More Alpha Sapphire after the break!
Picking up right where I left off, I entered Mauville... and good lord has it received an overhaul! It's been turned into a gigantic, uh, mall-like structure with apartments on the second floor. The entire city's received this massive overhaul into this giant... well, super-fancy mall thing. It's a welcome change, and especially so since they learned from Lumiose that all the crazy weird angles doesn't make navigation easy. Mauville is on a grid, doesn't have overtly-fancy street/boulevard names, doesn't have a shit-ton of redundant cafes, and makes navigation a lot more manageable.
Mauville is massive. The upper level with the tenants and apartments and whatnot are apparently inaccessible because the lifts have some kind of fancy identification techniques, so I'm sure that's an expanded area for later on. We've got a shit-ton of extra stalls arranged likewise. The Pledge move tutors and the 'ultimate move' move tutors, a couple of facilities for inverse battles and institutes, a massage booth, a booth selling mirrors for the genies, a cafe lifted directly from XY... it's a lot of fancy stuff and, again, a lot of them have all these additional details that make it so much better. The massage parlor has a couple of massage chairs, the mirror shop has a lot of mirrors for what is a one-time-use NPC, there's a parking area for bicycles which looks pretty cool... it's a pretty beautiful mall.
Of course, the normal stuff like the Mart (which sells a bunch of TMs) and PC are still around in a central park-like clearing with a miniature replica of the Kalos tower. Rydel's bike shop is still giving out Mach/Acro bikes for free... and the bike shop looks spiffy while doing it too!
And the cycling song. Good lord it's beautiful.
There are also a couple of changes, though. The Game Corner, where you used to play slots or buy coins to get TMs, has closed and there's the remnants of the Game Corner is pretty desolate and melancholy with it just closed and kept out of business and the owner is just like hanging outside and giving away old doll prizes. Pretty sad. Why do you have to censor freaking slot games, huh? Stupid.
There's also a bunch of people in the city as well as the brand-new TV station who go all 'O-Powers O-Powers O-Powers' which I will ignore because O-Powers are dumb as fuck. The TV station is kind of filled with a bunch of nice details, but it's just filled with more O-Powers and StreetPass bullshit that I'm never really going to use. There's also apparently a B-plot of a Power Rangers-esque franchise in the game that has kind of sank thanks to the advent of pokemon contests. I think the toys did show up in Slateport Market at clearance or something? Poor Power Rangers.
Also, a brand-new area is the Food Court, which, again, is pretty well-crafted and made to look like an actual food court. It's gorgeous. It functions more or less the same as the restaurants in Lumiose City where you have to beat trainers at the exact amount of turns to get a prize, except here the crazy food court works where you have to defend your seat from other people... in other words, just like real life. Just with more giant clawed floating robot-crab things headbutting little raccoons.
There's also an extended Wally dialogue, with me meeting Wally in front of the town, and then meeting Wally later on in front of the gym. His dialogue is significantly expanded, with his uncle going all 'you shouldn't push yourself too hard' and Wally being this poor sick kid with a self-image problem where he can't even bring himself to ask me to be his rival. Though I do think it's especially cruel of my player character here to completely demolish his Ralts just when he's trying to prove that he can too fight. It's a nice addition to the Wally plot that makes him feel a lot less redundant. As per RSE, I get Rock Smash from that little battle.
Mauville Gym, while still having the coloured-electrical-fence puzzle thing going on, is relatively darker (literally) and it looks a lot better too. There are only three trainers before I reach Wattson, whose redesign does make him look a bit more modern, if still wonderfully old-fashioned in his fashion sense. I did feel the puzzles were a bit too simple as opposed to Emerald, but then this is a Ruby/Sapphire remake. So.
Wattson's gazing at a giant floating black Voltorb thing before battling, and as expected... my Marshtomp completely one-shotted everything of his that doesn't have Sturdy. Wattson got completely demolished.
Afterwards I progressed West to wipe out all the trainers. The Day Care Center is still around, and Verdanturf is still devoid of anything as before. Some things do remain unchanged. I clear the rocks blocking Rusturf Tunnel and reunite Wanda and karate guy who's separated by the rocks. Blackglasses dude on that random exit in Rusturf Tunnel is also still around.
What I didn't expect, though, was for Wanda's boyfriend to hand me an Aggronite! I also found a Mawilite en route to Verdanturf, and an Alakazite in Slateport. I do absolutely love how these Hoenn mega stones don't have to be on some random time of the day to find. Excellent.
Going back to Mauville and progressing up North, there's another short cutscene of Aqua Grunts rolling out to Mt. Chimney, which I think is a nice way to both showcase how the teams are relatively active, and to help guide people through Hoenn... since there's a lot of things to go to from Mauville. There's the West Verdanturf thing, of course, but also the Cycling Road down South, which I cleared out.
Ending up at Slateport, I finally gave contests a try. It's still quite boring with me just spamming whatever move is of the type of contest, though I do like how the background of the contest stage is shown through my 3DS camera. I'm not sure what it means for Slakoths and Gulpins to perform in front of an image of my laptop's keyboard, but it's something. Lisia does a 'yes you have potential' bullshit thing afterwards, and some lady hands me Cosplay Pikachu.
Cosplay Pikachu is a special Pikachu who likes to wear dress-up, and can unlock different moves (Meteor Mash, Flying Press, Icicle Crash, etc) depending on what costume it wears, and it's apparently quite great in contests. Naturally, my Cosplay Pikachu will permanently wear the libre outfit, is nicknamed El Pika and knows FURAINGU PURESU. Also after screwing around with him a bit, pretty sure he'll just hang around in the box.
I head on up towards Lavaridge, demolish the Winstrate Family, and meet up with May, who like Wally has a bunch of extra dialogue talking about stuff. Also she gives me the HM for Strength.
Basically through all this grinding my team kind of leveled up a bit. Marshtomp learns Mud Bomb, which is awesome. Metang learned Bullet Punch, which in my opinion is a far better Steel physical move than Iron Head thanks to the priority. Ralts evolved into Kirlia and learned Magical Leaf and replaces that shitty-ass move Disarming Voice with the far more reliable Draining Kiss. My Kirlia's likely to become a Gallade in the near future instead of the Gardevoir thanks to his stat distribution.
Also, rounding up my team is a Nincada who I later evolved into a Ninjask and Shedinja. I'm keeping the Shedinja (nicknaming it Vollstandig). I've always wanted to use a Shedinja back when I'm playing generation 3, but never really had the patience to do so. Well, things are different now. I'm wiser and have more knowledge of the game mechanics, so yeah. And Shedinja is a pretty awesome physical attacker, I must say. I've never realized that that ghost angel bug skin is a physical attacker! Currently all he can do to hurt enemies are Cut and Thief, but basically as long as I play my cards right he demolishes every opponent he comes into contact with.
The sixth member of my team is still in flux. It could be a HM slave like a Pelipper or a Tentacruel, or it could be the Glalie from the demo... I do have KHRP, who's evolved into a Gyarados, and I could go for another Crobat, but I've used both of them in so many runthroughs. Probably will think of an option.
Overall? ORAS has been pretty fucking gorgeous. I do love it. I am an unashamed Hoenn-baby after all.
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