A look back at: Pokemon Ephemerald

Walkthrough

My final team: Glalie (Fire/Water), Raichu (Fire/Ground), Golduck (Bug/Dragon), Pidgeot (Grass/Electric), Kingdra (Psychic), Blastoise (Ice/Poison).

It's Emerald, but different, since every single Pokemon out of the 386 has had changes to design, typing, and moveset. And yes, there's grass just about everywhere, even on some water routes and in the towns. And while the storyline isn't all that different, who really cares right? There's new regional forms and such and yes you can complete the whole Pokedex in one sitting! So for this hack, I did a ton, and I mean a ton, of research before even starting the whole thing, crafting my own spreadsheet in order to analyze the best possible Pokemon to use before I even played. I paid special attention to typings, abilities, and movesets in particular, and that culminated in what I had as my team above, plus a few other ones like Houndoom which were also useful.

It was also very nice to know how every trainer had differing teams (well, almost, the S.S. Tidal trainers were not changed), and the difficulty curve was honestly perfect, nothing too much in overleveling aside from Magikarps that some trainers have. Heck, on that topic, Magikarp is actually more annoying due to being a Poison Point Pokemon. There's a few other ones where the ability can totally mess you up. Mankey and Primeape are Ice type, yet they have Flash Fire. Tentacruel's typing should make it weak to Water but it has Water Absorb. Quite a few Pokemon have Fire or Ice weaknesses in typing, but also Thick Fat. Then there were Pokemon I just thought weren't all that great in the long run. The Hoenn starters were all mono-typed, and most Fighting types weren't as good as I expected. Some move changes at least made some moves more interesting, like Water Pulse being 90 base power and Rock Smash being 50 base power. There's a lot to take in and I looked back at my own spreadsheet constantly as I went along.

Furthermore, even though there's no Fairy type, I do like the workaround of making Poison strong against Dragon. It gives the normally not-so-good typing a better crutch with an extra type it's good against aside from Grass. Ice also got crutches with being resistant to Ground and Water, while Steel isn't resistant to Ghost and Dark (as it should be) and also Psychic as well. Anyways, the game sort of has some linearity to it, due to ledges being in place in certain areas preventing backtracking at times, but it's not so bad. Victory Road was a surprise with every gym leader and frontier brain battling you again. Emerald but with a twist. I dig it, especially since I haven't played a Hoenn-native game in a while.

A look back at: Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven

It's going to be a Might and Magic marathon for me when it comes to some RPG reviews for a while, since I'll be exploring the remainder of the mainline games and the Heroes of Might and Magic semi-spinoff series. I say semi because this game sort of intertwines in the timeline of that series for some reason. Yeah, I'm probably going to miss some plot parts as I work my way through this.

With regards to the sixth game, I do miss the grid-based movement and the party size of six. That's quite the negatives there. But the positives are a bit better here. The sixth Might and Magic has already got full 360 degree movement going for it and even has not only real-time combat, but the option to turn it on or off. Wizardry 8 had at least one of these things, but the fact that this game came out before that already proves this series is already on a roll before that one. Real-time combat is a lot more engaging overall, as you're limited heavily in the traditional turn-based combat and many players of old probably got tired of that style, so having this come out at the turn of the century of RPG combat was nice. I enjoyed what I did overall using the real-time combat; combining this with the full movement range was icing on the cake.

And I do enjoy the immersiveness of the game overall. Seeing NPCs walking around casually makes the series seem like it's going to be more lively in the future, and that's even seeing them walk around while I battled enemies. The sidequests are nice too, most are for further promoting your characters up in their classes. As I got more used to the combat, I will say that it's not as hard as it seems, but it still can be nasty. I mean, it's Might and Magic, it's going to be nasty. With real-time combat, there's a very good chance that swarms of enemies can easily overwhelm parties while you're trying desperately to input all sorts of commands. And I'll see more of this in the immediate next installment soon enough!