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.
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.