>>36263083>>36263117This is a good point, and more broadly the game as a whole feels like it had bigger plans that largely came to fruition but were ultimately cut off by the deadline. On one hand Granite Cave and New Mauville are simplified a bit, the Trick House loses two rounds, and the trendy saying mini-game has been reduced to items so people's swear words don't get published online, so we don't quite get 100% of the original games. Yet on the other Mauville City went from a road to a three-story apartment complex, Secret Bases are sharable online just for logging on to the PSS and let you recruit 6 other trainers to battle and serve you while grabbing other bases flags to unlock more furniture and services, and you can fly your Latios/Latias like an actual plane. Then you have middle ground like Contests having their own side-story and superboss (I for one really appreciate the latter) and let you use the 3D camera as a backdrop, yet cannot be played online so their great potential is still largely squandered. The story does strike the balance I think the series should have; enough added dialogue to flavor formerly bland characters nicely, but not enough to kill the pacing.
But all of that good stuff is kind of squandered on the fact they are truly piss easy; even if you abstain from Exp. Share and Mega Evolution they take one of the easiest games in the series and stack 3 generations of power creep on top of it without adjusting the bosses to compensate until the Elite 4 (Mega Metagross is heart-stopping in a story battle context). But hey, at least fan mods can fix that!
They were my return to Pokemon after a decade and both gave me the big Hoenn high I was longing for, yet reinforced why I left.
