Pokemon Emerald starts with you being introduced back into the city of Hoenn. After a couple of quick conversations its off to the Professor's place to help him with a little chore. This is of course what decides your very first Pokemon and sets you off on your big adventure, and in the process the giant chore of catching every Pokemon and filling up your Pokedex - an encyclopedia for Pokemon for the first time players.

Within an hour of game time you will find yourself an expert with everything Pokemon. Collecting, levelling up, sorting your Pokemon order, planting berries, everything will seem like second nature, but it's time for some improvement. It's a chore to go into your inventory every time you want to use one of your items. Sure, you can map one item to the select button but that means you have to be quite selective about which one. What would be a nice improvement would be a Zelda-style mapping system. It's half way there, it just seems so obvious that mapping the bike to one button and another object - like the fishing rod - to another would cut down detractions from important gaming time - not by a lot, but it would definately bring down the frustration levels, as would shortcut keys for using the abilities the badges allow your Pokemon to pull off.

Holding the L button and tapping up on the d-pad would be a great way to break the rock infront of you, instead of going into the menu, checking out your Pokemon, selecting whichever has the ability and then selecting that ability. The standard way of dealing with objects is too dated.

With graphics and sound that match basically every other Pokemon game out there, Emerald only stands away from the crowd with the Pokemon specific animations, which, while being a pleasant addition, add nothing to the game. They look good but it's time to break away from the same old battle screen that we've had from Pokemon Blue/Red. And it's not just the battle scene that needs some kind of of refurbishment. It'd also be great to see some of the quasi 3D effects used in Minish Cap in the cave areas or in the buildings. We know the GBA has the ability to really shine when it comes to graphical ability, so why aren't Game Freaks making the most of it?

So what is new? Battle animations, wireless adaptor support (while not actually being packaged with a pair like the previous two titles) and Battle Frontier. While adding a new way to battle unlimited battles, it feels like this was added just to make people play the game longer without adding anything to the experience. The fact that you can pick up random battles just by wandering around the Hoenn region might make this feature a little redundant. It is good, however, to see new things being thought of and added. While this may sound a tad bitter the truth is that no matter how similar this title is to previous ones, the Pokemon franchise has stayed the way it has simply because it's not the graphics or sound that make the game. Under it all, Pokemon is one of the best RPG titles to ever hit gamers' hands.

Forget the all too intense cute characters and the fact that you can't mention the word Pokemon without getting glares of hatred from pseudo hardcore gamers, and you have an RPG that delivers strategy and replayability you just won't find elsewhere. Combine the fact that whatever you do in Pokemon Emerald with the ability to transfer information with Pokemon Colosseum on the GameCube and Pokemon Dash on the DS through the wireless adaptor and it suddenly becomes clear why Pokemon keeps selling the way it does.