Emerald Kaizo Guide
The original Kaizo: every trainer in Hoenn rebuilt with held items, hand-picked moves and maximum IVs, and 125 wild tables restocked from the first patch of grass.
- Author
- SinisterHoodedFigure
- Base game
- Pokémon Emerald
- System
- Game Boy Advance
- Version
- 1.1
- Region
- Hoenn
- Difficulty
- Brutal — one of the hardest ROM hacks ever made
Every fight the hack's documentation covers, in story order: gym leaders, your rival, the villain admins and their boss, the Elite Four and the Champion, plus any post-game rematches. Numbers on move chips are base power. Click a Pokémon for its full stats.
Search a route to see what's in the grass, water and hordes, or search a Pokémon to see where it lives. Click any Pokémon for its full moveset, TMs and stats.
SinisterHoodedFigure
This guide is built from SinisterHoodedFigure's own documentation. The hack, the ideas and the work are theirs — the site just makes the numbers searchable. Play it from the official page, and send them the feedback and the thanks.
About Emerald Kaizo
Emerald Kaizo is SinisterHoodedFigure's difficulty hack of Pokémon Emerald and one of the hardest ROM hacks anybody has finished. Every trainer in the game was rewritten: full six-Pokémon teams from very early on, held items on almost everything, four chosen moves each, and the trainer struct's IV byte pushed to its maximum on most of them. Roxanne — the first gym — fields six Pokémon at levels 14 and 15 with berries and custom movesets. Wild tables are restocked from Route 101 onward, drawing on the full national dex rather than Hoenn's, and twenty-seven move slots were reused for moves from later generations. The level ladder runs 15, 19, 29, 42, 48, 55, 70, 77 through the eight gyms and 100 at the Elite Four and Champion. Everything on these pages is read from CreamElDudJafar's decompilation of the hack rather than from the patch itself; the caveat that comes with that is spelled out below.
What's changed
- Every trainer in Hoenn rewritten: six-Pokémon teams, held items, four chosen moves, and the maximum IV setting on most entries
- No bag items in battle — the author's rules let neither side use a Potion or a Revive, only what a Pokémon is holding
- Gym leaders bring six Pokémon from the very first badge — Roxanne's team is levels 14–15 with berries and custom moves
- Wild tables restocked on all 125 areas, drawn from the whole national dex rather than Hoenn's
- Level ladder 15, 19, 29, 42, 48, 55, 70, 77 through the gyms, 100 at the Elite Four and Champion
- 354 moves, including 27 that reuse an older move's slot to bring in later-generation attacks such as Earth Power, Gunk Shot and Drill Run
- Fixed-type Hidden Power and Weather Ball variants the enemy teams use
- Still Generation 3 underneath: no physical/special split and no Fairy type, so a move's damage class follows its type
- 50 TMs and 8 HMs, with this hack's own list — TM32 is Draco Meteor, not Double Team
- Gym leader rematches are level-100 teams, and the whole Elite Four and Champion fight at level 100
- All 386 Pokémon are catchable, though some only after the credits
- A hidden superboss whose in-game name is three dots
What this guide covers
Every guide here is built from the hack's own documentation. Where a hack changed something but never published the numbers, this says so rather than quietly filling the gap with the original game's — which would be worse than leaving it out.
| Section | Source | |
|---|---|---|
| Wild Pokémon by area | From the hack | Read straight from the hack's own wild_encounters.json: 125 areas. These are a decompilation's numbers, and its author says the decomp is not a 1-to-1 recreation of the patch — see the source note. The source this is read from |
| Encounter rates | From the hack | The per-slot percentages the file's own header declares, published as written rather than renormalised. |
| Wild levels | From the hack | Minimum and maximum level per slot, as each table sets them. |
| Stats, abilities and movesets | From the hack | Base stats, types, abilities, level-up moves, egg moves, tutor moves and evolution methods all come from the hack's own tables, with the default build's #ifdef branches taken (friendship evolutions become level 1, and the bug-fix branch is on). These are a decompilation's numbers, and its author says the decomp is not a 1-to-1 recreation of the patch — see the source note. |
| TM and HM compatibility | From the hack | The TM and HM list is the hack's own FOREACH_TM order, and compatibility is its gTMHMLearnsets table. |
| Where TMs are found | Not published by the hack | The source folders this guide is built from carry no map scripts and no item placements, so there is nothing here that says where a TM is found. Nothing has been borrowed from Emerald to fill the gap. The source, if you want to dig |
| Trainer and boss teams | From the hack | Every fight in trainers.h with its roster from trainer_parties.h: level, held item, four moves and the IV byte. Abilities and natures are absent because the vanilla Generation 3 trainer struct has no field for either — the game rolls both at battle time. Emerald's numbered rematch slots hold repeat teams, so identical rosters are shown once. These are a decompilation's numbers, and its author says the decomp is not a 1-to-1 recreation of the patch — see the source note. |
Credits
- Pokémon Emerald Kaizo — the hack itself, and the release thread this guide takes its release date, level curve and battle rules from: SinisterHoodedFigure
- The patch itself, on ROM Hacking dot net, where the author publishes it: SinisterHoodedFigure
- The decompilation of Emerald Kaizo that every number in this guide is read from. It is a re-implementation in source, and its author says it is not a 1-to-1 recreation of the patch: CreamElDudJafar
- Remaking the game in git, and the community quality-of-life patches the decomp's QOL switch reproduces: Anastarawneh and CyanSixFour
- pokeemerald, the Emerald decompilation this is built on: the pret team
- Sprites via PokéAPI; base move and TM data from PokéAPI and Bulbapedia.
Reading the tables
SourceEverything here is read out of CreamElDudJafar's Emerald Kaizo decompilation at commit 735642bb63, built with the switches its include/config.h leaves on by default. This guide is built from a decompilation of Emerald Kaizo rather than from the IPS patch, and the decomp's own README calls itself "not a 1-to-1 recreation" — the binary hacking tools and some of the EK 1.1 changes made that impossible. So these are a source re-implementation's numbers, and a few of them may differ from the patch you are playing.
VersionThe decomp this guide is generated from builds Emerald Kaizo 1.1 by default (set in its own include/config.h). The release thread advertises a version 2.0, and no dated changelog reconciles the two, so the numbers here are the 1.1 build's. The decomp's authors also state it is not a 1-to-1 recreation of the original patch.
AbilitiesNo trainer Pokémon on this site shows an ability, and that is not a gap in the reading — it is the game. Emerald Kaizo uses the vanilla Generation 3 trainer struct, which has four fields: an IV byte, a level, a species, and (depending on the party macro) a held item and four moves. There is no ability field and no nature field; the game derives both from the Pokémon's personality value when the battle starts. Filling in an ability from the species would be a guess, so the column is left empty.
IvsThe trainer struct's one number for IVs is a single byte shared by all six stats, and 255 is its maximum. Most of this hack's trainers are written at 255; where an entry uses something lower, the Pokémon's line says so.
LevelsLevels are exactly as the trainer entries set them — nothing in this hack scales to your team. A leader's numbered slots hold the gym team plus level-100 Match Call rematch teams; the rematches are shown separately and kept out of the level ladder. The level curve SinisterHoodedFigure published in the release thread matches the source at most gyms but not all: Brawly 16–17 in the thread, 17–19 here; Wattson 27–28 in the thread, 28–29 here. That thread post has been edited over the years and the decomp is not a 1-to-1 recreation of the patch, so either could account for the gap — the numbers on this site are the source's.
BattlesThe author's rule for this hack is that no bag item may be used in battle — no Potions, no Revives, nothing but what a Pokémon is holding — and he says the AI trainers are held to it too. Where a trainer entry lists battle items anyway, the fight's own line says which.
MovesTwenty-seven move slots in this hack were reused for moves from later generations, and the in-game description text was never repointed — MOVE_DRILL_RUN still carries Horn Drill's description. Where that happened, this guide shows a general effect line and says which slot the move took over, rather than printing a sentence about the wrong move. The author says as much himself in the release thread — some move descriptions were never updated. The hack also has fixed-type Hidden Power and Weather Ball variants; the ROM calls them all "HIDDEN POWER", so they are listed with their type in brackets. This is still a Generation 3 game: there is no physical/special split, so every move is physical or special purely by its type — which is why the later-generation moves brought in here, Earth Power among them, are physical.
RatesEncounter percentages are the slot tables declared in the hack's own wild_encounters.json header — land 20/20/10/10/10/10/5/5/4/4/1/1, surfing and Rock Smash 60/30/5/4/1, and fishing split 70/30 for the Old Rod, 60/20/20 for the Good Rod and 40/40/15/4/1 for the Super Rod. They are printed as written, not renormalised. * marks a slot at 5% or less.
WhereThe data folders this guide is built from carry the battle, Pokémon and encounter tables but no map scripts, so only the fights whose trainer constant names a place can say where they happen. The rest are filed by where their own levels put them on this hack's gym ladder, and those headings say "Hoenn — after <leader>" rather than naming a route they were never recorded on. For the same reason no TM, HM, rod or item location appears anywhere on this guide.