This news changes Pokémon ROM Hacking forever

The Pokémon Luminescent Platinum team just announced their progress in the decomp of Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, and this will change Pokémon ROM hacking forever. In this video, I talk to some of the most influential voices in the community to explain to you what this means, and why this is so exciting, and look back to understand what we can expect for the near future. Special thanks to TTiN and Pokabbie for their essential contributions to this video!

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📚 Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
00:35 - Chapter 1 - Chibi Dawn and Awkward Rayquaza
05:36 - Click here to go straight to the news but the intro is important for context I swear
09:58 - Chapter 2 - Decompiling Gen 3
20:34 - The future of Pokémon ROM Hacking

🎵 In this video you heard soundtracks from Pokémon BDSP, Pokémon ORAS, and The Legend of Zelda.

[AsparagusEduardo]

Hi, just some small corrections:
Naranja, Unbound and Radical Red were not made in decomp, but binary.
Skeli (the creator of Unbound) let his binary engine (CFRU: Complete Fire Red Upgrade) available for other binary romhacks to use (including Radical Red) and had a lot of work and documentation poured into it.
Eventually, that work was inherited into Emerald and paved the way for what pokeemerald-expansion became 😊
I can't overstate how much even one person helping out others can make a massive impact on both community projects and life as a whole (even when they make weed jokes). Good video!

[Boricosa]

Does this mean BDSP is about to join the "mid games with an amazing modding community" hall of fame?

[Henrink]

Just hopping that Nintendo/Game freak don't sue for anything 🙏

[gordonwiley]

I wanna give a shout out to how you put words on screen to emphasize them while you talk. This is super cool to hear about!

[Ash_Stash]

dude ive seen yisuno's mega evolution animations for ages and always thought they were incredible but the fact that in time it could exist as an ACTUAL FUNCTIONING MECHANIC with POTENTIAL FOR CUSTOM ADDED ONES drives me so insane. i actually cant wait dude this is massive

[Shadrio]

So basically ILCA walked so The Pokémon Luminescent Platinum team could run. Amazing, this could end up being the start of a whole new wave of Pokémon Games, let's hope they get big enough that they start lighting a fire under The Pokémon Company's behind.

[MagentaNimbat]

At this rate BDSP may end up being a heaven for modding and that makes me incredibly happy to see

[PixieDiamondDew]

Ok, i have some respect for BDSP now… I’m grateful it was released

[MatsonKey]

As a Brazilian transgender girl who moved to the US at 15, I'll tell you right now, person reading this comment: literally any donations to this channel will be appreciated 5 times more than you realize. I don't usually, but in this case I def want to support a sister.

[deltaslushie]

being an autistic fan of pokemon this is like . the holy grail of news for me . I am excited and im checking out luminescent platinum right now!!

[christiancinnabars]

A small correction: in Gen 9, there _are_ animations for some Flying Pokemon fighting on the ground, but only for a select few wild encounters. In trainer battles, most of them still remain soaring.
So very small steps, but not entirely absent.

[blazie]

Gen 3 and the recently developed Heartgold Soulsilver decomps are incredible tools. BDSP decomp is gonna be awesome! I cannot wait for the inevitable gen 5 decomp because I can only imagine the possibilities that will open up with platinum and generation 5.

Gen 3 hacking is incredible, i’ve even seen a hack called Elite Redux that gave every pokemon 4 abilities at once and has tons of new content, and seeing what is possible with later gens of decomp through BDSP and HGSS fills me with joy

I will say that I really like that the unbound devs toned down the edginess down to undertones because it used to be a lot more blatant

Anyway I might make some hacks in the future for fun, because I really want to make something cool

[harukaze]

oh on the note of playing pokemon in portuguese
there's a pokemon red romhack in brazillian portuguese that is probably one of the highest standards for a fan translation ever made, going as far as even reworking the text engine for displaying accents more naturally

[shawnbay]

making a whole new game takes a huge amount of time & is a personal, private, acomplishment. I love that a decomp can bring a community 2gether & code 2ward the same thing(s). its like game design under socialism.

[ChillBear]

This channel has made me really comfortable with my place in the LGBTQIA+ community thank you so much for just being here it is very important for people to see relatable role models thank you

[Douglas]

2:11 The concept art for BDSP actually depicts everything in normal scale rather than chibi, so it's very likely that ILCA had to go with this artstyle because of the time constraints and unreasonable schedule Pokémon games are developed. The concept arts even had features that were used on Legends Arceus.

They did fix the one glitch nobody wanted to be fixed, though. The Cute Charm glitch.

[candyneige]

And then there's Legends Arceus, which can be best described as a collection of proof of concepts, that would eventually get further expanded on by Game Freak in later games. However, a few of them got abandoned by Game Freak, which would inevitably lead to modders expanding on these abandoned concepts on their own by modding Legends Arceus.

One of these abandoned concepts that modders have expanded on was originally going to be a Synchro Machine mechanic similar to that in the Indigo Disk DLC for Scarlet and Violet. You see, during the development of Legends Arceus, Game Freak had originally envisioned a Synchro Machine mechanic where you get to control as your own Pokémon, and initially, they were going on with the idea smoothly, adding sub-mechanics that allows your Pokémon to finally dodge roll and sneak, adapted the status effects so that it also affects Pokémon outside of battles, introducing fall damage and drowning damage, creating two new sound effects, one for when the Pokémon you're controlling as is at low health and the other for when the same Pokémon faints, composing a new chime that plays when your entire team faints and you black out, which was useful especially when the Pokémon you're controlling as is the last Pokémon in your team that hasn't fainted yet and it finally faints, adding a new agile and strong styles mechanic that allows the Pokémon using the move to do so either quickly or strongly respectively, but with the drawback of making the move perform either weakly or slowly respectively, and in general turning Pokémon combat from the traditional turn-based system into a real-time one, going as far as to even make Noble battles, which originally involved you controlling as your own Pokémon who has to throw balms at the Noble Pokémon while avoiding their moves.

However, when it comes to coding the actual moves in combat, while they do manage to code in moves for enemy Pokémon moves, even adding Alpha Pokémon in the process, no matter how hard they try, they couldn't manage to code in the moves for your own Pokémon, which forces Game Freak to scrap that mechanic. However, instead of scrapping it entirely, they did something unthinkable, they repurposed it into the mechanic that adds a hidden seventh Pokémon to your team, and not just any seventh Pokémon, *you* as the player character are the seventh Pokémon in your team. Sure you're still a human in this game, but the game now considers you as a Pokémon for the purpose of Pokémon move damage calculation, meaning that for the first time ever in a mainline non-Mystery Dungeon Pokémon game, you technically play as a Pokémon. This wild decision has a lot of ramifications, as firstly, it means that they have to bring back the traditional turn-based battle system after all, though adapting it so that it now includes the previously added agile and strong styles, secondly, in order to have you be able to get attacked by wild Pokémon, they made it so that the game will act as if you're constantly using the Synchro Machine to control as the seventh Pokémon, with the seventh Pokémon in question being a level 15 Normal-type Pokémon with 100 HP, no moves, and a hidden ability that allows the Pokémon to quick regenerate its health as long as they're not targeted by an opposing Pokémon, which creates several side effects, one of which being that, thirdly, it makes it so that you can still freely move even during battles, which wasn't intended by Game Freak, but they liked it anyway, so they've kept the bug around and turned it into a feature, and another side is that, fourthly, because the game acts as if you're constantly using the Synchro Machine, it means that walking Pokémon that follows you becomes impossible, and any Pokémon that you've thrown will just remain stationary without moving at all, and speaking of your Pokémon, fifthly, it also means that you cannot break ore deposits and shake trees normally, so they've adapted it so that any Pokémon you throw next to an ore deposit or a tree will make the Pokémon either break it or shake it respectively, not to mention that, sixthly, any wild Pokémon you touch (or get touched by) will not result in the initiation of a wild battle, but will instead just result in you taking damage, so to make wild battles still possible, they made it so that by throwing your Pokémon next to the wild Pokémon, you can trigger a wild battle against the wild Pokémon you just had your own Pokémon thrown next to, and another side effect is that, sevently, because it is hard-coded within the game that you will black out as soon as your entire team faints, you can have all 6 of your Pokémon fainted and still be able to roam freely because the seventh Pokémon that is you hasn't fainted, and thus, it doesn't trigger the black out, and conversely, eighthly, when you take too much damage and faint, the game would crash because it doesn't actually trigger the black out, and so, to make it so that you taking too much damage and fainting will cause you to black out directly, they made it so that whenever you as the seventh Pokémon faint, the rest of your team will also instantly faint with you if they haven't already fainted, causing you to immediately black out and also preventing the game from crashing, ninethly, the sound effects that were originally used for when the Pokémon you're controlling as either has low health or faints are now instead used for when you are in the same situations, since you're now constantly controlling as the seventh Pokémon that is you yourself, tenthly, the Noble battles have been changed so that you are the one who has to throw balms at the Noble Pokémon while also avoiding their attacks, since you're now constantly controlling as the seventh Pokémon that is you yourself, which also means that the only Pokémon in your team that can dodge roll, be affected by status effects outside of battles, take fall damage, take drowning damage, and sneak is the seventh Pokémon that is you, and finally, to hide the fact that you are the seventh Pokémon in your own team, Game Freak have hidden all stats related to the seventh Pokémon that is you, and they have even hidden your own health from the HUD as a number or even a bar, instead showing it as a black border around the screen that is absent at full health and gets more and more visible the lower your health gets, eventually turning red when your health gets low enough.

While this seventh Pokémon mechanic has certainly inspired the Koraidon/Miraidon mechanic from Scarlet and Violet, as fate would have it, Game Freak did eventually manage to fully implement the Synchro Machine mechanic into the Indigo Disk DLC, meaning that the seventh Pokémon mechanic, and more specifically the part where you get to play as the seventh Pokémon, gets inevitably abandoned by Game Freak and will most likely not return to any future games, especially Legends Z-A.

This has caused a lot of mods to be made for Legends Arceus, as there is one mod that changes the health value of the seventh Pokémon that is you to 1, meaning that as soon as you get hit even by the weakest of Pokémon moves, you instantly faint and black out, another that instead changes it to ∞, meaning that even the strongest of Pokémon moves will still not cause you to faint, another that changes the typing of the seventh Pokémon that is you from the Normal type to another type, meaning that you are now weak to certain moves and resistant to others, and maybe even immune to a few moves, another that instead changes its level number, another that removes the seventh Pokémon mechanic entirely and replaces it with the Synchro Machine mechanic as Game Freak had originally envisioned, and there's even at least one mod that turns the entire game into a Mystery Dungeon game, complete with you playing as an actual Pokémon instead of just a human, and everyone else being also changed to Pokémon accordingly. And speaking of Mystery Dungeon, there's also even an Explorers of Sky ROM hack that is a demake of Legends Arceus.

[Sammiwammi]

As someone who's played (most of) Pokemon Uranium, I can definitely say the creepy pasta vibes are minimal, it's a lot more fun and cute than it is edgy/creepy 😅 Also great to see you back! I hope the move went well! 🥰

[Sincald]

Aw hell yeah! I've played a lot of the fangames and romhacks mentioned, and they're all so impressive. Hobbyist modders are such an amazing force for helping evolve games as an art form.

[emote]

I find it kinda funny how BDSP is one of if not THE worst pokemon mainline games ever made, and now once this gets finalized it's likely to become one of the most important games in this fandom's history.

Really loved the video! I've been looking into DS rom hacking for a while because i like the 3D capabilities that the GBA just isn't able to manage, so the idea of being able to do all of these things ON THE SWITCH is craaaazy. Super cool stuff, i'm really excited for it!