Pokemon Sapphire Version

"Same Old Pokemon"

Pokemon Sapphire. The long awaited game had finally come out for the Gameboy Advance, and, having gotten Pokemon Blue as my very first video game, and had gotten and enjoyed Yellow, Silver, and Crystal, I was pretty excited for the new innovation that had come with the next version, sadly, it was rather disappointing.

Graphics - Pokemon on the GBA, huh? Well, the graphics have definitely tuned themselves up, but the overall look isn't that great for the system's capabilities. The game looks more 2 dimensional then 3 dimensional, and it is easy to forget that you can walk behind that building. The sand and water effects are nice, showing you your reflection and your footprints in the sand as you run, but the water still looks relatively flat. The lighting on the roofs of the houses is nice, but the overall look is very cartoonish and is disappointing if you were to compare it to a game like Golden Sun, which had come out a great deal before Sapphire, or a game like Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, this game clearly lacks and can leave a little disappointment.

Final Score: 6/10 - Good improvement over the last “generation” of Pokemon games, but nothing you wouldn't expect from moving from a Gameboy Color to a Gameboy Advance.

Difficulty - This game can make you scream in frustration at the difficulty of the tasks it will poor on you, and make you cry at how easy it is sometimes. The gameplay itself is very easy to understand. This game can be beaten with one or two creatures, depending on how much you train each one. If you just use one of the Pokemon that you're given to start the game with, you can use it the whole game and make it until the final bosses. Depending on how much you've trained it, you might or might not need to get another one or two, but using one super-strong one is much easier in the end result. If you do take the time to train a few more Pokemon, it can greatly decrease the fun of the gameplay, which does get a bit repetitive by the end. The puzzles that the game offers you are mostly done in caves. The difficulty levels of the puzzles themselves isn't that high, and can easily be finished in a trial and error fashion. The game just drags them out by forcing a random battle with a Pokemon every few steps, which can make you lose your place in the puzzle, but not usually.

Final Score: 7/10 - Challenging, but mostly due to in game delays or not spending enough time getting your creatures to a high level.

Gameplay - This is THE most frustrating aspect of this game, along with every other game to be played by mankind. The gameplay is the same as the other Pokemon games, simply renaming the moves and giving us the gimmick of two on two battles. Although they are more fun then the original Pokemon gameplay, the occurrence of two on two battles is very rare and too short when they happen. Most of the time you spend is walking around solving puzzles or the traditional one on one fighting. By this game in the series, if you had played the games before, then the ingenious gameplay has gotten a bit repetitive, and lacks the flair it had back in Gold and Silver. Granted, it still is amazing, it just gets boring from doing it so many times. The strategy involved when fighting CPU enemies is very low, just load your creatures up with super strong moves and use the one that works best, healing with items when necessary. Granted that playing against a human that uses strategy in his moves and training his Pokemon is much more difficult, but finding someone who plays like that is quite rare. And that requires you to venture into the most gruesome part of the game: training. In the original Red and Blue Pokemon games, there were 3 ways you could this, random battles, random battles while looking for certain Pokemon that gives your Pokemon a better increase in a certain stat if you defeat enough of this, or the lazy man's way out: the infamous Missingno glitch. Of course, the creators had gotten ridden of the glitch in the next generation of the game. And because the glitch had to be done on an island that wasn't in this game, it was now impossible to use the glitch to get easy training. This leaves now leaves us with the first two options, which are both equally time consuming and repetitive, and the second more so then the first. If you run from the random battles with wild Pokemon as you progress through the game, then you will be forced to backtrack and do one of the two mentioned, and be forced to do that until you are strong enough to win. The puzzles the game gives you to complete, as I've said in the difficulty section, aren't that hard, it's just the repetitiveness of random battles occurring whenever you're trying to complete the puzzle, forcing you to either run from the fight, giving up experience that helps your Pokemon level up to progress, or to waste your time fighting yet another battle. By the end of the game, you'll be very sick of all the fights you go through.

Final Score: 6/10 - The gameplay from the older versions is still fun and enjoyable. But by this point it's become very stale, and the random battles can ruin many parts of the game.

Story - As with the other Pokemon games, this one doesn't have much of a story. You're a boy (or girl) getting ready to go out into the world and explore the wonderful new creatures that any new player definitely hasn't seen unless they'd done research before hand or had spent much time watching the anime. The goal is to simply be the “best” in your world, which involves going around collecting badges for defeating various people, and collecting as many Pokemon as you can find. You do eventually “fight” an evil organization called Team Aqua/Magma, but the story behind that is minimal.

Final Score: 4/10 - This is easily the game's weakest point.
Play Time/Replayability - The game is mostly good for one play through, usually lasting 10+ hours. Sure, it is fun while you do that, but a second time through can be painful in how much you'll repeat things.

Final Final Score: 5/10 Gameplay is still good, but considering the advancements that they could have made and should have made to the whole game, it disappoints. The simple additions and minor changes from the previous versions aren't worth it to just buy another game. This is only for fans of the series that aren't burnt out on the old games, or new players looking to try out the series.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/30/06