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NOTE: There is a different ROM hack called Crystal Clear on Pokecommunity that I am NOT talking about here. What I just finished was Shockslayer's perfectly done open world hack, and I strongly recommend it. What follows is basically a rant following my past week of playing it nonstop.
The whole reason I got into playing ROM hacks was because I love playing and replaying the Pokemon games, but I've never been able to get into anything past Gen III. I love Pokemon the same way I love chess, in that the surface level simplicity of the game is enhanced by an underlying complexity. The problem for me starting with Gen III and then compounding thereafter was that the complexity just got to be too much and the simplicity was lost. After adding in abilities, multiplying the number of available Pokemon, methods of evolution, contests, natures, moves, TMs/HMs, etc. etc. it just got to be too much, so ROM hacks offered a way for me to mix up the Gens I was most comfortable with and give me the same experience I enjoy without the staleness of repetition. And Crystal Clear does that perfectly. The major ways that it does this are by:
1. Increasing the options for starters and skipping much of tutorial business. This allowed me to hit the ground running in the game, and to do so with a different start to my team than I'd ever had before.
2. Opening up the world. You do the gyms in whichever order you want and they scale with you. This is the central premise of the hack, and its genius is in letting the player create their own narrative. Rather than railroading through the same order of gyms like I always had before, I got to personalize my character's journey according to what resonated most with me. I liked the idea of a kid from Pallet getting his first badge from the next city over and fighting his way to face off against Morty for my final 16th badge, and I liked it so much more than if the exact same path I took had been predetermined.
