>>56417357Hoenn was the worst designed map out of the handheld games by a wide margin IMO. People meme on the IGN review, but there absolutely is way too much water. It's literally half the map.
Water routes in Pokemon have always kinda sucked. You're forced to use repels to avoid wild Pokemon (versus just avoiding tall grass on land). Wild Pokemon variation dies on water routes. Ruby and Sapphire had solid varieties of different types on all its land routes. Then as soon as you hit the ocean, it's all Tentacool, Wingull and Pelipper . Adding to this, all the trainers on these routes almost exclusively use water types as well. If you have any Fire, Ground or Rock types in your party, you're basically benching them for massive periods as a result of this. And lord help you if you're playing Sapphire and facing off against Team Aqua on top of that.
The games require THREE water HMs (Surf, Dive, and Waterfall), which was especially egregious in the original games, as Surf made the other two almost completely redundant in battle.
And then you get Routes 132, 133, and 134. Take everything you hate about water routes, and now add current puzzles that are entirely trial & error at points. You often can't tell if you are moving to the right tile until after you have done so since the path the current takes you down isn't always shown entirely on screen. Then it's back to the start to try again when you mess it up. Navigating through these routes is genuinely aggravating without a guide. These are the three worst designed routes of any Pokemon game. Nothing about them mechanically is fun.
...
