I absolutely dislike this region but I want to force myself to

>>32661890

It has one of the best sense of discovery in the franchise if you go out of your way to explore and surf a bit. You can go the entire game without seeing the entire middle-region sea or the sunken ship. Same with the diving areas. You just have a ton of stuff to discovery later on and explore all the nooks and crannies.

Also the gym leaders are fun.

>>32661890

I hate the music. fuck the soundfont, and even with a good soundfont most of the music grates on me if I hear it for more than a couple minutes

The map is an ordeal to explore

So many filler pokemon. Tons of pokemon are fucking clones of each other with a different name, while cucks defend this with "b-b-b-but it's for double battles! even though lunatone and solrock don't synergize with each other at all!"

Some of the worst gym leaders. A lot of them don't even look like they were designed with their type in mind (the surfer dude ends up being a fucking fighting gym leader)

Backtracking constantly. It would be nice if they gave you the fly hm when you beat the flying gym leader to cut down on the following backtracking, but that would make too much sense. Cucks defend this with "but there are a couple of inconvenient shortcuts which you would probably only know about on replays!"

And too much water is a legit criticism. Fuck the fuckers who turned it into a meme as if it's a ridiculous concept. The only thing worse than water routes are caves with awful rock puzzles, so imagine if 70% of kanto was gen 1's victory road

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>>32661890
i personally find it absolutely gorgeous.
it is one of the most diverse regions.
sure, desert and volcano stuff might be a bit short, but they are neat little pockets of freshness.

>>32661916
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zro82OX6iv0
>but there are a couple of inconvenient shortcuts which you would probably only know about on replays!
they were obvious to me the first time i played through the games...

>>32661890
The gym leaders have a lot of personality (Mainly in the ORAS games) and are fun to battle.

Exploring the game (like a previous anon said) is basically half the fun. I knew a lot of people who didn't even know the regi's existed or what the wrecked ship was back in the day.

Personally for me the diversity of the region it's self is greatly appealing and I'm a sucker for warm climates and tropical regions.

Fucking around with the Hidden base feature, even if they're almost useless now is pretty fun to an extent. It's good to at least experience it.

It's also a good region to get distracted in. Contests, exploring, elite four reruns, battle frontier, item finding.

I get why people don't like the region but I just personally believe a lot of it is unwarranted. It just depends on what you look for in a game/region.

>>32661916
oh and also, the games are about land and water.
groudon and kyogre.
aqua and magma.
so i think the amount of water is justified in hoenn.

>>32661890
step 1: throw your copy of ORAS in the trash
step 2: play RSE

>>32661939
this.

>>32661890
i like how you go to a completely new part of the region after you beat the 5th gym. you're forced into a more jungle like rough scenario to get to the next gym.

>>32661941

I've seen this argument a million times and I'll respond the same way I always do. Backstory/plot/lore/etc should NEVER be used as an excuse to fuck up gameplay. They could have found a way around this by having boats/bridges/etc. to bypass water, or just have a lot of water be background, or they should have at least really tried to increase the variety of pokemon found in water so it's not as boring.

>>32661971
well, you don't see that much water until lilycove, until then, u use boats and the routes where you NEED to use surf are very short.
and after lilycove, water routes serve as an open are of sorts. you movement is not as restricted as land routes, so travelling to cities and stuff usually don't take much time.
my only problem with water routes are the trainers. there are way too much trainers on water routes.

How can people not like the region? It's the most "open world" and unrestricted feeling region in the whole series. No space is wasted and everything feels natural and free, that is until ORAS ruined it.

>>32661971
for water mon i agree. they should have at least put some dive pokemon up to the surface.
at least there are places like the shoal cave to surf to. places like that makes surfing and traversing those routes worth in my opinion.

>>32661971
>water fucks up gameplay
Exploring the sea was literally the best part of the game you dipshit.

>>32662020

I guess that's the difference between someone who likes hoenn, and someone who gets mad just thinking about replaying it

>>32661971
This counter argument makes little sense.

Half the water routes in the game are completely optional, and the ones that aren't can either be bypassed by mr.Briney or require 0 additional exploration rather than just making a B-line for it.

The whole concept of Hoenn is this beautiful tropical region that is equal parts marine and land life. So forcing you to adapt/use the water parts of it isn't ruining gameplay at all, in fact it's more immersive and sensible than a lot of other forced water routes in later games.

Sure the argument can be made that if water is such a big part of the region they should have more technology to deal with it, espescially since a portion of the game is dealing with sea faring machines but this region screams exploration and fitness, with every other trainer being a triathlete, lot of side areas only accessible by bike and because the protag is dressed for just that kind of activity (More so in emerald).

The only negative for water routes I can think of is the sheer abundance of trainers that infest them but since a lot of them have ways to be skipped it's really only an opinion argument.

I love the designs, I love the region, I love the music
Fuck

Remember when /vp/ didn´t exist, and there wasn´t genwars trheads daily?

>>32661890
I think it has some of the best land routes in the series, with some of them really standing out to me like Route 113 and Route 119 and adore the way the region opens up after you get Surf, letting you experience multiple new locations in addition to just letting you move forward in the plot (that the reason I really fucking hate the forced Mauville warp in ORAS after you get Surf is because it might keep younger players from exploring those areas immediately). I also like how there are a few nonlinear sections (only in RSE though, ORAS made everything a lot more linear because ORAS are fucking shit remakes) like how you can do Steven's letter quest and the Dewford Gym in either order and don't have to do both immediately to head out to Slateport.
Hoenn is also a region that really liked to take advantage of the capabilities of the GBA, with areas like Mauville City's crossroads basically existing just to show off how far you could go without needing to cross a route gate (ORAS fucked this up too).
And I just adore the music and the soundfont, and don't understand the hate it gets. MIDI trumpets are my jam, but it might just be because I also play Touhou.
Overall, Hoenn is my third favorite region besides Sinnoh and Johto.
>>32661916
>"but there are a couple of inconvenient shortcuts which you would probably only know about on replays!"
If you're referring to needing to go to Slateport after Mt. Pyre, you just need to look at the map provided to you by the game to see that there's a route south of Mt. Pyre that takes you directly to Mauville.

>>32661916
>It would be nice if they gave you the fly hm when you beat the flying gym leader to cut down on the following backtracking

What are you even talking about? You get get Fly before beating Winona.

>>32661916
>I hate the music. fuck the soundfont, and even with a good soundfont most of the music grates on me if I hear it for more than a couple minutes
Shit-tier opinion
>The map is an ordeal to explore
How so? I found them to be among the easiest to explore.
>So many filler pokemon. Tons of pokemon are fucking clones of each other with a different name, while cucks defend this with "b-b-b-but it's for double battles! even though lunatone and solrock don't synergize with each other at all!"
Who? Ilumise, Volbeat, Plusle, Minun, Lunatone, and Solrock? Literally six Pokemon out of 130 new Pokemon? Maybe you want to include Wynaut and Azurill, both of which are fairly rare to even see in the game itself aside from one or two battles in Azurill's case? This is a shitty complaint. Complain about things that are relevant, not things that you can shrug off and move on from you fucking baby.
>Some of the worst gym leaders. A lot of them don't even look like they were designed with their type in mind (the surfer dude ends up being a fucking fighting gym leader)
Retarded complaint. Look at Giovanni, Jasmine, Fantina, and a bunch of other leaders.
>Backtracking constantly. It would be nice if they gave you the fly hm when you beat the flying gym leader to cut down on the following backtracking, but that would make too much sense. Cucks defend this with "but there are a couple of inconvenient shortcuts which you would probably only know about on replays!"
You get fly right before you're allowed to use it and all of the shortcuts are obvious if you weren't a brainless retard who never opened their map.
>And too much water is a legit criticism. Fuck the fuckers who turned it into a meme as if it's a ridiculous concept.
It's not a legit criticism unless you want to complain about the distribution which is. You can ignore most of the Water in the game if you so choose and ORAS even gave you a way to speed up water travel. Get over it, faggot.

>>32661916
One final thing:
>The only thing worse than water routes are caves with awful rock puzzles, so imagine if 70% of kanto was gen 1's victory road
So... two caves? Victory Road and the Seafloor Cavern? Wow, what a big deal.

You sound like a fucking child.

>>32661916
>even with a good soundfont most of the music grates on me
Stopped reading after that.

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>>32661890
Play Emerald.

>what do you guys like about it?
First of all, look at this map. It's really easy to imagine how the blank spaces would be filled, more than with any other gen. This gives the region a feel of cohesiveness.
Also it was the map that introduced true environment variety: jungle-river, route 113, jagged path, desert, volcano, lost ship... I could go on and on.
And we also got "imaginative" cities for the first time: Lavaridge, Fortree, Sootopolis and Pacifidlog.

The music is fantastic: the fact that they managed to create some of the most memorable tracks with the ugly GBA soundfont really talks about it.

It's one of the regions that gets backtracking right. The map has some great shortcuts for everytime it forces you to go back.
And the only times the backtracking is bad are optional.

I love the water routes and I love diving. For the first and only time in the franchise you really felt lost in a huge sea, and if the encounters were annoying I'd just use repel.
But then again, I also loved the snow route in Sinnoh, so I don't know.
My only problem with the water routes is the pokemon variety.Seriously, they really wasted the opportunity in diving; you can only find 4 different pokemon in all the seaweed, what the fuck GF.

>I want to force myself to love it
Been there.
I've found out that most of the times is a waste of time, when you don't like something you just don't like it, even if you see others enjoying it and want to experience it like them.
"Most" of the times though.

I hear a lot of people complaining that ORAS ruined Hoenn, but they never say why. Is it just a memer or is there an actual reason?

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>>32663475
I'll try to explain what I find wrong with ORAS.
First of all, almost everything from Emerald, the improved third version of Ruby and Sapphire, is completely absent. No Mirage Tower, no Desert Underpass, no Gym Leader rematches, no phone call system, no appearances from Scott or Juan, no Battle Frontier (inb4 ">muh"), and most of all it doesn't use the massively improved double battle system from Emerald where trainers could have more than two Pokémon and two individual trainers could battle you in a double battle if you walked into their line of sight at the same time.
The few things from Emerald that did make it to ORAS, besides small QoL improvements that have been in every game since Emerald like improvements to breeding and overworld ability functions, were crammed ungracefully into the Delta Episode. A couple things in the Delta Episode are alright, like they handled adding a Wallace fight with his Champion team alright, but some things like the Mossdeep Takeover were butchered. Delta Episode also makes you endure Zinnia who is the worst character in the franchise but that's a problem separate from what they do wrong as remakes.
Some features that were also in Ruby and Sapphire are missing as well. There's no Game Corner, no Berry Blending, no Safari Game, and instead of Lati@s being a roaming Legendary for postgame they simply give you one for free merely five badges in the game without making you capture it.
(1/3)

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>>32663475
>>32663672
And speaking of the above, there's a lot more handholding in the game. Extra teleports to your destination instead of having the player just walk there (most of them are fortunately optional but there's ONE fucking teleport that's mandatory and it completely breaks up the feeling of getting Surf and opening up the region up for exploration and I will never not be mad that it exists), there are extra free heals during cutscenes that sometimes existed in the original and sometimes didn't, and the game is made more linear than in the original with extra roadblocks.
Some areas are cut down in size either for no reason or to casualize the game. The two big examples are Granite Cave, which was a full-length dungeon with a small optional area in the original but is now only two rooms long (with a slightly larger optional area) and New Mauville which was a full-length optional dungeon with a switch puzzle in the original but is now, again, two small rooms with nothing in them besides wild Pokémon and a single button you have to hit for a sidequest.
Another negative aspect of the region in the remake is the increased number of loading gates. Hoenn was built for the GBA and had almost zero roadblocks. You could go basically anywhere but Rustboro and the upper half of Ever Grande without crossing a gate and having to reload the map. ORAS was made for the 3DS on a much-less-optimized 3D engine, and thus has route gates every five feet. They even turned Mauville from a cozy crossroad that you could take to go anywhere in the region to a giant, crowded shopping mall with route gates both inside it and on all four sides.
(2/3)

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Realized I posted those two images backwards in my above posts. My bad.
>>32663475
>>32663672
>>32663683
(3/3)
The graphics also look really blocky, as if they tried recreating the routes 1:1 instead of altering areas to better fit the newer artstyle and engine like HGSS did. This combined with the awkward chibi models makes ORAS look really dated compared to SM despite being two years older and on the same hardware, and it probably will age very poorly in the coming years.
I also think the OST butchered a lot of songs, but that's 100% subjective and I don't want to write textwalls about what I find wrong with each individual song.
Lastly, THIS FUCKING SCREEN. I don't know why the fuck they even put this here, I'd have to assume it was some attempt to say "oh hey, 'member the Battle Frontier? I 'member" but it just comes off to me as a slap in the face. Not only did they not put the Frontier in the game but they explicitly brought it up just to remind the older fans that it wasn't in the game. I remember shortly after launch some of us were in denial mode thinking it would be added as DLC but of course it wasn't, and it wasn't in SM either so it's sure as hell not "Coming soon!" I get mad whenever I look at this image.

I'm probably missing something but hopefully you can understand the broad strokes of why some people like me dislike ORAS as a remake.

>>32663672
>>32663683
>>32663692
Well... I guess I'll be playing emerald then

>>32663692
>>32663672
>>32662534
Also, I believe you can't skip Brawly anymore. You have to beat him before being able to give the letter to Steven.

>>32664252

are you sure you dont have it backwards? i always did granite cave before the gym

>>32664304
You can do it that way in RSE but I'm not sure I remember being able to do it like that in ORAS.

>>32662004
The most open region is still Johto

>>32664378
it's kanto actually

>>32664382
Eh... I won't argue that.

>>32662534
They should've boosted Relicanth's encounter rate, and had a distribution like:

>Common: Chinchou, Tentacool, Wailmer depending on area
>Uncommon: Relicanth, one of the other common spawns, maybe something evolved
>Rare: Kabuto, Omanyte, Lileep, Anorith, depending on area

>>32664403
That would completely defeat the purpose of choosing between the Root and Claw fossils

>>32664221
Honestly OP, if you don't at least already like RSE, play the remakes. Most of the stuff these guys are whining about is simply the remakes messing with their precious memories (also why a lot of people who love RBY and GSC don't like FRLG and HGSS respectively). If nothing else, the lack of physical/special split will bother the hell out of you.

>>32664408
>Getting a rare, late-game Pokemon earlier in the game
>Seeing the Pokedex entry about how it's found on the ocean floor
>Rarely, on the ocean floor, you'll find these ancient species

>>32661971
>Backstory/plot/lore etc should NEVER be used as an excuse to fuck up gameplay.
if only GF followed this advice over the last 20 years

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>>32663692
This. And don't forget Sky Pillar - In the original games, you had to be somewhat skilled with mach bike in order to get to the top. It made the encounter with Rayquaza way more satisfying. In ORAS its just a couple of staircases with some wall paints, and the game *forces* you to capture one of the strongest pokemons in order to proceed with the story. What a letdown.

The water routes never bothered me because they replaced caves, which were always the fucking worst. Don't get me wrong, I don't like water either, but RSE never felt like too much. If you don't want to explore the sea then just don't do it, there's more than enough gameplay on land to keep you occupied.

>>32661898
just this. This guys understands it. Also once you get surf the whole world has so many fucking shortcuts. E.g. after beating your dad, you can just go back to the 1st town, from there surf and you are in mavile. You are in the spirit mountain? Just go down and you are back in mavile. The whole world feels so fucking good and connected, that´s what I am kinda missing from the new games.

But Gen 5 had the best routes, worst worlddesign (especially bw) but great routes.

>>32665789
see
>>32663672
>>32663683
>>32663692
>>32665536

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>>32661926

>>32665774
At least caves have some diversity. The water routes are all the fucking same.

>>32662066
For me it's a problem with the number of water types. I can understand they they're there thematically, but so many of the wild battles feel the same while you're exploring the right side of the map. We needed some mammals in the water that weren't water type or surface skimmers or something like Dhelmise.

>>32666215
Caves have the issue of shoving Geodude and Zubat down your throat but RSE does a good job in making them a bit more diverse.

>>32666671
But they have other stuff besides Zubat and Geodude. The water routes have nothing but Wingull/Pelipper, Tentacool/cruel and Wailmer.

>>32661946
I have some issues with ORAS myself (mainly that I find the lack of Gym Leader rematches inexcusable, after even fucking XY had Gym Leader rematches) but in general, ORAS is a good game. Between good and great, depending on how much the flaws personally annoy you.

You are such a drama queen.

>>32662004
>that is until ORAS ruined it.
Excuse me?

>>32661926
On one hand, I love how they crammed so many Hoenn landmarks into this picture, and how it gives an accurate sense of scale (to the games).

On the other hand, I hate how it DOES give such an accurate sense of scale, as it really shows how small the region is. I wish they would've fudged it a bit and shown the beach with, say, the volcano far, far in the distance.

>>32662100
>only in RSE though, ORAS made everything a lot more linear because ORAS are fucking shit remakes
ORAS is just as unlinear as RSE, because it is a remake of the former.

>>32664420
>Most of the stuff these guys are whining about is simply the remakes messing with their precious memories
Yeah... I think this is true for at least 90% of the whining.

>>32666788
Read the post again.

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>>32667076
Did you even read the thread? ORAS added extra roadblocks to the game to stop players from travelling, e.g. >>32664252

The hot springs next to the pokemon center in Flannery's gym town(Lavabridge?) that you can go inside of, I thought that was the hottest shit as a kid.

>>32667111
Maybe you should read the whole conversation thread more carefully

>>32665814
>But Gen 5 had the best routes, worst worlddesign (especially bw) but great routes.
Aside from linearity

>>32661890
I like in the upper left corner of the map, you can fight a martial arts master and his disciple hidden in the woods, and you might never know that without just surfing around and exploring stuff after you get different HMs.
Also the raining routes are awesome.

>>32667508
Same linearity as always, only they dropped the pretenses.

>>32667491
You should take your own advice.

>>32667700
Since you need things spelled out.

>>32665774
>water routes replaced caves, which are the same or worse than water routes

>>32666215
>caves have more diversity (ergo they are better)

>>32666671
>caves shove geodude and zubat (ergo they aren't better)

>>32666788
>but you still have more stuff than just zubat and geodude in caves, whereas all water routes just have these encounters

>>32667866
>This just means the roadblocks make the main game more linear.
And the main game is the most important part of the game regarding region design. Of course you can explore the entire region after you beat the game, that's true for literally every region in Pokémon.
>It's not like they were removed or anything...
You're just trying to bait me now aren't you

>>32667544
Seriously, every game had the same linearity, the only issue with BW's linearity is that it's as subtle as a giant hole in your windshield so everyone noticed it. The other issue was
the already aforementioned world design which created a giant lap, so while it prevented back-tracking, it made you forget about those extra nooks and crannies you couldn't visit earlier because of the lack of tools needed pretty much encouraging you to run the lap again.

>>32668083
Fly is a thing. Also, no. I like BW but it is way more linear than the preceding regions. You have a fork in Johto. Kanto had a lot of going back and forth through the same thing. Ditto Hoenn and Sinnoh. They weren't exactly linear.

>>32667718
Are you seriously this blind?
>>32666671
>>but RSE does a good job in making them a bit more diverse

>>32668374
All the caves from gens 1-3 are more diverse than the hoenn games' ocean routes. That's my point which you've been ignoring or are too stupid to get.

>>32667542
The raining routes are cool when you first encounter them but they quickly become a nuisance. Not Fog bad but still annoying

>>32668439
I'm not ignoring it you stupid fucking faggot. I'm fucking agreeing with you. You honestly can't tell me saying "RSE does a good job in making them a bit more diverse" is essentially agreeing with you?

>>32670160
You saying that ignores the fact that gens 1-2 ALSO did it you total nigger