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Welcome to the Kanto Expansion Pak (KEP) Wiki!
KEP is a ROM Hack of Pokemon Red aiming to expand the game with related content from later generations while not fundamentally changing the original game. In doing so, it adds Pokemon related to the original 151: Regional forms, cross-generation evolutions, and the Pokemon that didn't make the cut ("beta") are all present. They are given adapted learnsets based on the originals while attempting to stay close to what made their evolved forms unique. New maps are added based on general Kanto lore as well.
Many quality-of-life changes are also made with the aim of making the game faster. Bugs seen by the community as improving the game are kept, sometimes even made into fully-fledged features (eg, the Evolution Stone Glitch).
KEP is made with the preconceived notion of Pokemon Red and Blue being among the best games on the Game Boy. The games are indeed flawed, but in the same way that modern "best of all time" games like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Witcher 3 are. When improving the game, it is not with the retrospective judgement from later generations, but with the idea of propelling the experience that people enjoy further. It doesn't need to be FireRed/LeafGreen or Let's Go: Otherwise, I would be modding them, not Red/Blue. KEP is squarely focused on being an improvement to the original Red and Blue in a way that one familiar with the vanilla experience would expect.
Later generations make significant improvements to Kanto, usually through overworld mechanical improvements (running, girl option, non-menu HM use, etc). These are imported to make the game faster, allowing for less downtime and more experience of the original game. Criticisms by enthusiasts are often with the stale early-game, a lack of a post-game, and sluggish gameplay. Thus, a focus is placed on these areas in particular. Additionally, efforts to make the region feel more lively, something that Pokemon Crystal and FireRed/LeafGreen did well, are also made.
While many would seek to fix the battle glitches, Pokemon Stadium and its response from RBY enthusiasts show that this doesn't necessarily improve the game, and sometimes glitches may not even be such (eg. the 1/256 glitch wasn't "fixed" in Stadium, just double-rolled). Some even make sense - Hyper Beam not recharging upon a KO could be argued as rational given the Pokemon isn't expending all its energy. In general, high-level RBY is received positively by fans and has a larger community than most old gens. As a result, it makes more sense to preserve and expand that experience rather than scale back and standardise it. Players tend to dislike cartridge play strictly because the health bars and animations are a bit slow, so some attention has been given to this area.
- Documenting Pokemon
- Documenting new items
- Documenting changed maps, walkthrough-style