Pokemon is one of the most impactful game series to me, because i grew up as a pre-teen playing especially Fire Red and Emerald, as a teenager i've played Omega Ruby quite a lot, and i've also watched the anime series when TV around here transmitted, so this helps me enjoying pokemon games even to this day, even if it isn't exactly one of my favorite game series of all time, because i feel that almost every game i've played from the series could be better if they had more changes and challenges on main-game and not just on post-game, and Gen I-IV has some quality of life problems. Omega Ruby is so far my favorite, and it has nostalgia involved, but it's also because i think it's the one with most interesting exploration and quality of life improvements from what i've played at least, but i didn't played X/Y and Sun/Moon or what came after that(and honestly i don't care about Gen 8 onwards).

But about this game itself now, it's pretty good. They've finally made TMs reusable here, HMs aren't necessary all the time and they even removed the necessity of rock smash, even though strength is still necessary sometimes, and with Fly you're kinda forced to use on your main fly type pokemon or you capture one just for that if you like me didn't used any fly type, but all right i guess.

The progression is the same as any pokemon game, you go to a town, talk with people who mostly talk about how they love pokemon, battle with their gym leader and then gain a badge, progress through another route and then another town, but it's still satisfying here due to some of the gen 5 pokemon being very awesome both in style and typing/moves. Samurott isn't even in my top 3 water pokemon starters but it's very cool, Exadrill has a good design and great usefulness, and this can be said about the others i've used. It was very bold changing entirely every pokemon you can capture in this gen, and i think they managed this well, even tho some of them are very weird, especially the trash thing, i really don't know why they did that, but it's not as if past generations didn't had some ugly pokemon, so ok. I would like this more if all gym leaders felt as challenging as Elesa was with me at least, she's the only gym leader i've lost to at first, but at least elite 4 and ghetsis are very challenging if you're not overleveled.

Besides most of the new pokemon looking really good, the other visuals are pretty for a DS game, pokemon have good animations in-battle and some gyms have interesting visual concepts, and the unova region provides a good atmosphere with it's towns and music, i don't find the OST to be as consistently awesome as Emerald/OR/AS, but route 10 theme is probably my favorite route theme so far, and Driftveil town and bridge themes are mind blowing, N's castle theme also deserves mention.

Most people say this is the pokemon game with the best story, and now i know where this comes from. I still feel it could be better if going from town to town it had more world bulding instead of most people just talking about how they love pokemon, but by the end specifically there's some interesting dialogues, and ironically my favorite part here is when Ghetsis say N was being manipulated, and i mean this is ironic because it was obvious and that's a common trope, but it's handled in a quite surprising way. Ghetsis unfortunately is a generic bad guy but ok i guess, you also get to battle a legendary pokemon using your legendary pokemon, and that's kinda kino.

Overall it's a nice pokemon game, and maybe i will replay it in the future instead of just doing post game content with my current save, since this is very replayable due to the variety you have building a team. Also Reshiram probably has my favorite legendary design now