There's no doubt that Pokemon Emerald is a legendary game, a version that is considered the true version of the Gen-3 Hoenn games, and one people will remember more than the other two. Sleeker interface, Pokemon animations, trainers call you, pincer double battles, more trainers, combining two enemy teams and a cooler legendary storyline, it was something to behold. But it just had so many flaws at the same time.
Due to my age, I loved Emerald as a kid, but looking back at it, some of the stuff I mentioned above I don't really like anymore. For those pincer double battles, I like to talk to the trainers individually, which helps better if they have more than three Pokemon (they wouldn't be able to send out full teams otherwise). I actually turn battle animations off because while novel for its time, they kind of got in the way. More trainers means more lines in walkthrough writing. And honestly, I despise the Match Call feature so much now. It's an unnecessary interruption, and the worst part is you can never turn the damn thing off. And that's just scratching the surface, because even some of Emerald's BEST stuff could be better.
I remember watching SmithPlays Pokemon's Youtube channel, where he went over the flaws of the early games, and worked to try and make them better. We see games such as Crystal Legacy form from the ashes of the flawed Johto games, and it only makes sense that Gen-3, and Emerald in particular, came next. I even saw his full playtesting stream, and it shows a lot of what I really enjoyed, so naturally, this ROM hack ended up on my wishlist at some point. And it delivered once I played it.
Emerald Legacy doesn't increase the difficulty that much, in fact not bothering to do so until post-game stuff. It's not meant to showcase lots of could-have-beens, but there are some. Now you get more Pokemon options pre-national dex, like Ponyta and Sneasel. Underwhelming Pokemon like Masquerain were made a lot more viable this time. Underwhelming or inaccurate moves got buffs to make them very much usable. And Pokemon with movesets that definitely deserved improvement got them. Characters like Courtney came back, and Matt and Archie got more battles with the player. Gym leader teams were done in a way to make them much more in line with their type specialties, with nice twists like Magical Leaf-using Plusle on Wattson's team or Breloom already being on Brawly's team. But all this while preserving the good parts of Emerald, thankfully there's lots of them.
I managed a good run of this game in under 20 hours, with a team of Blaziken (starter), Crobat, Magneton, Claydol, Ludicolo, and Glalie (obtained in an early in-game trade!), with Skarmory as an additional Fly user, Ninjask as a Cut user, and of the main team, Ludicolo was able to swap between HMs (no need for a Move Deleter, you can delete HMs easily). I of course tried to do some post-game stuff, but didn't bother with everything, since I'm not too interested in contests or Battle Frontier stuff like I used to, the only real reward for those are the legendaries as usual. But another nice touch is once you get Jirachi (Birch immediately asks you about this after the main run is over), you can get non-Hoenn dex mons out in the wild locations, and they even tried to make some sense of it. Clefairy in Meteor Falls, Caterpie and Weedle in Petalburg Woods, incredibly rare Lapras on one of the current routes, and so on. I think that's more than enough, but of the REAL improvements this game brought, the biggest one is no more annoying Match Call feature. The second biggest thing? Holding B while surfing makes you go ultra fast. There's a lot more, such as easier fishing, better utilization of the user interface, a few cut trees being permanently gone, and the Acro Bike upgrade that can even let you switch between Mach and Acro and jump up actual ledges. The team deserves praise for going after even minor things that needed attention and ensuring that the experience of playing Emerald again was much better than before.
