What Pokemon fans have been asking for these past few years has finally come to fruition - remakes of Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire, titled Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire respectively, will be launching worldwide this November. I'll be honest, I'm a bit surprised Nintendo and Game Freak went ahead and actually remade these titles. Obviously a great number of people wanted this to happen, but the main reason the first two generations of Pokemon games received the remake treatment was because Pokemon from Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver, and Crystal could not be transferred over to the GBA titles, so the developers opted to simply remake these games in the forms of Leaf Green, Fire Red, Heart Gold, and Soul Silver to work around this hindrance.
Still, it is kind of cool that players who may have missed out on the generation III titles will finally get to experience them on the 3DS - to my understanding, Ruby and Sapphire were surprisingly among the weakest-selling Pokemon games, and are thus some of the hardest to come by today. Plenty of bootleg copies can be found online, but a legit copy of either game or the successor Emerald will run you more than a few bucks due to their semi-rare status. One of the biggest surprises with this announcement for me personally was the fact that these games will be releasing by the end of this year, a little more than twelve months after X and Y debuted on the 3DS. If both X and Y and these Hoenn remakes were being developed simultaneously, it might help explain why X and Y were so short and considerably easier to burn through than previous installments. As a result, I do expect Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire to be rather direct remakes of their GBA counterparts - obviously they will account for the now 700+ Pokemon available, but I don't expect a plethora of new areas or content outside of what already existed in the original versions.
That said, I do have a small wishlist of content that I would like to see worked into these remakes. First off, Heart Gold and Soul Silver introduced a handful of new areas not present in the original GBC versions, like the Pokeathalon and the Sinjoh Ruins. As Emerald is frequently considered to be the most 'full and complete' generation III experience, I'd like to see some of the extra areas/content from that added to the pre-existing Ruby and Sapphire content. I'd also like to see Nintendo add a few more Mega Evolutions, whether they are just for Hoenn-local Pokemon or for Pokemon from other regions. While X and Y introduced some interesting Mega Evolutions, they were very limited to a handful of Pokemon and their respective typings, and though I personally rarely use Mega Evolutions myself, I recognize that even fewer of these Mega Evolutions see frequent use. With Mega Blaziken being the only other starter Pokemon outside of the generation I trio to receive a Mega Evolution, I can't help but wonder what Nintendo and Game Freak would do with a Mega Swampert and Mega Sceptile.
Am I planning to purchase either of these titles? Honestly, I can't say for sure at the moment. All this trailer provided us with was a release date and tentative box art, and I'd like to see some actual gameplay before I make a call on that. Considering that I haven't been as blown away by my playthrough of Sapphire as I was with my playthroughs of Soul Silver or the generation V titles, it's most likely that I would purchase Omega Ruby, if I were to get one game or the other. Still, I do find it a bit odd that this reveal came prior to E3. Perhaps Nintendo has plenty of other big reveals in store for the big show. I mean, I know plenty of people (myself included) are still holding out on a Majora's Mask 3D confirmation.
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