Pokemon Colosseum and XD: Sketch Version 1.1

Previously I wrote a comment, I perhaps should've waited a bit and played more first. I started with the Colosseum version, as I know Colosseum a bit better than XD. I was gonna play the XD one after beating Colosseum. But that probably won't happen because I don't like the way this hack was approached.

What I like are the changes to Smeargle's base stats (because battles are quite slow in the GC games so grinding is kinda painful, which you will need to do a lot of lategame with Smeargle's usual stats) but even more so, the fact that they start with 4 Sketches, and their new ability, Trace. Trace shenanigans are fun and I'm surprised Smeargle can't actually have trace in canon Pokemon games.

What I don't like is pretty much everything else.

You start, of course, with two Smeargles in place of Umbreon and Espeon. My first problem is that like the Umbreon and Espeon, they're not at the same level. 26 and 25 respectively. An important thing to do in a Smeargle run is to decide what kind of builds you want to give each Smeargle based on their stats. But you can't easily compare the stats of the Smeargles if they're not the same level. Because of this, I think it would be better for them to both be at level 25 when you start. Which brings me to... the way you get the other Smeargles. 

The way you get the other Smeargles is they are Shadow Pokemon, you snag them. As of the Pyrite Building, which is what I got up to before writing this review and may be quitting, I snagged 3 Smeargles; my party consists of 5 Smeargles. The Shadow Smeargles all appear to have the same (perfect?) IVs, and a neutral nature. This bothers me for two different reasons. One, giving them all fixed perfect IVs and a neutral nature ruins the fun of deciding which Smeargle should be the special attacker, which Smeargle should be the physical attacker, the support, etc. Two, more importantly, the starter Smeargles did not get this treatment. The starter Smeargles have a random nature and random IVs. Chances are, your starters are significantly worse than the Shadow Smeargles even if you reset for good ones (which would be a pain to do because you have to soft reset for two Pokemon rather than one). It makes me hope that later on there will be two more Shadow Smeargles to replace my starters with that will have perfect stats. I think if you'eegna make the Shadow Smeargles perfect you may as well make the starters perfect too. In XD this wouldn't be so bad since you only have one starter, but after many resets for good IVs you're still goimg to have a Smeargle that's inferior to the ones you snag.

And of course there's the issue I discussed earlier. Even if they were given random IVs and natures like the starter Smeargles, they're not the same level so you cannot compare their stats to assign them their roles. And you don't get them all at the same time, so they won't have any EVs but your starter Smeargles would.

Another annoyance is because the Smeargles are shadow, they have one of their precious move slots taken up by Shadow Rush, which is annoying in Colosseum because it takes so long to actually be able to purify the Smeargles. I am sure this is also not as annoying in XD, possibly not annoying at all because in XD you have access to purification pretty much right away. 

I understand that you probably got the idea to have Smeargles gradually added to the game (via needing to snag them as shadow mon) because starting with 6 would make it too easy at the start especially with their stat buff, but to compensate you could make them all a bit lower leveled than 25 maybe.

For me, with all that I would much rather play vanilla Colosseum with my party hacked to have 6 Smeargles from the start, like what Pikasprey did. (Not that I can do that since I don't know how to hack. So, yeah this was pretty disappointing to me. 3 stars because it's certainly playable, people might not find all those things I complained about annoying, but I found them annoying.)