likely no way for the team to branch off Unbound to provide a "bugfix and QoL-only" release path that would allow to release bugfix patches for the game on a more regular basis while working on a bigger project, and all the bug fixes and QoL improvements go together in one development path with all the ground-breaking, new developments and the world expansion that are currently being developed. In fact, maybe it's also the same reason why BFD hasn't been updated for a long time as well - there's no easy way to backport bug fixes and minor tweaks to it without having to spend considerable time and effort on it, possibly rewriting and adapting things. Therefore, what I'm saying here is just wishful thinking - I just sort of wish there was actually a way to "split off" bug fixes from the bigger developments, and I sort of wish there was "1.1.4" and "1.1.5" to clean up those issues and exploits based on the fixes that are already implemented somewhere in code and maybe provide some minor QoL improvements while working on the big expansion patch. But once again, it's a non-commercial hobby project, where the team works entirely in the time frame and within the constraints of the workflow allowed by the real life and work of each participant, so my observation shouldn't be treated as any attempt at a reproach or anything like that.
I apologize if anything in my recount might seem or feel critical - I'm a part of a dev team for a relatively big non-profit fan game project as well (Forge, if anyone is curious - a non-profit fan made Magic: the Gathering game, been a developer and maintainer for over 10 years), so I know full well both how much effort and time go into projects like that and how you have to balance real life and hobbies in order to actually find the time necessary to develop a big project such as Unbound. Therefore, please don't take anything I wrote in here as unwarranted criticism or pressure, that certainly wasn't intended. I wish the entire dev team the best of luck in the ongoing effort to complete an upcoming big update, whenever it may come, and I'm looking forward to revisiting Unbound again in the future and keeping playing it when the time allows me, in all its different forms and modes. Thank you very much for an amazing and unique project!
I would like to wish the Unbound development team lots of luck and determination on their current effort to complete a big patch that will make the game, I'm sure, even greater and more engaging and fun to play than ever. Judging by Discord announcements of the past, there are indeed things to be looking forward to, and I can only hope that the team won't feel burned out working on this project and will be able to see it through to completion (a bit worried here that the last gameplay-related announcement or teaser happened a couple months ago, I hope and pray it's not an indication that the development has slowed down or stopped). By the way, if you allow me one more opinion as a developer, I think that even if all those announcements already spoiled on Discord are made a part of the next release, it's already going to be a release worth far more than just a bump in the minor version number (as far as I can tell, it's planned as version "1.2"). In my opinion, those changes and a possible world expansion that might go with them deserve at least the title of "2.0", and possibly even an expansion pack-like subtitle for the ROM hack itself. Since honestly, those changes are no smaller (and potentially bigger) than what some commercial games do when they release full-on expansion packs for their games that take a year or more to complete.
All things considered and no matter what may come and when in the future of Unbound, I'll definitely keep playing your amazing ROM hack for the rest of the year and into 2022, exploring new difficulty levels and options and possibilities and enjoying every moment of it. Thank you very much for a wonderful experience like no other so far in the world of fan-made GBA ROM hacks!
Kind regards,
Agetian