Pokemon Crimson Red ROM

Pokemon Crimson Red is a GBA ROM Hack by Noodle_00 based on Pokemon Fire Red in English. It was last updated on July 24, 2025.

Description

Pokemon Crimson Red is a ROM hack that enhances the base FireRed Experience. What I wanted to do with this ROM hack is providing a difficult experience while providing the player a bunch of ways to handle each fight. Before every battle, the player has multiple Pokémon, Items, and Mega Evolutions to provide each fight as a puzzle to solve, but unlike a puzzle, these battles can be solved in multiple different ways. Crimson Red is meant for everyone to play. It’s meant for Intermediate nuzlockers that are looking for a challenge.

Features

• Increased Difficulty: Enemy trainers, Gym Leaders, and Elite Four members now have optimized teams with competitive movesets and smarter AI.
• Team Diversity: Expect enemy Pokémon with expanded movesets and a variety of counters to common strategies.
• Level Cap Adjustments: Progression requires careful level management to stay within caps for each Gym and major battle.
• Nuzlocke Challenge: There are 3 custom nuzlocke modes you can try specifically for this ROM hack, the rules are listed in the doc
• Legendary Encounters: Limited, but expect a challenge when they do appear!
• Gen 8 Mechanics and Pokemon: the pokemon, abilities, held items, double battle mechanics, Enemy AI, HMs and more are all up to gen 8
• Rare Candies: To reduce grinding you are given rare candies instead of having to hack them in, not mandatory just a quality of life features
• Team diversity: You are given hundreds of pokemon to use and battle with and it becomes even more diverse when you can use every held item (for a price ofc)
  AND MORE!!
• Difficulty: This game’s difficulty (when playing with HC nuzlocke rules) should be a little easier than emerald kaizo, there will be quite a large difficulty spike in the unfinished endgame i’m working on however that’s in the future. 

Changelog

V2.5.2

• Endless Candy
• Fixed bugs and softlocks
• New box sprite
• New hold item sprite (in the party)
• Slight balance changes (Urshifu, some moves, and optionals)

V2.5.1.1

• Bug Fixes

V2.5

Overworld

• Every rock has a Hidden Item under it
• Most routes are remade but layout of the region stays the same
• New berries are planted across remade routes
• Berries cannot be regrown and are limited
• Gym Leaders can be done in (mostly) any order

New Areas

• Brock is moved to the Sevii Islands
• Navel Rock is a new Aqua Hideout
• Magma Hideout is a gateway between Kanto and the Sevii Islands
• Exploration starts at Three Island – Two Island – One Island – Four Island – Five Island – Six Island – Seven Island
• Pewter City Museum has 2 extra floors
• Most Routes fully or partly changed
• Sevii Islands are now mandatory and can be traveled through with warps or Fly

Battle

• Pokemon, abilities, items, etc. are updated to Gen 8
• Enemy teams have perfect IVs
• Enemy teams do not have any EVs
• Trainers that have “[Optional]” in the Trainer Documentation don’t have to be fought and guard a Golden Bottle cap (read about them in mechanics)
• Trainers that have “[Optional]” and say “[Guards item]” reward the player with the item once defeated (duh)
• Every trainer has been level scaled to have every Pokemon be the same as the highest level in the player’s party
• Every wild Pokemon has their level scaled to be the same as the lowest level in the player’s party
• Pokemon AI is in the Trainer AI document in the google drive so don’t look for it here

Visual

• Battle backgrounds are visually changed
• Battle backgrounds may change during battles
• Battle UI is changed
• Player sprite is changed
• Some overworld sprites are changed

Mechanics

• Gen 8 Battle system
• Multiple new currencies
• G. Bottle Cap (currency) – Unlocked after beating any optional boss fight, can be used to exchange for 1 random starter Pokemon besides (Popplio, Treecko, Fennekin, Charmander, Squirtle, Bulbasaur, Sprigatito, Quaxly, Fuecoco) in the Celadon Casino.
• Heart Scale (currency) – Found all across the map (all locations are documented), can be given to the Move Maniac on Route 4 to relearn a move.
• Berries are all across the map and cannot regrow

Pokemon

• Rotom can change forms with the evolution stones (fire stone, water stone, etc.)
• Zacian can change forms with Rusty Sword as an evolution item
• Luvdisc evolves into Alomomola
• Raticate is Normal-Dark type

Useful Links

Pokecommunity

Reddit

Documentation

Documentation 2

Github