Crystal hack: Pokémon: Wasteland

[z3bra]

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Pokémon: Wasteland​

cover art by Zenkai2727

Official website: Pokémon: Wasteland
Latest version: Wasteland 1.5

Overview
Embark for a short, yet challenging Pokémon adventure!

Discover Dakos, a small region set in a hostile wasteland, with a unique story.

Goals
Dakos is a small region with only 3 towns, all accessible from the beginning.

I wanted this hack to propose a short adventure to the player. A game that you can start and finish in a single run, but that would still feel immersive and challenging.
For this reason, a lot of effort was put in the dialogs to provide a coherent story to the player.

Talking to the NPCs is very much encouraged, as they will help the player understand its surroundings and figure out a way to progress through the adventure. But you can also just grind your way there if that's what you're into 😉.

The storyline and tileset hopefully matches the wasteland theme. But so does the overall hostility of trainers and wilderness (especially at night!). Items scarcity in Dakos is real too, as you won't find a single potion in this ROM !

Features

• Original Wasteland tileset and story
• Starter given at level 30
• Challenging battles with fine-tuned trainers
• Increased wilderness diversity (with day/night cycle)
• Exp. Share benefits your whole party
• Running shoes available from the start
• Reusable TM
• And much more…

Screenshots

Credits
This ROM hack would not be what it is without the amazing work of these people (be it for the game engine, artwork or inspiration!) :

• Pret's team
• Rangi42
• RainbowDevs
• coraldev
• LuigiTKO
• Chamber
• Soloo993
• Blue Emerald
• Lake
• Neslug
• Pikachu25

Checksums
Base: Pokemon: Crystal Version (Rev A)

CRC:  3358E30A
MD5:  301899B8087289A6436B0A241FBBB474
SHA1: F2F52230B536214EF7C9924F483392993E226CFB
Size: 2048kb

Hack: Pokemon: Wasteland (Version 1.5)

CRC:  DAFDA27E
MD5:  B224A1E75C7F67F48EC31E2B138BC4AA
SHA1: 46E8E35812C6F5CDAB465AB13A5DD5EA4828A91B
Size: 2048kb

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[Inner Rhymes]

Ohhhh! I think I vaguely remember this title screen from reddit. Congratulations on the release!

 

[z3bra]

Thank you ! It sure was a lot of work, and I'm very excited to finally release it. I feel like it is now complete, and I hope people will enjoy playing it through !

 

[Marky Vigoroth]

Aiyah! You actually posted from the get-go a complete hack that already had several revisions!

 

[z3bra]

Yes sir !

I know the frustration that comes from ROM that are still under development, so I wanted to propose a fully complete experience right from the start !

Given that this hack is very short, it was totally possible to do, and I'm very satisfied with the current result.

 

[z3bra]

Just pushed version 1.5 to fix an issue with the nurse (if you say no, the game breaks).

 

[Lolight2]

I finished playing this hack, really awesome!
It made me wish that we could see more of the region in an expanded hack :)

 

[z3bra]

Ah cool ! How did you like it ? Yeah I understand the frustration but I wanted to make a short hack that's fully complete as an experiment rather than a half-baked full region ;)

 

[LaunchThePolaris]

Just finished the hack and I really like it !
There's a lot to enjoy in that wasteland, may be small but it got a lot of charm

 

[Exdysis]

Hi, I wanted to mention some of the bugs, oversights, and mistakes I encountered while playing it. I played this game on 3DS Virtual Console, but I'm pretty sure most of the issues were just oversights in developing the game rather than an emulator related bug.

• Near the start of the game, the old couple scripted to talk to you walk over the bed tile
• Hitmonlee's back sprite was gray
• A trainer on Route 2 says "Don't you dare taking our stuff!"
• Thursday is spelled wrong in the menus
• The palette used for Cut isn't recolored to match the new tree palette
• The Move Tutor displays physical/special despite there being no split in the game
• Dodrio can relearn Drill Peck despite not (?) learning it before level 38 (I'm pretty sure you just used the vanilla learnsets for Crystal)
• After defeating Soraya (blue kimono girl on route 4), she says her sister Soraya is mute. She should refer to Ariana, the other kimono girl on the route
• The Cooltrainer on R
  Spoiler:
  oute 4 says "the shepherd is a cool guys named Eddie"
• Black Pond Creek doesn't have "pond" capitalized
• A sentence of the final boss's post-fight speech automatically clicks through

Some thoughts on the game (includes spoilers)

Spoiler:

Overall, I found the hack interesting, but leaving something to be desired even despite its limited scope. The map design, especially with the new tilesets, were a big highlight, and not having to slog through the game's early levels was great. Pokémon feels really good when it's around level 30-50 and I think this hack made a good choice with that.

However, I felt like the game suffered a lot from not addressing Pokémon balance issues intrinsic to the vanilla gen 2 learnsets. Which Pokémon were/weren't worth using pretty much lived and died by that alone, with maybe one or two Pokémon per route even making it onto my teambuilding radar. I think reworking some learnsets and adding in a few more TMs would have done a lot to make the game more enjoyable.

I get the impression that the apparent lack of checks for the final boss's Alakazam (other than evolving Eevee into Umbreon, which I somehow neglected to do) was an intentional design element since you know it's going to be on the boss's team, but when Pokemon hacks make boss battles hard by just not giving you good counters, I think that's about the point where the difficulty starts to feel frustrating. Feel free to let me know if there were any Dark or Steel types included that I just didn't notice.

Moreover, it felt like the gimmick of having limited resources was only relevant in the last area, so there was nothing to keep me from just hoarding all of the resources until then and not being stressed on recovery items at all. Basically all of the difficulty was concentrated in the final area, and while it was pretty challenging (without going overboard and requiring grinding to progress).

Also, I think that you should have included something in the thread OP about the unreal time system. That was a really neat feature, but it took me a little while to figure out how it works because I had never seen something like that before.

Hope you find the feedback useful. Cheers!

 

[z3bra]

Thank you for the awesome feedback ! First of all, thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed comment on this hack, I appreciate it. Thanks for spotting those bugs, they definitely slept through despite my hundreds of runs and beta testing by other people as well. I'll look into fixing them.

Now about your other comments, be aware that my goal was to make a rather challenging game, without making it a grindfest. I wanted people not really into pokemon romhacks to be able to pickup the game and enjoy it, hence why it might not seem "that" challenging for seasoned players. This hack was also a way for me to experiment different stuff, like the day/night system, higher item prices, etc...

About the moveset, phys/spec split, etc... This was on purpose. I wanted people to be able to apply their knowledge of the original games in there, without having to use online spreadsheets or wikis. It does hurt balance overall, but I prefer this approach for a short game like this. Also I do not understand the original balance issues well enough, and was afraid of making things worse and soft locking the player somehow.

About the (apparent) lack of counter to the final boss, this is simply unfortunate I guess. Now that you say it, I realize there are very little of them (you can find both Houndoom and Scizor in the grass, but that's about it).

Spoiler:

However I put Gengar in the player's path exactly for this reason.

He's more of a glass canon, but a strong challenger IMO.

Edit: I checked back what I did, and there are in fact more dark/steel Pokemon in the wild: Houndoom, Murkrow, Sneasel, Larvitar/Pupitar, Scizor, Steelix. You can find the exhaustive list along with probabilities here: data/wild/dakos_grass.asm

As for the items, I was again scared to softlock people with a team too weak that they couldn't revive. My initial idea was to raise the prices for items, but this only made the start of the game unpleasant, so I gave up on it. Initially I wanted to give limited quantities to the shop items, but failed to program that well enough, so I gave up on that too. I like that you are stuck with only pokeballs to capture lvl 50+ Mons though ;)

Finally, regarding the day/night, I initially added that feature because I though it would make more sense to just "skip time" by sleeping. This was more of an Easter egg than anything, and I though it was to "small" of a feature to actually mention that. But after receiving so many good feedback about it, I realize this is the ROM's killer feature haha, so I'll probably mention that on the website ^^

 

[Ify201]

Creepy!

 

[TheEndOfTheRoad]

Yo z3bra, thanks for making this hack! This was an awesome little experience, didn't expect to get merk'd by a few trainers, but hey, it was worth it.

 

[Kitsune95]

I can get 1.4 to patch and play fine but not 1.5

 

[Unfolding]

I just played through this hack! Been looking for hacks with a shorter scope that do something more interesting than the typical eight-gym formula, and I really appreciated how there are multiple paths and how you can achieve the objectives in any order... that is, after you even find them! In that way, it has a sort of classic "Nintendo Hard" feel which was really refreshing. There's definitely some balance issues in terms of available Pokemon and just plain awful movesets, not to mention the levels of trainers and bosses, but balancing is always tough in an open concept hack like this. I also got a bit frustrated by the lack of PCs - I needed to free up a Pokemon slot for Flaffy for that quest, and that meant I had to go all the way back to Dawn Town, unless I missed a PC somewhere.

But my favorite thing was the existence of a "postgame" of sorts - I bet very few people realized that after you beat Azmov and her team, you can go back through the world and see a lot of different dialog, the graveyard prisoner reunited with his family, no more Rockets, and an optional super hard Mewtwo boss battle with a decent number of hints pointing you in that direction. This is a really cool thing to put in your hack! I can't decide whether it was a missed opportunity that you didn't advertise that there was more to do after the gym battle, or whether it's clever and makes the "true ending" exclusive. I ran back through the world because of the general quality of your hack and the fact that there were still some maybe unresolved questions, but it was still a leap of faith that I guessed you would have done something after the ending.

All in all, great work. The world needs more short hacks like this one!