>>58777550While I like the concept of a region divided in half between land and water the execution completely flops. Narratively you don’t need to deal with the ocean parts of Hoenn until the last quarter of the game and compared to the land routes there’s almost no variation in the ocean routes that isn’t repeated. Land Routes have stuff like the high grass jungle of Route 119, the desert of Route 111, the soot covered Route 113, etc. Yeah land routes have their generic grassy forest routes but they’re either made distinct through features or visuals or broken up from one another physically.
I can see the potential for greater variety of ocean Routes in east Hoenn with stuff like the mangroves, Pacifidlog corals (narratively) and the high currents but in case of the former two they should’ve been more present (the mangroves could’ve been a new way of including Cut for optional areas in the late game) and the latter should’ve been more focused on a single route. I think stuff like the Sea Mauville, Mt Pyre, Sky Pillar and Sealed Chamber could’ve done more to help as well. Like imagine a Route that’s a ship graveyard where treasure hunters go diving for old riches, or the Route around Sky Pillar had evidence of an ancient city dotted across the islands with some sunk into the ocean (later contextualised as Draconid in ORAS).
So I think those are the big two issues for Hoenn’s ocean, it becomes narratively important too late in-game and the routes aren’t interesting enough especially when they’re meant to be contrasted to the land routes.
Hoenn mightn’t be the best region for that sort of thing an archipelago region like Sevii or Alola would be fitting although there’s also the issue that giving Surf that early could make problems for challenge, could balance it by having few important trainers with weaknesses to Water (a problem given Team Magma) and just making the Water types early game not very good (a problem given Mudkip).
