Welcome back to Save State, where the grass is always greener. A month or so ago, fan-made Pokemon Emerald Rogue had a massive update that changed significant portions of the game, so much so that save files with previous versions were incompatible with the changes and required that everyone start fresh. Seeing as how I greatly enjoyed the original roguelite, I jumped right back into Emerald Rogue 2.0 for a considerable number of hours, and I would love to share some of the changes that this incredible ROMhack has made, even compared to a version from last year.

If you’re completely unfamiliar with Pokemon Emerald Rogue, it does away with Pokemon’s usual story campaign and focuses on the gameplay that’s been a mainstay of the series for the last 28 years. Within minutes of starting up Emerald Rogue 2.0, you’ll be shown a group of three Pokemon, one of which you can catch to be your starter. The great thing with this title is that your starter Pokemon can be anything. In Emerald Rogue 1.0, mine was a shiny Corphish that I took all the way to the Hall of Fame, while in 2.0, I was lucky enough to get a Larvitar in my starting trio for my first Pokemon on this brand-new journey.

After selecting your starter, you’ll get some basic information about how the title works and then will be off on your adventure, which is the primary game mode present in Emerald Rogue 2.0. On adventures, you’ll be given a few options of paths you can take, represented by icons on an overworld map. You’ll have routes where you can catch Pokemon and battle opposing trainers, which are now conveniently color-coded to represent the predominant type of Pokemon therein and use these particular areas to build your team and prepare for battling gym leaders at the end of each world map path.

Your primary goal is to do this to get eight gym badges, beat the elite four, the champion, and then finally, your rival. While you go through this journey, if any of your Pokemon reach 0 hit points, they’re considered dead and are wiped from your party. This means that you need to balance the money you get from winning trainer battles and selling off unnecessary items between purchasing healing items, battle items, and hold items that may very well form the cornerstone of your strategy. If a Pokemon dies to a surprise Focus Blast you didn’t expect, oops, you need to play more carefully in the future and look towards catching something new to occupy that team slot now.

The new nodes you can encounter in 2.0 have differing levels of risk vs reward, too, as you can find a battle simulator that lets you wager items, cash, or even the strength of your Pokemon for rewards, but only if you beat the kid using the Pokemon he chooses for you. There are also evil team hideouts where you can battle against Team Rocket, Aqua, Magma, and Galactic for some big rewards, including the extremely rare Master Ball. There’s even a new daycare rest stop where you can drop off a Pokemon for use later, buy Pokeblocks, or pay a delivery man to bring you a specific item of your choosing later into the run when you reach another daycare stop node.

The selection of items and Pokemon you find in every route path will be wildly different run to run. Sometimes you may get lucky and find an early Scyther with its technician ability and then find a Metal Coat right after, but other times you get nothing but Oops All Stunfisk. Roguelites are often a game of balancing resources, and Emerald Rogue is no different. You start with a little cash and can earn some more by battling trainers. One thing 2.0 has improved is that trainers reward you with more cash after a win, which is suitable since battling trainers, especially late in the title, can present a huge risk.

It’s impressive just how many things Emerald Rogue 2.0 managed to cram into this tiny package because Pokemon wander around on the map, a change that’s been popular ever since the main series tried it out with Let’s Go. On top of this, all 9 generations of Pokemon are present, so you can have a team of Ash-Greninja, Tinkaton, and a Mega Evolved Metagross all on the same team. Evolving and learning new moves follows the Legends Arceus method of letting you choose when to do so through the team menu, which is an absolutely excellent change. Players can even use multiples of the different battle gimmicks throughout the series, too, including Mega Evolution, Z-moves, Dynamax, and Terastallization, and you can choose which you use and which ones are verboten.

Some of the changes in 2.0 include methods of being able to control for RNG, which is amazing, as there will be times you couldn’t find a specific evolution or hold item when you desperately needed it, but now with the daycare rest stop delivery man, you can at least mitigate some of the item RNG. Similarly, being able to stash up to 3 Pokemon for later use in the daycare can be a godsend if you nearly party wiped against a gym leader. There are new honey tree nodes on the map, as well, which let you use Pokeblocks to lure specific Pokemon, which can be super useful if you desperately need a water Pokemon for your team but haven’t been able to locate a single route with a useful water Pokemon on it so far.

The methods to reduce RNG are your advantages towards being able to handle an improved AI that can more reliably use some of the more deadly strategies throughout Pokemon’s history. Especially early on in your Emerald Rogue 2.0 experience, you may have significant difficulty buying the hold items and TMs you need for your team, as inflation has even hit the Pokemon Rogue world with a vengeance. Thankfully, late game trainers are replete with cash that they’re willing to give to you if you beat them, but even random trainers in the middle of nowhere can have strong legendary Pokemon that threaten to sweep your team if you don’t choose right. Sometimes you need to take that risk, though, because money is tight in 2.0, and reaching the end of your adventure and wiping with a full wallet is a tragedy: spend ‘em if you got ‘em.

There are, of course, things you can do to help prepare yourself for a successful adventure run if you’re having difficulty. In between adventures, you’ll be back in your hub world, where you will be rewarded for challenges you’ve completed with money and building blocks. You can spend the building blocks to build useful facilities wherever you’d like to have them, and you can place things like item shops, a berry farm, and a daycare. The item shop is great because it lets you spend your hub money to put an item into your bag, which means you can smuggle specific items of your choosing into your adventures (the literal first item I bought was a Metal Coat. If you can’t tell, Scizor’s my favorite). The whole building aspect of 2.0 was completely unexpected and makes it so that many players’ hub areas may look nothing alike.

The daycare is especially advantageous, as you can stick up to 3 Pokemon in the daycare between adventures, which effectively means you can smuggle Pokemon of your choosing into any run of Emerald Rogue 2.0 you do. All you have to do is visit a daycare rest stop during an adventure and withdraw some Pokemon to bolster your team. Of course, you can also improve the stats of your Pokemon using berries and Pokeblocks in the hub, and you can catch Pokemon that you caught in previous adventures to take into new adventures with you instead.

One major thing that Emerald Rogue 2.0 changed up is that difficulty levels are selectable now- you can even turn off permadeath if you want to or enable permanent saves in the middle of your adventures so you can make multiple attempts when something gets really challenging. You get rewarded money for how far you make it in an adventure, but you can unlock additional reward funds and even unique or shiny Pokemon by clearing challenges on average or hard difficulty too.

So, all in all, Emerald Rogue 2.0 is a major overhaul with a customizable hub, more challenging AI, tons more options for team building, and you can use all of your favorites across all 9 generations of Pokemon with any or all gimmicks from the last four generations. There are tons of challenges to complete (as of now, I’ve only cleared about 70% of them in around 100 hours), multiple game modes, and you can still choose between single and double battles too. This is an incredible update that should be sure to interest the most hardcore Pokemon fans, and you even have some limited multiplayer functionality where you can embark on an adventure with a friend!

So, if you can’t tell, I’ve greatly enjoyed Emerald Rogue 2.0. Probably an unhealthy amount, if we’re being honest, but I think this also makes a great spot to end today’s entry. Always remember, parents, that the fastest way to get your kids’ attention is to sit down and look comfortable.

See you again at the end of the month!