So, I continue with Alpha Sapphire... granted, I'm playing at a very slow pace. If I'm not bogged down with work I would've completed the game within a day or two of playing it, but I'm not speed-running.
Anyway, I played through the plot from Rusturf Tunnel (I just only got the Rustboro-Verdanturf reference just now. TEN YEARS I've played this game damn it.) to Dewford Town, beat Brawly and talked to Steven, and went off to Slateport city and explored a shit-ton of stuff. Also fought Team Aqua, naturally.
And Dewford Town is where ORAS starts to show that it's not just a remake, and that it's got its own thing going on. The boat ride from Petalburg to Dewford takes place in the form of a cutscene instead of the boat just zipping down the in-game sea pathways. And Dewford Town stays mostly the same with it being absolutely minimalistic and the main thing there being these bunch of gossipers who you can troll into making a new trend.
There is, of course, always the Dewford Gym, and it's been absolutely revamped. No longer the entirely dark maze and you have to beat trainers to make it brighter (though one of the trainers in the gym reference this old puzzle), Dewford Gym is... a straight-up gym. They went through all the trouble to make these little details, these treadmill machines and bicycles and weight racks and whatnot. The puzzle's a lot simpler, with three trainers standing in a middle corridor, and you need to beat each one so you can step on a button that'll temporarily light up a side maze-like gym section that you have to navigate in the dark. I like it, it's a nice update to the original puzzle whilst still keeping the essence of the puzzle (darkness and having to beat trainers to proceed) intact.
The battle with Brawly takes place in an actual gym, again, and it's just funny to see my Dustox and Brawly's Makuhita face off surrounded by gym equipment.
Also, Ralts, like, totally sucks. I now realize why I never bothered with this thing until it's at least a Kirlia. It's so freaking fragile, and its Stab Confusion and Disarming Voice does jack shit to enemies. Even against something that's weak to it like Machops and Tentacools, it still has to go through a bit of a beating before going down.
And if changed gym puzzles isn't enough... Granite Cave's got a bit of a makeover! And not only just because of the added Primal Evolution plot either... instead of having to trek through Granite Cave with Flash and finding Steven at the bottom-est chamber, you just straight-up walk into Steven's chamber, with the rest of Granite Cave being out of reach until you have the Mach Bike. It's a rather strange change, but it does make the plot faster-paced.
The hiker that stands near the entrance of the cave still gives you Flash, though.
And Steven's chamber is blocked by a bunch of Ruin Maniacs until you beat Brawly. After I beat him, I returned to the cave and found Steven admiring this giant mural with Primal Kyogre apparently laying absolute waste to the old civilization... even if the mural of Kyogre does look a little derpy with those arms. Steven's switching from his full-realistic model to the more chibi-overworld model is a bit jarring, though. We get some introductions and some cryptic dialogue about how Primal Kyogre is a force of nature to be reckoned with and whatnot, which is nice... this expanded thing does help to build Kyogre up to when we actually face him in the future.
Kind of bummed I don't get to trek through Granite Cave and fight off all those Sableyes and Arons, though. I would like to own a Sableye.
After pillaging all the freebies in Dewford, I hitched another ride with Briney to Slateport town, and beat up everyone in the beach. I have to say... they really, really went all out with making the overworld beautiful. It certainly brings back memories of how I was pretty fucking blown away by Ruby and Sapphire's graphics back then. Look at, oh, the Seaside Shack, for one! You've got this Japanese elevated platform with gangsters sitting cross-legged, and all the tables have these soya sauce containers and pepper shakers and shit. It's wonderful. Someone went through the extra trouble to craft these realistic-looking sauce containers instead of just making up a bunch of random decorations and calling it a day. There's that digging shack from near Rusturf Tunnel too!
The Slateport market... just look at all the personalized dolls and crates and whatnot! Just look at that gorgeous shipyard and all the displays they put up in the Slateport Museum! It's wonderful. The plot at this point more or less progresses identically to RSE. There's the Soda Pop house, there's Team Aqua lining up outside the Museum (with some nice jokes about how they had to pay to go in instead of just barging in like criminals), the player character has to save Stern from Team Aqua and meet Archie for the first time...
And while I'm not that big of a fan of Archie's redesign -- I thought the super-tight wetsuit makes him ridiculous -- it does make him look a lot more pirate-y, so I can't say I totally hate it.
We've got a bunch of cameos in the museum as well! In addition to Kanto, Johto, Sinnoh, Unova and Kalos being referred to by name, we also get to see models of S.S. Anne, practically unchanged from its appearance in HGSS, as well as the Royal Unova, apparently 'under construction' because BW takes place years after RSE. Truthfully I don't particularly care that much about Pokemon's timeline and see most games as pretty stand-alone, but hey, if you like those timeline things, then more power to you.
Anyway, Slateport's gorgeous. And then there's a bit of an interruption with the new NPC, that loli celebrity girl, and her Altaria, who chooses me during this talent scout program and tells me I have the chance to become a new contest star. I get some stuff from her including the Pokeblock Case and a new costume, but since I have jack shit interest in contests, I leave. Contests are a lot less obnoxious than the films from B2W2 or the musicals from DPPt, and I certainly prefer them to the athletics olympics game thing from HGSS... but I still don't want to bother with them, at least not at the moment.
The pokeblock making minigame that makes absolutely no sense is gone, though, so there's that.
The Trick House is still around and the Trick Master still hides in the same spots -- I basically found him the first two times by pure memory/instinct. And likewise the Trick House has been revamped to look a lot prettier.
And the Cycling Road! That first diagonal angle shot of the Cycling Road is quite impressive, I must say. There's an additional cutscene of Team Aqua grunts rolling out which I'm pretty sure isn't present in the original RSE, though I may be wrong.
If anything, I wished there were more Aqua battles. Really, all those grunts that went into the museum, and after two of them are taken out the entire team retreats?
That route is still annoying as ever, with Plusles and Minuns and Elektrikes paralyzing all the members of my team that isn't a Marshtomp. And then there's the battle with May... and thanks to me not just relying on my starter and actually leveling up the rest of my team (though Exp. Share helps a fuckton) she goes down easily. The Grovyle, in particular, gets taken out by a single Fire Fang from my newly-evolved Mightyena.
There are some hints of things to come. May gives me the Dowsing Machine... which now takes place in the form of these weird buggy antennae that dangle off my hat. It's weird and hilarious. There are mentions of some kind of apocalypse that wiped out a good chunk of Hoenn's population, or something along those lines. It's a bit of detail regarding the Groudon/Kyogre backstory which I don't think is present in the original.
There are also mentions of Sea Mauville which I'm sure isn't in the original. I mean, New Mauville I'm aware of, but Sea Mauville?
My team is currently comprised of my starter, Marshtomp (nicknamed Armstrong after finding the name rater in Slateport), the Fire Fang Mightyena, Metang (who evolved from Beldum after the same battle where Mightyena evolved), the still-useless-and-unevolved Ralts (who at least learned Magical Leaf recently), KHRP the Magikarp (who I'm hoping to evolve to Gyarados simply by leeching off Exp. Shares) and a Nincada I use for Cut purposes.
My Zen Headbutt Skitty... ended up being worthless thanks to having the ability Normalize. Well sucks.
Yeah, I've decided to use Beldum in the playthrough. He's not that overpowered, at least until Metagross stage, and even then the trainers in ORAS are reportedly more powerful than their RSE counterparts and the plot's already quite different, so why not? It's still immersive anyway since both Beldum and Glalie are Hoenn-native Pokemon, so it wouldn't be as weird as using that Torchic in XY.
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