I deeply love ORAS. I think they’re some of the best games in the history of the franchise (or any franchise), with enough content to be extremely fun and a style I love, in a region I love. They’re beautiful, phenomenal games.
I still strongly prefer the region that Emerald lays out. I think that some of the reasons are typical, and then some are a little more personal. While the broad strokes are the same, there are clear key differences that change the experience fundamentally.
First, of course, is the Battle Frontier. It’s something that just seems so integral to the Hoenn experience, and I was devastated as a fan - truly the first time I questioned Game Freak as the developers of this series in a serious way - when it wasn’t in the remakes. I’m replaying Emerald now with the specific intent to spend hundreds of hours beating each facility, because it’s just so perfect. It’s the exact experience I want out of a Pokémon game, and it has all the flavor to make it a blast. The Dome itself is my #1 battle-focused location or battle facility in the history of the franchise. There is nothing in any game in the world quite like the Emerald Battle Frontier.
The second is the graphical style. I spend to many hundreds of hours in RSE that Hoenn as a 16 bit sprite world is just burned into my soul. I love the music, the tile sets, the textures and sprites, in ways I can’t even begin to explain. I think even further that this 16 bit style actually opens the region to more imagination and let’s the player create their own world from the things they see, a world that is fantastical and adventurous and defies the bounds that fully 3D gameplay can sometimes create. To be clear, I do know that this is entirely my own hang-up and some people will think I’m just a little off my rocker. But this graphical style gives locations like the Abandoned Ship, or items as simple as the Starf Berry, some different context and texture than they have now.
When I think of the original Hoenn, after picturing scenes from Emerald in my mind for a second, I actually first think of the in-game description of the Starf Berry - an almost-mythical item (at the time, anyway) that I was captivated by as a kid, even though I of course never obtained one. I first found out about it right here on Serebii’s site on the old RS BerryDex page:
“So strong, it was abandoned at the world's edge. Considered a mirage.”
Twelve short words, and an world’s worth of possibility to me when I was just ages six to nine, in the years RS and E came out. It came to symbolize Hoenn itself for me - a world of wonder. Just what was this “world’s edge” - was it somewhere I could go in the game? Was it a metaphor or an idea? And how could this berry be a mirage, what’s the story behind that? Part of what let my imagination run wild in that way back then was the graphical style; through its own limitations, and in the hands of a company that at the time demonstrated considerable skill with the sprite-based art form, the games I played were well-beyond what they might look like on the surface.
There are also some things beneath the surface that I think contribute to the rosy, nostalgic way I view old Hoenn that - if I’m being fair and honest - shouldn’t give RSE Hoenn any points over its ORAS counterpart, but do anyway for me. One of these things is some unused code in the game that isn’t normally ever encountered. This just happens to be stuff that I developed a deep interest in at the time, and nobody can blame them for not replicating or reviving unused, apparently scrapped code, of all things. But my favorite unused code element, the four additional Towers hinted at in the unused ribbons - Darkness, Red, Blackiron, and Final Towers - are another example of that tantalizing prospect of possibility, that extra bit of “what if?” that Hoenn has so much of already. Maybe that was just the first whisperings of what became the Battle Frontier, but maybe - in the world of possibility that lives in my imagination - there are four more great towers out there, at the edge of the Hoenn region, waiting to offer a legendary challenge to the rare trainer lucky enough to find them.
There are other little nuances here and there that evoke that sense of mysterious wonder that makes Hoenn so unique to me that I feel the remakes lose, or just lose the edge on. There’s the RS Battle Tower, for example, which fascinated me before the Battle Frontier built a thousand stories upon it; just a massive, imposing tower where the strongest trainers in the world come to engage in epic battles. That’s the foundation upon which the above implied Towers that I mentioned were built into something even grander in my mind, at the time.
The rest of the features of the region that draw me to the old Hoenn - and Emerald’s specifically - are minor. I’ll also admit that some aspects of the remakes actually feel even better than the old Hoenn - running across the bridge over the water on Route 120 at night with the stars reflecting back at you, or the beautiful flowers around Wally at Victory Road and the subtle symbolism of the kind of flower chosen. Not all is lost in ORAS Hoenn, not by any stretch of the imagination. Bringing back Steven as the Champion was a great call, too - if there’s literally anything I dislike about Emerald, it’s the Champion situation.
But to wrap up this ramble, to me, all of that is what the sights and sounds of the original Hoenn region in RSE are. That’s what the Battle Frontier represents to me as well, since I now know as an adult that the reward for clearing all seven facilities to Gold Symbol level is a Starf Berry. Hoenn more than any other region and in all its forms represents limitless wonder, to me, and RSE Hoenn just does a little bit better of a job at capturing that feeling.
