Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire Remakes Releasing In November
After dropping a few hints in Pokemon X & Y and years of fans speculation, Nintendo has announced that they are remaking Pokemon Ruby & Sapphire for 3DS, due out this November. It fits rather perfectly: X & Y just came out last fall, so it will have been a year since the newest main game release; meanwhile, Nintendo has already remade Pokemon Red & Blue (as Pokemon FireRed & LeafGreen on GBA) and Pokemon Gold & Silver (as Pokemon HeartGold & SoulSilver on DS), the first two generations of Pokemon games, so Ruby & Sapphire are the only pre-DS games left to remake. The new remakes will be called Pokemon Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire. In a nice touch, the temporary box art has red or blue bands at the top and bottom, which is reminiscent of the Japanese box art for the original games.
I’ll admit that while I’ll certainly enjoy replaying the games with modern bells and whistles, generation III was always my least favorite generation. It was the first time that some of the shine of Pokemon had rubbed off (since I was a freshman in high school), and I felt there was an overabundance of water routes, locking you into lots of battles with water pokemon and requiring three special water moves to full explore the world, moves which took up valuable slots in your limited movesets. I lost interest shortly before the final gym leader and never finished it. Years later, I acquired a copy of Pokemon Emerald, the “director’s cut” version of Ruby & Sapphire, but I never found time to play it.
Still, this will be cool, especially since Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire will likely use the same 3D engine as X & Y, offering something new. I do wonder if these remakes will base itself more on Emerald, just as HeartGold & SoulSilver took additional inspiration from Pokemon Crystal, the director’s cut of Gold & Silver. In the original Ruby & Sapphire, each game had a different enemy chasing a different legendary; but in Emerald, both enemies were present, fighting each other and chasing both legendaries, which fleshed out the content a bit. I’d also like to see these remakes incorporate as much content as they can, because you could tell how much the developers wanted HeartGold & SoulSilver to incorporate as many ideas and pokemon as possible, so they gave it lots of love and new content. After this, however, I wonder if Nintendo will ever remake Pokemon Diamond & Pearl, or if they might do another remake of Red & Blue.
Source: YouTube