Game review: Pokemon Alpha Sapphire, Omega Ruby

The original Pokemon Saphire and Ruby was probably the most ambitious the series got in a lot of ways, and the remake adds to it.

System: Nintendo 3DS

Price: R549

Pokemon, a series of turn-based strategy games has come a long way over the years, essentially challenging people to raise a team of monsters with which they can fight other monsters.

Each game has added and subtracted some sort of gimmick to try and keep things interesting, despite the fact that the series is quite iterative. This also has the side effect of making the remakes more interesting, as you see what didn't make the cut in the next title.

The main gimmick Ruby and Sapphire have is that each of them has a different set of antagonists – Sapphire has team Aqua (who want to expand the sea) and Ruby has team Magma (who want to expand the land).

This gives the titles a little bit more value if you're going to buy both, because changing antagonists changes the plot a bit.

The original game game also included a completely alternate battle system in the form of Pokemon contests, where what wins you points is how appealing your Pokemon is, and how appealing its moves are.

It even has its own stat line separate to the normal battle system.

Which is a fun distraction that would have been nice to have seen in the rest of the series.

The game also allowed you to build a secret base, which you could share with friends. This has been expanded in the remake so you can build your own mini-gym complete with traps and puzzles.

All of this makes a comeback in the re-release, along with a few new additions.

The first new addition is the training modes from X and Y, which is pretty much identical to those games. I would like to have seen maybe a suit of different minigames here, but it is still better than the old approach of just battling and hoping for luck.

One of the things I really liked was being able to enter into a sort of detective mode that lets you hunt a specific monster, giving you a bit of information on it before capturing it. That information improves as you become more familiar with the individual Pokemon being hunted.

If you are going for training the very best of a specific breed – this speeds things along a lot.

I am not entirely a fan of how the game is paced right at the start. You basically go from fighting your first gym straight into your second – and this feels a bit rushed right at first. I prefer the slightly steadier pace of later titles.

I also kind of missed having easy levelling options for my team. For the most part here it is back to grinding off of the tall grass.

There is also a lot of surfing involved. With Pokemon, every step while surfing has a random chance of sparking an encounter, mostly with Tentacool. If you don't stock up on repels, this can get tedious fast.

The good:

The contests are still cool, bases are expanded, the world looks gorgeous and sneaking is fun.

The bad:

Lots of surfing, and a bit of lack of options for quickly levelling up a team.

7/10