- Pokemon omega ruby and alpha sapphire review serial#
- Pokemon omega ruby and alpha sapphire review tv#
You’ve had your eyes peeled open, been forced to look all the way down that familiar rabbit hole, and you know it’s time to go back down. And then you take another step back, seeing yourself holding a 3DS holding a game holding a character holding a game holding a character playing Pokémon. Even the people in the world of Pokémon play Pokémon. You’re in a first-person view, and your character’s holding a GameBoy SP (the clamshell one), playing the beginning of Pokémon Ruby to welcome you to the beginning of Pokémon Omega Ruby. It looks like a bad port, not the high-def remake you were promised.Īs soon as this concern has had a second to settle in, the camera pulls back to reveal the border of a screen, hands, arms. You’re looking at the screen you expected to see, the one where the professor tells you about the world of Pokémon, asks your name, fails to remember the name of your soon-to-be rival. When the game first starts up, it reads like something’s wrong. The good news is that Omega Ruby is aggressively self-aware on this front. But you can’t shake the feeling that it’s also an unending gyre of game loops: a remake looping back to an earlier game that was itself comprised of loops, opening up a cylindrical maw that spirals all the way back down to the first time you woke up in Pallet Town and chose Bulbasaur or Charmander or Squirtle, if you can bear to look that far down. It’s Pokémon Ruby improved in every measurable way. You fight Team Magma, who, to your slackjawed surprise, are up to precisely no good.
It breaks from the preceding games by casting the player’s (historically absent) dad as a gym leader, tacks on the Mega Evolution concept from 2013’s Pokémon X and Y, and offers tons of little to-dos that help build up your team. If you didn’t play Ruby in the early 2000s, Omega Ruby is unequivocally the best way to experience it. Remakes matter for people who haven’t and otherwise wouldn’t have experienced the thing being remade. You’re vamping on themes but it always ends with that same resolving chord. You redo battles, re-explore routes, re-fight gym leaders. The designers have remade a ten-year-old game in a ten-years-newer engine, with the baubles developed during the intervening years hung on the sides. Pokémon is an ouroboros.Īt its broadest point, Pokémon Omega Ruby is about redoing. Each builds off of and feeds into the others. Old games get a fresh coat of paint every few years to bring their monsters into the current generation, new games incorporate pieces of the old, beckoning to nostalgia. After all, there are porous boundaries between individual entries in the series: overlapping geography, monsters, gym leaders, characters, and so on.
Pokemon omega ruby and alpha sapphire review serial#
This is broadly true for other serial games, but fundamental to Pokémon. And if tradition holds, it suggests the direction for every game after it. When you talk about one, you’re already talking about every game before it. Here’s the first loop: you can’t talk about a Pokémon game in isolation. But none of these forms loop back on themselves so often as games do. Repetition is natural, maybe inevitable, in art.
Pokemon omega ruby and alpha sapphire review tv#
Poems of a certain kind repeat whole lines, songs repeat choruses and leitmotifs, serialized TV suffers from self-imposed amnesia, and Hollywood essentially re-releases its biggest blockbusters every two years.
I’d argue that videogames have the most complex relationship to repetition of any artform.