Pokemon Emerald Horizons ROM

Pokemon Emerald Horizons is a GBA Rom Hack by BrandonXL based on Pokemon Emerald in English. It was last updated on April 14, 2024.

Introduction

Pokémon has always been at the forefront of my hobbies. When I was younger, I loved crafting teams for different Gym Leaders, Elite Four members, and really any Trainer that could be designated as a “boss battle.” The idea of creating a game of my own was never really a thing until I played games like Pokémon Unbound (skeli, ghoul), Radical Red (soupercell), and Inclement Emerald (BuffelSalt).

These hacks are among what I consider the best Pokémon experiences. My love for these games centers around a few commonalities: these games all feature a diversity in Pokémon you can obtain, these games are all on a sophisticated, modern battle engine, and – most importantly – they all offer a considerable degree of challenge, further showcased in their brilliant boss battles.

The concept of “boss battles” never really stopped appealing to me, and I knew that after playing these games that I wanted to create my own game as well. Given the vast amount of resources selflessly created by this community (in particular, RHH, DizzyEgg, and PRET), I set out to create a game with a few key principles in mind:

• Difficult, but fair. On a scale of 1-10, with vanilla being a 1 and Radical Red being a 10, I would say this game sits at a 6.
• Feature alignment with modern entries in the series
• Streamlining the player experience

Features

• Difficulty Related: Set Mode, Level Caps, and Disabled Battle Bag
• Most Gen 1-8 Pokémon are obtainable, including Hisuian forms
• Modern Battle Engine, with Fairy-Type, Mega Evolution, Updated Moves, and Physical/Special Split
• Loads of optional boss battles, with 8 Kanto Gym Leaders, 8 Johto Gym Leaders, and a few miscellaneous bosses who reward valuable items
• Exp. All
• Bosses and mid/late game Trainers scale to or relative to your strength, so grinding/overleveling isn’t a factor
• Updated move animations, courtesy of Skeli and ghoulslash
• No EVs/IVs/Natures factored into stats
• 75 TMs, with about 50% vanilla TMs and 50% custom TMs
• Ghoulslash’s DexNav (12 unique land/5 unique surf/5 unique fishing encounters)
• PSF’s Quest Menu UI, with 30 Side Quests to Complete
• Buffel’s Poké Vial implementation
• Ghoul’s Item Description Headers
• Badge-Based Poké Marts
• BW Repel System
• Unlimited use TMs/Forgettable HMs
• Nicknaming and Move Relearning in Party Screen
• Decapitalization
• Level Grinder to quickly hit Level Cap
• Linking Cord for most trade related evolutions
• Post-Game Boss Rush Mode
• 2.5x Lucky Egg
• Premier Ball Bonuses
• No poison damage in the overworld

Changelog

V1.09

• New optional areas to explore (the smaller Icefall Cavern and the greatly expanded Scorched Slab)
• Some new overworld legendary encounters; this was requested a lot, so this update marks the first batch of legendaries being made attainable.
• Addition of BSBob’s/RavePossum’s map popups
• minor bug fixes
• minor trainer adjustments

V1.07

• cleaned up some bugs
• Added a new challenge mode to the Elite Four

V1.06b

• Took all of the graphical improvements from 1.06 and modified Gym Leaders and Trainers to prevent crashing

Known Bugs

Very minor, but the only bug that hasn’t been addressed (to my knowledge) is the DexNav sprite being discolored on certain areas of Route 104; this does not break anything and isn’t permanent!