Pokemon Storm Silver - All Boss Battles

Storm Silver is a standard enhancement hack of HGSS, featuring all Pokemon through Gen 4, some minor QoL and updated trainer battles. I’ve loved this hack ever since I first played it many years ago because I love the visuals of HGSS with the colors, general graphical style and details like following Pokemon (tbh probably my favorite-looking games in the series with only really Gen 5 doing certain things better imo), but the gameplay really does not hold up and this hack fixes it. I last played this hack back in 2021 after Dray first announced he was starting on a v2.0 and it made me want to replay it. At that time, I believe it was supposed to be more similar to the original, but with a lot of the more modern QoL/other changes done in Renegade Platinum ported forward, but I recently looked around the GitHub repo for the game to see where progress was since I was thinking about it again, and noticed it seems like it’s very much not that anymore. While I’m still very excited to play it whenever it’s out, since it’ll probably feel like a significantly different game, I decided to replay the original one more time since the reason I looked for progress on 2.0 at all was because I felt like playing again.

This very long video has basically every major battle in the game, timestamped in pinned comment. I didn’t feel like going legendary hunting, so aside from Lugia I basically progressed from story objective to story objective (although I generally did detour to do optional backtracking at Union Cave, Mt. Mortar, etc, when available) to get experience. In postgame, I hit all the Kanto leaders and Red - I’m aware that there are rematches available with all 16 leaders as well as a second round of the Elite Foure, and was originally going to do all of those. However, as the game was winding down, I was feeling like I was more or less done with this playthrough, and therefore decided to just finish out the remaining leaders and Red and call it there.

Difficulty-wise, while this game is harder than a vanilla game, it’s not too bad and you can basically pick six things you want to use for fun and run with those the whole game. Early game before your full party is assembled you’ll probably even outlevel and mostly steamroll bosses, as happened here. I think the level curve started to noticeably catch up and surpass me around badge 7 or 8 - I think the hardest fights pre-Elite Four were Archer and Giovanni at the Radio Tower as well as Clair. Lance was definitely the hardest main story fight, though, primarily due to the level gap, as I arrived at the League Lv49-51, which is already below every E4 member, and Lance himself is 54-60 (4/6 mons on the higher end of this). I grinded a couple levels to get everyone to 52 before starting the challenge which was still below most members, but doable, but Lance was a bit of a struggle - funnily enough I definitely had a guaranteed win at the end if I Calm Minded more but I was really not used to fighting bosses that actually use healing items anymore so I assumed he was out of them and kept spamming attacking moves, but thankfully got saved from a redo by an insane anime moment crit at the very end. Kanto is better than vanilla but still a pretty easy boss gauntlet, although I do take a lot of care to juggle my Lucky Egg around the whole time to maximize exp (maybe I should have been doing this immediately post Lake of Rage when I got it but I didn’t really feel the pressure to do so until suddenly noticing levels catch up at the very end of main game). Red, however, is a challenge due to still being like 16 levels down on him despite the more careful exp management and using all Rare Candies I’d accumulated during the game. There were a bunch I missed that I could have gone and picked up, but I was lazy. Naturally that also meant I didn’t want to grind further. I figured I could probably find a route to make this work and tried a few attempts. Fortunately, Red’s team has a number of moves that can miss or otherwise bail us out with good luck, so when I happened to get a lucky attempt while routing this, I just stuck with it.

Team comp was decided based on stuff I wanted to use + accounting for lacking QoL in the game. Lapras was chosen to not need to buy a Game Corner Ice Beam TM. I also wanted to give it the Thunderbolt TM so I went with a physical Electric in Luxray to avoid having to buy another copy immediately (but I did anyway later in the game when I had more spare money). The game also has three water HMs, so I chose Swampert as my ground so that it could also eat Waterfall. Leafeon and Charizard were simply Pokemon I like that filled types not yet covered, and finally I chose Chimecho as I figured Psychic would be a good type to slot in out of what I was missing and realized it had decent buffs in this hack, and these are cool places to use Pokemon that are normally garbage in vanilla.

Game can be found in the drive link on Dray’s Twitter: https://x.com/Drayano60