The problem with Hoenn was never the water routes; by themselves they were fine, in fact as a whole they are remarkably fleshed out and at worst they have small sections where they fall to the same level as other games' water routes. The game gives you an extensive number of diving spots to find new pokemon, items, and areas, gives you three unique dungeons as rewards for exploration (not counting the aqua base), and gives you a big unique puzzle area west of Pacifidlog town. Most of the complaints against the water are solved by just using repels, and complaints against the pokemon distribution are also only looking (quite literally) at the surface level. Yes, the pokemon variety is nonexistent when you're just surfing out in the open, but that is NOT all the water offers. If you look for pokemon by fishing and going underwater, you can get Wailord, huntail/gorebys, Lanturn, Starmie, Corsola, and Luvdisc. The last two are shitmon but some pokemon exist to collect rather than to battle. If you add Walrein, Glailie, Horsea, and Wigglytuff you get four more lines, and I'm not counting evolved forms of pokemon you've seen before at Sky Pillar. They could have added more mons you get by normal surfing, but that's honestly the least interesting way you can catch pokemon, compared to surf and water being a conduit for other methods that aren't on the open water. It's not super amazing and they are mostly water types but the whole "dude there are only three pokemon" complaint is a complete and utter meme. Also, like 95% of the trainers can be skipped if you don't want to do them, which is nice.(cont.)
The real problem here are not the water routes routes inherently, but the game's pacing that leads the player to overlook much of what's interesting about them. Once you move out from Lilycove city the game doesn't encourage you to take your time, because the story pushes you to hurry up and do the evil team plot, so you go to Mossdeep pretty quickly to beat the 7th gym and get dive, so then you can get to sootopolis and the underwater aqua hideout. In theory the player might explore while they're doing this, but in practice they're more likely to ignore all the "extraneous" stuff and try to beeline to the evil team locations up until Rayquaza resolves things. Then immediately after the Rayquaza cutscene, Juan tells you right next to his gym that he's waiting for you, so most players go straight to the eighth gym, and then naturally on to the elite four since that's what the entire game's been leading up to. Do you see the issue here? The biggest events of the game's plot happen after gym 6 which leads the player to want to pick up speed to go to necessary locations, and the structure of the game here encourages you to do gyms right as you can access them, but this doesn't mesh very well with all the dive spots and optional areas that require slowing down to explore.
(cont.)I believe this is the main reason why people complain about the water routes. If you're only going from point A to point B as needed while ignoring what's around you, you're mostly getting the plain open sea, and seeing the same few pokemon (or just using repels). If you're interacting with the more interesting parts of the map that make the water routes much more full, and puts them up to par with (at times better than) the land routes, you will probably have a considerably higher opinion of the water. You can also go back to explore everything you missed in the water routes in the post game, which actually makes for some good post-game content (RSE in general give you a lot of freedom about whether you want to do content during the main story or leave it for post-game, making the actual post game content for a player potentially highly variable), but I don't think that many people do this outside of what's west of Pacifidlog and in the Southwest, and if you didn't like the water routes in the first place you may not be inclined to go back. TL;DR: You're reading the whole thing or your mother will die in her sleep tonight.
i think the problem with the water is that its at the ass end of the game more than anything. right after gym 2 you learn about how vast the ocean in the game is then you get stuck behind bullshit blocking you from exploring it nonstop (that 50 square pixel chunk of water right after petalburg was insult to injury). by the time they gave me the ocean it was a nuisance more than a reward.
oh it seems we mostly agree
somewhat true but I think you're downplaying how bad the Pokemon encounters are. that's the major flaw imo. yes you can just use repel, but constantly going into your bag to apply repels just feels like shit. there's a reason that land routes aren't just blanketed entirely in grass. you need to give the player some respite. water being all encounter tiles was okay in earlier gens when water routes were limited, but when making water much more important in gen 3, they should have introduced a way to denote specific encounter tiles on water the way that grass does on land. I think that would have gone a long way to making those routes feel better to explore. I actually don't really mind that they're all concentrated towards the end, even if you do bumrush the Elite Four, it was likely that you'd keep playing the game for awhile (at least as a kid you did) and having some stuff to explore was cool.
The upside of the repels, at least, is that it makes you spend a bunch of money, which cuts down a little on the typical late game money excess where you can buy all you need without thinking.
>>59675895There's no problem with Emerald and I don't know why you guys are so fixated into thinking that every game is irremediable dogshit, bro just go play another game if you dislike pokemon so much
