Emerald hack: Touhoumon Purple

[Agastya]

I'm sure that you've heard of Touhou Puppet Play (referred to as "Touhoumon" from this point on) at least once by now, and that's what this is. For those of you innocent enough to not know what it is, it is a Japanese fakemon hack of Pokemon Fire Red that replaces Pokemon with characters from the Touhou Project series while still following the basic progression of Fire Red. The latest version, 1.8, was another huge shift which was more focused on balancing the power creep between obtainable characters along with a new type chart and the Physical/Special class split for moves.

There are two main features to 1.8. The first main feature is that stats are very balanced and nearly everything (barring a few joke characters) is viable without abusing X Items or overleveling, and the second is that the vast majority of the cast has multiple evolutionary paths they can take by either leveling or simply using an evolutionary stone. As an example, something's level evolution could be a slow bulky special attacker, but by using a stone it could choose to become a fast physical attacker instead. This allows for a large amount of variety in team building, and adds replay value.

Now that the boring preface is out of the way, let's get to the main draw here: this is a hack of Pokemon Emerald (U) that uses Touhoumon's lineup of obtainable 'mons to take everything you know about Pokemon and snap it in half. This hack follows Hoenn's basic plotline and gameplay progression, but the changes to the 'mon lineup, attacks, and type chart changes the game rather drastically. Its mostly vanilla Hoenn since that was my aim, but there's a few curve balls thrown at you to keep you on your toes.

Anyway, now for some screenshots that I hope will show there's been enough changes to the ROM for this to be worth posting:

Spoiler:

"But wait!" somebody cuts in, "Can I still enjoy this if I don't know the first thing about Touhou?"
Well, yeah. It's still just Pokemon. A lot of the typings will make more sense if you know the characters, but there's a fair amount of documentation about 1.8 to tell you what character/move typings are.

"I don't want to learn a new type chart. That sounds dumb."
You learned a type chart when you first played Pokemon, didn't you? Just leave a type chart image up, it's not hard.

"I played a Touhou hack before, and it was an obnoxious grindfest where things just had high stats. Is this hack like that?"
No, because I'm not a complete idiot. That said, the difficulty level is overall higher than vanilla Emerald, but you won't have to grind to 100 or anything for the main game.

"I've seen Emerald hacks that replaced Pokemon before, and the Battle Tents and Frontier were a complete mess."
Not this one! The Battle Tents and Battle Frontier have been edited to reflect the in-game changes. They're fully playable, and they will kick your butt up and down the street if you're not careful.

"Prove it."
Okay, here's some screenshots of a few of a few things in the Frontier list, taken from the Battle Factory:

Spoiler:

Now that that's out of the way, the hack can be found on this page.
I host download links on an external web page so I don't have to worry about updating download links every place I post this, so I hope you understand. Along with the patches, I've enclosed just about every resource you could ever need for hunting items, knowing the level curve, so on and so forth.

As for a credits/thanks list:
Nintendo/Gamefreak: For Pokemon itself
ZUN: The guy who came up with Touhou Project and its characters, any Touhou content is his own creation
HemoglobinA1C: The man who made the sprites for the Japanese hack. He's stated that his sprites are all free to use as long as he is credited, and this is where he's being credited (outside of the readme file, of course)
Darthatron for the old Physical/Special split used for quite a while
DoesntKnowHowToPlay and Tailes of the Nuzlocke Forums for the current Physical/Special split
HackMew cuz look at all these crazy solid tools
Scizz, Silver314, Wichu, LU-HO, thethethe, and many others I may have forgotten for tools they've created as well
Chrisitan Mass for the hex editor XVI32
Bulbapedia for having Frontier structures well-documented

 

[machomuu]

I'm glad a Touhoumon hack has finally made its way over to PC, given its hacking community size. It's a shame that this is the first of them to come over, though, given the time between the first English patch and the time of this post.

Pertaining to this hack, I never knew about the stat balancing. This is a lifesaver, as it no longer makes hackers give trainers a crapton of Hyper Potions (which is a choice of potion that I really feel should have been used only in later levels, even when they were necessary) to make enemy trainers hard, and it eliminates the need to have to grind for the false-difficulty that was to ensue.

 

[Murkrow]

oh a new touhou hack? nice!

 

[Chronosplit]

Not to pick on what some view as very small details, but what's the status on the Dex entries?

 

[Agastya]

I'm glad a Touhoumon hack has finally made its way over to PC, given its hacking community size. It's a shame that this is the first of them to come over, though, given the time between the first English patch and the time of this post.

Pertaining to this hack, I never knew about the stat balancing. This is a lifesaver, as it no longer makes hackers give trainers a crapton of Hyper Potions (which is a choice of potion that I really feel should have been used only in later levels, even when they were necessary) to make enemy trainers hard, and it eliminates the need to have to grind for the false-difficulty that was to ensue.

The balancing was a feature of the original JP 1.8. It helps competitively, but it's not stopping bad hackers from slapping four Full Restores on every trainer thinking that's difficulty. See also: the unofficial JP patches that just spammed (underwhelming) legendaries and Attack forms.

oh a new touhou hack? nice!

Dunno about "new," it's been around publicly since about.. December last year? I just haven't posted it here until now.

Not to pick on what some view as very small details, but what's the status on the Dex entries?

My current goal for them is "sometime before the sun explodes." I'll probably start working on them again after I finish decapping, but I just don't feel like working with text for a while. You can view the stuff I've wrote so far here.

 

[搞五搞六]

I'm a freshman in Touhou Puppet Play.I want to ask whether Touhou Puppet Play is a series or just a rom?Is there a Firered hack of it?And is there any difference between them?THX!

 

[Murkrow]

hey im not exactly following touhou hacks since i played the original one like, quite long ago. will be giving this a whirl. i hope this can get updated much since i saw that some conversations are still not updated which can lead to some serious immersion breaking.

and when you mean difficult i hope its just not slapping doubleteam/minimize on every single mon as well (like a certain famous hacker here does)...

 

[machomuu]

I'm a freshman in Touhou Puppet Play.I want to ask whether Touhou Puppet Play is a series or just a rom?Is there a Firered hack of it?And is there any difference between them?THX!

I'm in the process of writing a review of Touhoumon: Another World, so here's a summary (apart of that review) that basically explains it all.

For those of you that don't know, Touhou Puppet Play (aka Touhoumon) is originally a hack of Pokémon Fire Red. The hack replaces Pokémon with Touhou characters, in a similar fashion to how Moemon replaces Pokémon with Moemon. However, it does have its differences, specifically, moves, types, capturing apparatus, and various other features help to make the game differ from Fire Red. Originally it was simply the same adventure with Touhoumon characters, but then people started to take interest. Eventually, Touhoumon became a template for other Touhoumon hacks featuring various other changes, these changes ranged from entirely new regions and stories to smaller additions and patches such as new Main Characters and music.

Various hacks have different touhoumon, stats, and sadly in the minority of cases, stories and locations. The differences between them can be vast or minute, so it would be best simply look for hacks and see what they have in common and how they differ.

 

[sudloa]

oh man! this is very interesting.
i'll bookmark your hack for further update.
it looks really nice to try.

 

[Murkrow]

SO KAWAII

I swear i just melt to pieces seeing some of the chibi forms.

 

[or19937]

I remember playing this game a while ago. Didn't really enjoy it back then, but i'll give it another shot :3

 

[Agastya]

I'm a freshman in Touhou Puppet Play.I want to ask whether Touhou Puppet Play is a series or just a rom?Is there a Firered hack of it?And is there any difference between them?THX!

It's Japanese in origin, and originally a Fire Red hack. There's a million and one unofficial versions (this being one of them) but nearly all of the unofficial versions are terrible.

and when you mean difficult i hope its just not slapping doubleteam/minimize on every single mon

I'm pretty sure I can count the times I purposefully used evasion moves on one hand - as pathetic as it may sound, I sort of have a "passion" for the 1.8 "metagame" so foes rely more on actual good movesets rather than illegal moves or legendaries or evasion to kill you.

SO KAWAII

I swear i just melt to pieces seeing some of the chibi forms.

I remember playing this game a while ago. Didn't really enjoy it back then, but i'll give it another shot :3

Well, this hack probably isn't for everyone since you can't mindlessly space bar through it for the most part.

 

[Murkrow]

just notice an illogical moveset/tm...SKomachi can naturally learn willowisp but is unable to learn willowisp from the tm. Are the movesets copied directly from the original Jap version?

 

[Agastya]

just notice an illogical moveset/tm...SKomachi can naturally learn willowisp but is unable to learn willowisp from the tm. Are the movesets copied directly from the original Jap version?

Yes. In other words, blame Japan.
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It's been a while, but I guess I actually have reason to post in here other than "shamelessly bumping my thread for attention so I can feel better about myself." I finished writing the dex entries and I'm inserting them right now, but I haven't proofread the majority of them and at this point I don't really care. I also "made" some sprites for the other Orbs that still used their Ball graphics. They're not the best, but they get the job done.

There's been a lot of little things done here and there since I've posted this, so there'll probably be an update to this.. at some point "soon." I'm not giving any dates since I'll miss them and all 0 of the Touhou fans here will get mad at me.

 

[Master Xemnas]

It looks incredible, im going to play it soon !

 

[digimonqueen]

what level does your starter puppet evolve at? mines at level 13 right now. i chose the rabbit one.

 

[Agastya]

what level does your starter puppet evolve at? mines at level 13 right now. i chose the rabbit one.

All starters evolve at 36, which is around Norman's gym. Their stats are slightly higher than other unevolved forms so they won't be complete dead weight until then, but they'll start falling behind a bit around the Lavaridge stretch if you're raising a full team. Almost everything else available for capture before then evolves around 22 so you won't be behind the power balance.


Anyway, while I'm here, I may as well take this time to say I've finally gotten around to updating the hack after slacking off for a few million years. Your save files are still usable, so don't bother asking.

 

[digimonqueen]

where do i get a FLYING-type Puppet for Roxanne's gym? i can't seem to find one.

 

[DoesntKnowHowToPlay]

where do i get a FLYING-type Puppet for Roxanne's gym? i can't seem to find one.

Mystia and Tokiko, which are very hard to have not seen at that point in the game, are both pure Flying. If you were serious about not being able to find one of them you're probably going through the game way too fast as they're very common early on.

 

[digimonqueen]

you mean CMystia? i think i saw one, but i ran out of Tohou Balls and i'm kinda broke. trainers keep on kicking my butt.