The worst thing is (was?) that you couldn’t even build the car without looking at a tutorial online. So many steps that are impossible to figure out on your own.

I like the game and spent a lot of time with it, but when I last played it half a year ago it still felt pretty unfinished.

Edit: looking at the changelog, it’s the first update in two years and they didnt really add anything new, apart from some bug fixes and a “feature” where you can die from a wasp in your house if you leave the doors open all the time. They won’t be adding any more features after this. How can they even call this 1.0.

I think so yes, it doesn’t stray too far from the original story but adds a lot on top of it and adds a lot of post game mechanics that I haven’t encountered yet. I had never played Crystal before (but I did play Silver and I think Crystal’s story is 90% same?) and it seems really polished (haha). It just feels like a much more modern game than what I remember Silver being.

I’m looking for a similar sort of ROM hack for Emerald since I never played gen 3 and later. I think I’ll go for Modern Emerald but I’d love to hear other suggestions.

I have gone down the same rabbit hole lately. I’ve been playing Polished Crystal and am planning to play Modern Emerald next.

Polished Crystal adds a ton of features and I love it. They added many Pokémon that you can all catch, it adds a lot of new moves and introduces the modern types and physical/special split which I prefer. It also seems like a lot more difficult than vanilla gen 2 with revised gym leader parties. I’d suggest playing the 9bit version which has almost a decade of new features added to the 2.2.0 version you usually find.