>>54175072First we need to define terms:
>Difficulty HackThis is a hack that simply makes the game more challenging for people above the age of 10. Most romhacks fall in this range somewhere. Common examples are Drayano, Dio Vento, Buffel Saft, etc. Now, these range in terms of quality and fun; some people might not want to slog through hundreds of shitmon trainers knowing that they WILL eventually win, but have stat walls to overcome. Others introduce fun gimmicks for the gym that doesn't make the experience tedious, but different. Examples would be like including weather effects in the gym or making use of pokemon move combinations while switching.
Most don't succeed in making the game more fun, because they fall into the pitfalls of making every trainer, not challenging, but tedious. Fighting Rattatas with perfect IV/EVs isn't challenging. It's just long, either by brute forcing it, or forcing me to EV train on wild route mons for hours.
>Challenge HackWhat Run&Bun is (OP subject), and others like Emerald Kaizo, Radical Red, and Unbound Insane, are "challenge" hacks. These are inherently designed to be unfun for the general population (Unbound goes so far to give you a warning on selecting the difficulty saying as much) but they cater to a specific niche. In OP's example, Run&Bun is made by a competitive pokemon player, where every trainer is effectively a competitive fight. The appeal here lies in seeing thematic teams (be they type gyms, trainer classes, etc.) that normally one would never see on Smogon/VGC, but at a level one would expect from playing there. For most people, getting filtered by Youngsters and Bug Catcher isn't fun. But for some, they do really enjoy teambuilding for every fight, consulting documents for strategies, and running percentages to determine if they have kills.
And it's okay to not like that. I certainly don't. But they're not designed for most people. It's like going into Elden Ring but wanting to play Breath of the Wild.
