New Features in Pokemon Omega Ruby Alpha Sapphire

Pokemon Omega Ruby Alpha Sapphire are releasing this Friday, November 21 for Nintendo 3Ds and are looking to be the biggest remakes yet. Beginning with Fire Red and Leaf Green in 2004, Pokemon has steadily been remaking previous generations of Pokemon Games, with the most recent being Ruby and Sapphire, released in 2003. Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire will be using the same graphics engine as X and Y, which means a more 3D world as opposed to the very top-down perspective of previous games. The game also includes Mega Evolutions, a lot of them actually, as their recent trailer shows.

Siliconera reports on some of the more major changes coming to the remakes. Camera angles have been reworked so that buildings and trees hang over the camera and create shadows. Other times it will zoom out like when you go up Mt. Chimney on the trolley, showing you the whole mountain. Colors have been reworked so that routes are more different from each other than the simple copy and paste of before. These are mostly small upgrades, but are worth noting as they spice up what could have been a port with nothing significantly different.

A major feature is the addition of hidden Pokemon in the various routes you will be traveling. There will still be random encounters that you always expect in Pokemon, or JRPGs in general, but now special hidden Pokemon hide in the grass. These encounters require you to sneak up on them in order to enter a battle and potentially catch them. To help you find these rare encounters there is the DexNav gadget, attached to your PokeNav. Using the DexNav you can see what Pokemon you’ve encountered or caught before, and will show spaces that clue you in on a rare encounter. Scanning Pokemon you’ve encountered in towns or in the wild increase their search level, allowing you access to more information about where to find it. It’s basically the key to a Pokemon wikipedia within Pokemon. However, the more information you gather, the more your search level goes up, and the more you are likely to run into Pokemon with rare and hidden moves generally taught via breeding.

Personally, the last Pokemon games I played were actually Ruby and Sapphire, but even then I don’t find anything here that motivates me to get into the series again. Pokemon Gold was the best Pokemon game to me and is all I really need, for now. However, I’m sure Omega Ruby Alpha Sapphire will sell millions of copies once it releases Friday, November 21 on Nintendo 3DS.