YMMV / Pokémon Crystal Clear

• Annoying Video Game Helper: The calls from the Pokémon League after each new badge can become this after a while. While their advice can be useful at the beginning, they usually start to repeat advice you already got from them after around 6 badges and their calls cannot be skipped. Fortunately, as of 2.0 Beta, you can now call the League and disable their calls.
• Awesome Music: New music was created specifically for this game, including an 8-bit demix of Cynthia's theme for Elite Four Doom's fight.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: After beating Champion Shockslayer for the first time, a level 70 shiny Swinub named "Pigy" battles you. If you attempt to catch it, the ball will fail and you'll be told that it's moving too fast to catch.
• Broken Base: There are two distinctive types of players of this ROM hack: Those who want to do everything on their own without receiving or giving help to others, and those who want legitimate assistance with the game without being redirected to a vague document online that, unsurprisingly, doesn't actually cover much outside of getting started. More players lean towards the former, but many others feel that gets taken too far sometimes; a lot of responses to genuine questions are to either refer to the aforementioned documentation, or to "just play the game."
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Although the Elite Four can be challenged immediately after you collect your 8th badge, you will very likely have an extremely tough time beating them as is. For reference, the gym leader you defeat for your 8th badge caps at level 40, while the Pokémon League is well within the level 55 to 70 range on your first run.
  • The game starts out around the same difficulty as vanilla Crystal for the first 8 badges, but things get harder for the next 8 badges. Some gym leaders start using Pokémon outside of their normal typing and legendaries, with all of them having a full team of 6 by the 16 badge mark. And then there's the new Elite Four, who's 10-20 levels higher than Crystal's Elite Four and none of the members stick to a single type. They also upgrade in levels after beating them once, with Champion Shockslayer's strongest Pokémon being level 90.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The ability to inject custom starters has the potential to be this, as there are no restrictions on the species of Pokémon you can set as a starter, including Olympus Mons like Mewtwo, Lugia, Ho-Oh, Celebi and Mew.
  • The open world nature of the game also makes it possible to grab higher level Pokémon ahead of schedule. In addition, trainers scaling by your number of badges allows you to drive up their levels (and thus, your EXP gain), letting you rapidly level up your mons at the modest cost of increasing trainer battle difficulty.
  • You can obtain Snorlax, the king of Gen 2 competitive play, along with every TM necessary to create the infamous Curselax set, from the very start of your game if you know where to look for everything.
  • A Cinnabar Island start, if you’re lucky and/or persistent, can shatter the early/mid game to bits. The buried Pokémon Mansion underneath it has Pokémon whose levels start in the teens and go up to the high thirties, despite your single mon being level five. If, by some miracle, you manage to catch something like Magmar or Flareon on the third floor, you’re set for a large number of gyms. The downside? You start with five balls and no Mart until you get off the island, at which point you can’t go back until you get Fly. Once you leave, you're gone for a while.
  • Normally you can't obtain the Hidden Machine Fly until you've gotten at least 3 badges and visited the specific locations on where to obtain them. But if you start a new game in Goldenrod City, you can visit the northern checkpoint house to obtain a free Spearow named KENYA, which comes pre-learned with said move, without any initial requirements. And because of how this ROM hack is programmed, not only are you allowed to use Fly without any badges needed but you can virtually fly to ANY Pokémon Center across BOTH regions with no strings attached (save for New Cinnabar, Mt. Silver, and the Indigo Plateau, which need to be visited at least once before it becomes a fly location).
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Since the game tries to stay compatible with vanilla Crystal as much as possible.
  • The lack of certain mechanics from future Pokémon generations, most notably the physical-special split is sometimes frowned upon.
  • The heavy dependency of Hidden Machines, more notably the ones that are practically useless in battle and just take up a move space on a Pokémon by default, gets quite exhausting. This does get partially addressed by being able to acquire a Sword key item that serves as a replacement for the hidden machine Cut, but as far as other useless moves go (such as Flash or Whirlpool), they do not exist.
  • Victory Road is unaltered and remains a Disappointing Last Level, a relatively small cave with no trainers or puzzles.
  • Because it's intentionally as compatible with the baseline Gen 2 games as possible, that means that IVs are handled in the same way. This means that female Pokemon cannot have a max Physical Attack IV unless they're an all-female species. This was later fixed in Gen 3, but here it can be frustrating, particularly since female starters are stuck at a Physical Attack IV of one due to their gender ratio.
• Memetic Mutation: The idea that any questions about the ROM hack should be directed to a debatably unfinished documentation on Github has become somewhat of an inside joke within the community.
• Squick: Elite Four Honeybun's Snorlax is nicknamed Daddy.
• That One Boss: Once again Elite Four Honeybun and his Snorlax. It knows Body Slam which has a high chance of paralyzing you, Curse to increase its attack and defense, Lovely Kiss to put you to sleep, and Rest to fully restore itself. On top of that, it's holding Leftovers to restore a bit of its HP at the end of every turn. Without a Fighting type or a Fighting type move, you're probably in for a rough time.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: For all the new things added in this ROM hack, some of the changes weren't well received by everyone.
  • The Elite Four challenge forces the ruleset of not being allowed to change Pokémon before your opponent sends out their next Pokémon, as well as outright prohibiting the use of items. This was a major sour point for the more casual players who have no interest in playing in a more competitive environment.
  • The Elite Four being changed from the original cast to new, original characters (most of which are actually just self-inserts based on the dev team), was a small point of contention. While nobody outright disliked them, some felt they were wildly unimpressive by comparison.
  • Silver, the player's rival, is completely cut from the game, and none of his battles/character development can be seen here. Somewhat softened by the fact that the game's Character Customization made him Promoted to Playable.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The cameo character Ness, in addition to quoting some pretty predictable lines word for word, doesn't play any music from his game during the battle against him at all, but instead a track from Cave Story.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The Pickaxe is used only once, to break a rock inside the cave west of Cherrygrove City since you return the Pickaxe to Shockslayer after rescuing him.

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