The Thick of It reviews for Pokemon Ruby

The Thick of It

The brother equivalent to Pokémon Sapphire, Ruby does not expand on Red and Blue like Gold, Silver, and Crystal did, but it presents a new storyline that coheres with the basic idea of the game: Catch as many Pokémon as you possibly can and use them as your personal defense.

In Ruby and Sapphire the stakes are higher: There exist over one hundred newly discovered Pokémon native only to Hoenn, you can receive more money from winning the battle, and more than half of the storyboard follows the pursuit of Team Magma or Team Aqua in their respective dastardly terraforming proposals.

When the teams finally realize where they screwed up, it's an opportunity to capture a presumably powerful and potent Pokémon: Groudon in Ruby, who has been said to be responsible for shaping the continents and forming mountain ranges, and Kyogre in Sapphire, who is credited with controlling the seas.

The start of the game commences in a fashion similar to its predecessors, but the potencies of the Gyms are balanced and just right for your experience level at that point. Compare it to the Red, Blue, and Yellow versions, which left you little room to prepare, and Gold, Silver, and Crystal, in which you tackled a plethora of weak Gyms in Johto and remodels of the Kanto Gyms that confined their power to level 50 Pokémon—when the furthest that most players could get was level 40 with proper training—and then left for Silver Cave to be whacked in the face with Red's level 70-plus Pokémon. Ruby and Sapphire are similar to Red, Blue, and Yellow more than the others in that it follows the same pattern almost strictly: there are eight gyms, you had Regirock, Regice, and Registell, the equivalents of Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, and rounded off your game with the capture of Rayquaza as done with Mewtwo.

In some respects I feel that the Ruby version's assortment of Pokémon are more potent than those in Sapphire: Lunatone, Seviper, Sableye, Latias, Kyogre, and Lotad make their home in Sapphire and only Sableye and Seviper hold a candle to the collection in Ruby. What I can say for real is that Ruby wins out as the most balanced, but far from flexible. My final rating: 8 out of 10.

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