6d ago

I did not like Pokémon Emerald.

I’ve been replaying though the Pokémon games for the first time since they came out.

I just finished Gold and started Emerald last week. I was really looking forward to it as I always hear great things about emerald.

But I have not been enjoying it. I feel like I’m constantly under leveled and even when I have a higher level than other Pokémon, I feel weaker.

The map has been a bit annoying going in circles for the first half of the game. I am at the 5th gym now, and decided to drop it and move to gen 4.

I also have not been happy with the team I built. It seems that the move sets I have are not really that good. I’m at level 20-30 and I’m just getting my first good moves for some of my team.

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To be fair, anything that follows Gold/Silver is going to feel lackluster. Because Gold and Silver are awesome (personal favorites).

In that gen at least you kind of have to grind out some XP before each gym or you get schwacked. Whether that makes it a better or worse game is subjective. In the Alpha/Omega remakes this isn't much of a problem. But when I tried playing through those I stopped because it was trivially easy for that reason and others. Again, subjective.
- I remember spending all of my pokedollars and then fighting the gym leaders and being ko’d until I was finally strong enough to defeat their entire party.

Emerald is my favorite pokemon game. I started with Leaf Green, then played Ruby or Sapphire, then Fire Red, and then the other Ruby or Sapphire. Then Emerald came out, I liked that it was a mix of the Ruby and Sapphire story. Plus it added a lot of overworld use of abilities like synchronize, flame body, keen eye and others.

I hate to tell you that you gave up too early but most of the good things about emerald happen after the 5th gym when you get surf (the expanded story from ruby and sapphire, the battle frontier, improved gym leader teams and rematches, etc)
Gen 3 has so many trainers so you shouldn’t be underleveled with probably the only exception being the 5th gym. The only trainers between the 4th gym and the 5th are 5 or so in the desert and the gym trainers. The gym leader also uses 3 fully evolved pokemon. If you don’t have a strong super effective move (which is likely) then that fight will be a challenge.
The rest of the game I don’t think is that hard, the 7th gym is probably the next difficulty spike but I won’t tell you.
Some pokemon are also just not good and so you probably shouldn’t bother using them. It’s not like in later games where even if a pokemon is weak you can use the power of friendship and drugs to power boost it until it can fight anyway.
- I think not having good Pokémon has been my problem. I’m hesitant to replace them due to having trouble finding a good alternative and I don’t really care to grind for levels. I didn’t need to do that in the previous games.
  I think I’m going to drop it and give it another try after finishing x and Y when I play omega ruby
  
  Shroomish, or more accurately breloom from the first forest is amazing.
  Aron gets good but takes a while. Same with lotad.
  Plus mudkip is a beast. Treeko kinda sucks and torchic is good but so much of the game being water really puts fire in a bad position.
  But yeah, there are a lot of bad mons especially early game.
  
  If you aren’t having fun there is no shame in that. I feel the same way about Sun and Moon.
  I am sure that there is a lot those games do right, like the island challenge instead of gyms and a different kind of elite 4 and other things but the early game is so boring that I don’t care to get that far.

Joke aside, it probably just isn't for you. Personally I can't bear gen 4,5 and 8 but love gen 3,6 and 7
- I think that’s the case, already in general 4 I like the Pokémon I’ve caught and I’m not even at the first gym yet.
  I think I struggled with the Pokémon in gen 3 since they didn’t learn good moves until a higher level. Loyola’s doesn’t even learn a water move until like level 37 in that gen.

Hoenn is my favorite region. Emerald is my nostalgia game. What you say is fair and valid. Early game movesets don't feel good at all. If it's within your means, I would suggest trying Omega Ruby / Alpha Sapphire. It feels much better to play through. If you never want to see Hoenn again, then no shame in that. :)
I'm on a slow run through all the games. SoulSilver definitely is hitting
- I plan to play the rereleases after finishing x and y

Nice hot take haha. Tbh I like being under-leveled in Pokemon because it’s way too easy most of the time. There definitely is some backtracking in Emerald, although I personally really liked the varied environments. I think it has a lot more variation than gens 1,2 and 4.

I've been a gen III hater from the start. It's a major step down from GSC in so many ways. Bad region, bad soundtrack, horribly lopsided type representation, much less content, and you had to start all over with no way to link and trade over your GSC 'mons.
Ruby/Sapphire were even worse at release, as you only had 202 Pokemon in the Dex and no one knew yet that all of the missing species would eventually be obtainable by linking to the far too many additional games they split them up across.
- TBF, the poor sounding soundtrack was likely as much to do with the GBA hardware as the music itself, they did what they could with the GBA's God-awful sound chip. The type distribution isn't great but Diamond and Pearl's in Gen 4 is even worse (Platinum fixed it in Sinnoh though).

This is the last Pokémon game I played and it’s my favorite. I used to get Rayquaza early game and just blast through. There’s a lot of cool stuff after the final gym.

Gen 4 was a lot of fun, probably my favorite lineup in any of the first few generations. Torterra is awesome.
- I had a pokémon phase around gen 6/7 including ORAS, and partly to complete dexes I got previous DS games around that time too. Got Pearl/Diamond and Black/White and shared one of each with my sister so we can play in parallel and trade.
  I had a blast with black, but pearl... Not so much. It felt like a boring crawl. Mostly because of the terrible pokémon distribution. Seriously, there's a fire-type elite 4 and there are literally not enough fire-types in the game for him to have a complete team, even counting the fire starter! And one game doesn't have any access to dark type until 6th gym or so, while the other has one in a very early area.
  And the pokémon that are there feel like they're always the same, in good part because they decided to keep a lot of pokémon exclusively for the post game area.

I really liked that generation, and would go so far as to call it my favorite; but that could just be me looking at it through nostalgia-goggles, because that was the first gen I actually owned and got to play from start to finish, myself.
I think you've got a couple generations or so left before it starts to really nosedive in quality. Sun/Moon was the breaking point, for me.
- I planned to play up to sun/moon. I’ll give them a shot, but I’m mainly interested in platinum, black and white and , x&y.

I think the difficulty curve of Johto in G/S is quite relaxed until you get to do the rest of the gyms. Maybe that's why emerald feels like such a slog.

I skipped the 3rd gen GBA games and jumped from Soul Silver to Omega Ruby (I played Platinum ages ago) and I agree with you, perhaps is it too much water?
Okay bad joke aside, I maaaybe don't love the 3DS graphics, when I eventually get to play Pokemon X and Moon I'll find out I guess.
- Too much water is a legitimate problem

I have hugee nostalgia for fire red, but that’s the only one I played as a kid. I have genuinely tried getting into emerald, sapphire and platinum later in life to no success. I hate how hard it is for me to get into “new” games these days

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