One of the most popular Pokémon ROM hacks of the year is Heart & Soul, a reimagined GBA Pokemon Emerald ROM hack that attempts to give Gold & Silver a whole new life, with an insane ammount of upgrades, quality-of-life enhancements and challenges for you to explore. This update went live on 23rd August 2026.
Just imagine if GAME FREAK made this for GAME BOY Advance; well, this would be it, but on an entirely new level, available to be downloaded ethically from HackDex, by patching your own Pokemon Emerald file.
To make you aware just how vibrant this ROM hack is, it features an expanded Johto, it comes with Pokemon from 1st, 2nd and 3rd generations, it has a day/night system, 16 gym leaders, two safari zones, and even allows your chosen Pokemon to follow you, alongside a bunch of other features that I don't want to spoil. It's worth playing, I promise.
New Features added/changed in 2.0
- Rebuilt the game and all features on pokeemerald-expansion
- Restored Surf and Bike music, with option to disable
- Abilities up to Gen 9, including Hidden Abilities
- Items from up to Gen 9 available, including shiny charm (not all items)
- Randomizer has all mons Gen 1-9
- Hidden Items + Itemfinder
- Overhauled Kanto maps and tilesets
- Kanto rematch trainers
- Kanto in-game trades
- All PokéGear Rematches from GSC (and some new ones), including gift items, with option to disable
- Full PokéGear Radio with all channels from Crystal (and some new ones)
- PokéGear Condition menu
- All 92 HGSS TMs
- New postgame content
- Kurt's Berry Balls boost catch rate by custom-defined type affinity if more impactful than the vanilla boost
- GB Player Key Item to toggle Gen 2 music and sounds
- Ice Path boulder puzzle
- Mom's Savings System
- Voltorb Flip
- Entei, Raikou and new kanto roamer are all independent
- Choose one lati to roam kanto. The other will be at southern island.
- Roamers no longer intentionally avoid the player's route
- Added a sound cue and animation when the player enters the same route as a roamer
- Added clock to start menu
- Changed [REDACTED]
- Room Decoration (dolls only) in New Bark Town
- Spiky eared pichu event in viridian
- Added [REDACTED]
- Slowpokes grow their tails back when you beat the league
- Tutors and trades can utilize your pc pokemon
- Added [REDACTED]
- Can fly to more routes and pokemoncenters
- Rocket takeover only happens after 7th badge, no matter where you get it
- Buffed the kimono girls
- Various UI/UX improvements, including Shiny Markers for colorblindness accessibility and shiny-hunting QOL
- New Battle Backgrounds: Cave ponds, snowy routes, snowy mountain, snowy cave, volcano cave, new beach
For those wondering if this was developed with AI, I can confirm it was, but on a minor level. The developers have stated: "every line of code written for the game is either hand-written or manually reviewed by a member of the team. However, it is still important to point out that LLMs like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot have been used for some tasks, such as reviews of hand-written code, debugging, auto-completion, and creating Python Scripts for I/O procedures. However, it was not used for generating any assets such as art and music.
