notorious Exp issues right after Ecruteak.
this isn't Chikorita-exclusive lol, Chikorita just gets the short end of the stick because it sucks with the gyms. Gen 2 in general has this problem; if you want to add a new team member past Ecruteak you're basically SOL unless you spend 8+ hours grinding on the lowest-level wild pocket monsters you've ever seen.
Does anyone recommend any fangames (maybe romhacks?) that don't follow the traditional Pokémon formula? I've played PokéClicker, Pokémon Tower Defense, PokéFarm Q etc.
Emerald Rogue is a good one even if 2.0 is overly difficult for no real reason. I enjoyed the 1.0 versions (even though they really are pretty huge downgrades) and the game itself can be pretty fun in short bursts.
Despite the dev being a tranny, he's pretty quiet about it. Literal only time you'd ever know is if you looked hard at his profile picture or went into a secret room in a mostly-irrelevant building.
1.0 has character customization, town-building, meta progression and surprisingly decent balancing,
2.0 has all of this, expanded, as well as challenges/quests that feed into the town-building, rideable Pokémon, following Pokémon, a larger selection of Pokémon, a bunch of new features, and a few completely new routes to traverse alongside 1.0's transplants from mainline games. It also has multiplayer, but due to it involving some shit to do with IP addresses
and having no other friends autistic enough to do this stuff with me, I never got to give it a shot.
2.0 really is worth the upgrade even if it's a bit of a pain in the ass. It has difficulty settings (I was playing on Normal) with granular customization if you want to do something like remove all Pokémon of a certain generation or make trainers harder. 1.0 doesn't have this, but it does have two versions: "classic" (which sticks solely to generations 1-3, no gimmicks, old sprites, etc.) which I greatly enjoyed and "EX," which is the recommended version but stuffs in all that NuGen bloat. It's got every gimmick, every mon, DS sprites, etc. Did not like it nearly as much.
Anyways, go give it a shot. I genuinely think it's one of the better unconventional ROM hacks out there and it's a shame that it seems to have been overshadowed by Pokerogue's retarded controversies.
If you want something that vaguely follows the traditional formula but
completely (and I do mean completely) overhauls the battling system, I think I'd have to recommend
Pokémon Tectonic. It's such a drastic overhaul that it can be a little overwhelming, but I found it interesting enough. Never managed to get too far into it because I quickly lost the time unfortunately. I can't give a very in-depth review as a result, but I'll just say that even the first hour or two is rather surprising and it's quite a challenge to get ahold of all the new features and strategies the battling system opens up to you.
Rocket Red is probably stretching the definition of "non-traditional formula", but you play as a Rocket grunt doing Rocket grunt things and getting promotions so I felt it worth mentioning. Story's a bit edgy but it's a little endearing
until like 3/4 of the way through, when it gets so completely fucking insane that you can't help but laugh. Was supposed to get a huge 2.0 update in 2023 that got cancelled/indefinitely postponed because the trannies over at Pokecommunity threw a
multi-page fit in 2021 (that got completely deleted, because of course) over a one-off tranny line near the end of the game. This, understandably, pissed the author off enough to remove the download link from Pokecommunity for years and eventually led to him rescinding the revamp for an original game of his that's supposed to act as a spiritual successor.
All that drama aside, give the game a shot if it sounds fun. It was quite a bit of fun, at least to me, so I recommend it wherever I can.
I would probably recommend
Pokémon Crown if it had a single download available, but it's been over 3 years and the fucking thing doesn't even have a beta. If you still have hope and want to see what real-time battling in 2D might look like, in a medieval setting, it might be worth keeping an eye on.
I've heard good things about
Pokewilds, but from what I understand the dev team is full of retarded incompetent trannies and they haven't done any work on the game for
a year and a half now. There was some drama, I think, that I can't remember for the life of me. Nevertheless, it's Pokémon but survival. Try it, I guess.
If you want "Pokémon but survival" except
good, I must insert my obligatory
Cobblemon shilling section because this fucking mod has stolen hundreds of hours of my life at this point. It's technically just a Minecraft mod that adds Pokémon into an existing game, but the usual formula (gyms e4 champion etc.) is absolutely nowhere to be seen and a lot of the emphasis is just on hanging out with your bros while you build cool shit or go fishing. There are
add-ons that add trainers (
as well as loads of add-ons in general), and
future plans to include gym leaders + regular trainers and such, but none of them are officially implemented into the game yet so if you want to avoid that formula then Cobblemon's your man.
I hope I could be of service. Despite the plethora of ROM hacks out there, basically none of them are interested in doing something new with the formula unless it's for a GameJam. :/