Pokemon Odyssey - Where No Game Freak Has Gone Before

29/08/25

While I don’t a hundred percent agree with the overall sentiment, I think it’s hard to disagree with the fact that Pokemon has lost something in its last decade. Now, whilst I’d be bold enough to say that the 3DS era onwards hasn’t produced an outright bad Pokemon game, there hasn’t been one that captured and enraptured my attention like the way the Johto or Hoenn games had a stranglehold on me in my youth. But even if Game Freak wasn’t producing them, it wasn’t as if these Pokemon games weren’t being made. No, in the realm of fangames and romhacks, all in the hands of fans, the thankless work of producing some of the best Pokemon content - official or not - has never ceased. In fact, the last few years have produced some of the most acclaimed romhacks and fangames the space has ever seen - namely Pokemon Infinite Fusions, Pokemon Unbound, and today’s topic of choice, Pokemon Odyssey. A marriage of the Pokemon license with the themes and mechanics of the dungeon crawler Etrian Odyssey and the vibes of the anime Made in Abyss. From this melting pot, we’re left with Pokemon Odyssey, a work of staggering excellence with perhaps the most solid foundation to a Pokemon title I’ve ever seen. While minor issues crop up here and there, they’re small fries in the genuine incredible experience that makes up Pokemon Odyssey.

Despite my love of Pokemon stretching back nearly two and a half decades, romhacks and fangames is an area I’ve only really dipped my toes into. I’ve messed around with games that have remixed existing Pokemon games, like Fool’s Gold or Crystal Clear, but outside of a few hours in Pokemon Unbound, I’m more a newbie then anything else when it comes to these new-fangled romhacks, always just looking fondly from afar. I’d play more of them, but my To Be Played backlog of video games is so high it’s kind of hard to justify putting in dozens of hours on any unofficial title, regardless of their apparent quality. The difference that made Pokemon Odyssey a must-play for me was the fact that I am a sicko for dungeon crawlers, and one dungeon crawler in particular: Etrian Odyssey. Infusing Pokemon, a franchise near and dear to my heart, with one of my favourite RPGs of all time, with a sprinkling of one of anime’s most unique recent releases… having that all packaged together, how could I not jump on day one? Seeing these three properties that all hold something special to me, mixed together in a nearly perfect way, makes Odyssey a staggering achievement alone.

Pokemon Odyssey places you in the shoes of Nyx, an established character rather than the ‘player character slate’ most Pokemon games - core or fanmade - opt for, as she begins a journey into the mysterious Yggdrasil Labyrinth in search of its depths, mysteries, and at the urging of her older sister. Accompanied by her fellow Guild members, the meek Ethan and odd, robotic Olympia, Nyx’s journey into the Labyrinth starts small, before she - literally and figuratively - rapidly finds herself out of her depth. It’s a game that manages to scale from rather humble beginnings to genuinely world-shaking stakes, all whilst feeling natural in terms of progression. It feels very much like shades of both its inspirations, Made in Abyss and Etrian Odyssey, in that sense. Alongside the little I played of Pokemon Unbound, Odyssey is easily the most ambitious and well-thought out romhack I’ve ever played. Nearly every element the developer tackles lands wonderfully and punches above nearly everything and anything Pokemon has attempted since its 3D revolution. Its narrative is engaging and spans a variety of genres, the world is beautiful and begging to be explored. The depth of its battling is staggering and the adherence to its inspirations are incredible. Outside of what I’ve heard about Pokemon Unbound, Pokemon Odyssey genuinely seems to be in a weight class of its own.

The foundation of every Pokemon game is, of course, the Pokemon themselves. Whilst many modern romhacks opt for throwing as many generations of Pokemon into them as possible, Odyssey opts for an approach that is both restrained and ambitious. The game features the entirety of the first three generations of Pokemon - along with any post-Gen 3 evolution they may have had, along with a select number of later generation Pokemon to appear either for a specific story or quest-based reason. Beyond that, a sizable portion of Pokemon - both from Gens 1 through 3, and beyond - appear in Odyssey as one of the game’s unique Etrian variants. Much like with recent Pokemon games having a subset of older Pokemon receiving a new regional form, these original Etrian Variants make up the majority of Odyssey’s ‘new’ roster additions.

Original Pokemon - colloquially known as “Fakemons” - are a divisive subject, as many believe they inevitably ruin and clash badly with the fairly unified art style of Pokemon. This can absolutely be the case, but the work done on the Etrian Variants in Odyssey is nothing short of phenomenal. Each of the 100 variants present in Odyssey each pull their design from a creature, character, or concept from Etrian Odyssey, both honouring and incorporating the design work from Etrian seamlessly into Pokemon Odyssey, whilst also balancing the herculean act of keeping them in line with Pokemon’s GBA era of general art direction is far and away Odyssey’s greatest achievement. I genuinely don’t think there is a single bad design in the bunch - which, to be fair, I’m biased for how much I love Etrian Odyssey’s design work - and by the end of the Second Stratum I’d already molded a team together that consisted solely of Etrian Variants speaks volumes. Though, the fact that three of my favourite Pokemon - Xatu, Dusknoir and Noctowl - received fantastic variants certainly helped my enthusiasm to utilize them.

The fact that I wanted an entire squad of Etrian Pokemon in my team is helped by the fact that essentially the entire roster of Pokemon in the game has been rebalanced - some with small tweaks, others with major stat overhauls - to become viable within the game. Moves, stats, and types (via the Etrian Variants) are all tweaked to give you the most versatile roster Pokemon has ever seen. Are you a huge fan of Beedrill, Butterfree, or another low-tier Bug Type? You can make ‘em work. Better yet, if you really, really want to power through with some of the ridiculously powerful Pokemon in history, the game provides enough challenge that you never feel like you're steamrolling through encounters. Not everything is quite equal, as there will always be Pokemon that are just better full packages, but this is as close to a fully balanced roster I’ve ever seen. For better or worse, for years people have been echoing Elite Four Karen’s monologue from Gen 2, saying that people should use the Pokemon they like most, and I think this is the closest we’ll ever get to that ideal being realized.

Pokemon battles are for the most part relatively close to a normal Gen 3 battle, though double battles are consistently in play for any trainer encounters. There are a handful of new moves and a whole new type, but they serve to just spread things out a little bit more than flipping the table on Game Freak’s brand of balancing. Overall, the balance of Odyssey is immaculate, even on the game’s brutal Hard Mode. Fights never feel quite unwinnable, but on this hardest of difficulties you need to know what your chosen squad of Pokemon is good at, and lean into those strengths and cover up weaknesses to survive and thrive. I’m not great at hardcore Pokemon battling, but solving the little puzzles that many of the major encounters become was a lot of fun, and made me pull from Pokemon I’ve never used ever. The best example I have for this kind of balance was the brutally difficult Third Stratum Captain fight. She’ll open the encounter by bringing out a Pokemon that automatically activates Sunny Day, and considering this is a Fire-Type themed fight, causes her already powerful Pokemon to become decimating sun gods. To make matters worse, she has a Legendary Pokemon in her squad that hits so hard with Sunny Day’s boost, even Water-Type Pokemon were being one-shotted by his Fire moves. Thus, I had to tweak my team to incorporate not only Pokemon that could take hits from this opposing squad, but also negate moves like Sunny Day that’ll push me at an even further disadvantage.

With Hard Mode somewhat puzzle-like boss encounters frequently requiring all but the best teams to make some changes, this may be in the form of changing up moves, stats, or even entire Pokemon, and Odyssey serves the player swimmingly in this way to prevent undeeded grind. With a Level Cap in place to gate your progress on Normal and Hard Mode, horizontal tweaks are required then simply vertical upgrades. To that end, NPCs hang about in your home base that’ll allow you to relearn any forgotten moves, completing some early-game quests will provide you with a tool to alter your Pokemon’s EVs - raising stat bonuses, basically - and an EXP tool exists in the game to instantly bump your team up to the level cap. Abilities and Natures can be tweaked, and as long as you have enough money, you can essentially generate the Pokemon of your dreams. It turns rejigging your team into a snap and rewards you for continually catching Pokemon throughout your journey, keeping you from having to backtrack to and fro to get a certain Pokemon to counter a specific Stratum Captain. There is something to manually building up a team in a Game-Freak produced Pokemon game, but I think with the curve Odyssey presents, having this fully available from the jump is for the best.

Beyond the battles, Pokemon Odyssey manages to twist the general progression of Pokemon with the dungeon crawling of Etrian Odyssey. Rather than moving from town to town, battling each Gym Leader in turn, you’ll almost constantly be navigating through dungeons downwards, floor by floor, with each stratum of the Yggdrasil Labyrinth showcasing entirely different aesthetics, climates, stratum explorers, and of course, new Pokemon. Each dungeon floor, after navigating their maze-like layouts and solving whatever mysteries and conflicts plaguing the floor, will inevitably culminate in an encounter with the Stratum Leaders, who oversee each floor and test explorers to confirm they’re prepared for the next step of the journey downward. Generally, they feel like the perfect sweet spot between Pokemon’s usual overworld navigation and the dungeon crawling at the core of Etrian Odyssey, though they do somehow end up feeling a little forgettable, but not at the fault of the developers. There’s only so much you can translate the Etrian formula into the language of Pokemon - I never really felt that marathon-esque fight for survival, trying to get that little bit further, even as your team near death. They do the best they can to replicate this in Pokemon Odyssey, and what’s here is good, but I think my expectations were just a little too high in that department.

Now, regarding the floors themself, most Stratums feature some specific gimmick or obstacle in their maze-like layouts, but again, they honestly feel rather forgettable and annoying at best. Having to deal with getting randomly poisoned by bushes in the Fourth Stratum or grinding through ice sliding puzzles on the Seventh Stratum was never fun, but completing most of these sections will unlock some sort of shortcut or whatnot that’ll allow you to bypass them on future forays, so I can’t be that hard on them. Hyper-powerful Pokemon also visually roam the floors, usually significantly above the level cap available to you, in a nod to the FOE minibosses endemic to Etrian Odyssey. Sadly, though, the FOEs in Pokemon Odyssey rather feel like they exist just to check a box rather than be a more important mechanic in the game. They normally just exist as a boss fight for a quest, or as an obstacle you have to avoid getting a TM or other key item. They’re just kind of there, which is a bit of a shame.

Speaking of, your goals in this game aren’t simply limited towards the downward treks of the Labyrinth - the game also features a few dozen side quests from the various NPCs you’ll encounter through your travels. Now, while the actual quality of these quests may vary heavily - some requiring you just to simply find a Pokemon to show them, whilst others are more intricate, sending you on hunts for boss-like trainer encounters or powerful FOE battles. Regardless of their quality, the vast majority of them do reward you with some pretty key upgrades, some as simple as having a greater selection of consumables to buy, or gaining the ability to alter your Pokemon’s stats or engage in more efficient forms of grinding. The ones that reveal extra little tidbits of lore - especially a handful that transport you to totally different regions for some rather spooky moments - are the cream of the crop, but they do feel a little forgettable then anything else, and I just found I was doing them for the rewards then anything else less tangible.

But the whole game doesn’t take place within the Labyrinth; beyond the hub town of Talrega, Nyx can sail across a massive, ocean-based map, in reference to the sailing element present in Etrian III. Through this, you can find a number of mini-locale/dungeons, along with a quartet of towns who have their own unique set of Pokemon, quests, and dungeon-esque areas to explore. While getting to explore each of these non-Labyrinth areas was fun, I have to single out the actual navigation of the ocean biome as pretty frustrating. Pokemon encounters are disabled unless you enter dark water patches, much of your time out in the great blue is spent navigating a maze of autoscrolling waves that’ll either eventually lead to new mini-locales, or whirlpools that’ll send you back to whence you came. At first, finding the first couple of towns is easy, but certain islands require such specific paths that I almost tore my hair out after my seventh whirlpool-based failure. Thankfully, the developer has provided extensive documentation on pretty much every element of the game, and that includes full maps of the sailing overworld. I’d gotten so sick of running into every dead end or ending up consistently at the wrong island, that I just decided to zoom in on those damn maps and unlock the ability to warp to them (which goes for every location once you’ve visited them once). Thankfully the sailing isn’t a massive part of the game, and whilst it helps Pokemon Odyssey’s scale stretch beyond just the Labyrinth, it just isn’t that fun to deal with blind.

The narrative of Pokemon games has always been a weird one; I think it’s been pretty rare that we’ve had a Pokemon game with a consistent, solid throughline that didn’t backload much of its tale into the last couple of hours before the Pokemon League, and it seems romhacks and fangames are where you go to find the real narrative-based Pokemon games. At the same time, thanks to… interesting titles like Pokemon Snakewood, a lot of people write off fangames in the Pokemon sphere as being immature, edgy, and profanity laden. Now, I’m not here to make the declaration that Pokemon Odyssey is a standard in RPG storytelling or anything like that… but it’s the first romhack that I’ve played that truly *feels* like a fully contained, satisfyingly told, RPG-esque tale. Pokemon games, ever since Gen 3 at least, have always had the humble beginnings to saving the world/defeating the Big Bad format, but Pokemon Odyssey feels like the full RPG equivalent of that formula. A tale that starts with Nyx and her friends just exploring a mysterious labyrinth naturally grows and twists in complexity and tragedy, never feeling like it’s jumping the shark despite the genuinely crazy things that happen. Because man, Pokemon wishes it could be as crazy as Odyssey gets.

Nyx’s adventure into the Labyrinth starts low-key and small-scale, and much like Etrian Odyssey and Made In Abyss, rapidly ratchet up the stakes and complexity of the story the further you go in. It helps with just how likeable much of the cast is - Nyx and Ethan could both 100% be described as somewhat annoying and whiny, but considering the situation they’ve been thrust into, it feels pretty realistic. Olympia, Ethan’s robot-like companion, is a massive highlight of the entire game, with pretty much every other line perfectly treading the line of being hilarious but also not turning her into a flanderized joke of a character. The game also has a pretty developed secondary cast, far better than Game Freak’s core efforts. The way the developer has incorporated the Stratum Captains into the main plot, working with Nyx and co. to deal with the cataclysmic events emanating from the Labyrinth really delighted me. Honestly, it makes me wonder why the core series has never lent towards such a concept. Dealing with Team Aqua or Magma in Gen 3, or Team Galactic in Gen 4 - these are incredibly evil individuals trying to, actively or not, destroy the world; why wouldn’t the best Trainers in the world step in and help? If I had to nitpick, I think the Big Bad is a little too much of a Biggest Bad, seemingly being evil for the sake of evil, but pretty much the rest of the narrative flows naturally enough around it to prevent it from clogging things up.

It’s also got a fantastic grasp on straddling a number of genres through its story - whilst it genuinely holds the fantastical foundation, the further you get into the game, the more Odyssey begins to lean into elements of horror, especially - and most surprisingly - body horror, but it never oversteps its bounds, becoming too comical or stepping too far. Here and there, it’s got moments of profanity or edginess that maybe pushes the envelope a little further then I’d otherwise prefer or breaks the fantastical tone of the game, but these moments are few and far between and especially in the case of the game’s more grimdark elements, do serve the plot quite well. I did note, though, that at times it feels like the details of the story feels a little… disconnected from the core Pokemon gameplay. Without going into details, you’re battling individuals who give off the vibe - or outright say - they could rip your leading characters apart or destroy them with their bare hands, but instead you’re just… having a Pokemon battle? This really only bothered me in the final hours of the game, as you’re suddenly obtaining literal power-ups for the main cast of characters to stand up to the scale of threats at the core of this game’s plot… and again, we’re just battling Pokemon? It’s something you really need to stretch your disbelief here and there otherwise it just becomes a bit befuddling. But I digress - While it’s not going to hit the marks of some of gaming’s best stories, Pokemon Odyssey's narrative is easily the best I’ve tackled in my limited forays into the world of Pokemon romhacking. It’s charming, exciting, and deeply interesting, and the fact that this won’t be the last we’ll be seeing of its world has left me chomping at the bit for more.

Finally, I can’t help but shout out the brilliant audio-visual experience Pokemon Odyssey provides. Much like with the excellent Etrian designs, the developers have done brilliant work in making Odyssey feel like part of the world of Etria, but also existing in the Pokemon world we know and love (in more ways than one). Each dungeon floor feels like its own place, but also calls to mind Stratums from any of the myriad of Etrian games - the First Stratum feels like the verdant forests that kick off the majority of Etrian titles. Character spritework also looks great, with nary an existing sprite recolour in sight. It’s just a genuinely pretty game, greatly outstripping the already brilliant work presented in Pokemon’s Gen 3. The soundtrack is also superb, consisting mainly of remixed and altered music from Etrian Odyssey, returned to sound perfectly at home on the GBA’s speakers. It is uniformly good, through and through, pulling me back to the first time I played Etrian Odyssey a decade ago. But beyond that… There was also a moment - in a certain decrepit city, after a certain revelation - when a remix of Hanezeve Caradhina, Made in Abyss’s most famous, iconic, and fantastic vocal track kicked in to just cement the moment as not only one of Pokemon Odyssey’s best, but one of the most atmospheric, emotional moments I’ve seen in any game this year, period. It would’ve been so easy to just port or remix some existing Pokemon music into this game, but the effort to take tracks from Etrian Odyssey and Made in Abyss and make them fit the sound profile of the Game Boy Advance so well it sounds as if they always were on it is stupendous.

This might’ve been a bit more of a rambly review, and certainly much longer than I otherwise write, but it just goes to show the passion I have for Pokemon Odyssey. It is not only, easily, the best romhack I’ve ever played - Pokemon or otherwise - but it’s one of the best games I’ve played all year. Whilst some of the most expansive and extraneous elements might feel a little tacked on, the core of this game, from its battling, to its narrative, to its presentation and balance are all nothing short of masterstrokes. If you have an inkling of love for Pokemon as a franchise, what it was, what it is, and most of all, what it CAN be, you’d be remiss in not diving into what could be potentially the best Pokemon game ever made. The fact that this expansive, gigantic experience is getting a follow-up blows my mind, and I can’t wait to see more. Pokemon Odyssey is the closest Pokemon has ever gotten to a masterpiece, and the fact that it’s infused with the DNA of one of my favorite franchises and one of anime’s most unique new releases makes it something that really shouldn’t exist. But it does, and by god, it’s good.