## 2025-04-05 Don't think a Pokemon romhack has any right to be this good to be honest. I will be honest - I find Alpharad kind of irritating. I'm sure he's a perfectly fine guy, but I am just not a fan of his content that much. But his idea of paying a bunch of people to make fun games is good and I will credit him for it. It led to **Mario Mon**, which is probably the highest quality romhack I've ever seen. **Mario Mon** is a romhack of **Pokemon Emerald** but isn't just a reskin. It has its own original story, graphics, music, and map of the Mushroom Kingdom. Rather than catch Pokemon, you instead participate in a game that Princess Peach has invented, where you CAPture various creatures from across the **Mario** series' long-running history. The whole thing is super polished, and I've been having a blast. The routes are now "worlds" (World 1-1, World 4-2. etc), and they're all pretty well-designed. The game is well balanced, unlike those needlessly difficult **Pokemon** romhacks that have become memes too. One thing that kinda stinks is that putting together a good team takes quite a while. Most routes don't have a huge variety of monsters, which is well in-line with **Pokemon**, but also kind of boring. I'm like 7 hours in and still don't have an Electric monster, for example. But that's a small and mostly personal issue. The writing is also surprisingly pretty good for a romhack. Most of them fall victim to the trappings of a person who's a great engineer but probably not a very good writer. **Mario Mon** avoids that pitfall - in the main story at least. Bowser in particular feels just like he would in a **Mario Bros** [[JRPG]]. But there's definitely some silly stuff in the NPC dialogue that is going to be dated one week after the game's launch. I'm three ~~badges~~ Power Stars in - I'll let you know how the rest of it goes. ## 2025-03-07 Lost hours of progress cause I forgot to save so I WONT see how the rest of it goes so I'm just gonna call this done for now, but it was super fun while it lasted!