EDIT: I originally wrote this with improper links. This has been fixed... I won't be able to directly link you any ROM. You'll have to jump through a few hoops to get this done... But it's worth it!
This section of the forum seems quiet but I noticed no one has mentioned this game, which surprised me because it's so damn good!
POKEMON CRYSTAL CLEAR
created by ShockSlayer
This game is a HEAVILY modified version of Pokemon Crystal.
"So what?" you say, having seen hundreds of half-baked mediocre Rom hacks in your time.
"Shut the hell up," I say, "Keep reading!"
Features:
- Open-World, can travel anywhere, including between Kanto and Johto
- HMs not needed for any direct paths, but optional side areas still need them. HMs are found in both the normal Gen 1 and Gen 2 locations
- When you learn Fly, you can fly to places you haven't been to yet
- Choose your character sprite (like Rocket Grunt, or the 2nd Gen villain!) and colour tones
- A ton of starter Pokemon to choose from (all 6 starters, several babies, and several hard challenges)
- You choose your starting region, Kanto (Pallet Town) or Johto (New Bark Town)
- Kanto restored to Gen 1 glory (like Viridian Forest and Cerulean Cave), plus improvements
- Can tackle the gym leaders in ANY order
- Tons of secrets and flavour text
- Difficulty of the gym trainers/leaders is determined by your badge count; from level 10s to level 90s
- Can rechallenge gyms on varied stengths by interacting with statues at the front of the gym
- All 251 Pokemon are obtainable, special trainers let you trade for Pokemon that need to be traded to evolve
- Can rechallenge leaders and trainers at will
- Story basically stripped out; no rival, no Team Rocket blocking things up.
- Soundtracks from both the early and later games
- Extensive Options for quality of life, like making it so Nurse Joy turns you around after healing
- Can actually trade with the legit games; is recognized as plain Crystal!
- New, more challenging Elite Four; the old Elite Four can also be played if wished
(the game was updated after this video came out, including more starters and such)
"How have I never heard about this?" you ask...
Well, the above YouTuber who does Lets Plays on many Pokemon ROM hacks got his hands on it when it was publicly available and did some videos. They exploded in popularity. This excited the ShockSlayer team, but as the downloads started to accelerate they got freaked out (Nintendo are court jockeys) and removed all public links on their own without being asked to.
This is what you must do to get this game. Unfortunately I can't share the ROM itself, so there is a lot of extra work you're going to need to do so you can play this... (or get lucky finding it online somewhere, like perhaps an old easily-findable reddit thread where someone asked for it and a helpful user posted an archive.org link to an older version that used to be on the shockslayer.com website.....)
I recommend doing the following steps however to get the full updated experience of the game:
You'll need an Game Boy Color emulator. My Oldboy! works well on Android, and there are many options for Windows (DreamGBC, PlayGuy, BGB...)
Hope you enjoy! It can be so repetitive to play the old games over again, and I can honestly say this game breathes a lot of life into that nostalgia
Also, if you cheat as much at Pokemon as you do on Neopets, you will find that pretty much all Crystal GameShark codes work properly.
