I recently came across a colorization that turns the original black and white/green version of Pokémon Red for the GameBoy into a proper GameBoy Color title. This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, but the sheer number of hacks that have been made over the course of several decades is slightly overwhelming, so I'd love to get a decent first selection by hearing which are your favorites that have improved or transformed console and handheld games in meaningful or entertaining ways.
Thanks in advance!
I have gone down the same rabbit hole lately. I've been playing Polished Crystal and am planning to play Modern Emerald next.
Polished Crystal adds a ton of features and I love it. They added many Pokémon that you can all catch, it adds a lot of new moves and introduces the modern types and physical/special split which I prefer. It also seems like a lot more difficult than vanilla gen 2 with revised gym leader parties. I'd suggest playing the 9bit version which has almost a decade of new features added to the 2.2.0 version you usually find.
Based on the description, it seems like it would make sense even to someone who hasn't played the original game yet. Would you agree with that?
I think so yes, it doesn't stray too far from the original story but adds a lot on top of it and adds a lot of post game mechanics that I haven't encountered yet. I had never played Crystal before (but I did play Silver and I think Crystal's story is 90% same?) and it seems really polished (haha). It just feels like a much more modern game than what I remember Silver being.
I'm looking for a similar sort of ROM hack for Emerald since I never played gen 3 and later. I think I'll go for Modern Emerald but I'd love to hear other suggestions.