First full-on review I'm posting on this website! This is the first game I've truly sunk a good amount of time into that I hadn't played before getting this account so now's as good a place to start as ever.

First off, Pokemon Emerald Rogue is a game that I've put a ton of hours into. I've had kind of a weird relationship with Pokemon lately because I want to love it, but the games themselves make it kind of hard for me to right now. The gameplay loop of main series Pokemon games and anything similar is EXTREMELY boring to me because of how many mandatory fights there are that are just completely free. I've also had a lot of experience playing the game competitively but it's frustrating losing a fifteen minute long match to one bad RNG roll and it's really unintuitive to try and learn where you went wrong otherwise. I've been in need of something a little different from both of these, to say the least. A highly replayable version of a Pokemon game that's difficult enough to be engaging should be amazing for me even if it's still on the easier side. So, why not give PokeRogue a try too?

Just as a fair warning, most of this game's art and music are all from preexisting assets. This is going to be a bit of a weird review since I'll be talking exclusively about gameplay as a result. For what it's worth though, this game uses Gen 5's artstyle and pulls music from both Gen 5 games and PMD which means it's really nice on both fronts.

If you've never played PokeRogue, I'll give a basic rundown of how the game works. You'll first pick a few starters from a list of every existing starter Pokemon as well as every unevolved Pokemon you've caught or hatched during a run. From there, you'll be sent off to do 10 battles. Most of these will be with wild Pokemon but there will be some trainers mixed in. When you win a battle, you will be rewarded with a choice between one of a few random items to enhance or heal your team members as well as the ability to buy items from a shop before moving onto your next battle. The wild Pokemon and Gym Leaders you fight will be determined by the type of biome you're currently in. Your 10th battle will always be against either a stronger Boss Pokemon or a Gym Leader and once the fight ends, you can move onto a different biome for the next 10 battles. Rinse and repeat until either your team wipes or, in the case of Classic Mode, you make it through 200 floors.

Despite how the gameplay is quite literally using main series Pokemon's formula, I think this game has a more similar appeal to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon from a pure gameplay standpoint than the main series games. I promise it's not just because 90% of the music in this game is from PMD, hear me out. Most individual battles in this game are very straightforward and will end in only a few turns. The biggest problem scenarios in this game come from your team being whittled down too much or not being prepared enough for a certain situation as opposed to the strategy that goes into each individual battle. Ultimately, big draw here is resource management, exactly like PMD. There's a lot of evaluating risk and planning for the far-off future and I do think this is to the game's benefit. The middle portion of the game might seem like it'd drag on for a while on paper but it ultimately is fine for reasons I'll talk about soon. It kind of needs to be longer so you can prepare for the endgame anyways.

The general speed of the game is very nice. There's no overworld so immediately after you're done with one encounter you move onto the next. You can also set the game speed to move five times as quickly as the average Pokemon battle in this engine. This might not sound like much but it is a huge deal when so many battles in this game are unimportant. Things change quickly and you're brought up with a lot of choices because of the item rewards you get for winning each fight. It's nothing too crazy, especially during the easier parts of the game, but it's enough to fill in for a bunch of the battles themselves being simpler. This is why the middlegame being longer is fine with me, by the way - you still do have things to focus on that keep you engaged enough.

My biggest problem comes from the unreasonable difficulty curve. This game is completely ridiculous at the very start, really calm during the middle, and just kind of ridiculous at the end. For the first 30 floors or so you can get screwed over bigtime by the game throwing something completely impossible for your team to handle at you. My team's levels are still below 20 and none of them have evolved. I should not be put up against a random trainer with a Paldean Tauros, a Spiritomb, and some third fully-evolved Pokemon that currently slips my memory. Literally nothing I could do. Is it normal for roguelikes to be this unreasonable at the start?? I had spent a solid hour or two bashing my head against the wall before I made it through the first part of a run.

Before anyone says this is a skill issue I proceeded to get 3rd place on the Daily Leaderboard a few days after this. I'd like to think I shouldn't be the type to struggle this badly here. The solution is with the Egg Gacha system. If you defeat a Gym Leader or get lucky with an item pull you can get a ticket to roll a gacha machine for some eggs. These eggs have no impact on any current runs, but whatever they hatch into will become usable as a starter from there on out. You can get a majority of all Pokemon from this, including legendary and mythical Pokemon, and a lot of the Pokemon you get from this may have an Egg Move as well that you can choose to add to your starter before a run. The main consistent way past the early game is to either get something with very good stats without the need to evolve or to get a Pokemon that gets very good Egg Moves. Otherwise it feels like it's luck of the draw whether or not you get checkmated early on.

Some ~100 floors of planning for the endgame later and the game throws a ridiculous trainer battle at you. A lot of people I talk to have had issues here but I don't think it's so bad mainly because the AI is VERY exploitable. They do arguably go a step above the main series games and make the trainers switch their Pokemon under certain conditions but these conditions are very easy to pick up on and exploit. You could just put up Stealth Rock and either switch repeatedly yourself or switch until you happen upon an ideal situation to use a setup move like Swords Dance on a Pokemon with a decent Speed stat and these fights become completely free. It really doesn't help that whatever method they use to decide each Pokemon's current moveset isn't very good. There was one point my active Pokemon was below half health, the opponent sent out Greninja against my Ground-type, and it proceeded to use...Water Gun... I ended up tanking the hit and knocking it out afterwards.

Then you reach the final boss. I went into this game blind and had no idea what to expect here but I'm going to be honest, this is one of the most poorly-designed boss fights of any video game I've ever played. After the absolute slog of throwing myself into the early game repeatedly in hopes that things would be different next time, and after the next 100+ floors of nothing of note happening, the final boss was quite literally completely unbeatable for the way my current team was laid out. I knew exactly what to expect the moment the final boss appeared on screen and despite the best spur-of-the-moment planning I could give, despite playing this game competitively for over a decade and sitting on the top of a Pokemon Showdown ladder for around six months straight, it just wasn't enough and I had to watch my team slowly crumble as the hours of time I spent getting to that point would need to be started all over again.

Despite all of that this boss is exceedingly simple to prepare for. I have not lost this fight even a single time since that very first run where I made it that far. You do need to prepare for it, but a lot of the time my preparation has come down to dedicating two moveslots to it and avoiding using certain items and that's just been enough. I can't even call this boss fight hard. It's just really, REALLY dumb, and I wholeheartedly believe that anyone looking to play this game should spoil themselves on the final boss before playing. The alternative is repeatedly using the built-in feature to retry the fight (which didn't exist when I first played) enough times to get good enough RNG to cheese it out.

So I think I've made it pretty clear that my first day's worth of experience with this game was dreadful. After you get enough gacha pulls to get a decent lineup of starters and know what the final boss's deal is you can definitely start to have a lot of fun with the game. Keep in mind this review started with me saying a lot of good things about the game's systems. I did go on to beat Classic Mode and try out the other modes the game has to offer.

There is an Endless Mode that removes all trainer battles from the game, adds a boss every 50 floors instead, and gives you certain debuffs after you clear a certain number of floors. This mode is fun to try out once or twice but isn't as good as Classic in my opinion. There's nothing super wrong with it except for the hardest fights here being very cheeseable once again but experimentation feels a lot more limited here and it feels much harder to run an actual team as opposed to one mon that hard carries you and a few "supporters" in a sense. It doesn't even feel like you can be super expressive with that one hard carry if you want to go super far either.

Then there's a Daily Run which is pretty cool. This game's RNG is deterministic and what Daily Run does is give everyone the same seed every day with a random starting team and random encounters for 50 floors. There's no shop and there will usually be around two Gym Leaders and a little boss fight at the end. Beyond just clearing the 50 floors, there's also a score system that will award more points the more Pokemon you defeat and the less turns it takes to defeat them. The pre-set RNG makes it very fun to go through with whatever route you feel like would be best and optimize each fight for a high score. It's a really fun change of pace that I'd recommend everyone try at least once.

The game unfortunately does have an issue with freezing and needing you to reset from what presumably is their servers being overloaded since it is a free browser game, and not all of the moves and abilities are finished unfortunately, but it's getting basically constant updates. It's really cool signing on and seeing that an ability you wanted to try out works now or that a new feature was added that improves the game. Oh, and when I say it's a browser game, I mean that this game works on ALL browsers to my knowledge. I've played it on mobile and it's been perfectly fine. Great stuff there.

As unfortunate as it is though, the fact that this game was as rough to start out as it was makes it hard for me to think too highly of it. I've had a lot of fun with it and I'd suggest everyone at least give it a shot with everything I've said in mind. I know the developers are actively changing things and they could totally make the early game easier but I doubt they'll change something as big as the final boss. I'm on the fence about bumping it down to 2.5 just for how brutal that first day of playing was but I need to be honest with myself and say that I did have a lot of fun with it still.