4/5 ★ – MichiganJFrog17's review of Pokémon Sapphire.

Completely overshadowed by Emerald but still a great game. It's amazing how many mechanics, features, and secrets they built into this game, most of which I completely missed as a kid. The postgame is the biggest negative difference. Emerald has a ton of options, but Sapphire only has the battle tower, in which you can only fight lvl 50 (and under) or lvl 100 pokemon. Given that to beat the elite 4, your pokemon will all probably be somewhere in the 50s, that means you can't play the lvl 50 and can only play the lvl 100 mode. So basically, the battle tower is useless. Played a modified ROM with two small changes: trade evolutions are gone (replaced by level up/elemental stone) and the starters were randomized. My choices were Seedot, Nidoran (F), and Bagon. Went with Bagon. Turned out to be quite a grind, given the slow experience gain and late level-ups (30 and 50). As a result, relied a lot on my other pokemon that I caught. Elite 4 team (after beating them twice): Chrono, lvl 53 Salamence Fly / Flamethrower / Dragonbreath / Earthquake Fraz, lvl 55 Machamp Strength / Brick Break / Fire Blast / Cross Chop Django, lvl 53 Magneton Tri Attack / Spark / Thunder Wave / Thunder Bolt Eurydice, lvl 54 Milotic (shiny) Surf / Recover / Ice Beam / Toxic Vileplume, lvl 50 Vileplume Giga Drain / Sunny Day / Solarbeam / Sludge Bomb Snatcher, lvl 56 Linoone Slash / Belly Drum / Shadow Ball / Rest MVPs of the elite 4 were Machamp (solo'd the first battle against dark types) and Milotic (almost all of Drake's dragons are double weak to ice beam). Linoone with Belly Drum is actually amazing too - was able to take out the second battle with boosted Shadow Ball. Magneton handled the Ice/water trainer pretty well. Fraz was definitely the MVP of the early game, as Bagon/Shelgon took forever to level up and didn't have great moves. For a while, I had a Lotad/Lombre named Waals, who I stopped using around level 27 because the move pool was just awful. I also used a Sandslash named Ares for a bit, but didn't love the movepool either. A large part of the game for me was the quest for Milotic. Feebas hunting itself took several hours, and about a week of real-life time (on and off). I looked up a few methods online for locating the Feebas tiles, but none of them seemed to work. Ultimately, the best method is: use the old rod (only have to play the fishing mini game once), start on the top of the river, and fish on every tile once. This was counter intuitive to me, because the Feebas encounter rate on its tile is 50%, so there's a chance you'd totally miss one. But someone on reddit did the math and given that ~99% of tiles don't have Feebas, and since on those 99% of tiles fishing twice is guaranteed to waste your time, it's actually faster just to fish once on each tile and keep going until you find Feebas. You might miss one or two tiles, but eventually you'll find one. Once you find the tile, it's pretty easy to catch Feebas, because they appear 50% of the time and have a high catch rate. I planned to catch a bunch (maybe 30 or 40, about a full box full) in order to find the ideal nature (to help with the pokeblock stage next). To my surprise, on about my 40th encounter, I found a shiny Feebas. I could hardly believe it. Nature be damned, this was the one I would evolve. The next step was to figure out how to evolve it, and that involved feeding it Pokeblocks to raise it's beauty stat. The pokeblocks needed to be made with a certain kind of berry. I used the Kelpsy berries on route 115. You can find 6, and then I replanted them all a few times to grow more. They take 12 real life hours to grow (I guess the in-game clock works with the emulator) and I think I used 9 berries total. As it turns out, the Feebas I got had the worst possible nature for evolving, because it "disliked" the type of berry (dry) that increases beauty. From what I can tell, that just means there's a 10% penalty in the gained stat each time a berry is consumed. Making a pokeblock at the station with 3 other NPCs results in a pokeblock with a "dryness" of 23. With that penalty, each block fed to Feebas raises beauty by around 20. Apparently beauty maxes at 170, meaning I needed 9 Kelpsy berries and then 9 pokeblocks. And what do you know, it worked! 9 blocks and one rare candy later, I had my shiny Milotic. And then I said to myself, "Now I can finally play the game."