Pokemon Omega Ruby: Count me out

I'm sorry, I cannot do this. I want to love and play that game, but it's just not working. At all.

It really should have, mind you. I love Gen III as a whole, and I chose one of my favourite 'Mons out there as my opener for those remakes, i.e. the adorable Skitty — the idea being to polish off a solo run with a Cute Charm Delcatty, thus coming full circle in all matters Skitty. After my delightful run of Sapphire with a non-evolved Skitty, that run with the fully evolved feline should have been a total walk in the park; and yet, I found myself struggling. My Move pool is crappy beyond belief even after five darn Gyms, and my lv.52 Delcatty still has a hard time one-shooting foes. Bloody GameFreak locked Ice Beam behind the Dive wall, effectively preventing me from upgrading my Move pool early on; and since I have yet to go back to Fallarbor to snatch Return, I'm stuck with low-tier Moves such as Assist and Faint Attack. This is just not fun, and this is so not what I signed for: I expected to get an easier and smoother ride with a fully evolved Skitty, not a harder and more tedious one.

However, my unexpected struggles with Delcatty are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my issue with ORAS. I'm gonna try to say this as delicately as possible: from the bottom of my heart, I curse GameFreak for the changes they introduced in those remakes. Them fools basically destroyed what was in my opinion the biggest strengths of the Gen III games; namely the swift pacing, the adventurous feel and the near-perfect layout of Hoenn. Gone is the heady rush of running at a breakneck pace through the entire region, from beaches to mountain tops: progression in OR feels sluggish as all heck, a feeling considerably worsened by the abundance of useless cutscenes. It's not nearly as bad as in Sun&Moon, granted; but it's kinda worse than in X&Y, and progression really suffers from it. My save file reads 7:42, and yet I'm barely beyond the fifth Gym; in RSE, I'd already be lounging in Sootopolis, or even striding through Victory Road.

And you can also forget about cruising it your way in those remakes. RSE left you to your own devices, free to explore and roam around at will and leisure; ORAS, on the other hand, want you on rails and nowhere else. One telling example will suffice to express the depths of my contempt for that new approach: after showing my deadbeat dad who's the real family don in Petalburg City, I always fancy Surfing through Routes 105 to 109 and challenging all the Trainers on my way, before landing in Slateport and taking a right turn at Mauville to rally the newly opened Route 118. Smooth, effortless and perfect. That detour is my little treat; so why did GameFreak feel compelled to take that simple pleasure away from me and force me to follow Wally to Mauville right after I conquered the Petalburg Gym? This is my journey, dang it! Let me travel to places the way I see fit, and drop the bloody handholding already, will ya?

And since I'm mentioning Mauville... Why, GameFreak? WHY? What was wrong with the original Mauville, to make you want to overhaul it so completely? It was just perfect as it was, cosy and tiny and homely. The very last thing I wanted in my Pokemon was another architectural disaster of Lumiose City proportions! There was absolutely no need to make Mauville's so darn complicated and so ridiculously enormous. And the latter doesn't just affect Mauville, mind you: all scales have been enlarged, just because. Everything is way too big in ORAS, and the weird camera angles make things even worse. The marvelously efficient layout of RSE is shattered beyond belief, and the player is left with a disfigured Hoenn that's painfully confusing and tedious to scale — in every darn sense of the word. GameFreak probably realized that they screwed up, because they kinda shrank things again in Sun&Moon; but the damage is done as far as ORAS as concerned.

Those nearly eight hours were a trudge, let me tell you that. It started nicely enough, mind you: the game's overall vibe stood pleasantly halfway between X&Y and Sun&Moon, and I was thrilled to rediscover Hoenn under that new graphical guise. But then came the handholding, the cutscenes and the enormous areas, and I had to endure obstruction after obstruction. I was sorely tempted to give up several times; yet the thought that better Moves and one-shooting were somewhere down the line kept me going, along with the desire to get my paws on some Mega Stones and pave the way for future runs. But ironically enough, that last point was actually my undoing: my will to crawl ORAS ultimately broke when Stephan kidnapped me on Route 123 and took me to some remote island to snatch the Key Stone. Oh heck no. I was on my merry way to the Weather Institute, and I just couldn't muster the strength to tackle that diversion even if my life depended on it.

And that's how I turned off my 2DS and shoved my OR cartridge back into its box, not to be touched for a very long time. See you, so long, goodbye, hooray! Mind you, I'm not swearing off those remakes just yet. I still hold onto my fantasy of an Audino Solo Run with ME included; and beyond that, I'm aware that a lot of my current repulsion towards ORAS stems from the sheer contrast with RSE. I simply cannot play the originals and the remakes at the same time or in quick succession; if I ever want to play the latter again, I have to let a lot of time pass, and get used to the idea that I'm basically dealing with a completely different pair of games, with an atmosphere of their own. I mean, it's pretty much like that with every single Pokemon remake; I just have to suck it up. And if it turns out during my next playthrough that I just cannot get used to these games after all, then I'll pawn them without regret. And that, dear fellow gamers, marks the end of all ORAS tidings for now. Thanks for reading as usual, and drop by anytime!