That question popped in my mind again when I was thinking of my first composed song's musical story, "Team ZamSon Leader Battle Theme V1", and started imagining the Hoenn region having a new third evil organization.
Hi! The main developer of Starwish, Zamius, here sharing more about the game/project's backstory! Feel free to come and say hi on our Discord and ask anything you might be wondering about the game, its lore, or even what my favorite Pokémon is! I'm always more than happy to talk about Starwish. ^^
What if a Pokémon game was voice-acted?
Pokémon Starwish was created to answer the one question some players have always wondered, including me:
A few highlights from my playthrough of the release version of the demo — chaos included. (Now, onto how this all started...)
The Spark
I grew up with the 3rd Gen of Pokémon, which is why the Hoenn region is the closest one to my heart of them all, as my first game was the Pokémon Ruby version, which I borrowed from my friend until I got my very own game, the Pokémon Sapphire version, as a birthday present from my parents. Naturally, when the Pokémon Emerald version came out, there was no doubt in my mind which of the three was the best. Ruby version, of course, d'uh! Groudon's cool, you know? ... Don't believe me? Fair enough. I just tried to prank you, lol. We all know Sapphire's the actual winner, am I right?! ;D
... No? (sigh) Do my jokes really stink that bad? (groan)
The idea for a continuation of Emerald came quite naturally to me when I was thinking about the story for Starwish and could I connect my song and the new Team ZamSon organization to it somehow as well? The answer to that was to continue the original story of the Emerald version and add these new inventions (including the voice-acting and HM Tool features) on top of it so it would make sense why they are in the game everybody knows already. That way I could give the original game something new while keeping it familiar enough without labelling it as another remake, like the ORAS games.
How It's Made
I then started researching the usual methods of making a Pokémon game, and it got down basically to two realistic choices: A ROM hack or a real game with RPG Maker XP with the Pokémon Essentials plugin. The first option seemed too complicated for me personally, so I decided to go with the RPG Maker XP method. That meant I had to start from scratch and gather all the original game's assets that I could find and create the rest myself or commission a pixel artist to make.
After watching most of the basic tutorials (shoutout to Thundaga!), I tried to figure out how the voice-acting system could possibly be made to work, and after some trial & error, I made the breakthrough finally! At that moment I thought I had done something historical but soon found out that I wasn't the first since some Spanish devs had already done their fangame, Pokémon Unbreakable Ties, with partial Spanish voice acting, so there goes that trophy, lol. Kudos to you guys! However, a fangame with FULL English voice acting was apparently unheard of among the Pokémon fangame community, meaning our Pokémon Starwish gets that honor/trophy. \(^w^)/
While scouting volunteers to join the project, I also wanted to solve the issue with many of that era's official games: The HM slaves. It was necessary to find a suitable Pokémon to learn most of the HMs in order to be able to get everywhere in the game when something would be blocking the path and you have to sacrifice a slot for it instead of being able to use your full battle team. At least I found this very annoying personally, and if I were to make a new version of the same era's game, I wanted to solve this problem. Thus, the HM Tools were invented for the game to replace the field usage of the HMs. Of course, you can still use them like always if you want, but this gives everyone the much-needed alternative option to travel freely in the game without needing to sacrifice any of the precious battle member's slots just to be able to smash a rock, push a boulder, or even fly to another location. Then more ideas started popping in our heads as we started picturing the new path according to our game's story progression. One of them being able to spot the famous Elite Four members outside of the League and see a new side of them as persons with their own lives too. Another is the new Mr. Briney's Ice Cream Shop on Route 104's beach, where you can buy three different flavored homemade ice creams with actual usage during the battles.
As for the rough estimation for the full game's realization, we're aiming for late 2027 into 2028 at the moment. And when we do get there at last, our goal is to get as much positive awareness and video coverage for it as possible (while avoiding the infamous Nintendon't's ninjas by keeping the game free without any financial benefits from it!) and show the world that the future of Pokémon games NEEDS to have voice acting in them as RPG games. It really adds that much more to the immersion level of the experience!
Thanks for your interest in our game! Hopefully it was a blast, or if you haven't tried it yet and wanted to "investigate" it first, thus reading this, then prepare for something fresh and surprising with an open mind and adventurous motivation!
-Zamius the "King of Games" Dev
(fan-appointed title)
What's Next
So far our project's overall team has grown quite a lot from when only my co-dev, AnnieverseVT, and I started planning it in October 2025, after I had just published my very first video game and Visual Novel, Scenes from the Heart – Part 1, on Steam. Currently we have over 40 volunteered voice actors and around 10 other volunteered helpers in different task areas like scene writing, music, and character designs in our Discord server where also the casting calls are held as well as random gallups from time to time and, of course, some behind-the-scenes extra stuff.