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Kanto Expansion Pak

June 27, 2024

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A faithful rendition of gen 1 with some quality-of-life improvements without affecting the core gen 1 battle engine. The addition of dozens of beta and cut Pokemon from gen 1 and gen 2 days as well as evolutions of future gen 1 Pokemon give the whole run its own identity. A great time if you want a twist on gen 1 that still feels like the first generation of games.
  • Great variety of Pokemon pulling on not only every future "version" of gen 1 Pokemon, but cut Pokemon from the early days of the series.
  • Quality of life features like running shoes, move reminders, etc.
  • Obstacles removed from parts of the world to give the game a more open path to take.
  • Large postgame with rematches to all the bosses, new legendary encounters, new areas, and a large gauntlet of very hard battles.
  • Five starters including Pikachu and Eevee that add more Pokemon Yellow encounters.
  • Interesting implementation of the Dark, Steel, and Fairy types that borrows from beta Gen 2.
  • If you don't have an interest in the unique eccentricities of the gen 1 battles, this makes almost no changes to it.
  • I was a bit disappointed in the decision to not apply any of the type updates to gen 1 Pokemon (Clefairy is still Normal, Magnemite is just Electric, etc)
5/5 Stars

Summary

A hack that takes the vanilla gen 1 battle experience and adds in tons of beta Pokemon, scrapped designs, future-gen evolutions of gen 1 Pokemon, regionals, paradox forms of gen 1 mons, convergent evolutions of gen 1 mons, a larger post game and some quality of life improvements.

Major Features

  • 100 new Pokemon that fill out all gen 1 pokemon from future generations (Kingdra, Sandy Shocks, Wiglett, Galarian Legendary Birds), Kanto(?) Pokemon such as Meltan and Melmetal, and many prototypes such as Gorochu and evolutions from early drawings and beta versions.
  • Dark, Steel, and Fairy Types for the new Pokemon only.
  • New locations that adds more of a post-game and/or reference early planned and beta content such as the intro gym.
  • No version exclusivity
  • Female character option
  • Gym Leader Rematches

Review

The Kanto Expansion Pak serves as kind of an ultimate love letter to Generation I. The battle system is largely unchanged, you still have weird movesets, SPECIAL is a single stat, and Focus Energy is still broken. I am a sucker for playing around with new Pokemon and this game exploring parts of the beta Pokemon I'm less familiar with— being the stuff planned pre-Gen 1— felt fresh and show a kind of "what if" of the series.

I love the exploration aspect of Pokemon and finding new areas, new Pokemon and twists in Kanto, a region I've explored dozens and dozens of times at this point was an amazing time. You have to be interested in playing with all of Gen I's odd battle system and gameplay traits though. This is a very true-to-form Generation I experience with things being more additive than transformative. Even the type chart follows the Gen II beta with Dark being weak to Normal type.

You know if this interest you or not. I think it's a great time and one of my favorite hacks I've played so far. Hop on it and just enjoy playing around with some of the weird Pokemon that never were, it's worth a look.