Technically speaking, I think this is the first ‘real’ video game I ever played as a kid. I must’ve been 4 or 5 years old, I played it a bunch until losing the cartridge several years later and by then I had mostly moved to playing Emerald and the new Gen 4 games anyhow. Recently my childhood nostalgia and how much it holds up has been a subject I’ve been interested with, so I decided to replay this game 2 decades later and see how it held up compared to my memories of it.

I had a lot of fun doing a specialized Water-type only run of the game, however the age of this game really shows in certain ways. Especially because I’ve played Emerald at least a couple dozen times by this point and the improvements it made on the original Gen 3 games are really apparent coming back to this one. You probably are playing this over Emerald either because of certain version exclusives or for nostalgia reasons like I was, otherwise Emerald is strictly better. But I’m happy I went back to this for a little while.