The Legacy games (Yellow, Crystal and Emerald) are all pretty good, fix a lot of the issues with the first few generations, like dark type being special and not physical, and improves stats and movesets of a lot of mons so pretty much everything is useable, Has much better trainer AI and teams, while not being super “hardcore” difficult like some romhacks try to be. It’s challenging, but fair.

Fusion. It has Mr. Sir

CW: Spooky shit

Best one i seen is pokemon emerald rogue, which turns the game into a roguelike and adds all gen 1-9 mons to pokemon emerald.

Gaia for a high quality hack that feels like a “real” pokemon game
Crystal Clear for an open world gen 2 with a lot of cool shit

I have this list in my notes from 4 months ago

• Unbound
• Pisces (?)
• FireRed Rocket Edition
• Celia’s Stupid ROM Hack
• Glazed
• Gaia
• Infinite Fusion

They’re all pretty well regarded in the scene IIRC, but I’ve only played some of Glazed and it seemed cool? Pretty sure they’re all finished projects except Pisces which is why it has the question mark.

Oh also Pisces has fakemon which I know isn’t everyone’s cup of tea

Pokemon: Too Many Types (As seen in Alpharad’s video!

It makes for the funniest pokemon content I’ve ever seen

I’ve recently been playing renegade Platinum and put it on my custom-firmware DSi XL. Super fun n quite hard

Anything Drayano made, like Renegade Platinum or Storm Silver. Essentially the vanilla games but made better in every way.

I’m going to go off the beaten path here and suggest one that hasn’t been completed, but it is more than halfway done. It’s called Pokémon Coral. A game that intends to feel like playing Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal for the first time with completely new region and 251 pokemon from gen 1 to 7. It’s the prettiest gen 2 hack I’ve ever played!

https://www.pokecommunity.com/threads/pokémon-coral-version-2022-demo-out-now.402361/

I’ve been playing the Radical Red challenge hack of firered

Pokémon Quetzal is a fun emerald ROM hack that has a whole bunch of extra pokémon, and settings to change how often shinies appear.

It also has multiplayer which I have not touched but sounds interesting.