Pokemon Emerald Rogue v2.0 Changelog

Pokemon Emerald Rogue launched its version 2.0 on July 2, 2024. The update includes new features and is quite large, so I made this post “Pokemon Emerald Rogue v2.0 Changelog” to explain everything separately.

Pokemon Emerald Rogue Information

• Creator: Pokabbie
• Base ROM: Emerald
• Language: English
• Latest Version: v2.0
• Last Updated on: July 02, 2024
• Status: Completed

Also Check Out: Pokemon Emerald Rogue Information, Features and Download

Pokemon Emerald Rogue v2.0 Changelog

Generation 9

• All the Pokémon from Scarlet & Violet (including both DLCs) are here and now in Rogue! (There are some moves still missing sadly however)
• Revival Blessing has not been given to any Pokémon; I’m sure you can guess why 😅)

DEV: A massive thankyou to everyone over at RH-Hideout for implementing Gen9 into Emerald Expansion; without them all of these amazing modern Pokémon features would never have even been in Rogue ❤ (Or in most other Emerald hacks you may have played 😉 )

New Battle Gimmicks

• Both Tera and Dynamax are now available in Rogue (unlocked after beating your 1st Run or via that 100% totally secret method no-one knows about mhmm)
• When both Key Items are used together, 1 gimmick will be randomly chosen and the other will be disabled
• The Tera orb will recharge itself whenever you enter an encounter, so you essentially have 1 charge per route (Use it wisely 😉 )

DEV: Thanks again to RH-Hideout’s incredible work!

Updated Trainers

• Gym Leaders, Elite Four and Champions from all 9 generations are now in!
• Gym Trainers can now have Shiny Pokémon

DEV: To avoid “Trainer stole my shiny odds” situations, each Trainer has only one Evolution line that can appear shiny for them and they have much higher odds than the player (Around 20% chance). It also means it happens more often, but not crazy often either 🙂

• Rival Trainers will now appear in Adventures too! Be careful… they may catch you out if you’re not looking out for them!
• Improved Trainer Team generator to aim for more viable teams with more variety

DEV: The improved generator will aim to give each Trainer their own identity without making them predictable. So for example I opted not to always give every Trainer their Ace rather just have them have a preference to pick it. The generator also now attempts to get more type coverage too (This scales with difficulty too)

Multiplayer

• You can now connect to another friend’s game and visit their Hub, Trade Pokémon and go on Adventures together
• This is achieved by connecting a Companion App, named RogueAssistant, to mGBA
• This feature is still quite early days and currently not all the planned features are in. Most notably multi battles are not currently supported (I do hope to get this in for a 2.1 or 2.2 release)

DEV: This has been very exciting and fun to work on although, unsurprisingly, has been a lot of work too! I really wanted to get multi battles in for the 2.0 launch because the idea of doing a co-op Adventure with you friend sounds just amazing. But unfortunately I just couldn’t get it working in time and I definitely didn’t want to delay the update just for this. So hopefully this is a reasonable middle ground for now. Sorry if you felt led on with the Trailer; it really wasn’t my intent, I just got excited to show all the work and forgot to think about the implications 😭 (Regardless, hopefully you will still enjoy the rest of 2.0 enough to wait for the battle stuff in a later update 😛)

Offline Pokémon Box Extension

• By making use of the same Companion App mentioned above, you can now access a Pokémon Home style Offline Box Storage granting you (hopefully) all the space you will even need!

DEV: I know Pokémon Storage became a point of contention towards the end of the last patch. So hopefully this will help address this given I can’t reasonably extend the storage on cart; there is also an unnamed hub upgrade which should hopefully provide a decent alternative for those without access to the Companion App too!

Reworked Pokemon

• Pokémon now both follow the player and can spawn in the overworld and wander around! (There is a setting if you’d prefer the older grass encounters)
• Held items are now infinite use (except berries; berries will be auto re-equipped if you still have some in your bag and you will be notified if this fails)

DEV: I never liked that only a few held items became meta previously due to a lot of them being a pain due to them being consumable. So now nothing* is consumable! Hopefully this leads to people wanting to play with more exciting sets! 😄

• Legendaries now no longer have a Trainer in front of them, instead they will enter an enraged state and their health must be knocked to 1hp (they will always endure at 1hp) before they lose the enraged state and can be caught.

DEV: Catching Legendaries is now harder and more of a resource commitment than previously. Even if you manage to knock it down to 1hp quickly it’s likely gonna be after 2 turns at least, so this also works as a nice Quick Ball nerf! 😉

• Pokémon’s learnsets have been adjusted and will now be mainly based on their most recent appearance; I have gone back and trickled in some of their older moves too, but avoided both Toxic and Scald as those moves were nerfed for a reason! 🤢
• All Tutors have been merged into one and you can now access any move for said Tutor, however each move has a specific cost associated with it
• TMs are now infinite and are now contain more modern selection
• TRs are now present; 50 moves are selected at random from the Tutor move pool at the beginning of an Adventure to become TRs

DEV: This was aimed to add a bit more unpredictability to your movesets, having to choose to go to a Battle Prep or a Mart RestStop may end up changing which moves you have access to and you’re not always going to be able to get the exact same moveset easily in each Adventure.

Updated Difficulty

• Config Lab is now a UI screen rather than buttons on the floor
• Added Difficulty presets which setup the individual options for specific difficulty/skill levels with descriptions provided for each
• Reworked Easy mode to make the difficulty more accessible for new players whilst still being engaging

DEV: I’m hoping this should be a good entry level for people who haven’t particularly messed around too much with Pokémon outside of the mainline games

• Added new difficulty Brutal mode for those few players who found Hard too easy

DEV: (You know who you are 😉)

• Removed some redundant options

DEV: Some options such as Item difficulty or Legendary difficulty just led to weird gameplay experiences imo. So I opted to removed both in favor of rebalancing the main experience to feel better to play regardless of your difficulty

• Added new difficulty options for:
  • Diverse Trainer Pokémon (Trainers will feature more types on their teams e.g. Brock will choose some Steel type Pokémon too)
  • Release Fainted Pokémom (Force On in every difficulty except Easy; in Easy fainted Pokémon will stay in your Team until either a Revive is used or the Player heals with a Nurse)
  • Affection (Force Off in every difficulty except Easy; aims to reward newer players who are less familiar with more difficult Rom Hacks and also makes it more familiar to experiences in Mainline games they may have had)
  • Switch Mode (Force Off in every difficulty except Easy; moved from settings to Config Lab)
  • Fresh Start (Renamed version of Bag Wipe, as it now affects some Hub meta-progression feature too)

DEV: With the Easy rework I wanted to make an experience that was a good first step for players who have never touched more difficult rom hacks before. People who have mainly only played Official Games before. It will be slightly more difficult than Mainline games but not overwhelmingly so.
The Brutal mode is the complete opposite end of the spectrum! If you want to be punished for a missplay or for lack of information gathering during a battle, you will be! I basically ramped everything up in this mode that I could 👿

New/Reworked Encounters

• Routes will now always have at least 1 Pokémon matching their type hint (They also now have a visual tint based on the type hint in the Map screen too)
• Sinnoh routes have been added
• Routes have more variation in how Trainers are placed
• Strong Trainers (Mini bosses) have been removed
• Battle Simulator has been added which allows you to wager either Money, Items or IVs and then take part in a random battle with 3 lvl50 Pokémon each

DEV: The Strong Trainers were always super weird. I loved the concept but they were also so risky to pick with very little gain. So the Battle Simulator attempts to take that concept but lower the stakes. The stakes are now only ever as high as you want to make them. And even in the worst case scenario of you completely wiping out, you won’t lose any of your actual party. It also now provides the only way inside of Adventures to adjust your IVs

• Honey Tree has been added; at this location you can use new Pokéblock item to store/buffer an encounter for next time e.g. if you throw down a fire and flying pokeblock, the next time you visit the honey tree, there’s a good chance you’ll find either a Charizard or a Talonflame
• Game Show has been reworked so it’s now a series of mini games where in you attempt to earn a larger and larger reward for winning successive rounds

DEV: As funny as it was to watch someone always pick incorrectly, the old Game Show was just a “never gonna enter that” encounter for many. Now I’m hoping it serves as a nice slow pace change where there isn’t any risk involved. Just some fun mini games and some good items (if you do well!)

• Dark Deal will now display descriptions for all Charms before you choose to pick them up
• Mysterious Shrine has been added which provides you a Sacred Ash in exchange for a Capacity Curse (Sacred Ash gives you 1 free retry; if you completely team wipe you will respawn just after you obtained your last badge with your party revived)

DEV: Some of you will recognise this as a reworked version of the old Graveyard. Now it’s much more viable and definitely something worth considering for harder challenges imo 😉

• Catching Contest has been added will specialize in a specific type and challenge you to catch the Pokémon with the highest in a specific Base Stat; if you do so you will be given a large money reward

DEV: Another slower paced encounter; this encounter works great as an opportunity to add a good/rare Pokémon to your Team and often it can be an intentional trade off between catching the mon that’s going to win you the money vs catching a mon that you want to add to your team

• Mysterious Sign has been added; this encounter will only ever spawn in the first column and is an opportunity to learn about the upcoming Gym Leader; you find out their type speciality for free and can then choose to pay to find out about their lead and/or their ace
• The DayCare Rest Stop has been added which provides: temporary Pokémon storage, Mint, Pokéblock & Berry shop, In Adventure plantable berry patch & the Item Courier
• The Full Rest Stop has been made significantly rarer; it only tends to appear late on into a Run
• Rest Stops now appear more chaotically, you will not always be able to bet on having a Rest Stop right before the next Gym Fight

DEV: Everyone who played the last version knows just how OP the Full Rest Stop was 😉 I’ve attempted to give the player more tools/control at each Rest Stop but as a trade off, you will likely have to make moment to moment decisions about which Rest Stop you want to enter as you’re likely not going to be able to get access to everything you want at once anymore

• Team Hideouts have been added. For each Adventure you will encounter Grunts from either Team Rocket, Aqua, Magma or Galactic. In these hideouts you will find a lot of Grunts, and a lot of Items; these are the only location in Adventures where you can find Rare Candies and the Master Ball
• Legendaries have been reworked to limit the number of encounters you have per Adventure; each Adventure will now feature a guaranteed “Box” Legendary, which will appear later on into a run, and up to 2 alternative/minor Legendaries, which will appear earlier into a run (Legendary in Rogue still includes Mythicals and Ultrabeasts)

DEV: Legendaries were a bit too easy to get a hold of in past versions imo and I wanted to lean more into making the experience feel like a condensed/abridged version of an actual Pokémon game; so limiting the Legendaries and providing them in a more structured manner very much felt like a good way of doing that 🙂

Updated Hub

• You now get to choose the name of your Hub (It is yours after all!)
• Player can (mostly) build or upgrade whatever they want when they want (Currency for this is awarded through Quests rather than buildings being specific rewards for Quests as previously)
• Multiple new buildings/NPCs should allow you to customize yourself and your Pokémon pretty much however you want! (Provided you have the $)

DEV: I wanted to make the Hub feel like a more important area. It’s its own little mini game! What I’ve ended up with sort of feels a bit like a light version of Animal Crossing. It won’t take a lot of time from you outside of your runs, if you’re a play that just wants to jump into the action over and over, but it will feel much more rewarding and personal to you (At least I hope!)

Quest Rework

• Previous quests have been split up into a 2 different categories: Main and Challenges
• A “Final Quest” has been added which is accessible once completing all other Main Quests
• Challenge Quests keep track of the difficulty they are completed on and some even offer additional rewards for being completed at higher difficulties (Completed Challenges can be attempted again at higher difficulties too)
• Challenge Quests also display completion for each Difficulty Level separately

DEV: The idea here is to provide a core experience to most players so they can play the game and “beat it” feeling satisfied about their experience, without needing to 100% every Quest in the game. Main Quests aims to serve as a tutorial and provide a glimpse into the many different ways to play, without introducing tedious repetitive quests (cough Mono Type Quests cough)
Challenges are where most of those tedious Quests now live and they have also seen a rework to remove the “turn the difficulty settings up” style Quests so now they can be completed on any difficulty. I want the player to feel like they can play at whatever difficulty level they feel comfortable at and not to feel frustrated when doing something like the previous “Please Stop…” Quest
To capture the essence of those more difficult Quests, I’m hoping that Challenges keeping track of what difficulty was used when they were originally completed will encourage some players to try higher difficulty settings out 🙂 (I am looking forward to eventually seeing someone insane enough to attempt 100%ing Brutal 💀)

Visuals

• Time of Day is now visible in the overworld; it progresses as you play, so no need to change system clock (Evos still generally use Sun/Moon stone instead of this mechanic or have become just regular lvl up Evos where they weren’t branching e.g. Riolu)
• Seasons are now visible in the overworld

DEV: This generally just makes the game feel more pretty and varied and also helps to break up a bit of the monotony with encountering the same routes again; it feels a little bit different at a different season, even if it is just a coat of paint on the top! It’s also worth noting that both of these features can be set to “Hidden” in the settings if you’d prefer to not have them.

• Improved Battle UI based on Platinum’s UI

DEV: I wanted to step away from Emerald’s UI and given I have made use of more DS Audio and Routes this update, it made sense to pick something from the DS too 🙂

Improved QoL

DEV: My aim here was to streamline everything and anything I could! Reduce the number of button presses, the number of fades in/out the steps in a process, you name it! I wanted it reduced!

• Pokédex now contains all information about a mon: moves, stats, abilities, evolutions, forms etc.
• Level up moves can be retaught at any time
• Pokédex, Level Up Moves, Evolutions & Nickname can be accessed from the Party Menu and these submenus can cycle between party Pokémon avoiding the need to back out and reselect

DEV: The big improvement here imo is Level Up moves no longer ask “Would you like to learn XYZ? Yes/No?” in the middle of battle whenever a mon levels up. Rather you simply get a little popup whenever any new moves are available or any evolutions are available (Along with a little Party Menu indicator too). So Battles are much more snappy and you can review all the moves at once in a much faster UX

• Evolution methods have been updated to reduce unneeded steps: “Hold item and level up” evos are now just “Use Item” evos, “Level whilst knowing Move XYZ” are now just “Reach Lvl XYZ” (Level determined by level the mon learns the move)
• 4 Key Items can be registered and accessed in the ORAS style selection

DEV: Big thanks to Merrp for developing this feature! ❤

• Move Type Effectiveness is now shown in battle when hovering over a move
• Picking up Items/Berries is now instant and creates a popup rather than locking you in place until you spam past the message box
• Nature Mint screen now displays the current natures including the -stat and +stat of each Pokémon

DEV: Hopefully this makes people more likely to want to use more varied mints in situations where they don’t have the exact nature mint they want but it’s better than what a Party Member has

• Nickname settings have been added: Ask (Previous behavior), Always, Never, Automatic (Assigns a random nickname)

DEV: The pace of Emerald Rogue can sometimes make it difficult to come up with nicknames so hopefully the Automatic nickname mode can still keep Pokémon unique while avoiding slowing down the gameplay (The nickname list is mostly just common pet names, foods or household items so expect some absolutely wild nicknames xD)

Native Battle Speed Up (QoL)

• You can set battle speed to 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x or Instant (Same as disabling animations)
• Battle speed can be set differently based on type of battle: Wild, Trainer, Important (Gym Battle, Legendary, Shiny etc.)
• Holding L button can be used to temporarily return to 1x speed (This likely will see some tweaking/reworking later as it’s a bit obscure atm)

DEV: This one deserved its own separate title! I’ve managed to commune with the GBA gods and receive this blessing of Native speed up!.. Or something… But this is pretty big imo as this isn’t hardware/emulator specific; you can play Emerald Rogue on an actual GBA and have it use 4x speed in battle without distorting the audio horribly. Although it does make some minor artifacts with some moves e.g. Dragon Dance, but it’s nothing too jarring thankfully

Safari Rework

• Safari no longer infinitely spawns Pokémon based on your Pokédex entries. Instead it will show you baby versions of the exact same Pokémon you used/caught in your past runs (Nicknames and all!)
• The Pokémon you caught have enjoyed Adventuring with you (Rather baby versions of them), so have come to chill out in your little Safari area; you may recatch them and use them as partners on your future Runs!
• If a Pokémon is left in the safari for a while it may end up disappearing; though this is easily avoidable so don’t worry too much 😉

DEV: It’s no secret I disliked what the Safari become in 1.0 versions of the game. It turned into a place where people grinded out IVs or Shinys rather than playing the main game and it never felt very personal; it made the Pokémon feel a lot more like numbers than party members you previously triumphed with!
So this rework aims to address all of those points. It mostly means, if you want to catch Pokémon, you need to go on an Adventure to find them. It especially makes Legendaries far more elusive and far more befitting of their title.

• You can choose which Poké Ball to use the Safari (The Poké Ball swapper has been removed due to this)

Candy Rework

• Rare Candy is no longer given in the Hub or by Quest Rewards
• Partner Pokémon you have in your Party whenever you embark on Adventures will gain Levels based on how many badges you gained on the Adventure (These levels are purely for accessing Evolutions in the Hub and Learning more powerful Level Up moves)
• When embarking on an Adventure, all Partner Pokémon will have their Level reset (So it’s possible to start an Adventure with a Lvl 10 Dragonite for example 😉)

DEV: The primary reason Rare Candies used to be given was so you could skip ahead and skip over the early game Gyms. This was way before Quests existed in the game and the second they were added Rare Candies quickly became used in a bit of a dull way; most Quests required you to do a Full Run i.e. don’t skip any Gyms so people would hoard Rare Candies, enter a run and then level up their starter to lvl100 before sweeping the first 6/7 Gyms…
This wasn’t very fun imo 😅
This new system does away with the idea of Skipping Gyms and with overleveling to obscene degrees entirely and instead grants you the ability to improve your Partner out of Run but not to a point where it makes the early game irrelevant. It is also worth pointing out that Rare Candies can now be found inside of Adventures, although only in 1 specific encounter)

Bag Rework

• Bag has been reworked to have access to substantially more item slots while also merging the pockets all to share the existing slots between multiple pockets
• Bag now starts out with a small number of slots and can be upgrade in the hub (Key items do not take up these Item Slots)
• More pockets have been added to split up the items more predictably
• The bag UI will display the number of Items you can carry
• Bag will be automatically sorted; sorting modes can be adjusted by pressing Select in the bag
• Shop inventories have also received the same sorting treatment

Pokeblock

• Pokéblock can be created in the Hub or in the new Daycare Rest Stop
• In Adventures, Pokéblock can be used to reroll encounters for a route or can be used at the new Honey Tree encounter to attract a Pokémon of a specific type for the next time you visit the Honey Tree

DEV: This should hopefully give the players a bit more control over their team building by allowing them to slightly control what Pokémon they are going to encounter; it should also make the Mono Type Quests much more manageable avoiding losing runs due to not having access to specific Pokémon

• In the Hub, Pokéblock are now the currency used in the Bakery to increase IVs

DEV: Increasing a Pokémon’s IVs is more of an investment than previously and hopefully should feel far more satisfying when a Pokémon finally hits that 31 IV and then hard carries their next Run! 😄

Shiny Pokemon

• Pokémon’s shiny state is determined in the overworld, with a Legends Arceus style animation + sound effect which plays too!
• The base shiny odds has been increased to 1/400 for these dynamic encounter spawns, but kept at 1/100 for the static spawns (e.g. Legendaries)
• It is also now possible to chain hunt shiny Pokémon by knocking out the the same type of Pokémon over and over again
• Shiny Odds Pokémon can be boosted by 2x by using a “Shiny Pokéblock” on a Route

DEV: I never expected there to be a Shiny hunting community pop up when I first launched, so I wanted to improve the experience for them 🙂
Ideally it should now be more engaging to hunt for Shiny Pokémon and Shiny Legendaries are much more elusive, as the shiny state is sort of locked to the current adventure, so getting your hands on one is much more exciting I hope!

Player Customisation

• Added outfits for all Mainline Protags! (Though some of them don’t have a backsprite 😅)
• Improved outfit customisation, so now you can manually adjust the colours of your sprites in game to any combination you want

Sound

• New Music track from the Generation 4 games; these have been scattered throughout the game as I have made a bit of a pivot into more gen4 music in general

DEV: I had hoped to include music from Gen 5 too but that turned out too difficult sadly and now that Gen9 Pokémon are here too I’m not sure there is even enough space to try and get more music into the ROM sadly 😢

• High Quality Audio; fixes the crackly audio that could happen in the last patch

DEV: A big thank you to CyanSixFour for their help with this ❤

• There are now audio sliders in the settings menu

DEV: I’m aware that these can make the audio go a bit weird when set to particularly low but not 0% values (e.g. 20%, 30%) but I still think it’s worthwhile to keep them on for people who want to only keep certain sounds enabled 🙂

Misc Points

• The bike has been replaced with a shiny new alternative ✨
• The wild encounter preview in the Start menu will now appear based on whether the Pokémon has been seen in Pokédex or not which should streamline the later replays much more
• Catching bonus has been changed to discourage recatching the same species over and over: After you catch a Pokémon twice on a route the artificial catching boost is removed. After you catch a Pokémon 4 times, the catching rate boost is removed too
• There is now only a single water encounter by default, however the Wild Charm
• The water encounters are subject to the catching bonus changes over the course of the entire Adventure)

DEV: It’s no secret I disliked what I began to dub “IV fishing”. The act of players catching Pokémon over and over again until they have a mon with good IVs or have a team with 5 or 6 of the same Pokémon. With the way this is setup, if you have good Poké Balls and you’re trying to catch a relatively normal species over and over, you should be fine (It’s at least no worse than mainline catching); but if you’re trying to catch a team of Beldum? Good luck…

• Removal of seeded mode

DEV: I know some will be sad by this, but I found this feature got more and more clunky as time went on and I wasn’t really a fan of it being used to hunt for specific species of Pokémon. Hopefully through both the new Pokéblock mechanics and a unspecified Hub unlock people still have an easy way to grind out catches for specific Pokémon though 😛

• Addition of more Charms and Curses
• Charms can now be added in the Hub

DEV: When you start and Adventure with Charms Questing will be disable; I wanted to give people access to these tools to provide something close to a Sandbox Mode, but obviously I also didn’t want people to cheese themselves out of more challenging Quests so I think this a decent trade off for now 😛
Also worth noting that a lot of the new Charms & Curses available via the Hub merchant are not ever given out during runs; they are purely intended for Challenges

• Mystery Man modes have been removed in favor of turning them into unique Curses & Challenge Quests

DEV: I loved the concept behind the Mystery Man but the setup was a bit obscure and there wasn’t an awful lot of incentive to actually play multiple modes. So I’ve converted almost all of the modes into Curses and added Challenge Quests for them too which I think plays much nicer! I’m hoping that with all these controls, people attempt to create their own crazy Challenges too! 😛

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