#electrical tower fakemon I think

[monsoon-of-art]

…I think this was better in my head

[radramblog]

Pokemon Quartz

I have a confession to make.

I fucking love Pokemon Quartz.

Okay, context. Pokemon Quartz is an infamous Romhack of Pokemon Ruby, finished in 2006 by a young Spanish developer going by Baro. It was possibly the first completed romhack that completely replaced the entire set of the available 386 Pokemon with a set of newly designed Fakemon, and while lots of the replacements are pretty obvious analogues, there are some pretty interesting designs and the sheer effort required to do this solo as a teenager is something to behold.

(Look at Lileep, it’s a dodo now! I think its cute.)

The hack shows it age pretty well these days, with the sheer development made in GBA hacking especially in the last couple of years obviously showing it up- obviously something like Clover or Radical Red is going to make Quartz look ancient, and limitations in available tools are pretty obvious if you know where to look. The game’s region, Corna, is blatantly just Hoenn with some modified route themes, and its pretty clear that the designs for each Pokemon are limited to the replaced mon’s colour palette (as with Torido above).

(The map is kinda pretty though imo)

Quartz is infamous for a few reasons ultimately linked to the developer’s youth. For one, the dialogue tends to be a mix of poor English and weird humour and plenty of cursing, along with some jokes that don’t really fly these days. (To Baro’s credit, the writing and English does get better as the hack progresses.) The plot is utterly nonsensical as a result of shoehorning the Electric themed Band Ambar as villains into vanilla Ruby’s story, and involving the very 00s teenage idea of CHAOS vs ORDER and the pseudophilosophical musings that go along with it. Also like some of the designs are extremely ugly, to be frank. Lots of people are aware of Babos, the Skitty replacement, but that’s only really scratching the surface- the Llamayama line (aka Numel) and Berchi line (Clamperl) are pretty awful if you ask me.

(ew)

(…sis you are literally standing in a centre)

(hey can we take this from a 10 down to like a 6 or so)

I first encountered Pokemon Quartz as part of a bootleg multi-game cartridge picked up in my time living in Kuala Lumpur. The version of the hack on that cart was either very early or just broken, since none of the doors in Golden Island or the nearby Broke Cave (Dewford Island/Granite Cave) would actually let me in and therefore I couldn’t progress especially far. (I understand there was another broken ROM running around the internet that just had legendaries and Master Balls running around the first few routes, for some reason,). My trying to find a walkthrough or a fix led me to one Let’s Play of the hack by Zorak, which I suspect considering his association with fellow early LPer Chorocojo is the reason a fair few people are aware of Quartz at all. While I absolutely wouldn’t recommend reading that LP these days- its very late 00s, enjoys a certain R-word way too much, and to his credit Zorak has a comment on the archive stating that he considers it “immature and severely unfunny!”, but it was the only way for me to consume the remainder of the game at the time, having not figured out emulators at that point. I could go on for a long time about those early Lets Plays, but I’ll save that for another day.

(Oh also I’m ganking a bunch of the screenshots from that LP since my file is in endgame, cheers mate)

Okay but why do I like this game then? Well, aside from tickling my nostalgia bone something fierce, there’s a lot of cool things in the hack that make it stand out. While the lore behind the main legendary Pokemon is pretty bad and some of their designs are godawful, the Braille puzzles from Ruby have been converted into an entire original runic alphabet and is expanded to be present in the encounter events for Kaomare and Karendi (Kyogre and Jirachi). I had a lot of fun translating all of the script by hand, even if the actual text is a bit edgy. Speaking of Karendi, the game has a very JRPG style item chain sidequest to get to the encounter, which is pretty fun and something that to my recollection hasn’t been seen since. It has some little ideas in the dex that took Game Freak years to try, such as an evolving legendary (Ordkip->Tanord, replacing Latias and Latios) and the hack’s replacement for the Kanto starters having a 4th evolution (replacing the legendary beasts in the dex). The player is actually offered a second starter from the trio replacing the Johto starters late in the game at Muddy Island (Pacifidlog), which while a bit useless at that point is still something that took GF until X and Y to try. (Emerald doesn’t count imo)

(I’d translate the Cornan, but I lost my notes. Find the key yourself, cowards)

I can’t really explain beyond that why I love Quartz so much, but it’s the type of attachment that doesn’t really make sense and can’t really be explained. With that in mind, please believe me when I say never play Pokemon Quartz.

Most of the Pokemon are reskins of the original mon without changing the stats or learnset, and some of the ones that are make zero sense (As an example, the Water starter gets Aeroblast of all things, but only if you overlevel it in the second stage). The 3rd Gym leader’s ace, an overleveled Groundoe (Sandslash), has 4 ground moves, so any Flying type beats it outright, except 2 of those moves are Earthquake and Fissure, so if you don’t have a bird you are S.O.L. . The 4thleader has an absurdly overpowered ace in the form of Freech, one of the few mons to be completely overhauled, being the Milotic equivalent except its Dragon/Ice with overpowering STAB moves and Speed Boost. Basically, the game balance is completely out of whack.

Instead give a look into Pokemon Ultra Quartz (I refuse to type Let’s go Blobbos more than once). Released in 2018 by the developers for the excellent if also problematic Clover, UQ fixes just about every issue with the game’s balance, expands the encounter tables to include many of the Quartz mons that were implemented but unobtainable, and re-enables missing features such as the Battle Tower, while leaving most of the rest of the Quartz experience untouched- in this sense, I’d argue it’s the superior Quartz experience. It does still have issues- the labyrinthine route and cave design is untouched, Blobbos is here but is pretty pointless, and TM availability is as shitty as Quartz (which is the same as vanilla Ruby, but still). It does also add a few events of varying quality- Blobbos is as adorable as ever if a little pointless, the endgame developer battles are neat and decent grinding, and the postgame dungeon added is pretty sick even if the secret boss is… unique? The direct 1:1 import of the Deadly Seven from the infamous Pokemon Snakewood is both unnecessary and obnoxious, so try to keep in mind its origin when suffering through that forced segment of the game.

(My final team- Dotori, Psimouse, Rubygon, Mazalon, Oceadino, Kaosune. Or, Flying/Fighting completely overhauled Cradily, Serene Grace Gardevoir, Split evolution Vibrava, Ghost/Steel Banette, Water/Flying Swampert, and Fire/Dragon Groudon.)

It’s a good game despite this, ok? Give it a shot, experience some Romhack history but not quite as shit as it was in ’06.

Wait shit I forgot to mention how Baro put his name everywh-