radical red is a labor of love by an entire community that somehow includes almost every pokemon in existence on a gba file and finds way to implement them all in competitive-esque battles to give a challenging, varied experience.

and i am about to be very mean to it. sorry.
radical red is a very impressive endeavor but i do not like it. not because it is difficult(it’s really not that bad there’s several cheese strats if you desperately desire to win), but because i do not like what it says about the pokemon community and its proclivities. pokemon fans have a massive chip on their shoulder over the fact that they are obsessed with a series for children. and to be clear, it is fine to love pokemon at any age, i myself am a grown pokemon addict, but the current obsession with hacks that have EVERY POKEMON and are the SUPER HARDEST EVER NO ACTUALLY reeks of a combination of insecurity and an unwillingness to venture beyond pokemon’s constraints. there are brutally difficult jrpgs out there, but pokemon necessarily has a difficulty ceiling because a lot of pokemon are just better than others. the moment players have access to aegislash, urshifu, mega audino for some reason, etc. the game becomes easy but with the appearance of difficulty because the trainers all have minmaxed legendaries and slightly more competent AI. eventually it feels like the game is patting you on the back for beating the SUPER DIFFICULT HARDCORE ACTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE game that hasn’t actually ever been that.
pokemon fans want to optimize themselves to death and to that end i have to ask, why are you not just playing competitive? radical red hall of fame teams tend to just look like competitive teams so i’m confused why pokemon fans froth over this. it creates and environment with 1000 pokemon to use, but by pokemon’s nature, when a game gets this ‘difficult’ there are really only ~60 pokemon worth using. you can lug a ledian to the elite four if you want but it feels like the game doesn’t want you to.

radical red is just a symptom of a greater problem; people adore it so obviously it fills a desire of the community, but this constant push towards optimizing all the fun out of the games is misguided and making rom hacks boring and samey. there are new difficulty hacks with every pokemon daily at this point and even though radical red is one of the originals, i find the entire genre uninteresting and devoid of the charm a standard pokemon adventure has. if i wanted to fight battles with legendaries and the top 1% of pokemon i’d just go play vgc.