pokémon omega ruby and alpha sapphire review

Everything looked very charming, but from the way towns and roads were laid out, to the dialog, to being forced to run back-and-forth between the first few locations just to get that first Pokémon… most of the smoothness of X & Y was gone, seemingly beholden to the way the original Ruby & Sapphire began. Once I’d stepped into the world of Pokémon ORAS, everything I had to do for the first few hours felt strangely out of date. Pokémon ORAS showing me the beauty of the Hoenn region I was about to explore felt like the promise of a modern experience, but once I started into the game, I quickly realized it was more of an unintentional tease.

It’s sweeping and beautiful and a real improvement from the intro in previous games, which typically are unmoored from the story and consist of a Pokémon professor breaking down the premise of the world in a bit of blunt exposition. The game features a nod to its GBA origins wrapped up in the surprisingly cinematic opening sequence. Pokémon ORAS exists as a gold-plated version of the Game Boy Advance games Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire, with the setting, story, list of Pokémon and mechanics of those games dipped in the molten goodness of last year’s Pokémon X & Y. Even odder, then, that Nintendo would release Pokémon Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire ( Pokémon ORAS) as their follow-up, a game so firmly rooted in the past.Ģ003, to be specific. With that massive technological upgrade came the removal of some of the vestigial RPG speed bumps meant to stretch the experience out, and Pokémon was finally ready to join us all here in the future.

I found it easy to forget, having that game in my hands, that the series was still full of blocky, barely animated sprites as recently as 2012-I honestly had to Google to remind myself exactly how rough it actually was. Pokémon took a massive leap forward with Pokémon X & Y.

Pokémon omega ruby and alpha sapphire review