Masquerain
Shiftry
Delcatty
Hariyama
Claydol
Huntail

Pros: Let me first say... what the hell happened? Why is there so much less, and so many removed features from Gold & Silver? It's like this generation was a reboot of the series, which, is not necessarily a bad thing! In fact, this generation was a great introduction to a whole new age of Pokémon fans. And also, this is our first 16-bit Pokémon game, with detailed sprites, lots of color, and an art style that's super easy on the eyes. It's as if we received a Pokémon game for the Super NES. And while not everything from the previous generation returns, there are some new features to the series here, particularly 2-on-2 "double" battles (which took advantage of the GBA's new four player link cables), and a simple but very useful new mechanic, the run button, yeah, you can just run anywhere on the overworld, which is a nice in-between walking and biking. Also, battle mechanics with new abilities, are refined in this game for the most part, and other new gameplay modes like events such as Contests are pretty neat, where you can build Pokémon stats for beauty, toughness, cuteness, smartness, etc, and put them in a contest where they're judged upon, it's alright. But in general, these new additions didn't hit nearly as hard as the new additions in Gold & Silver did.

Cons: Like I said previously, what the hell happened. In so many ways, this game killed Pokémania for the generation of people that grew up with Red & Blue and moving on to Gold & Silver, such as myself. But the ways it did that, were, one, there was no connecting to the prior generations, no link cable trading, nothing, it was like a hard reset. Which, that just cut the cord for those of us who built upon our journey going from Red to Gold, expecting to go from Gold to Ruby... But nah... And two, no day and night cycles, the real time clock features felt like a significant step down here, not to mention other new features that Gold & Silver introduced were not really expanded in significant ways, like new types or breeding. Gold & Silver introduced so much to the series, that to see this new generation introduce one or two major things, and remove other major elements really sucked... man, what a kick in the gut it was upon first playing. And then comes the Pokémon themselves, and I know this is a very subjective thing, but... I'm not a fan of their new designs here, a lot of new patterns, stripes, zig-zag shapes, somethin' was changing in the way new Pokémon started to look starting with this game, and I'm not sure if it's because the new console power allowed them to showcase more complex designs or what, but I wasn't a fan. Like, what the heck is going on with Blaziken? Why are their legs so long, and standing up like a human person? That whole thing started a bad trend in my opinion for third stage starter Pokémon that's still felt in the series to this day. And the region itself, I don't wanna say too much water, but the land of Hoenn wasn't really doin' it for me either, and another step down from Gold & Silver that allowed us to travel to other regions. Just, time after time, this game paled in comparison to Gold & Silver, and I would not call it an improvement whatsoever.

What it means to me: If you couldn't tell, this was not my Pokémon, and it absolutely killed all hype I had for the series for, I don't know, decades. The gameplay is fine in a vacuum, it's an alright game on its own, but when put up against previous games in the series, it was an awkward reset... If you were someone who grew up with this one, I could see how you'd enjoy it the most, I mean, it's essentially an SNES caliber Pokémon game, that's not a bad quality to have.

Pokemon, due to its popularity and missed potential in many of its games, is often debated among gamers as to what the ideal Pokemon game would be. After playing this, I think these Hoenn games are pretty close to the ideal.

Let me clear this up quickly: third versions of Pokemon games have a status as being the definitive version of a set of games, and there is no reason to play any that came before it. While it is true that Emerald added some extra content, 90% of the game is just the same. If you play Ruby or Sapphire, you aren't missing THAT much from Emerald. Emerald has some solid additions, like the Ferry actually being a place you can explore, being able to get both fossils, and being able to cleanly go in a straight line from Verdanturf to Route 118, making breeding easier, and the Battle Frontier (namely, the Battle Factory, my beloved). However, Emerald is actually worse in a couple regards - namely being the PokeNav constantly going off from phone calls from random trainers, Ditto being accessible making breeding for the Pokedex more lame, and, for some reason, being able to catch a Level 70 boxart legendary before the Elite 4.

Onto the game, I've gotta say - WOW! The GBA games are the ones I tend to see the most nostalgia for these days (maybe it's just a generational thing?), and I've got no question as to why. One of the game's biggest strengths is its map - incredibly interconnected, loading zones take almost no time at all, and are super lovely to go through. This game truly feels like it takes advantage of its hardware and graphics - compare this to Gen 1 with its very basic map and routes containing nothing but trainers, this game has SCENERY! Beautiful waterfalls, carved out paths, reflections in the water, hidden crevasses, bike ramps, secret bases - not to mention the sheer variety of places you can go! What really sells me on the game is that you really don't have to explore all that much to progress, and being able to go to all these cool places on my own without being forced to makes this game feel genuinely open world in a way I've only seen Super Mario World match in how despite how small the world really is, objectively speaking, the amount of stuff everywhere, all the secrets, and how many random offshoots go to who-knows-where make this game absolutely exceptional. I mean come on, there's a desert, a cave with a high and low tide mechanic with a frozen over section, there's a ton of little diving spots that lead to new spots in the ocean you couldn't go otherwise, the entire Sky Pillar and Regi caves are barely alluded to, leading the player to have to find them on their own and be absolutely bewildered when they do. Gen 1 absolutely THRIVED off of playground rumors, so building the game like this absolutely plays to its strengths in a deceivingly massive world.

One thing that kills me is that people play these games with the speedup button practically held down, and it significantly dampens the experience in my eyes. It's a slow game, yes, but sit down, have a little patience. If you want to get a quick fill of battles, go play Emerald Rogue or Showdown or something. Speeding up so often in this game dulls you to the world, to battles, it numbs your experience a lot.

Really, I can't stress enough how much I love the map in this game. Had I been a young boy, I would likely have gone around the map so many times just to see if there was something I missed - which honestly, there's so much stuff that there probably ARE things I missed on this playthrough. Furthermore, the Pokemon in the region are also excellently selected. Pokedexes have to pick a ratio between old and new, and Hoenn's absolutely nails it on that end. Not just in ratio, but also how they're distributed - at the beginning of the game, it's almost exclusively new stuff, with the rare older Pokemon around as a familiar, relieving sight.

Playing this time around, I used a bunch of unorthodox Pokemon I normally would never use. My final team was Blaziken, Ninjask, Tentacruel, Minun, Claydol, and Glalie. While they had struggles in the beginning, all of them eventually grew into their own niche, and all performed super well. Ninjask struggles against singular Pokemon, but against whole teams, it'll Swords Dance up and wreck them. Minun's stats aren't very good, but in exchange, it learns a bunch of VERY useful status moves, like Thunder Wave, Charm, Encore, and Baton Pass. Glalie, despite being such a late catch, actually pulled its weight VERY well, especially into the Elite 4. Of course, having tons and tons of team members, all of which can work well and the player can feel a bond towards, is a strength of any mainline Pokemon game, but still, worth mentioning.

The game is fairly solid in terms of difficulty. It isn't as hard as Emerald's gym leaders are, but the game definitely can throw some punches, especially Norman's gym. They gave him two Slakings, which was fucked up. Barely won. The game does struggle with finding a good spot for levels later on, as my team was very often underleveled, but I guess that's the cost of using a full team of 6, huh? I just don't like grinding is all.

Unlike Emerald, you actually get into a fight with the cover legendary in this game, which came as an absolute shock to me. It ended up being pretty epic, all things considered. I had to weigh my choices between taking the easy way out and killing it, or struggling, struggling, and struggling to catch it. You have a lot of pressure, too, since you only have that one chance. Sadly, this coolness is significantly reduced by the fact that you have the Master Ball at this point, removing any tension at all. How lame!

Most of my gripes with the game come in the very end, which felt weirdly rushed. "Rushed" isn't usually a term you see associated with Pokemon games (aside from the infamous performance issues of Scarlet/Violet), but it's weirdly fitting here. The Wally battle is super random and out of nowhere, and even stranger is the way he just stays there afterwards and you can fight him again sometimes? You enter Ever Grande City, which isn't even a city. It would have been cool to have a lovely place reserved for only the strongest trainers, retired champions and the like, with its own mart and houses and everything, but whatever. The Elite 4's teams are just... odd. Phoebe and Glacia using only 3 and 2 lines of Pokemon families, respectively, comes off as really strange. Two glalies, two Sealeos and a Walrein. Drake also only has three lines of Pokemon, although Emerald fixes it by replacing one of his Flygons with a Kingdra. Steven being the Champion is just kinda... alright, I guess? You only saw him a couple of times in the game (the Double Battle with him in the Mossdeep Space Center is only in Emerald). And when I beat him, May came in (???? these are supposed to be one-on-one matches, how did she even get in? The door always locks behind you in every room) along with Professor Birch, who told me to use Rock Smash to find Pokemon and then I got taken to the Hall of Fame. The whole ending part of this game after the 8th gym leader really does just feel unfinished, in all honesty. This is made worse by the fact that they don't have rematch teams! And you can't rematch Gym Leaders in this one! So grinding levels on Pokemon for Pokedex purposes takes a LOT longer in this game than it should in others. I beat the Elite Four for the first time in 39 hours, but I didn't complete the Dex until 62 hours in - most of which was spent just going to the Elite Four over and over! If you plan on also catching the whole dex, please, watch a show or movie in the meantime.

One other things I'll mention is this game has a lot of strange details that are easy to miss, like the TV channels showing things like the Game Corner's service day, the Energy Guru, and swarms. There's the VERY complicated Pokeblock mechanic as well. Contests are neat, but are hard to get into and aren't super rewarding. Secret Bases are badass, but in my adult age, aren't something I'll spend a lot of time doing. This game is absolutely chock full of things to do, but not all of those things are very interesting is what I'm trying to say.

This game left me wanting more. Like, why does this game not have cool quality of life things like showing you what's about to come in when you play on Switch and you hit A too fast and go straight to the Pokemon menu? Why does it not offer me to use another Repel after I run out? Why can't I go hunting for Pokemon with May?! That's not something I'd hold against it, though. It just means what I played was really good.

That's most of what I can say. Definitely a really really solid game, even if it is very slow and uninteresting at times. What's here is a genuinely great game. I haven't played most of the mainline Pokemon series, but I'd wager these are some of the best games out of them all.

Somewhat continuing all of the Pokemon I played last year (though without the looming responsibility of using the Pokemon within them to beat Pokemon Stadium games XD), this is a game I played a TON when I was in grade school. It’s also, however, a game that I never played through with a proper Pokemon team of six, and it’s also a game that my partner really wanted to parallel play together. This made for a great opportunity to give this a replay for the first time in nearly 20 years, and seeing my partner’s experiences in her version of the game was also a really fun time~. It took me about 33 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (with a team of Blaziken, Claydol, Sharpedo, Plusle, Skarmory, and Shiftry).

The third Pokemon game starts and plays out very similarly to the previous two. You’re a young person (you get the choice of a boy OR a girl this time, carrying forward the trend started in Crystal) going out on an adventure to become the regional Pokemon League champion. You arrive in the Hoenn region having just moved there from Johto to here where your father is a gym leader, and you quickly set off on your quest to be the best like no one ever was. It tries a few new things with the narrative writing, like how we’re not fighting Team Rocket anymore or how there are a few more characters with a little more meat to them, but it’s by and large very similar to how these games had always been up to that point. That absolutely isn’t a bad thing, mind you, as I certainly don’t mind a Pokemon game with a thread bare story if it’s otherwise fun to play, and this one absolutely fulfills the being fun to play.

Gameplay-wise, it’s still Pokemon. You catch them, you train them, you fight trainers, win badges. It’s something you’re almost certainly already well familiar with by now, and the third generation of Pokemon doesn’t really rock the boat too much on the fundamentals and plays very similarly to the first two generations. That said, while some of the more fundamental problems with Pokemon still haven’t been cleared up yet (most prominently, the stat a move scales off of is still tied to the move’s type and isn’t particular to the move itself), there are a LOT of quality of life changes as well as general polish to the design that makes this game WAY easier to go back to than its GameBoy predecessors.

The game as a whole is so much easier to play now. You still have an inventory limit, yeah, but it’s far larger than Gold & Silver’s was, and inventory management is far less of a constant burden. You also no longer need to swap your Pokemon boxes manually, so you can catch Pokemon to your heart’s content without ever needing to worry about running out of space in your computer. Lastly, while it’s still not perfect, the running shoes are a VERY welcome addition to the bicycle to make getting around a lot faster and easier. Sure, it sucks that you still can’t run inside, but being able to zoom around in outdoor areas really helps the pace of the gameplay significantly.

As for the topic of polishing design, the overall experience has been fine tuned very significantly from the previous game, and a lot of more burdensome design choices of past games have been either ironed out or removed entirely. On the topic of the latter, wild Pokemon no longer run away from you unless they’re one or two very special cases, which makes catching Pokemon FAR less of a burden than it once was. Additionally, while there are still 8 HMs in this game, far less of them are actually needed to progress, so you need to spend a lot less time worrying about juggling HM users or trying to find space for crappy moves in your team. The biggest and most important change, however, is not only all of the new Pokemon, but all of the new moves. We’re still not quite there yet, but the moves added in these games make SO many Pokemon types SO much more viable now that they actually have move sets. Poison and bug types are still SOL, sadly, but most other types with really weedy move sets (especially dark types) are finally far more usable than they’d ever been, and the game balance is SO much better for it. We’ve still got some important stuff to clean up, but we’re at least at the point where Pokemon isn’t just fun to play, it’s easy to play, and that’s a milestone worth celebrating in and of itself.

Just about every main line Pokemon game is a big presentation upgrade, and this game is no exception. With the power of the GBA, Pokemon look bigger, better, and more detailed than ever before. The GBA’s sound chip is infamously under powered compared to the graphics, but this game still manages to have a really fun and memorable soundtrack either way, even if it’s not the best the music would ever be.

Verdict: Recommended. There are still some quality of life features and design shortcomings that make Pokemon games from this era a chore to go back to compared to more recent entries, there’s no doubt about that, but the advances we’ve made by this point really cannot be understated. If you’re looking for some retro Pokemon fun, this is a really good game to sit down with, even if all the kinks in the series still wouldn’t be ironed out for another game or two.