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Pokémon Ruby And Sapphire Defined Pokémon As We Know It Today
It's Warp Week 2002, bay-bee. As soon as Ken Shepard and I knew we would be warping back to 2002 for a week of 2002-themed stories, we both immediately honed in on the Pokémon titles of that year: Ruby and Sapphire . We obviously had to talk about them. Both of us are massive Pokémon fans who don't make any secret of our love for the games, and we were both Pokénerds all the way back in the third generation of games that launched in '02, even though we were both pretty young at the time.
So here's our little chat about our memories, impressions, and experiences of Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire , originating in 2002 and continuing all the way up until today. If only young Ken and Reb could have seen us now.
Kenneth Shepard : we are now entering the pokémon zone.
Rebekah Valentine : i'm ready to catch some of em. probably not all. they're not all in ruby and sapphire .
KS : only as many as they'll allow, while not letting us trade our old ones for the first time.
RV : Gen 3 really felt like a breaking point of sorts, huh, between that initial sketchy feel of what Pokémon was and this sort of newer, polished, "oh no we need to get it together because this has become way more popular than we realized" thing.
KS: It is kinda fascinating to look back on it in that way, because I think even as a kid I didn't quite realize what a significant moment it was. Yeah, it was on a wider screen on this new Game Boy that I had only gotten a few months prior for Christmas, but I was nine, I had no real concept of a video game franchise's legacy or what this would mean in the future.
RV : I was a little older than you, 12 when it hit the states, and I had become a Pokémon fan just two years before. I actually have a weirdly vivid memory of hating these games initially. Like, I hated the new look of them, I hated that you couldn't transfer Pokémon or catch all the old ones (can't believe I was a proto-National Dexer), I thought the protagonists were lame, and I hated the trumpets. To me, two years of Pokémon was a huge chunk of my life, so this felt like such a major change. This wasn't my Pokémon .
But then, like, I think I must have put hundreds and hundreds of hours into Sapphire . I had to go to an after-school program every day until my parents could pick me up, and the other kids and I devoured these games. We had so much fun making secret bases, trading (fake) playground secrets about how you could get rare Pokémon, it was grand. And now I look back on that time very, very fondly (and love the trumpets).
What was your history with Pokémon before this?
KS : My twin brother and I had gotten into the series in first grade, initially through the anime because we were in the boonies and TV and VHS were much more accessible than video games. I remember kind of feeling like a trendsetter at the age of seven because once the two of us got into it, our childhood best friends got into it (our favorites were the four Kanto starters and that "brand" followed us throughout grade school), and then within weeks it felt like all the other kids had gotten into it. Sure, you had your contrarian detractors, but by and large that elementary school was in full-blown Pokémania. To the point where the school tried to ban everything. Games, cards, toys. If it was a Pokémon, it was supposed to be confiscated. Then eventually that became unenforceable.
The weird thing was, and I think this is something a lot of Pokémon fans can relate to, after a year or so of Gen I hyperfixation, there was a severe backlash to the series just in general. Kids who didn't want to appear childish by still playing the games or even just liking the little guys. Which I remember as being one of the first times I really felt alienated by my peers because Pikachu was my guy and I wasn't about to pretend I never liked him to try to look cool or whatever.
And surprisingly, Ruby and Sapphire got a lot of people back into the series. We were all kids, so I don't think there was any grand reason for it beyond kids just coming back to something after pretending to be too cool for it. But my elementary school library, despite trying to ban Pokémon prior, was giving out free bookmarks for the games even before they were out I think, and that surprisingly nudged us all back to it.
RV : Oh man, I also had that backlash, I think at the same time. The kids I was playing with in that after-school program were younger than me. Some only by a few years, but at one point I was a middle-schooler playing Pokémon with first- and second-graders. My only friend my age who played it too was my best friend, so we ended up keeping it a secret as much as possible. Maybe that's why I felt so irritated with Ruby and Sapphire ? Because I wanted to fit in? I genuinely don't know.
I will say, while I've come around on basically every aspect of Ruby and Sapphire in the years since, one thing I still don't care much for are the third-generation Pokémon designs. There are some I like all right, but I'd be hard-pressed to name a Pokémon from that generation that I genuinely love. I'm scrolling through a list right now trying to figure out what I don't care for here, and I think it's that a lot of them seem…rougher? Angrier? More abstract? I'm not sure.
KS : It definitely feels like Ruby and Sapphire were a point at which the series kind of changed visual styles, with more elaborate designs and a language that feels more akin to what we have now. Since then, there have been other generations in which it felt like another big step happened, like the much more alien looks of things in Sun and Moon . But Ruby and Sapphire feels like the game in which a lot of the modern Pokémon look was established. Which is probably why Ken Sugimori's art from Gen III is still standardized and used in so many official works.
Two of my favorite Pokémon ever are from Ruby and Sapphire (Latias and Beautifly), and I think I tend to look at most generations as a sort of "I have a few favorite...
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