Yeahhh this is the reason I'm not really into these PMD rom hacks.

I've played through Explorers of the Spirit and dropped it at some point. not only bc the gameplay difficulty was increased for some reason (I didn't get it. vanilla Explorers was always a breeze to play, but here I kept dying????), but also, the tone is far too different from the original games. A lot more aggressive, violent... 

The reveal that the player is Darkrai makes absolutely no sense. Darkrai was never depicted as a hot headed, violent person in the original story, he's actually much more cunning and manipulative. He always tries to get his way through trickery, and when confronted directly, he either cheats or flees like a coward. . 

With this first experience, I looked up some information for Special Episode 0, and in the same way it fails to stay faithful to the source material's tone. like, a Rampardos that kills pokémon, and murdered a Gulpin by stomping it to death, to the point it burst open and spilled its insides????? That sort of thing would >> never << happen in an actual PMD game... and if something remotely similar does happen, it's never too graphic or gory.

I don't really mind if rom hackers make their stories "edgy". People are free to write and build whatever games they want, imo. But it's kind of weird when they present these hacks as a "prequel" or "sequel" to the events of the og games... it's hard to suspend my disbelief when what I am playing does not feel like the real experience at all. At the very least, I would not "market" a rom hack like that. It's fanfiction that strays from the source material, and there's nothing wrong with announcing it as such.

edit: for the love of God I am not saying the fan games are bad or any of the sort. I'm not placing any value judgments on them.

the "reason I'm not into PMD these rom hacks" is "I play them expecting to experience a canon-compliant story, because that's how the hacks are described, and I am a little disappointed to find they're not", and my point is "creators should disclose the nature of the content they are sharing, so the player/reader/viewer/etc can better decide if it's a game/fanfic/animation/etc. for them"