>>35093336>I haven't noticed what this change in gameplay was>I haven't played EmeraldWell no wonder anon, since it was only in Emerald, DPPt and HGSS (it might've been in Gen 5 but Gen 5 has almost zero double battles so I sincerely don't know). To explain, in RS, every double battle is explicitly scripted as such and the engine prevents enemy trainers from having more than two total Pokémon on their teams. This leads to the incredibly awkward seventh Gym battle with Liza and Tate where they only use a Solrock and Lunatone, and it makes double battles as a whole just kind of laughable, since RSE is one of those games that's not afraid to give more than three Pokémon to trainers in single battles. Emerald completely fixes these problems by allowing any two normal trainers who meet the player's eyes at the same time to battle the player at the same time in a double battle, using the teams of both (though if you give one trainer more than three Pokémon via ROMhacking it only uses their first three, to prevent a team from having more than six), and expanded the code to allow more than two Pokémon in general. You quite often find double battle situations where you fight three, four, or even five Pokémon, and the game uses a mix of encounters you can't avoid due to route designs and encounters you can take on one at a time via single battles if you really don't want to do a double battle. Liza and Tate even get four Pokémon for their Gym battle.
Most of the added Emerald content is optional, so if your LP ignores said content, if they don't go to the battle tents or visit Mirage Tower or go to the Desert Underpass or visit the extra postgame section of the Safari Zone, then you wouldn't know it's there. I highly recommend playing through Emerald, just because it's a great game on its own but also so you can compare what's missing from ORAS.
