Pokémon Omega Ruby

I loved ORAS when I finished it the first time, but I actually rushed through a lot of the things because I had a lot of things to do in real life. I gave it another go a half a year later to see if anything held up and to be honest, I just felt more disappointed. Not as much as X/Y, but there were so many opportunities missed to make this the best Pokemon game so far.

Delta Episode - just what the hell were they thinking? The whole damn thing is just a glorified fetch quest and a tease at the end that only serves to infuriate fans of the original Emerald. Everything is just dangled in front of the player at the end, but nothing is really gained from it.

The Mauville City redesign is a breath of fresh air and really establishes Mauville City as an actual city in terms of design and feel.

Too bad some of the other places weren’t given the same treatment. e.g. Petalburg City doesn’t even look like a city, and Evergrande City is more of a stopping point because it only has a Pokemon Center (and why on earth would you have a city on top of a waterfall? No wonder it’s pretty much empty).

There’s something unsatisfying in the story when traveling around. I don’t know if it’s something picked up from X/Y, but it feels streamlined at some places.

Also, there’s some pretty useless locations that serve no purpose at all. I might be missed something important in New Mauville, but that was an opportunity missed.

Maybe it’s the transition to 3D underwhelming? I personally found Pokemon Black 2/White 2 to be the pinnacle in terms of the world map’s locations. There were so many nooks and crannies, whereas X/Y was incredibly linear with barely any alternate routes and secret stuff. ORAS restores this to some extent, but that’s pretty much because it’s a remake of an older Pokemon game before the maps got bland.

Or maybe it’s the Exp. Share? I actually turned it off for most of the game and it still felt boring.

Soaring is a fun inclusion and it’s a nice alternative to Fly.

The HM slave problem - two Pokemon in my party are used solely for HMs. So I pretty much have four Pokemon to choose instead of the usual six.

Secret Base has improved greatly and takes advantage of the 3DS’s streetpass function perfectly. There are more options for customisation and you can make your base into a pseudo-gym.

No trainer customisation though. It’s pretty much certain that Game Freak barely follows through with well-received features by the fans.

I still find it annoying that the gym leaders and E4 members are treated like the trainers outside, because they don’t have an animation for throwing their Pokeball out or a defeat animation.

I can’t remember if you could battle the gym leaders again, but I’m sure they don’t have a Pokemon with mega evolution with would have been great for a challenge.

In the end, I guess ORAS is a good game. It could have been great, but it tremendously falls short of expectations when you consider what could have been done (e.g. more town and city redesigns, and Battle Frontier).

I still have hopes for the 7th gen of Pokemon, but I’m pretty damn sure I’m going to be disappointed.

I’m getting old.