Just finished the Pokemon Odyssey romhack. Wow what a fantastic game. I even got the true ending cause I was enjoying it so much.

Obviously it borrows heavily from EO for its music and themes so it automatically scores points for that, but I really liked all the additional references and inspirations from other games and anime. It may be weird but I sort of felt a connection with whoever made this hack, it would seem they have taste similar to mine based on what they chose to borrow from.

The writing was mostly solid and I really enjoyed the story - not only were my expectations subverted quality-wise due to the nature of romhacks and their authors, but also in how the story played out. I was especially impressed how the tone shifts throughout - often becoming mature but never feeling 'edgy'. I would say I enjoyed it more than the story modes in the Untolds if that's saying anything.

Gameplay is doubles pokemon - if you're not into that then you probably won't enjoy the hack, there is a lot of it. Unfortunately the difficulty drops off around halfway and the AI never seemed that effective - I remember only a single time it actually switched into another mon. For eg. to force certain doubles strats for enemies they had to make mons with movesets with only one move so the AI would be forced to use it, which makes them predictable and abusable. I personally still had fun though because a doubles-only romhack was still quite novel to me and there were a large range of EO variant mons and new custom moves to play around with.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of janky implementations of EO mechanics. FOEs, Sea navigation, gathering, sidequests, camping etc. were all interesting at least but didn't really serve to improve the game, merely a 'huh, neat' at most. The limitations of the engine are surely to blame and I appreciate the attempt at least. Shortcuts in the stratums worked quite well however.