Pokémon Lazarus (2025)

I haven't dabbled into Rom hacks at all. In fact, this is the first I've ever played. Gotta say, I did overall enjoy this. It has a lot of merits but also a good amount of flaws. If you have a hankering for a pokemon game that is nostalgic with some modern quality of life changes, this is a good place to look. It's flaws are noteworthy though.

This is the most challenging Pokemon game I have played. To be fair, that's a pretty low bar. Most Pokemon games are brain dead easy. If you counter a pokemon, you typically make them faint in one attack. Most Gym leaders are often homogenized, making countering them trivial. This is by no means a bad system. Especially with how simplistic combat is. It's turned based following a convoluted rock, paper, scissors system. Pokemon over the years has become increasingly convoluted. Not the most satisfying form of complexity in my opinion. One of the the great things about the original Red and Blue versions are the simplicity that is also intuitive. It makes sense that water beats fire and rock. It makes sense that fire beats grass. With double elements and the new elements added, the intuition is mostly thrown out the window.

In modern Pokemon games there just too many combinations that I found myself constantly needing to refer to a weakness chart. I understand wanting to make the game more complex, but this complexity feels more like convolution rather than actual depth. This isn't a problem with this specific game, it's a problem with the series as a whole.

Now with that rant aside, what makes this game so challenging is gym leaders rarely have one type of Pokemon. They have more well rounded teams and the gym theme is often loosely placed. For example, the poison themed Gym leader had a Gyrados for some reason. It did have poison fang as an attack, but that feels like such a stretch... It's not a bad thing to have well rounded Pokemon, but they further elevate the difficulty by having level caps that only expand once you beat a gym leader. In theory, this isn't a bad way to balance the game. In practice, most Gym Leaders, even the first one, feel over-tuned. The Gym leader will have Pokemon 2-3 levels higher than you can possibly have, due to the level cap, and they will often use extremely strong moves that you can't possibly have access to. What this means is that if you don't meticulously counter each pokemon, you're going to lose or have a bad time. Even if you use a Pokemon that is strong against a gym leader's pokemon, they often are so over-tuned that they can still one shot you. This results in a lot of tedium. Since you will lose and need to reload/retry a lot and rely on some luck. This issue also expands to the random trainer battles. A lot of battles can feel like razor thin wins. Not a bad thing in a vacuum. But what that means is a lot of wasted time of running to the nearest Pokemon center and needing to heal and run all the way back...

You can carry healing potions to mitigate running back some what, but another big issue I found with this mod is the economy of the game... I was always broke because the amount of money you get from trainers is minuscule and prices of Pokeballs is high. Also they made catching a lot of pokemon frustrating... a lot of pokemon have a low chance of being caught, which means you will need to throw tons of pokeballs at them and hope for the best. Making catching even trivial pokemon into a very costly and tedious endeavor.

If they instead made catching a pokemon a mini-game, such as some quick time event or something that required skill, like the fishing mini-game, then I would be okay with it. Because if I could rely on skill to catch a hard pokemon, it would actually be a satisfying challenge. Instead it's expensive, tedious and frustrating.

I realize I am only criticizing the game so far, I did actually enjoy it though. In spite of all its frustrations. It's made by a small community and the dev has been releasing lots of updates, in fact they released a recent update that allowed you to toggle off the level cap, as just one example. Still, I would argue the gym leaders and random trainer encounters need more balancing. And certainly tone down the absurd difficulty with catching random pokemon or fix the economy of the game.

Lazarus does offer a fresh new world to explore. It contains over 400 Pokemon across the different generations. It has most of the new mechanics that have been introduced over the years and a lot of passion went into it. The plot is pretty bad and generic, but that's the case with all pokemon games, so I won't harp on that. Another issue with this mod is the poor/lack of tutorials. The game assumes you've been playing pokemon non-stop and doesn't bother to explain a lot of the newer Pokemon mechanics. For example, I had no idea how to activate a mega evolution. The game never explains it. I had to look it up on a reddit forum. The game also doesn't explain the shiny mechanic