March Mania Day 28: Nostalgia for Pokémon Sapphire

Yesterday I wrote about my nostalgia for Pokémon Gold. Today I write about a game that I associate with being a big kid rather than just a kid.

Pokémon Sapphire was one of the main series Pokémon games for the Game Boy Advance. Unlike Gold, the day/night cycle was reduced to a token in game clock set at the beginning of your adventure, there was over-world weather such as rain and sandstorms, and you had a choice of two different bicycles that each had their own features. The bikes were called the Acro Bike and the Mach Bike. The Acro Bike allowed you to do wheelies and hop on said wheelies and was important for some hard to reach areas that required jumps across gaps spanned by narrow white rails while the Mach Bike allowed the player to go lightning fast, up sandy inclines, and cross over cracked floors at the expense of turning ability. The plot of Sapphire is similar to the first two games but there have been a few features and challenges added. There are Pokémon contests where the right kinds of moves and attributes (such as beauty or coolness) of your partner can win you some neat ribbons. In the contest halls there are square machines that you can use with other people or non-playable characters to turn berries into blocks that can be used to increase attributes of a Pokémon.

It was decisive in the Pokémon community back in 2003 for the lack of backward capability of the first two generations of games. 16 years later and we now can transfer a Pokémon from Sapphire caught in 2003 all the way to the newest Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon games (though transfers between generations are one way and non-reversible). Also only some of the old favorites such as Pikachu returned. I can say I enjoyed the game in spite of the at the time drastic changes. One of my favorite parts of the game was collecting decorations and finding a place to make a secret base and have a personal space within the game.

Since I was a big kid when I started playing this game, I did not have the same struggles I did playing Pokémon Gold, though the evil team's hideout was a challenging maze and the seventh gym leader was actually a pair of twins with Psychic type Pokémon.

I'm sorry for the shorter post than yesterday, but I don't have as much nostalgia for this game as I got it later in childhood, but I do still have some nostalgia for it. Thank you for reading and we're almost to the end of March Mania!