Brown Version

October 14, 2022

Don't Want to Read?

One of the first major ROM hacks with its own region and story. Has some unusal custom types, some repurposing of event and location code, pokemon from future generations, and more.

Truly impressive what the dev could do in the early days of Pokemon ROM hacking.
World design feels similar to that of a standard Pokemon game.
One of the few hacks I've seen that adds new typing.
Recontextualizations of existing Red events manage to feel fresh despite being the same functionally.
New types are balanced a bit odd and can be confusing.
Some of the dialogue and NPCs can feel a bit off, but not enough to be too bothersome.

3/5 Stars

Summary

A brand new Pokemon adventure in the Rijon region. This is one of the very first full new region hacks of a Pokemon game, starting development in 2004 with a later 2014 Edition cleaning things up and adding some new features. It adds new types such as Gas or Sound to give the game an even more unique feeling.

Major Features

A whole new region of Rijon with a brief visit up north to Johto.
New moves and TMs.
Abnormal, Gas, Sound, Wind, Wood, and Tri types added to the game in addition to the standard Pokemon types (including Dark, Steel, and Fairy)
New Music
New Pokemon from later generations including Sylveon.

Review

Pokemon Brown is one of the first Pokemon ROM hacks to feature a new region and was made by the same guy as Pokemon Prism, the more infamous hack due to Nintendo's takedown. I was interested in playing it for both of those reasons and the unusual addition of adding 6 new types to the game. The type changes are a bit odd (wood really seems unnecessary) and most of them don't have hardly any moves or pokemon attached to them. Seems like one of those "asked if we could, didn't stop to ask if we should" situations.It would have probably been better to not add/update all these types, but it was an interesting experiment.

The region is interestingly designed, there's a few odd points here and there, but I had fun exploring it and being able to go up north to Johto for a brief visit. Likely due to this being an early romhack, many events such as needing the silph scope, giving drinks to guards etc are repeated and simply reskinned here, but the reskins are fun and interesting. For example, the Pokemon Tower is now a forest with glitch pokemon in it.

I don't have ton to say about this one, it is a bit rough around the edges, but it was interesting to play through. I'd say check it out and see if you want to stick around with it. It's a good time and an important piece of Pokemon ROMhacking history.