Pokemon Heart Gold: 40+ hours logged in, got my sixteenth badge a while back, spent time testing assorted things like high level Pickup. Figured it's about time to make some comments about the game.
Well... it's a GSC remake. To a large extent, we all knew what we were getting coming into this. There were four major complaints I had about the original games:
1. Johto as a region was tiny and lacking in dungeons and things to do compared to all the other regions, presumably to make room for a second region on the cart. This was especially insulting since...
2. Kanto was crippled, had all the routes shortened and almost every dungeon removed entirely, with only some bland gym battles against low levelled bosses.
3. Really low levels all-around, with pathetically gym leaders outside of Whitney and Clair (and Blue I guess) and by far the worst E4 in the series.
4. Johto was filled to the brim with gen 1 Pokemon, with a lot of gen 2 stuff either held to aftergame only or requiring really obscure methods like swarms.
How did the address these issues? The answer, with one exception, is: sorta.
-A Safari Zone was added west of Cianwood, with a few short routes and caves leading up to it. Goldenrod also got a GTS and a building for the new Pokethlon minigame. Not much, but Safari Zone and Pokethlon are decent time wasters at least.
-Pokemon locations are almost identical to Gold/Silver; annoyingly, the Crystal modifications were ignored, despite almost everything else from Crystal getting in (even the Suicune/Eusine plot). HOWEVER, the new areas provide a bit of saving grace; Misdreavus, Murkrow, and Larvitar can be found in the Safari Zone, and there's a small cave with wild Misdreavus and Steelix. Houndour is in the Safari Zone as well, but I'm not sure you can get it before the E4. Sneasel and Slugma seem screwed.
Also, on a semi-related note you can now get Fire/Water/Thunder/Leaf Stones reliably from the Pokethlon, so using stuff like Starmie or Arcanine is feasible now. Dragon Scale, King's Rock, and Metal Coat are also there, though strangely not Up-Grade.
-Wild Pokemon and random trainers still have total crap for levels. However, Falkner and Bugsy got big level gains and are now severely overlevelled and have real TM moves this time (Roost and U-turn). You now need very specific Pokemon or specific strategies to beat them, making them some of the best bosses in the entire series instead of the worst. Whitney and Clair are still good, and the second rival battle now throws a level 18 stage two starter at you right after the second gym, which caught me flat-footed; turns out a L14 Spearow is not an effective answer to a L18 Bayleef.
-Kanto is the one thing they really fixed up well, with three dungeons (Viridian Forest, Seafoam Islands, Cerulean Cave) restored to full length. The routes are longer and have more trainers to face now, and there's plenty of legendaries added for you to catch, though some of the locations are kinda silly (Zapdos right outside the rebuild Power Plant, really? <_<). Also, all the Kanto gym leaders got a significant level bump to higher than E4 levels now, the gyms were redesigned and all have underlings now, and all give out TMs, though some are kinda silly for that late in the game. The aftergame in general is pretty eventful now, with 16 gym leaders to rematch and a souped up Elite Four and an even higher levelled Red to top it off as the ultimate final boss.
The new music remixes are nice, at least by Pokemon standards. Some of the graphics that they clearly focused on are really nice, like the golden leaves on the path to Tin Tower or the 3D perspective at the top of Celadon Mansion. Having a touchscreen for all the menus is nice; running shoes that you can permanently toggle on is nicer. The Pokemon following you on screen looks really awesome with the right Pokemon, like Raikou. Having the Battle Frontier be an exact copy/paste of the Platinum one is kinda dumb, but better than nothing (or the Crystal Battle Tower, which was worse than nothing!) I suppose.
As for my team, I wasn't sure where the Pokemon or TMs and really wanted to rush to experiment with specific game elements (i.e. the Safari Zone) were so I opted for a smaller, legendary one to count on overlevelling to make things easier; I basically ran 3-4 Pokemon for almost the entire game. You might have noticed that I almost completetely stopped commenting on boss difficulty after a while; this is because my levels were too high after a certain point to give any meaningful commentary.
Feraligatr - Definately the most diverse of the starters now, with Ice Fang and Crunch (and Superpower really late) by level, physical Waterfall, and TM options like Swords Dance, Dragon Claw, and Earthquake. Averagish speed and special defense hurt it against some special attacking bosses though. Physical STAB is nice, but keep in mind that Waterfall's power is only okay unboosted and it's a bit slow to sweep with Swords Dance, even in-game.
Golem - Easily the earlygame MVP, with complete type advantage over the first three gyms. Remember how I mentioned 'specific Pokemon' for Falkner and Bugsy? Yeah, Geodude is one of them (along with Onix!), although you'll probably need to grind it to get Rock Throw in time for Falkner. Kinda fades later on in the game, but good enough for me to keep using it through endgame, which I haven't done in a long time with the Geodude line.
Spearow - Used to plug an otherwise gaping weakness to Grass, although it let me down in the aforementioned Rival fight. Then again, looking at Pidgey that has even less damage, so eh. Aerial Ace at level 17 or so helps, but I dumped it when I got Entei.
Raikou - Caught the roamers with traded Master Balls. Raikou was awesome throughout the game and made fantastic use of the Choice Specs found at Lake of Rage, even with basically just two moves (Thunderbolt+Shadow Ball). It was so overlevelled at first I barely used it until Feraligatr and Golem caught up, but having the extra insurance certain didn't hurt.
Entei - Joining with Flamethrower is nice. Unfortunately it's redundant with Ho-oh, so it basically got phazed out around the time it stopped being overlevelled.
Ho-oh - It and Lugia getting Recover at 71 is -_- now; thankfully I didn't need the Roost TM for anything else. Sacred Fire is really damned awesome against bosses, even resisted, but the PP is an issue. I opted for Fly for the second STAB over Brave Bird and used Extrasensory in the last slot for the massive PP, though running off the weaker attack stat definately hurts at times. Still completely unfair in-game against anything that doesn't have strong Rock damage.
Feraligatr, Raikou, and Ho-oh were the main things I wanted to use, as I'll only be doing a conventional run once in English and have a team planned out already. I traded over a spare high level Gardevoir over late into Kanto to cover a minor team weakness to Lanturn and Quagsire, but haven't used it much. The downside to this makeshift team is that I don't really feel much attachment to it, so I haven't felt like doing any gym leader rematches or a strengthed E4 run or Red yet, despite getting the last gym badge over a week ago. Instead I've been doing stuff like testing Pickup, breeding Extremespeed Dratinis, and planning for a Pokeniu mk II run when the games get released in English.
