Pokemon Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald (GBA) Review Generation Three Memories | Video Game Thoughts.

Generation Three was a completely different story. My dad bought me a Gameboy Advance for one Christmas and with it Pokemon Ruby or Crash Bandicoot the Huge Adventure. I really enjoyed Pokemon Ruby. Just like with Red and Blue, I replayed Hoenn over and over again. I never heard of the complaints against Hoenn for the Pokemon not looking like Pokemon when I was actually playing the game. Those were complaints I heard when I was much older. There are Pokemon I like each generation and Pokemon I dislike. For generation 3, there were some pokemon I liked and some I disliked, and there was nothing unusual about the proportion to me. Plus generation three had two of my favorite starters ever, Treecko and Torchic, and two of my favorite early game pokemon ever, Poochyena and Zigzagoon. Unfortunately, I was always confused as to why the really agile Treecko and Grovyle evolved into Sceptile, who as far as I'm concerned only now looks a bit more agile in generation 6. Back in generation 3, he looked lazy to me, like he just decided to stop exercising and got a little fat. Whereas Torchic looked very silly as Combusken but amazing as Blaziken. I also still adore both Poochyena and Zigzagoon, they both had this puppy-like charm to them. Linoone always looked a bit strange me, a little too flat and stream-lined. Mightyena on the other hand always looked great. I wish Mightyena was more viable in battle. I happened to catch a shiny Poochyena in the grass under cycling Road, but I ended up losing it when I carelessly restarted the game once. That said, I never noticed any of big changes besides graphics. I wouldn't understand how to breed Pokemon for competitive battling until pretty much generation 6, so I didn't appreciate a lot of what generation 3 did to innovate. Storywise, I think with Generation 3 marked the beginnings of real improvement.

Generation 3 had villains who finally acted a bit like actual people in that they didn't see themselves as evil.

Generation 1 and 2's villainous teams saw themselves as bad guys, which didn't make much sense and made the games more than simple, it tended to make the games flat. However, Team Magma and Team Aqua had kind of silly plans. For these large and well-organized criminal groups, you'd think their leaders would realize the potential for their plans backfiring, and you'd think any sensible adult would realize that we need both land and sea. It's just hard to rationalize the extremes they go to. I would be okay with a villain having a nonsensical goal if the story accepted it as nonsenical, but in the game it was presented for the sake of actual drama, particularly when Kyogre or Groudon are summoned and the world goes haywire and we hear that horrible overworld music. For that amount of drama, I think the villains needed a better plan. One thing I do need to say about Pokemon. As more games were made in the series, I've noticed an increase in jokes the games contain. I want to say 98% of these jokes are fine for a family friendly franchise. Most of the time people comment on jokes in the series, it seems to me it's the person twisting what's in the game to make it seem more vulgar than it actually is. But about 2% of the time, which is to say extremely rarely, the developers will actually put a vulgar joke in a Pokemon main series game, and it annoys me every time. I never find these funny and I usually think the game would have been better without it. I don't know, to me, the funniest jokes are clever and make you think, and vulgar jokes rarely accomplish either. Like with Silver, I ended up buying Fire Red not in high school but in college. I also bought and played Emerald in college, and I filled the National Pokedex in Emerald because I heard that if you did Professor Birch would let you pick one of the Johto starters. Heartgold and Soulsilver were being released at around this time, and while I love Totodile, I also think Cyndaquil is super adorable, so I wanted to be able to play Soulsilver with two starters, and my method was to get one in Emerald and then trade it up to Pearl and from Pearl trade to Soulsilver. But then here is the problem I have with generation 3. I replayed it too much. I replayed it a lot initially, and I wasn't that little when it was released that I could enjoy repetition so much, so after a while, I was just tired of seeing Hoenn. Bur that was due to overplaying the games, more than anything else.