Everything You Need to Play Pokemon League of Legends (With Step-by-Step Instructions)

Two and a half years in the making, a League of Legends hack for Pokemon Emerald was finished recently — giving players the ability to explore and battle in Riot Games’ fictional world of Valoran. The creator, who goes by the username “C me”, has been keeping fans updated about this project through Pokecommunity.com since December of 2015.  

The game takes the premise of Pokemon and utilizes the Champions of League of Legends in battle. A lot of the mechanics from Pokemon Emerald remain (including double battles and passive abilities), while introducing newer things, such as the Fairy typing from Pokemon X and Y. 

The process of getting the game is a bit involved, but we’ll list out the steps you need to take to jump into this neat fan project.

How to Download and Play Pokemon League of Legends

Step 1: Get a Game Boy Advance emulator.

This will allow you to play Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games on your computer, specifically Pokemon Emerald. If you have another preference, then go for it; I used VisualBoyAdvance — but if you have another preference, then go for it.

Step 2: Get a ROM of Pokemon Emerald. 

There are quite a few out there, but people complained of problems with some versions of the game. I used the Trashman version, which worked just fine for me. This version of the Emerald ROM is easy to download and use.

Step 3: Download a hack for League of Legends

After successfully downloading your preferred ROM for Pokemon Emerald, you’ll need the most important part — the League of Legends hack. You can use this League of Legends ROM Hack if you don’t have one of your own. 

Step 4: Download a program to make them work together.

To make it all work together, you’ll need to apply the League hack to the base Pokemon game. There are plenty of programs that can do that — the two biggest being Tsukuyomi and NUPS . 

Use NUPS or Tsukuyomi to apply the League of Legends hack to Pokemon Emerald. Follow this detailed NUPS/Tsukuyomi Tutorial to figure out how to do that.

• Note: Players have had a few problems with this step. But a thread on Reddit has emerged to troubleshoot a lot of the issues: Reddit Troubleshooting

Step 5: Open your emulator and run your newly patched ROM

This is the last step. Open VisualBoyAdvance. Click on “File” at the top, click “Open GBA”, and select the newly patched Pokemon Emerald ROM. If everything worked properly, the game will start and a notification will pop up stating that the game isn’t made by Riot.  

After all of that, you can explore Valoran and capture Champions — essentially playing a brand new Pokemon game. My own brief playthrough has involved finding some low level champions to start building my team and defeat the first gym leader.  

For more information about this game or the resources you need to run it, you can check out the original Pokecommunity thread for this fan project.