The best Johto ROM hacks, from faithful remakes to full expansions

If you want the biggest Johto there is, play SoulGold. If you want Johto exactly as you remember it, play Heart & Soul on GBA or Crystal Legacy on a Game Boy Color.

Every Johto hack is one of three things: Gen 2 made better, Johto remade on newer hardware, or Johto as the base for something much bigger. Find your row in the table, then read that hack’s section for the catch.

I’ve finished SoulGold (v1.2.1 with the postgame). I haven’t finished the others.

Which Johto hack should you play?

You want	Play	Platform
Faithful Gen 2 on Game Boy Color, modernized	Polished Crystal; Crystal Legacy if you want it closer to vanilla	GBC
Open-world Gen 2, go anywhere from the start	Crystal Clear	GBC
Johto remade on GBA with a Kanto postgame	Heart & Soul (Emerald base); Liquid Crystal if you want the older FireRed remake	GBA
Johto plus Kanto, hard, all 493 Pokémon	Sacred Gold / Storm Silver	NDS
Johto expanded with 959 species and forms, every Mega, boss battles	SoulGold	GBA
Every Pokémon redesigned, same Johto story	Fool’s Gold	GBC

Polished Crystal (Crystal, GBC)

Play this if you want Gen 2 to feel modern without leaving the Game Boy Color. Running shoes in Gen 2 is a thing I’ve wanted since I was a kid.

Rangi42’s Polished Crystal adds the physical/special split, Fairy type, natures, abilities, running shoes, unlimited TMs, a Battle Tower and Factory, and Elite Four rematches. You get Johto plus Kanto, with new areas like Cinnabar Volcano and Goldenrod Harbor. The roster is 289 species plus forms and variants, 391 in all.

It left beta with 3.0.0 on February 1, 2025, and 3.2.3 (December 12, 2025) is current. Set style is on, badge boosts are gone and trainers hit harder, so it’s a step up from vanilla. You pick EV mode and whether abilities are on when you start.

There’s also a “faithful” build that leaves the Pokémon alone. The two builds differ, so choose before you start. The repo had 132 open issues when I looked.

Crystal Legacy (Crystal, GBC)

Play this to replay Crystal the way you remember it, only fairer.

TheSmithPlays and cRz Shadows built it on pokecrystal. It fixes Crystal instead of rebuilding it. Moves and learnsets are rebalanced, the Team Rocket plot is reworked, rival and boss teams are rebuilt, and there’s a level cap. Chuck, Pryce and Jasmine scale with your badges, so the mid-Johto level dip is gone.

Heart & Soul uses Crystal Legacy’s trainer teams, which tells you how good the balance is. The current version is v1.3.1, reportedly from August 30, 2024. Don’t expect new areas. If you want more content, look further down. A fairer Pryce alone would have saved childhood me a lot of grinding.

Crystal Clear (Crystal, GBC)

Play this if you want to wander. It’s the open-world Gen 2 hack.

You pick your starting town in Johto or Kanto and choose from 24 starters. I’d probably lose an hour on that starter screen alone. There are no roadblocks. Gyms and trainers scale to your badge count, so you can take all 16 gyms in any order.

Pokémon follow you, you can buy a house, and it works with Pokémon Stadium 2. It runs on GBC flashcarts with a real-time clock. GBA flashcarts need Goomba.

It’s easy on purpose. It’s also the hardest hack here to find info on. Listings say 2.6.0, but the creator’s site gives no version, and the patch only comes through Discord. I haven’t finished it.

Heart & Soul (Emerald, GBA)

This is HGSS on a GBA with nothing added. Play it if that’s what you want.

Lil Dill’s team released v1.0 on September 26, 2025 on the Modern Emerald decomp. They rebuilt it all on pokeemerald-expansion for v2.0 on August 23, 2026, and v2.0.2 is current. You get the full Johto story and the Kanto postgame, Kimono Girls and Eusine included.

There are following Pokémon, PokéGear radio, Voltorb Flip and gym rematches. The roster is Gen 1 to 3 plus later evolutions, with Gen 9 abilities and items in 2.0. The physical/special split and Fairy type are toggles. It isn’t trying to be hard. The Challenges menu is a bonus. It’s the one I’d hand to a friend who hasn’t touched Pokémon since HGSS.

It’s built to be a base for other Johto hacks, and SoulGold is one. There are no Megas, pre-2.0 saves don’t carry over, and the roster stops at Gen 3. If you want the full feature list, it’s on the GitHub repository. I haven’t finished it.

Liquid Crystal (FireRed, GBA)

Play this for the FireRed look on Johto, plus the Orange Islands.

It started in April 2007 and is still what a lot of people mean by “Johto on GBA”. The Orange Islands pull at my nostalgia every time I see it on a list. You get a real-time day and night cycle with five periods, seasonal weather, Dive, the physical/special split, and a whole third region, the Orange Islands, with its own story. Levels are higher and rival and gym movesets are redone, so it’s a little harder than Crystal.

It’s been “Live Beta” 3.3 since around 2013, and the lead moved on to indie games. The Orange Islands were never finished, and development ended for good in June 2023. If you want a complete Johto on GBA, play Heart & Soul instead. I haven’t finished it.

Sacred Gold and Storm Silver (HeartGold / SoulSilver, NDS)

Play this if HGSS was too easy for you. It’s the hard Johto, and it’s the one older friends still bring up with a mix of pride and pain.

Drayano makes all 493 Gen 1 to 4 Pokémon catchable, almost all before your first Elite Four run. Trade evolutions use items and you have the National Dex from the start. Gym leaders and the Elite Four bring six Pokémon and better AI. You get bonus fights against Cynthia and Steven, and Arceus is the true final boss.

Pick “Complete” for Drayano’s type, move and ability edits, or “Classic” to keep the Pokémon vanilla. v1.05 from June 2012 is the last official release. No Fairy type unless you use the unofficial 1.1 mod, no Megas, none of the modern conveniences. I haven’t finished it.

SoulGold (Emerald, GBA)

Play this for the biggest Johto on a handheld, especially if you like level caps.

RahTak started from Heart & Soul’s maps, ported to pokeemerald-expansion by smithk200, and grew it into a much bigger game. It came out as a beta in July 2026 and hit v1.2.1 on October 21, 2026. Johto gets a new tileset and new areas like Vajra Desert, Snowtop Mountain and Kitakami.

You get 959 species and form entries across 702 dex numbers, and every Mega, with new ones for Typhlosion, Meowscarada and Primarina. Legendaries are bosses with multiple health bars. The postgame adds innate abilities, 121 trophies and Title Defense.

Level caps run per badge from 12 to 70, set to None, Soft or Hard. Hard difficulty turns gyms and the Elite Four into doubles with tougher teams. I played Hard with hard caps, and from Whitney on I had to actually build a team. I lost to her more than once, and I’m not ashamed. More in my SoulGold review.

There’s no Kanto. If the Kanto postgame is what you want, Heart & Soul has it and SoulGold doesn’t.

SoulGold vs Heart & Soul: the lineage

These two are related but separate, and people mix them up constantly. I had to draw it out on paper the first time. It went like this:

1. Heart & Soul v1.0 came out in September 2025 on the Modern Emerald decomp.
2. smithk200 ported most of it onto pokeemerald-expansion as its own project.
3. RahTak built SoulGold on that unofficial port, added the full roster and Megas, redrew Johto and made the map bigger. The beta landed in July 2026.
4. The Heart & Soul team rebuilt their own game on pokeemerald-expansion for 2.0 in August 2026.

SoulGold credits the Heart & Soul team and uses some 2.0 assets with credit, but it isn’t an official Heart & Soul release. Heart & Soul is faithful, with Kanto and no Megas. SoulGold is bigger, Johto only, with everything the engine can do. My full comparison goes feature by feature.

Fool’s Gold (Crystal, GBC)

Play this if you’ve run Johto so many times that you need every encounter to surprise you.

All 251 Pokémon are redesigned with new types and movesets. Chikorita is Fighting, Cyndaquil is Ice, Totodile is Flying. The story is vanilla Crystal, all 251 are catchable, and the shiny rate is 1 in 1,028.

Every matchup you know is wrong now, so the early game is harder than it looks. An Ice-type Cyndaquil is the single funniest thing on this list to me. It came out around April 2020. I haven’t finished it.

Hacks that visit Johto without being set there

Prism shows up on every Johto list because it runs on Crystal and looks like Gen 2. The story is in Naljo, a custom region, with Rijon (from Pokémon Brown) as the postgame. You never play through Johto. It’s still a good hack, with play-as-Pokémon segments and mining. The play-as-Pokémon part is why it’s stayed on my someday list.

Glazed puts Johto between two custom regions, Tunod and Rankor, so it’s a third Johto. Infinite Fusion, a PC fan game, uses Johto as its postgame with eight more badges, set three years before Gold and Silver.

Still torn between the two GBA picks? Read SoulGold vs Heart & Soul and decide in five minutes.