Romhack Pokemon Crystal but open World ?! (Pokemon Crystal Clear review)

Pokemon has one of the biggest Romhack and Fan game scene, but when most people think about Pokemon Romhack people generally think of the GBA Romrack, while Romhacks based on the GBC games exist they are certainly less common than the GBA, today we will talk of one of them, Pokemon Crystal clear is a Romhack of Pokemon Crystal for the Gameboy colour, with the twist that is open world.

The game starts with a character creation screen, of course it isn't as complex as modern day pokemon games, in this game you choose your sprite from various pokemon chracters such as Red, Blue, Silver , Ethan and others, after selection the sprite you can edit their colour palet, some my character was a Silver with a Blue colour palet.

After choosing your character you can chose your starter Pokemon, you have mutiple choices from the Johto and Kanto to random Pokemon such as Ditto and Growlithe, mine was Porygon

After that you can choose where you want to start your jorney, tho levels aren't ajusted so it better to choose in an early game city/town.

If I had to describe this game's progression it would be Pokemon without an story or roadblocks, there's no Snorlax blocking the road, there is no Sudowoodo blocking the path to the next town, you can just walk to whatever city you want, there's no story events either outside of some sidequest for legendaries, this is a open wolrd game and you are free to do whatever you want , even pokemon gym are balanced so that their pokemon teams will scale with how many gyms badges you have , meaning that you can fight the Dragon Gym first and the flying gym last.

When I used to play Pokemon games as a child I always found the dialogue annoying, for me when characters started to talk I would just endlessly mash A until it's over, those moments they felt like it took forever to end, Cristal Clear completly removes that , I would love to play that game as a child and I really wish it came out when I was 10/11, but that 10 year old me is no more, and While it's really cool to play a pokemon game with no plot and dialogue that most people skip anyway, however playing this hack made me realise that the boring dialogue and especially the story detours were a necessary evil, because without them the game will just become a cicle of Gridning and Fight Pokemon's Gym, with catching pokemon whenever you need or want them, the story detour made the game less repetive, in fact one of my favourite moments in Pokemon Crystal was one of those detour when Team rocket invaded the Radio Station in Goldenrod city, I am not saying this to thrash on this Hack, after all it sets out to be an open world Pokemon game, and it complets that with sucess but rather to say it made me realise the inherent flaws of such concept.

With that said the game adds many Quality of life features that I really appreciate to pokemon crystal, the Pokedex is the main example, not only it gives the infomation a regular pokedex would alreday give such as their location and typing, but it also gives you their spawn rate, move sets, TM that they can learns and stats.

Other QOL features is the fact that you evolve pokemon that would normally only evolve using trade with 2 NPC, one in Kanto and Johoto, I am only giving these 2 example but there are many other QOL that I could spend all day talking about.

While I do have some issues with the gameplay loop, but I really do like this experince and there's something so satisfactory about playing a pokemon game where you can to whatever you want a make your team from whatever pokemon you want instead of being limted to pokemon that you have acess too, this hack uses the solid fondation of Pokemon Crystal and makes a sandbox of it for pokemon fans to enjoy, if you love Pokemon Crystal and want to revit it, this is the perfct hack for it.

The Graphics are pretty much the same as Pokemon Crystal, which was an OK looking GBC game, but pokemon was never exceptional with Graphics outside of Black and White, when I play old Pokemon games I generally play them muted, because I don't like the sound of most GBC and GBA games, but at least you can customise the music in the options menu.

This review is a bit short but so to end this review I am going to say that I liked this game so much that I even catched all of the 251 Pokemon in this game, something that I won't normally be able to do in a regular unmodded pokemon game because of things like trade evolutions , version exclusive and event only Pokemon.

No I didn't play this game for 300 hours this was mostly thanks to emulation speed ups

 

[PacGuy]

Crystal clear is great

 

[Nelson2001 Nelson2001]

A fairly well achieved and achieved Romhack of the original game that has improvements and quality of life and in addition to being slightly more challenging than the original but without losing the essence itself and by the way very good your review as always friend.

 

[Heinzu]

Very interesting hack, I haven't played it yet but I'm thinking about it. Thank you

 

[Glossy Cat]

Nice review! Thank you.