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As for the general overview of this hack, you have the same story progression as in the Vanilla game and all the locations/interiors/puzzles are unchanged (more are added post game though). But the new writing is done well (often humorous and informative), and the slightly edited overworld graphics is ever so pleasant. Of course, new fakemons replace the original ones, bringing new challenges with altered storyline mostly through modified texts.

The hack suffers greatly from a couple major flaws, however.

First, as previous reviewers have mentioned, the scaling is downright horrible. To understand this, the first thing to realize is that a few trainers in each route will almost always sweep you unless your Pokemon are sufficiently high-leveled and fast. Pinsir at this early game outspeeds most wild Pokemon and OHKOs them, Mischu has even better Stats and knows only Bind/Disable early on so it spams Bind and again nothing really outspeeds it (other than possibly your starter) if you started at Pallet Town. This really encourages you to start at the center of the cities (Cerulean, Saffron etc) so that you can capture many different Pokemon without encountering the trainers and have easy access to evolutionary stones.

The second thing to realize is that contrary to what the scaling seems to suggest, it is not a good idea to even out your team early on. The money you receive from trainer battles is proportional to the level of the last Pokemon the NPC owns, and you cannot even buy enough Poke balls or potions with low-leveled team due to scaling. To give you an idea, lvl 10 base Bug Catcher will give you a measly 100. On top of that, it is time-consuming to raise them all evenly, so it is better to raise one Pokemon and then capture high-leveled Pokemon (which now should know better moves) to make out your team.

All of this forces you to play this hack as a jailbreak; do not engage with trainers, pick one strong Pokemon and raise it, capture high-leveled Pokemon to make your team, and only then you start your journey, or sufficiently waste your time. It is something hard to explain in words how contrived this is unless you actually try it yourself.

Another main flaw is with the lack of information the author managed to compile and provide. There is a Github page which contains all the information, but it is all over the place so you have to figure out which is which, one by one. The thing is, it is not just new Pokemon that were added. New types were added as well along with new moves. Speaking of moves, again due to that hard scaling, you have to capture certain Pokemon at certain level interval to ensure they have the moves you want. For example,

• Gastly evolutions should be caught before lvl 51 if you want them to have Hypnosis (you will find many trainers spamming Hypnosis btw).
• Feliflame (evolved from Persian) learns Redhot Claw (Fire-type Slash) at lvl 50 but Persian learns Slash at lvl 51, so you have to capture Meowth lvl 44-49, evolve it to Persian, and then use Fire Stone to evolve it to Feliflame to get both Slash and Redhot Claw, all of which are STAB moves.

There are many more examples but the hack would have greatly benefited from simple readme files about new mons and movesets for easy access (after all, what the heck is Redhot Claw?). It is players who should decide to play a game blindfolded or not, not the developers, especially when multiple aspects of the game were modified. It is not easy to figure out things in-game anyway due to scaling (wild Pokemon can very easily wreck havoc unless you are prepared).

This is why I would recommend this hack only if you are willing to scavenge information on the Github page if the need arises and potentially reset a couple times early on. You can definitely enjoy this hack blindfolded, but I have seen some people getting frustrated in the early phase in other forums, and all of them seemed to be due to lack of information, which suggests that I cannot recommend it to the general audience without any precaution. It sure is a well-made hack, but the chance is high that you will get frustrated more than you enjoy the hack if you are not equipped with necessary information.

I'd like to start out by saying the concept is fantastic. As someone who loved all of those silly little PokéGod stories being able to actually use them in battle was great.

Having a Dex full of fakemons of varying stats is very fun as similarly to playing Pokémon for the first time. You're not aware of what sucks and what doesn't, it's all a grand adventure with little online to spoil you.

As a previous reviewer stated, the scaling isn't all that great. The way this works is that all wild Pokémon and trainer battles scale to your highest-level Pokémon in your party. This method removes a sense of satisfaction with progression. You never get better as everything else will always meet you at the same level. I'd love if this was just optional or the scaling was changed to how many badges you have.

This scaling also has issues where if your Pokémon are high-level you're catching Pokémon who have learned their entire moveset and with TMs being single use and there not being much variety in the shops you're sorta just stuck with the movesets they have for better or worse.

Overall I'm leaving a positive recommendation. What's there has some issue but I still definitely enjoyed my time with it. I do think this is more aimed at people like me who are aware of as well as enjoyed the old myths and fake Pokégod cheats. I'm not sure how much someone who didn't grow up with or be into them is going to care so much about seeing Ridley's artwork renamed as 'Flareth' or Slashman from Megaman's sprite repurposed as a Pokémon. A lot of them are silly or clash artistically but to me that's part of the fun.

The screenshots make it look like this is colored Yellow-style, but these are actually in SGB mode. It's a regular monochrome otherwise, so make sure to regard this as a monochrome one. For those emulating make sure to run this through bsnes, it even has a custom border.

All that said this is a trip and a half. What flaws there are are almost completely due to what Factory Adventure is based on, and I wouldn't worry too much about them.

This hack is fairly promising and from what I have played it *is* quite nice.

Everything in regards to the writing that I have seen so far have been pretty good with some humorous dialogue every once in a while. And while the setting does seem a bit edgy I haven't really seen much of that outside of the opening blurb yet.

Really, the main issue I have with this hack is the balancing. Which I realize it's using another hack as base for, but it's still something that is featured in this one, so. The pokemons you face, both wild and trainers scale up based on the highest level pokemon in your party, this is a pretty awkward way to handle difficulty scaling in my opinion and results in the following issues:

1. There is not much point in capturing low level pokemons unless it's something you're planning you use *now*. You can always just go back and catch it later and it will be higher level and save you from grinding them up.

2. You're excessively encouraged to grind up your entire party to always be at an even level. While I do think encouraging to keep an even leveled team in pokemon games is not bad, it's way too harsh in the implementation. I want to stress that WILD pokemon can show up at the same level as the highest level pokemon in your party.

3. Challenging Gym leaders early is not a good option, since they all have many pokemons, and you're better off coming back later. It seems smarter to just come back way later in the game when you have a fully formed team that can counter everything thrown at you.

To compare and contrast to something like Crystal Clear, which scales up parts of the world (but not everything) based on your gym badge count, which makes for a much more gradient curve and more enjoyable experience. It also puts more power in the players hand how difficult they want the experience.

There are also a lot of other issues, such as trainers not really giving you much money when you beat them, this is not a huge issue at the start since you start with a good chunk of cash, but you want to spend all of it right away so you don't lose it should you faint out.

I do want to see more of this hack because it does have some neat ideas, and if the blurb is true where these pokemon designs came from then that's also super charming to me. But in it's current state it's kind of a slog to play, and I don't really feel incentivized to do much of anything other than grinding up my party till they learn good enough moves to tackle the gyms.