YMMV / Pokémon Radical Red

• Cheese Strategy:
  • Prior to Version 4.0's nerfing, the Totem Alolan Marowak fight in Lavender Tower can easily be cheesed if you catch a Qwilfish with the Prankster ability, make sure it knows Destiny Bond, and then use it to win the battle without much of a struggle.
  • In general, any mon with Counter, Metal Burst, or Mirror Coat can serve as this, especially if they have a Focus Sash or Sturdy. A lot of enemy mons in the E4, such as Bruno's infamous Zacian-Crowned, are very difficult to face in a head-on fight and can instead be dealt with more reliably with a mon that has Focus Sash or Sturdy to survive an incredibly devastating hit, followed by the appropriate counter move to destroy their opponent with their own strength. This is an especially common strategy in monotypes and hardcore mode.
  • Getting a Nincada grants you both Shedinja and Ninjask; the latter guarantees an Erika victory. Two Swords Dances against her lead Rillaboom ensures Dual Wingbeat KOs everything on the team, even the Meganium that can boost its Defense, and her ace, the Mega Venusaur.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Most non-monotype or Fire monotype players often add Typhlosion with its Hidden Ability Blazing Soul onto their team, granting them a powerful ability for Fire moves in the vein of Gale Wings (where Flying moves will always go first as long as there is full HP).
  • There's a small chance for one of the Egg Vendors to give the player an egg containing Kubfu. As such, many players will soft reset for a Kubfu egg and add it to their team in order to get Urshifu early, helped by the fact that the player can evolve it as soon as they obtain a Water or Dusk stone. Poipole and fellow legendary Cosmog can also be obtained from it, but aren't as common due to their late evolution levels and lack of power or utility until then.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Thanks to the addition of DexNav, you can catch a Sentret with Double-Edge at the beginning of the game. Sentret evolves into Furret at level 15, the level cap before defeating Brock. Furret received two notable buffs: a +10 to its base Attack, and the ability Adaptability, turning Double-Edge into a whopping 240 base power move before the first gym. Thanks to these buffs and the addition of Extremespeed to its movepool, Furret can remain competitive for a surprising length of time.
  • Snom in the Viridian Forest, Buneary on Route 3 and Riolu in the Mt. Moon Basement Floor. What do these have in common? These are friendship evolutions, meaning they can evolve incredibly early, made even easier with an in-game cheat code that provides infinite friendship-raising Pomeg Berries. Their evolutions Frosmoth, Lopunny and Lucario all come with stats that are incredibly overpowered for the early game and it's all too easy to bulldoze through trainers with them. As of Version 4.1, Riolu has been nerfed to evolve at a fixed level of 30 rather than friendship, preventing the player from acquiring Lucario before beating Misty, though Frosmoth and Lopunny remain untouched.
• Fandom Rivalry: Chances are, if a person likes hacks with original regions and/or Fakemon, they aren't going to be a fan of Radical Red and the many hacks it inspired, with the reverse also being true. The Pokemon Quarantine Crystal fandom is arguably the most vocal and vitriolic in regards to Radical Red, while fans of the latter dislike Quarantine Crystal's focus on Fakemon and lack of documentation.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Scizor is often a go-to choice to help easily sweep bosses thanks to its versatile movepool and its Technician ability (where moves of 60 power or less have their strength multiplied by 1.5x), especially if you are able to Mega Evolve it.
  • Qwilfish had Destiny Bond and Prankster, and there's nothing stopping you from bringing a low leveled Qwilfish to boss fights to ensure that the opponents will always go for an offense move to knock Qwilfish out, rather than setting up hazards. Especially notable in Hardcore mode where you pretty much can't stop hazards from being set up because of the inaccessibility of moves like Taunt or Defog, or straight up preventing you from removing hazards anyway. This is no longer possible due to the nerfs in 4.0, however.
  • Delphox is one of the many Pokémon that have been buffed in this game, but the developers went a little overboard when making the fiery fox more viable. Replacing Magician is Magic Guard, which is common among fangames that buff Delphox, turning it into a solid Life Orb abuser. However, where it truly becomes insane is its movepool, as it now has access to Nasty Plot for quick setup and freaking Mind Blown, which loses its hefty 50% recoil damage thanks to Magic Guard. This gives Delphox a 150 Base Power STAB move with zero drawbacks (aside from low PP). Unsurprisingly, Radical Red's Showdown metagame has it Kicked Upstairs to Ubers. It did get a slight Nerf in 3.0, as it now learns Mind Blown much later.
  • Mega Sceptile received lots of love in Radical Red. For starters, it got a boost to its Attack at the cost of its Special Attack, already making it stronger since it has more good physical moves than special. However, RR gave it an even bigger blessing in the form of Technician, as well as plenty of good moves to take advantage of it. The biggest example of this is Scale Shot, which gets an immense power boost from Technician by virtue of being a multi-hit move and boosts Mega Sceptile's already high speed to insane levels. To top it all of, Sceptile and its Mega Stone are quite easy to get. You can either pick Treecko as your starter in the beginning of the game or receive one from Brendan in Silph Co., shortly before you get the Mega Ring. Similarly, the Sceptilite can be obtained by showing a scientist on Route 16 your own Sceptile. As of V4.0, the Hoenn Starters can no longer get their Mega Stones via the route 16 scientist- Now, the Swampertite is locked behind the Mudkip kid in Saffron, the Blazikenite is obtained from May at Cinnabar Island, and Sceptile was hit the hardest by this, with the Sceptilite only being given to you after the final Brendan fight, i.e. right before entering Victory Road.
  • To put it simply: Prankster Volbeat + Tail Glow + Bug Buzz = mass decimation on a majority of Erika's team.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • After you defeat Giovanni in Cerulean Cave, he has a Heel Realization about his actions, admitting he has sacrificed too much but kept going due to Sunk Cost Fallacy. However, Archer and Ariana both voice their support for him and that they are grateful he saved them. To them, he is more than just a boss, but actually family. This raises Giovanni’s spirits and he makes a Heel–Face Turn, deciding to use his resources for good. The trio leaves to new beginnings. And when you see Archer and Ariana again in the Sevii Islands during the postgame, they are nothing but pleasant to you, treating you as an old friend in sharp contrast to their Jerkass behavior when you first met them.
• Hype Backlash: The game was incredibly hyped up when it released due to how impressive it was on a technical level. However, several players found the game's difficulty to be more annoying than genuinely challenging, causing some to turn against it. The fact that much of the game's technical prowess comes from the Custom FireRed Upgrade Engine and more technically impressive hacks like Pokémon Unbound have come out that use the engine only serves to exacerbate this. There are also players who dislike the hack's impact on the hacking scene as a whole; see Once Original, Now Common below.
• Nintendo Hard: This game's difficulty is brutal, and will demand that you strategize and min-max your Pokémon's stats or you will lose. Each boss fight is essentially a competitive battle, and the AI is improved to be more of a challenge. Version 2.3 introduced Hardcore mode, which introduces even harder bosses, while also restricting the player from using certain moves like stat boosting moves, weather, and some status moves.
• Once Original, Now Common: While difficulty-based enhancement hacks are nothing new, Radical Red was the first of its kind to include the entirety of the National Pokédex as well as all generational battle gimmicks at the time of its original release^note Terastallization was skipped even when other Gen IX content was added and drastic changes to weaker Pokémon's stats and even typings. Following the hack's release, several other National Pokédex difficulty hacks have released for different games, making the hack seem much less special. Additionally, the amount of Radical Red imitators has put a foul taste in the mouths of players who dislike competitive-oriented hacks and desire more original regions and Fakemon.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Quite a number of normally-overlooked Pokémon used for battling (such as Qwilfish, Volbeat, and Furret) gained newfound popularity thanks to the QOL changes made to them.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard is nothing new for A.I. in Pokémon games, but it stands out like a sore thumb in a hack that otherwise adds Artificial Brilliance. The most notable and often-mentioned example of this is that the A.I. can always see and play around what items you have equipped on your Pokémon, which makes some strategies involving held items far more difficult to use, and makes the type-resistance berries near-worthless against bosses.^note A clever player can use the berries as an A.I. Breaker, but this still requires an exploit in the A.I. rather than actual player skill. Unlike the player, bosses also make their action when their turn starts, instead of before, meaning they also have an unfair edge when it comes to countering your moves and ruins a lot of the illusion of Perfect Play A.I..
  • In older versions, the implementation of Raid Dens has a few annoying idiosyncrasies. For starters, certain Dens are completely locked out unless you beat certain Gyms. While this was likely done to prevent the player from getting any Disc One Nukes, it mostly serves to exacerbate Early Game Hell by stifling the Pokémon that the player can obtain before a certain point. Additionally, what Pokémon is in the Raid Den is completely up to RNG, and there's no way to change them other than just waiting in order to get another chance of getting their desired Pokémon. And don't even think about messing with the game's Real Time Clock either, as it'll freeze up and prevent you from accessing daily events for 24 hours. This was remedied in 3.0, where the player can respawn Raid Dens via using Wishing Pieces rather than having to wait a day.
• Tear Jerker: The Return TM is now given by a girl near Lavender Town, saying that she doesn’t need it anymore. Given how Lavender Town is the graveyard of Pokémon and Return is a move based on The Power of Friendship, this poor girl lost a dear companion and is still grieving her loss deeply.

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