Thief Sapphire

October 10, 2022

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Your standard Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire, but you can only steal Pokemon and none of your Pokemon gain XP, so you have to steal new team members to have a fighting chance. Fun idea, but would probably need a lot of major changes to make it more than an interesting challenge to play for a while.

• Surprisingly covers edge cases such as Rare Candy, meaning you're going to have to keep stealing to stay viable.
• Really interesting challenge idea.
• Stolen Pokemon count as traded, so you'll be just relying on luck to have them actually follow instructions until you're a couple badges in.
• It can be a bit too easy to win by stealing all of a tough trainer's Pokemon.
• Difficulty starts out high, plateaus, then becomes pretty easy later in the game

3/5 Stars

Summary

Ruby and Sapphire, but with stealing trainer Pokemon being the only way to gain new members of your team. You also cannot gain XP.

Major Features

• Pokeballs, Great Balls, and Ultra Balls are now Thief Balls, Robber Balls, and Burglar Balls.
• You can capture trainer's Pokemon with these balls (except in double battles).
• You cannot capture wild Pokemon.
• Your Pokemon cannot ever gain XP.

Review

This is an interesting challenge run type of hack, but would need some additional reworking to make the concept fit into the game better. The developer in the pokecommunity thread said they did not play through the game themselves, so I assume this was more of a development challenge. 

The game starts out very difficult due to stolen Pokemon counting as traded, so they do not always obey you. Once you get past this hurdle and get some badges and enough money to get the better balls in high quantity, the easiest way to win is to steal all of the challenging pokemon from trainers. I limited myself to one steal per trainer, but after a while the battles became a bit repetitive and easy and I did not finish the hack.

It's still a cool idea for a challenge run though and I really love the idea, maybe someday it will be revisited with more overhaul to the quest to make it fit a bit better.