Spoiler: Rocket Edition:
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...and while its a darker version of the Kanto story, it actually makes everything make more sense.
You play a pink-haired rocket grunt, the gameplay is shaken up by the fact that you steal pokemon from trainers but get very little money from winning trainer battles, limiting your access to things like pokeballs to catch your own pokemon. its great playing the bad guy for once. you get promoted from grunt to admin to executive to boss, able to steal stuff from more trainers as you go. there are bunch of sidequests where you can do crimes for people for rewards with branching options to do the good thing here and there.
but what I didn't expect this game to do? have an actual story. I thought I'd just be badass rocket trainer who makes everything succeed for team rocket for once or something, but no. Its more like, the rocket protag's story is a side journey to Red's story, where you go around Kanto doing jobs at different times while Red's journey is happening at the same time, just almost never where you are. In some ways you do all the things that set up stuff for Red to solve, or go places to do things at times he doesn't. Team Rocket still goes through all its usual plots that get foiled, but your the one doing all the stuff that succeeded, Lance has this crime rehab program in case you want to be good, and thats just how it starts out.
as it gets deeper, the game delves into the political backstory of this version of Kanto, detailing the war it fought between it and Johto. Lance is portrayed as a Johto foreigner who won the war and now rules the region, with the other side being Oak, the previous champion and various other scientists that were apart of the Mewtwo Project to try and win the war: Blaine, Fuji, Shigeki (the old man in viridian who teaches you to catch stuff) and this team of course funded by Giovanni. the Mewtwo Project failed for a few reasons, Oak decided to surrender and Giovanni decided to make Team Rocket as this group to take back Kanto from Lance, giving Team Rocket a political motivation of driving out a foreign power from their region.
I thought that hey, thats cool, maybe I'll just go catch Mewtwo and beat Red for Team Rocket or something? But no. it goes harder/deeper.
see, turns out? this version of Oak is evil, and decided not to engineer the ultimate pokemon....but the ultimate human trainer, reasoning that a pokemon's true strength didn't come from power from a human's ability to lead and command them to their fullest potential, and thus made Red to be this ultimate trainer puppet of his to beat everyone and basically allow Oak to takeover Kanto by being an advisor to Red and speaking for him because Red is so specialized in pokemon and nothing else- not even socializing. Mewtwo it turns out, isn't capturable- its too powerful. So instead you go and capture what is called "The Catastrophe" another failed clone of Mew....that turns out to be Missingno. Yes. Seriously. THAT Missingno. The legendary of this game is literally Missingno. complete with this blocky glitch sprite, you catch it with a master ball and everything.
Team Rocket still falls and is disbanded by Giovanni....so the grunt goes to the pokemon league in revenge for team rocket, gets there too late as Red beats Blue, then Oak comes in to start puppeteering, claiming he is Red' interpreter since he speaks very little, and wants to start enforcing more strict policies in the name of "public safety"- he's a tyrant, its made very clear he's just doing this to take over the world with Red as his figurehead-so I the rocket member, stopping at nothing, use my stolen pokemon team of magnemite, scizor, seadra, dragonite, arcanine and missingno. to defeat Red himself then defeat Oak when he finds that his toy trainer doesn't work. my rocket trainer basically ends up saving Kanto and possibly the world from evil Prof. Oak with the power of a freaky glitch pokemon when Oak himself tries to desperately enter his name into the records to become Champion and the Missingo basically glitches the environment to stop that.....
and how it really ends is that at court, Red is medically examined to not be a human being in sound health and thus denied from being Champion and being genetically modified is judged to be too dangerous to practice pokemon fighting in civilization, Blue turns down championship, making it all default back to Lance. Oak's crimes aside from assaulting Agatha because he decided love and honor was dumb for evil intellectual reasons and she thought him being ruthless was hot so he assaulted her for backing him up for the wrong reasons and thus he gets exiled and he won't get funded for his research ever again and my rocket member.....well they accrued a bounty of like, 328,000 pokedollars or something big like that for numerous crimes they committed without shame or going to the police officers once to lessen any of this and thus earned 55 years in penitentiary prison.
.....What you thought this was going to have a happy ending for my rocket member? Hah! Nope. Just because my grunt saved the world from Oak, doesn't mean they get off scot free. No, they're doing hard time for life, this may be a more cynical pokemon world but its still pokemon and they're a Rocket criminal thug who stole from pretty much every trainer in the region without doing anything to make up for it, this was a No-Mercy run of pokemon, of course its not going to have a good ending for the criminal. Despite it all, Lance is the one who wins in the end. its wild.
oh and the stinger at the end reveals that Bill and Elm meet at Oak's basement lab with Bill having copied Oak's research that made Red.....probably so they can make Gold. this whole thing was made to keep in line with canon events, technically.
so yeah, this game is a creative romhack in that its the Kanto region but from a different perspective and done in a different order, taking the structure and modifying it so that you have to go through a familiar region in an unfamiliar way. and honestly the bad end I got was entirely avoidable- there was police officers I could've gone to, to like lower my bounty for returning the pokemon I stole. it makes me wonder how different the game would be if I did it as crimeless as possible, what would change from my playthrough which did all the crimes to the max. I'm guessing the final cutscene with the judge would be the one that would be most different, probably.
also during like the climax, Oak observes/implies that my rocket character is also silent and seemingly "meant to be controlled from afar" just like Red, which might be implying that the rocket protagonist is also somehow a genetically engineered human, but Oak doesn't seem to know about the rocket member until that moment, which either means there was a second person making them but its never explained who made the rocket protagonist (or its just a nod to the fact they're both PCs). the rocket protag does have pink hair though, its oft commented on throughout the game, and Oak's basement laboratory is filled with dittos probably used to help make Red.....so maybe The Rocket protag you play in this is a human clone from one of those dittos or a ditto that took on human form that somehow escaped, made its way to Celadon and became a rocket grunt for some reason? it might explain why they kept changing appearance so fast when promoted. so potentially, this whole game is about a failed Mew Clone, catching a second failed mew clone, to beat another failed mew clone. magnificent.
But yeah, this was a fun change of pace from normal pokemon fan games. they did a good job of structuring this so there were boss equivalents throughout each leg of the journey despite you not getting badges for most of the game, they spun their own story while made the conflict of Kanto more complex, in the end didn't really change that what Team Rocket was doing was ultimately bad....it just that in this game, there were other bad people involved and Lance's policies while legal, care more about the economy of Kanto than its actual prosperity. Blue actually comes out looking like the best person morally, because he's just a normal kid who actually followed the advice of caring for his pokemon and doing everything right, got the championship and Red the puppet comes and takes it away from him.
So yeah, if you don't mind a darker interpretation of pokemon, Pokemon Rocket Edition's good, I'd recommend it just for the experience of playing a rocket grunt for once, but having an actual story with it is good to. I'd give a 8/10, B+ kind of rating myself.