As I continue to dive deep into [[The Nostalgia Arc]], one thing has become abundantly clear: I actually never outgrew **Pokemon**. I thought I did, is the thing! I never hated the direction that **Pokemon** as a series has been going, but I just assumed that it wasn’t for me anymore – that it was always a kid’s game and I had aged out of it. But the reality is that I didn’t age out of my love for the series, just the way that it wastes my time as an adult. **Pokemon** games are so *fucking slow*. The animations are slow, the on-boarding is slow, the movement is slow. It’s just slow, slow slow! This became apparent to me during my now month-long stint of devouring various Pokemon romhacks. Games like [[Pokemon Unbound]], [[Pokemon Crystal Clear]], [[Mario Mon]] and **Pokemon ROWE** have tons and tons of QOL features that blow past the base series’ terribly slow pacing and sometimes archaic design decisions. In doing so, they’ve made me love **Pokemon** again. It turns out that when you can quadruple the game’s combat speed, place healing spots all over the map, manipulate IVs and EVs directly and a whole bunch of other shit, you can get me super deep into playing these games again! Of course this isn’t some scathing indictment of canon **Pokemon** games. But I just love seeing what the romhacking scene is capable of as far as expanding **Pokemon** to its absolute limit. Of the games I’ve mentioned above, **Crystal Clear** and **Pokemon ROWE** are open-world games that let you beat 16 gyms in any order, with the difficulty increase with each completed gym. **Mario Mon** is a fully imagined “Pokemon” game that takes place in the Mushroom Kingdom and replaces all the Pokemon with Mario enemies. And one I didn’t mention is **Emerald Rogue**, which is a Pokemon Roguelike with all 9 Pokemon gens in it and a fully realized meta-progression system! It’s unreal. And then on the note of challenge – one thing I like about a lot of the hacks I’ve mentioned above is that they have variable difficulty that has actually gotten me into starting to learn the intricacies of **Pokemon**’s turn-based combat at a high level. I never got into competitive because I feel like I missed the boat there, but at the same time base-level **Pokemon** has been too easy for me for a long time. These hacks have gotten me to actually add status effects to my teams’ move pools! It feels like I’m playing a whole new game. So yeah I absolutely still love **Pokemon**. I just needed to find the versions of it that appeal to my changing taste and age.