>>53450870>Substance>RNG stat manipulation (1 day of coding)>Contests (way too much dev time, nobody cares)>Berry farming (a poor fork of the rudimentary system in Gold/Silver)Sure am glad THREE YEARS of dev time gave us these gems and not a system that already existed.
Don't get me wrong, gen 3 is actually my favorite. But it definitely was them throwing a lot of darts at the board to try and expand things to do in the game other than battle Pokemon, which was ill-advised in this portion of the series. This would have been a strong time to tie up gameplay features and formalize everything they had learned up to Crystal. Instead they focused on a (admittedly very good) tropical region instead, which feels like a direct response to how withdrawn and rural Johto felt. Weather and playing around with a variety of routes centered on weather seems to be the driving element of gameplay design, as well as the abilities system.
It just all feels like they took ideas at the beginning of the project, and devoted asymmetrical resources to each item. Sea routes are same-y and lack content, and a lot of loose ideas just seem "dropped" into those routes rather than having those routes built around them. The current puzzle hiding the Regis reeks of "whoops, this was supposed to connect to Slateport!", the Abandoned Ship being by Dewford reeks of "well it's gotta go somewhere, but we can't have TWO spooky areas with this and Mt. Pyre, so it'll just have Dive as a gimmick", Undersea Cavern just being...in the middle of an intersection is beyond strange. Mirage Island was a fool's errand. Shoal Cave showed that tides COULD have been neat...if they existed literally anywhere else.
It's all just so clearly rushed. Day and Night probably didn't even make the idea board, let alone the cutting floor.
