Pokemon Crystal Clear is a romhack that provides an experience unlike any official Pokemon game. And it makes me wish Game Freak would take notes.
For those unaware, Pokemon Crystal Clear is a romhack of Pokemon Crystal for the Game Boy Color. Pokemon Crystal was the third game in Generation 2. Generation 2 games are notable in that they include nearly all of the first Generation’s landmass in addition to a whole new region. So instead of defeating 8 gym leaders before you can complete the game, you have to battle 16 before you can take on the “final boss”.
In the official release, you have to play through all of Johto (the region new to Gold/Silver/Crystal) before you can take on Kanto (the region from Red/Blue/Yellow). And the order you do each gym in the regions are set, for the most part. You can do a handful out of order, but you’re doing most of them in the developer intended order.
Pokemon Crystal Clear throws all that out and brings a new style of progression to the series. The first choice you make in the game, even before picking a name, is choosing a starting town. You can pick any of the towns from either of the two regions in the game. And you don’t have to worry about starting in a town that was home to a gym that housed level 30 Pokemon in the original game, because gyms and trainers scale now. Trainers scale based on how many gym badges you have, and gym leaders will even change their teams around. So if you wanted to start in Pewter City in Kanto, Brock will be the first gym leader you fight, and his team will be very similar to what it was in Pokemon Red. But if you decide to take him on as your 16th Gym Leader, the battle will be drastically different.
It’s freeing in a way. It makes the Pokemon world feel real. It makes sense that Gym Leaders would change their team around based on if a strong or weak trainer challenges them. There are no “wink-wink” moments where a Pokemon suspiciously blocks a path until you beat a Gym. If you’re having problems beating the gym you’re at, you can just go to the next one and come back once you have a better type advantage.
Freeing is a good way to describe this romhack as a whole. There are very few limitations placed on the player. There’s obvious stuff like not being able to challenge the Elite Four with less than 8 badges, but there’s other restrictions like not being able to receive Cut until you have 2 badges.
Renewability is another concept valued highly in this hack. I can only think of 1 item that you can’t get more than once. All TMs are purchasable, you can get infinite Lucky Eggs and EXP Shares, and you can even farm Master Balls. Every Pokemon is catchable in the Wild. So you just don’t have the single starter you picked at the beginning. You can find a Squirtle or Cyndaquil in random encounters.
I loved when TMs were made to be reusable in the mainline series. It promoted experimentation. In older games, I would just hoard TMs and use ones I knew that I wanted. But once they didn’t destroy on use, I experimented a lot more. It’s kinda like that classic mindset of saving healing potions in Skyrim “in case you need them later” and you finish the game with hundreds of them. And while TMs are still destroyed on use, I’m happy with the middle ground of them being infinitely replenishable.
I know some people really value scarcity in a game, and how it forces you to be really thoughtful with your choices. I guess I can see the appeal, but I kinda drift away from games like that. I’m not a big fan of the pressure that game design breeds. I like being given as many options as possible and be able to swap between them freely.
What do you do if you find out your starter has terrible stats in the vanilla game? You have to trade from another game or just start a new save file. But in Pokemon Crystal Clear, you can go out and catch another Charmander, Togepi, whatever. The only limit… is your mind.
(is that line dumb? probably. dont forget to delete that)
The Pokedex is also GREATLY enhanced compared to it’s vanilla counterpart. In addition to the height, weight, and description that the base game gives, you’re also given information about learnable moves, type disadvantages, level-up info, and you can even view it’s shiny sprites.
I don’t think I’ve ever been one to “catch ‘em all”, but it actually feels really satisfying tracking down Pokemon when you can get all the information about where to find a Pokemon in-game, rather than on a wiki. It’s fun to catch as many as I can. I even labeled all the boxes and I’m putting them in numerical order. It’s kinda stupid and a waste of time, but its fun (and still a waste of time).
There’s so many more little things that I’m probably forgetting about. Your Pokemon can follow behind you like in HeartGold/SoulSilver, there’s a setting to make pokecenter healing go faster, you can decorate a home, you can fly to any town without having to go there first, you can RUN, the list goes on. There’s an innumerable amount of tiny quality of life features that make it hard to go back and play the vanilla version.
Pokemon Crystal Clear is one of my favorite Pokemon games. The open-world natures creates for an experience that’s unlike any Pokemon game to date. And the weird thing is, this was achieved by taking out all the narrative from the vanilla game. You don’t fight Team Rocket in this game and you don’t have to chase down the gym leaders before you can fight them. Technically, that all happened before the events of Crystal Clear. NPCs will talk about buildings that used to be occupied by Team Rocket, then mention how some kid cleared them out with his Pokemon.
It makes me wish that we see Pokemon take a more open approach when it comes to game design. Game Freak has dabbled in allowing you to choose between one of two gyms, but that’s not really a meaningful choice, is it? At least when compared to being able to challenge any of the 16 gyms in any order.
Crystal Clear reminds me a lot of Breath of the Wild in how you can tackle the game in any way you want. I hope we see that type of game design in Legends: Arceus and in the future past that.
Would I Recommend It?
Of course I would. This romhack is a labor of love that provides a Pokemon experience unlike any in the series. The quality-of-life additions make this an extremely enjoyable experience, even as someone who just played the most recent game in the series.