I used to play a ton of ROM hacks and fangames quite a while ago, but I hadn't really checked on very much of what's being made now. It's pretty amazing how far things have come since the days of stuff like Quartz! However, I'm also more than a little overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options around now. I took a peek around the Showcases and the Hall of Fame (along with this thread), but I was wondering what you folks suggest. Is there any particular game you really, really enjoyed?
Major pluses for me would be a ROM hack or fangame that has:
-An original region without too much focus on story. A lot of these story focused hacks tend to get a bit melodramatic for my taste, and the ones in old regions have sort of a "Been there, done that" feel sometimes.
-Some crazy new mechanic. Mega Evolutions and regional forms are all well and good, but is there anything out there that does something really wild?
-A lack of random difficulty spikes or focus on competitive teams prior to postgame. The kind of Pokemon I use in normal gameplay and the ones in competitive are wildly different. I want to be able to use my Dunsparce in peace.
I'm not expecting to find things that meet all of the criteria, but that's sort of my ideal wish list. While I'm here, I figure I'd drop a few general recommendations of my own for anyone else reading this thread.
I really enjoyed Focas Lens' Puppet Dance Performance/幻想人形演舞 and expansion. It's far and away the most polish I've seen in a fangame. I'd imagine it's pretty hard to get legitimately in the west as they don't ship internationally (Though they do sell it digitally), and if you don't know Touhou, I'd imagine it's pretty hard to get into a Touhoumon standalone game. It has some pretty fantastic quality of life features like the 6th gen EXP share, along with a slew of original ones like a shared resource gained like exp used for swapping abilities, moves, and purchasing EVs. There's also some interesting mechanical changes, like instead of evolving, a level 30 everyone gets to pick a specialization that changes learn lists, abilities, and sometimes typing as well. It has a very fair difficulty curve, a stupid amount of content with the expansion in place, and a wonderful soundtrack. It's also in full Japanese, but I'd imagine there's patches floating around to change that.
The novelty of the Crystal Randofuser is still absolutely crazy to me. It's a randomizer that mixes evolution lines of the same stages with proper difficulty checks and consistency so routes and trainer's teams make some kind of sense. I had a great time playing through it over the course of a lazy afternoon.