30-day VGC: A game sequel that disappointed me
Honestly I’ve had a pretty good time with most sequels that I’ve played, so this was a tough one for me. While not truly a sequel, I’m going to choose Pokémon Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire as a follow-up game that disappointed me. I’m a big fan of the entire series of Pokémon games, and the 6th generation Pokémon X & Y was definitely my favorite before the latest installment, Sun & Moon. It was the first game that featured fully 3D environments and Pokémon, and they made a lot of quality of life improvements that made the game a lot more accessible and a lot less grindy than previous entries in the franchise.
Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire, on the other hand, feels a bit regressive. There are some really cool additions like the DexNav, but overall the design lacks the cohesion that was present in X & Y. It’s easy to get lost when you’re trying to remember where to go for the next plot point, and you end up seeing a lot of the same pokémon repeated over and over. I think in some cases they just tried too hard to stay true to the original Ruby & Sapphire, and that meant throwing out some of the evolution of the series in the intervening decade.
Whereas I have almost a thousand hours on my X & Y game and over a hundred on my new Sun & Moon cartridge, I barely managed to force myself to get through a single playthrough of Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire, so I think that definitely qualifies as a relative disappointment.