- Having access to almost every existing Pokemon makes adjusting your team extremely easy, and also extremely fun.
- Several quality of life changes are extremely welcome, and make the game far less of a slog to get through.
- Mega Evolutions always feel satisfying to both beat and to perform, and completely refresh the game.
- The difficulty spikes throughout the game can cause tedium, and really feel both untested and unbalanced.
- Quality of Life improvements such as the Pokevial and access to the PC from anywhere feel like they can undermine the point of the hack.
- Item’s feel like they’re thrown at you out of the blue and in vast numbers, causing confusion.
There’s a seeming predilection in the Pokemon ROM hack community towards hacks that make the games notably harder.
The most famous of these is obviously Pokemon Radical Red, a hack of Pokemon FireRed Version that turns the game into a far more strategic affair that you can’t just power your way through, but there’s also several other hacks that turn up the heat, and Pokemon Emerald Imperium is another one of these types of hacks, for (you guessed it) Pokemon Emerald.
Unfortunately, though, several balance problems keep this hack from being as high-quality as Radical Red, even if certain improvements are incredibly welcome.
Pokemon Emerald Imperium uses a battle engine similar to that found in hacks which use the Complete FireRed Upgrade, meaning that moves from generations going all the way up to Generation 9 can be found and used in the game, and mechanics such as Mega Evolutions are featured prominently in the title (indeed, developer Iriv24 went above and beyond in this aspect, creating custom Mega Evolution sprites for Pokemon who previously had none).
Pokemon going all the way up to Generation 9 are also available, and you can choose starters from any region, which makes designing your team all the more engaging, especially when there’s so much more to think about when it comes to type match-ups and figuring out what Hidden Ability is best for any given scenario.
There’s also an additional rival added in the form of Dawn, who is traditionally found in Generation 4 Pokemon titles, and all the Gym Leaders from the Sinnoh region. Just like in Radical Red, these additions exist specifically to test your team in different ways than the game would traditionally test you, asking the question of whether you’re prepared for any given scenario.
It’s a cool idea, but it’s an idea that’s better executed in other ROM hacks, especially due to the way that the difficulty improvements in this hack are implemented
The difficulty improvements in Pokemon Emerald Imperium are very weirdly placed. Certain fights it feels possible to steamroll through, regardless of the make-up of your team (I tested a mid-game Gym leader with a variety of different teams, and it felt like a lot was left down to luck rather than skill), while some fights feel like punching a diamond wall, with opponents using moves that can seem altogether unfair and feel more trial and error than anything approaching actual strategy.
There’s also the fact that several characters will just give you a whole stack of items, something that Radical Red didn’t do due to wanting to force the player to grow naturally in skill rather than rely on Berries and the like, and not only does it unbalance the game: it also can feel like you’re drowning under the weight of a thousand potential options.
Scattering these throughout the game, or placing them in PokeMarts would be the optimal solution here, rather than throwing that at the player and hoping they have the wherewithal to go through everything that’s been handed to them.
It is worth noting that Emerald Imperium isn’t strictly feature-complete. While most elements of the game are complete, several, such as some post-game Legendaries, aren’t actually in the game yet, so there’s still the opportunity for complaints made here to be fixed over time.
What’s much more difficult to fix, however, is several Quality of Life decisions made by the developer that are baffling. Most are really worthwhile, such as completely removing the need for ‘HM Slaves’, and being able to toggle an Infinite Repel whenever you want (something that Radical Red also did, and came as an absolute god-send to people exploring caves and the like who didn’t want yet another Zubat).
For some reason, the ability to heal from anywhere has been added to the game in the form of the Pokevial, along with the ability to access the PC from anywhere.
The latter of these is included ostensibly so that you don’t have to go back and forth between Pokemon Centres between each battle, but it has the unfortunate side-effect of making it so that you never really have to think about your team, and the ability to heal anywhere only makes this feel more pronounced, essentially completely removing the need to purchase items at all (especially since, as is custom in these hacks, players cannot use items in battle unless they choose the lower difficulty option).
These are both things that aren’t unique to this specific ROM hack, but it really does feel like it cheapens the challenge level of anything they’re included in. Not enough to completely ruin the experience, but enough to make it just that little bit worse.
Overall, the improvements to the game do enough to make this a ROM hack worth playing for anybody who specifically wants a significantly harder version of Pokemon Emerald, but if you’re looking for a direct one-to-one version of Radical Red for Generation 3, you may want to wait a little while to see if any additional improvements are made.
