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Rating: 77/100
The third generation of Pokemon was a pretty significant turning point for not just me as a Pokemon fan, but for the franchise as a whole. For me personally, while I'll always have a soft spot for both the Johto and Unova games, Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire, and later Emerald, are very important to me in that Sapphire was the first video game I ever truly completed (As in, reached the Elite Four and defeated them), as back then, I was only just learning the concept that video games did, in fact, need to be completed. It was also the generation where I truly learned about stuff like strategies, applying type match-ups, deciphering puzzles, and so on. This was also, unfortunately, the period where Pokemon's popularity was waning for a variety of reasons. I never stopped liking Pokemon even during its slumps, and as you can tell, I still do to this day. Having replayed the original Ruby and Sapphire games on a whim, some parts of them have aged pretty well, while others are a bit more primitive compared to the innovations that its later remakes would apply.
I won't belabor the game's story, as it's still pretty much the same as the other ones: You get to go on a journey with Pokemon, battle the gyms, and defeat a group of bad guys, though in the case of RSE, the version you play as a different set of villains. In Ruby, you have Team Magma, who wants to expand the land mass, and in Sapphire you fight Team Aqua, who wants to fill the world with more water. Yeah, they're not exactly the most well thought-out villain groups, and their reasons for doing what they do raise a lot of questions, though the remakes would fix this. That being said, the gameplay has a LOT going for it, especially when it came out during the GameBoy Advance's heyday. When I say that RSE was a turning point for the Pokemon franchise, I meant it. RSE would introduce a lot of new gameplay elements that are now considered indispensible, such as abilities, individual natures, relearning forgotten moves, berries that restore health and heal status effects, items that could increase happiness, and new battling styles such as double battles, where both parties could send two Pokemon out to battle one another. The most important feature, which has stuck around even to this day, is the menu sprite-based storage system. In previous games, the box system was very clunky: when your box was full, you couldn't catch any new Pokémon until you physically changed the box yourself. Ruby and Sapphire completely overhauled the way boxed Pokémon were represented, allowing you to see all the Pokémon in a given box, arrange them however you want to, and even change the wallpaper to however you want it to look.
The graphics also got a complete overhaul as well. They're a lot sleeker and sharper, the sprites have much smoother movement, and for the first time ever, your character is allowed to run, speeding up the pacing quite a bit. Granted, the battle sprites for the Pokemon are still static, with Emerald's sprites only having two frames of movement and either rotating or scaling, eschewing the detailed sprite animations of Crystal, those are fairly minor nitpicks in my eyes. A lot of the new Pokemon introduced in these games have some really great designs and concepts, like Absol, Salamence, Tropius, Gardevoir, Rayquaza, and so on. The soundtrack also made the transition from 8-bit chiptunes to utilizing more actual instruments and the occasional synth sound. I mean, do I even need to mention the French horns and how awesome they sound? There's a reason people who grew up with these games constantly make memes out of that music.
But not everything introduced in the third generations games turned out for the better. For one, the characters and their characterization are a lot weaker here than in previous games, save for a very select few. Honestly, Teams Aqua and Magma are pretty weak as villains. All they want to do is either turn in the world into an ocean or expand the land mass, that's it, and never stop to consider the consequences of their actions until they stare them in the face. Plus, your rival character is kind of bland in terms of personality, and after a certain point, the game doesn't let you battle them anymore, so you don't even get to battle them when their starter Pokemon reaches its final stage. You battle them a total of four times, and the last time you battle them, their starter is still at their second stage of evolution. Granted, all of these things would get addressed in the remakes, so my complaints are pretty much rendered obsolete. On the Pokemon side, while a lot of the new Pokemon are really cool and can be utter beasts if you train them right, several of them are not only pointlessly rare, but also pretty useless once you get them. Not only that, there's no way for you to catch every single Pokemon once you finish the Hoenn quest. A lot of Pokemon from the Johto region in particular are flat-out inaccessible in-game, and the only way to even get them is to trade them not only from Fire Red/Leaf Green, but from spin-off games like Pokemon Colosseum or XD: Gale of Darkness, and good luck trying to get those spin-off games these days since GameCube games are super expensive now! Plus, since RSE was made on an entirely new engine, it was impossible to transfer Pokemon from the GBC games to the GBA games, long before Diamond/Pearl/Platinum introduced the GTS.
And for every good new mechanic RSE introduced, there are some that are just flat-out bad. For one, fishing is made needlessly more complicated than it was previously. In previous games, you ever got a bite or you didn't. Here, it's possible for the bite to get away from you, which is unfortunately more common because the game expects you to push the button literally as soon as you see the "Oh! A bite!" message and not take your eyes off the screen for even a second. And I don't think I need to go into all the weird logistics behind getting a dang Feebas. Hell, upgrading your fishing rod even reduces your chance of getting certain Pokemon compared to catching them with a Good Rod. Again, these would be addressed in the remakes, and even in Fire Red/Leaf Green, so complaining about them is basically a moot point. That being said, a lot of fans complained that the latter half of the game's main campaign consisted of surfing across nothing but water routes. I actually didn't mind this too much when I was a kid, and I still don't. I loved exploring across the water, diving into new areas, and looking for stuff in every nook and cranny I could find. This was also addressed in the remakes, and I know it was such a big issue that people made memes out of it. Oh, and I wasn't a big fan of the Battle Tower or Battle Frontier. I found them too hard to deal with, even as a kid. I know a lot of people like those, and that's totally fine, and I actually don't consider their inclusion to be a problem. I did, however, find the Pokemon Contests to be a bit too restrictive, especially since you're only allowed to give your Pokemon a finite amount of PokeBlocks, and couldn't really max out their stats unless you knew exactly what to do. Again, these would be addressed in the remake.
All that being said, I still have a fondness for Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald as games, though as of now, I do prefer the remakes because of the new additions, refinements, and for addressing a lot of RSE's flaws. I do still play RSE on occasion whenever I feel like it, and there's a lot to be said for the new mechanics that newer Pokemon games still utilize to this very day, so the modern Pokemon franchise as we know it still does owe a lot to RSE. So while they're not perfect, they still did a lot for the franchise, and I think that's still something to respect in the grand scheme of things.
