Mudkip Wins Easy Battles – Pokémon Ruby

**Pokémon Ruby** (Game Freak/Nintendo, Game Boy Advance, 2002/2003)

In 2003, most of the most successful retail games in the UK were played on Japanese consoles, and a good proportion of those games were Japanese too. Our games culture has never worked in exactly the same way as Japan’s, though. One noticeable thing looking at the respective lists of #1s is that in Japan eight games on Game Boy Advance reached #1 in 2003, while in the UK there was just the one. It’s not that portable consoles haven’t succeeded in the UK, with Nintendo’s all doing very well. It’s just that they haven’t had the kind of games and audience to succeed in chart terms against the home consoles.

We’ve never really developed our own hit portable series, and successful portables here have tended a little more towards players (younger, older, more casual) less inclined to go out and buy the latest big thing on day one. Their games’ slow and steady sales are fine business-wise, but less so for beating the charts. Only one series has been an exception to this, and stands out even more for it. In the entire list of UK #1s, only eleven portable-exclusive games have ever reached the top of the combined formats chart. Seven of them have been Pokémon games.

That is a remarkable record of popularity, even more so when you consider that the UK’s chart compilers have counted Pokémon’s dual releases as two different games each time, making the release strategy more of a hindrance than a help in reaching #1. The initial wave of Pokémon Red and Blue, the trading cards and the anime, was a phenomenon, and it turned out to be one with staying power. The games being the centrepiece of everything helped. So did the strategy of staying true to those portable consoles, with only spin-offs on Nintendo’s home consoles. Combined with the Game Boy being a decade old by the time the first games hit big here, it meant that rapid technological advances of new platforms presented obvious selling points for each new game (or pair of games).

Pokémon Yellow got the first bits of colour after the monochrome originals, Gold/Silver got proper full colour, and Ruby/Sapphire got a big graphical upgrade courtesy of the Game Boy Advance. That process added freshness even in the compressed release timetable they got in the UK, giving each release a clear new identity regardless of how much they did or didn’t change the gameplay. Pokémon Ruby draws great attention to its falling volcanic ash and wobbling reflections in water, flashy details which wouldn’t have been possible in predecessors and allow it to add a different atmosphere to its world.

Outside of graphical details, as the third full iteration of the series, Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire confirmed its direction with a new permanence. Each game would continue to start with a new setting, story and a choice of new pokémon. The Kanto region setting for Pokémon Red and Blue that reappeared as a late bonus in Gold/Silver was no longer to be a fixture of all Pokémon games, and neither were all 151 of its pokémon. On the other hand, much of the gameplay and story structure was even further entrenched.

Pokémon Ruby skims lightly over the process of choosing a starter pokémon, underplaying its significance in a seeming assumption that players will already know the drill. It sets you on a routine of catching pokémon in random battles, compulsory fighting of trainers along your path, and contests with gym leaders to win new badges and gain the abilities to open up new routes to physical progress in its world. The battles are turn-based and each pokémon can only know up to four moves. The familiar routine is part of the appeal, with each new game offering small refinements and twists rather than an overhaul.

You start off as a child who has just moved into the area, with the new choice whether to be a boy or a girl. If the latter, your neighbour says that as they heard their new neighbour was a gym leader’s kid they assumed you’d be a guy, which is… a wild bit of illogical sexism to throw in. Looking at a TV and getting a message that dad might like this programme complete with an ominous sixteen ellipses made me wonder if the game was going to darker places than previously, but no, that’s just how it does things, like the almost heart-looking symbols at the end of lines of uncompleted dialogue. Dad is around and eventually you even get to complete a loop of half the map and come back to fight him, which is a nice way of personalising the badge sequence. The eventual storyline of Pokémon Ruby pits you against Team Magma, intent on expanding the land, with Pokémon Sapphire villains Team Aqua also against them. It’s diverting enough without losing the thread that exploration and discovery is the real driver.

There are new pokémon contests, new berries to plant, new connection options, new double battles where you fight against two trainers at once using two pokémon at once. And apart from the last one, which is quite a rarity, it’s very possible to ignore all of them. There aren’t any new pokémon types, just some new combinations of them, which means that battle strategy isn’t much different either (a good thing to me, who still couldn’t remember how all of the types matched up).

The biggest attraction is in new moves and new pokémon, of which my favourite was Mawile, a fairy with a great crocodile mouth on the back of its head whose moves include intimidate, astonish and fake tears. And the characters along the way include plenty of charming new inventions too: the family battling you in sequence; the TV crew filming their defeat at your hands and then screening your collaged together interview sentence. All of the constancy leaves space to have fun with out-there possibilities, if not a lot of space. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a dangerous concept for games to get carried away with, but Pokémon Ruby’s success, and that of the series beyond, is the product of a sure touch for working out the minimum required change and doing it well.