Pokémon Monomyth

What it is

Monomyth is a complete new Pokémon game rather than a remix of Emerald. It takes place in the Athanto Region, a wild and often dangerous land where getting back to a town before nightfall is part of the challenge, and tells a character-driven story of its own. The team worked on it for about seven years and chose to finish the whole game before announcing it, so there were no public demos.

What's in it

• More than 360 Pokémon, mixing returning species with original designs, plus new moves, abilities and animations.
• An original soundtrack of over 200 tracks.
• Thousands of coat variations among wild Pokémon.
• Side quests across the region, Contest Halls, Trainer Hill, a Battle Frontier and a post-game.
• Smarter trainer AI, link-cable trading and asynchronous online features.

The team says the game was built for real Game Boy Advance hardware, so it recommends accurate emulators such as mGBA and warns that older ones like VisualBoyAdvance won't run it properly.

Playing it

Monomyth is distributed as a patch for your own copy of Pokémon Emerald, and the official site has a patcher and step-by-step instructions. It was directed by thistlehare and K. Japonica with a large team credited as Team Monomyth.