Poképan Crystal

Poképan Crystal is a patch for Pokémon Crystal which makes the game more open to differing sexual orientations. The only change made is to make the move "Attract" skip the check to see if the user and target are opposite gendered. Pokémon may now infatuate (and be infatuated by) males, females, and genderless Pokémon.

I made this hack as a way to mess around with the wonderful Pokecrystal disassembly project, learning a little about how the game works and getting a chance to play with assembly code. Had I the time to really dive into the guts of the game's code, I would love to make the game's handling of gender itself more diverse than male/female/none.

Pokémon Crystal was released in Japan in December 2000 and in the US in July 2001. Nearly 20 years later and the idea of non-heterosexual attraction in Pokémon (whether it be the human characters or the Pokémon themselves) remains unseen, leaving people to cobble together their own representation through fan-works.

The hack was published on Itch after being rejected from Romhacking.net with a response that the site did not allow "political statements". Afterwards it was uploaded to Itch.io in hopes that it would find a more welcoming home there. The staff member that rejected the hack originally was removed from their position shortly afterwards and the hack was resubmitted and accepted. A nice summary of the events that unfolded can be found in this interview on Video Game Choo Choo.

Download

Download Poképan Crystal

Screenshots

Install instructions

To play, patch your Pokemon Crystal v1.1 rom using a utility such as Lunar IPS and run using any Game Boy Color emulator.

Alternative Sources