>>35376565I decided to draw the basic path the player takes between the start of the game and reaching Lavaridge town in ORAS. After this point, the game gives you the option to teleport to Petalburg and back to Mauville, then teleports you back to Mauville anyway. And once you head towards Fortree the path you take is pretty linear anyway. As you can see, there are only 3 parts where you actually need to backtrack in the first half of the game.
1) At the very start of the game when you go back to Birch's lab after battling May. Most Pokemon games have early game backtracking like this and it's hardly something that is exclusive to Hoenn (e.g. going back to Pallet Town to collect the Pokedex after delivering Oak's Parcel).
2) After rescuing Peeko and the Devon Goods from the grunt in Rusturf Tunnel, you have to go back to Briney's cottage while visiting Devon Corporation HQ on the way. Technically you can take a different path each time as you travel both ways. You take the normal route on the way to Rusturf Tunnel and on the way back to Briney's cottage you can explore a new part of the route with Cut (both in Route 116 and in Petalburg Woods).
3) Meteor Falls to Lavaridge. This is probably the only case where you can't take a new route to get to your destination, however like I said earlier it takes just about a minute. If you're going to criticise the game over a single minute of backtracking then that's unreasonable.
Even if you want to claim that RSE has too much backtracking just because of the additional backtracking between Flannery's gym and Norman's gym, you can't claim ORAS has too much backtracking.
