Hello everyone, today I want to talk about the Rom Hack Pokemon Renegade Platinum. It's a Rom Hack created by Drayano on the game Platinum and makes many quality of life and difficulty changes that significantly improves the base experience.
The Improvements included are numerous. Such as unlimited TMS, and free move tutors and reminders (so you can teach your Pokes all kinds of varied moves). In fact, most Pokes have been buffed in some way to make them more viable than their original versions. For example Farfetch'd is now Fighting/Flying and has better stats and has access to moves like Close Combat turning what would be a jobber in the Pokemon Games into a potential monster. Luxray is now dark/electric and has access to more physical electric type moves, including some from later games. In fact, moves like Scald and Wild Charge, first introduced in Black and White have been retroactively added to this game. Even Unown, the Pokemon that can only learn hidden power, now knows Secret Power, Ancient Power and Cosmic Power as well and nearly took out one of my Pokes. The Fairy Type has been added giving players a counter to Dragon types. Eggs hatch near instantly making breeding less of a chore. You get the Poketech apps instantly, many side events are aleady completed like collecting all the Unown or seeing all Regional Pokemon which reduces a ton of tedium. All Pokemon, including legendaries and mythical are obtainable in the game without needing to trade or get DLC. There's an NPC in the daycare that can help you quickly level up but also EV train. This game is amazing for Nuzelockes. HMs are also reduced to just needing Strength, Rock Climb, Surf and Waterfall to complete the game which is more reasonable. Rock Climb being a rock type move now makes it more valuable as a pretty strong physical rock move.
The hack also makes improvements to the difficulty in fun and fair ways. Gym Leaders have full teams and competitive movesets and updated AI. They will switch their Pokes, use weather and status conditions and other tricks to make the player not rely on brute force to win. I remember there was a bug trainer that used rain dance to weaken my fire type moves and had a Scyther use bulk up and rock moves to sweep my team. The Elite 4 even have randomized teams so you can't even pre-plan a winning approach and need to adapt on the fly. It's just great. This isn't just one of the best rom hacks I've ever played, but one of the best Pokemon games and RPGs ever based solely on the gameplay. There's so much choice in team building, custom challenges etc. I implore you to play this game if you haven't.
My criticisms are the same ones I had for regular Platinum. The game is pretty slow. Text and battles and animations progress quite slowly. "Saving a lot of data" is a meme amongst its playerbase. I also find the progression of the story odd. Like, imagine if I told you "hey, there's this JRPG where you start out in a small town and 30 hours in, you go to what is basically Hell and fight the Devil", you'd expect the game to be all about that and build up to it. But in Platinum, the Distortion World and Fight with Giratina is such a small part of the adventure and has very little build-up to it specifically is done. And when it's done, everything goes back to normal like nothing happened and your player character spends another couple hours beating the 8th gym and Elite 4. Early adventures with Cyrus and Team Galactic feel so detached from the Distortion World. They're the classic Pokemon criminals that steal Pokes which makes the stuff in the Distortion World feel like an out of place nonsequitur. Like, I have criticized Hoeen's Team Magma and Aqua but their goals of "more land/ocean" was set up well and followed up on and people in Sootoplis reacted to what was going so it felt like stuff was going down in the world. It felt somewhat grounded and set up in the world of Hoeen despite how unrealistic it was. Platinum seems to jump the shark with alternate dimensions, a God of Time, a God of Space, The Devil and a full on God Pokemon all while Mew exists. Seems overkill to have so many legendaries as well. I would rather we have more regular pokemon. It would hurt the power creep a lot less.
Cyrus as a villain is also just not interesting to me. I get that Pokemon is meant to be "Saturday Morning Cartoon" levels of deep but I don't feel Cyrus compliments that. With other villains, they had a grounded view of the world and some character change as a result of your progress. Giovanni was the head of a mafia and did crime, taking him down meant also taking down said crime syndicate. Archie and Maxie can be contextualized to stand in for industry and environmental conservation respectively and were misguided in their goals. Defeating them gets them to decide to work together and realize their mistakes. N was manipulated, later realizes this and sets out to seek his own truth thanks to the player. Cyrus has nothing. He hates emotion and the current world because he's....... evil? Even though the world of Pokemon is already a Socialist Utopia (they got free healthcare, the environment is treated as a priority, there are no crimes done by regular individuals or companies, there is no corruption in the justice system, there are no taxes or expenses for accessing many services. Even Debt collectors are very chill) so Cyrus feels out of place. Even when you beat him, he just goes "I'll make a new Red Chain and try again". I know some people like him because he's "the first truly evil Team Leader" but that makes him shallow as a puddle and rather out of place.
Sinnoh as a region is also oddly designed. On the surface it looks somewhat open-ended and non-linear. But no, it's quite linear and Mt Coronet in the center hampers travelling back and forth. Oreburgh is the ony city with a link to the Bike route which should normally make backtracking easier but you never need to go back there for any reason. This makes this the first region where Fly is pretty much required to traverse it in a reasonable way wheras past games were better layed out. You have Snowpoint City so far to the North so you might think it's the last area you have to visit but no it's the home of the 7th gym.
The various towns are also visually similar. There seems to be just smaller towns and big towns with little variation like Snowpoint and Oreburgh. Gen 3 looked a lot more distinct despite being on the GBA.
These critcisms do detract a bit from the game but the gameplay and improvements more than make up for it.
I'll briefly mention Diamond and Pearl. I started Pokemon with these games first so they're very nostalgic to me. Me and my Honchcrow were amazing. I was even able to beat my friends who were using Platinum with its superior roster using my weak Diamond Pokemon. I guess Honchcrow, Bronzong, Gastrodon, Gyrados, Lucario and Luxray were quite the team (with Abomosnow, Torterra, Tentacruel, Staraptor, Crobat and Golem as backups). But these games are quite lacking. The pacing of the game is weird, like you gotta backtrack to Hearthome to challenge Fantina. Cyrus has next to 0 screentime so he's even more of a waste (at least Platinum gives him speeches to show he's like this charismatic cult leader) and so few Pokemon. Seriously, there are only 2 fire pokemon lines- Infernape and Rapidash- a starter and a mediocre mon respectively. So if you didn't pick Chimcharr your options are limited. So much so that the Fire Type Elite 4 has to use 3 Pokes that aren't fire types, one of which is even weak to fire ("Galaxy Brain Strat: Abomasnow can't be 4x to fire if there are no fire Pokemon around" *taps forehead). Gen 4 introduced so many new Pokemon that were good evolutions of older Pokes like Leafeon, Glaceon, Gliscor, Rhyperior, Tangerowth, Electvire, Magmorter etc that never showed up in D/P, but the game is totally cool with having so many Baby Pokemon and countless old guys like Zubat, Tenacool, Geodude etc everywhere. 🙄
So yeah, Platinum fixes most of D/P's issues. And Renegade Platinum makes what's there near perfect in terms of gameplay. The only improvements I can suggest now are what rom hacks like Theta Emerald and Gaia were able to do and have Pokemon and moves from later gens added in. But given how hard DS Rom Hacking appears to be, RP is probably already at the limit of possible improvements and that is already incredible and better than most regular Pokemon games. I'm perfectly happy if I never get Diamond/Pearl Remakes that use SwSh as the base, because Renegade Platinum is already better than any official remake
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