This game deserves straight tens, why? Well let's not give away any spoilers but it was an extremely brilliant story line just like any other Pokémon game. It will offer hours, heck even days of fun, and just like any other Pokémon game your journey consists of trying to earn all Pokémon Gym badges and then head of to the biggest stage of them all. The game offers many fun mini-games to participate in as well when you proceed through the game, but again I'm not going to give anything away.
A role playing game similar to all the other main Pokémon titles, the story for Pokémon: Emerald takes place over land and sea and pits you against the Team Aqua and Team Magma from Sapphire and Ruby. This time around, Pokémon will show off their moves prior to battle, perhaps as a sort of taunt.
Nintendo also added some new options to the game. A new Battle Frontier area has you play through seven big battles. The Battle Dome places you in a tournament in which only three Pokémon can participate. The Battle Tube has you select from three entrances and attempt to make your way to a goal. A good if predictable Pogo
There's no denying the success of Pokémon is based on a very worthy formula, and much to a degree deserves its long running triumph. Nintendo has crafted a game that takes the more accessible elements of children's story narrative (re lat able brave child entering a vast and unknown world of discovery), toy/card collecting (you find your Pokémon of varying abilities, train them into a fighting force for combat and trading), and RPGs (slow turn-based battles, and friendly townsfolk who don’t mind you rifling through their houses and taking their items). From these ingredients, Pokémon is cooked into something worth far more than the sum of its parts, if a little cookie cutter several years on from the original.
Emerald has the same level of insanely addictive collecting and battling where you catch the creatures and have them fight against other Pokémon in a selection of moves with a top trumps/rock-paper-scissors style stratagem. Poor choices, like selecting a fire elemental Pokémon against a water one, can quickly lose you fights. This is the backbone of the game play and it still works wonderfully, as does the ultimate choice of whether to capture or finish off a wild Pokémon when they reach their final vestiges of health; risking a missed imprisonment and prolonged brawl should you fail to get your target. The rarer the baste, the harder and riskier it is. Obvious, yet well balanced.
Layered on top of that is the upgrade system and expansion of your little pets, which sees them grow, adapt and evolve under your tutelage. Some Pokémon can be given special abilities by items, others gain them from experience won in fracas. They become unique to you and thus the true genius of Pokémon pops out and traps you with its compulsion. Within an hour of the game, you're hunting down rare beasts, affectionately giving them silly names, and crushing all-comers, whether those are CPU trainers from the story or link-up/wireless human players. It's fun and addictive. It's also inevitably samey and flawed... The stagnant character of the franchise shouldn't’t shock anyone. That's the nature of the market, and cleverly that's the ethos Nintendo has inspired not only as a game play ethic but as a commercial one too. Gouda catch Um all. So it's likely Pokémon addicts will buy this regardless, making the review redundant. At the same time, Emerald cannibalises enough of its brethren to make it one of the better, more rounded examples of its type which alternatively makes it easy to recommend as great entry for those new to Pokémon.
This leaves a distinct quandary on our hands regarding the score. Pokémon Emerald is a very enjoyable game. Yet Pokémon Emerald is a very cynical game. It's disarming in its unpretentious charm, yet aimed at an audience that will feel the need to buy it. This despite it being essentially a Potch if it were released on the PC, for the price of a new product in its respective market. All this is taken in account for the final score, because, let's face it, if you want to collect all the Pokémon games; it does’t really matter anyway. And if you didn't care for Pokémon before, this is not going to convince you to change your religion either. But if you're one of the slightly unsure fans looking for another hit of the series -recycled parts be damned-, or just trying for your first time, add a good two marks to that little number at the bottom of the page. There. Simple.
We can almost hear the rusty pitchforks being sharpened now. But wait. Hold on. Allow an explanation. Pokémon itself, as a conceptual game, is executed excellently. It looks lovely, with colourful, well defined sprites that leap out with crispness, especially on the DS' screen. There are some great incidental effects too, like your character leaving footprints in the sand and reflections in pools or water. Likewise, the audio does a good job of conveying a cheery Saturday morning TV atmosphere, as does the story; which isn't anything too far beyond a fun rites of passage romp complete with run-ins against Pokémon gym trainers and feisty teams Aqua and Magma.
There's plenty within Emerald to even keep you busy beyond the basics of the game. Sub-quests and challenges are abundant, you can import your creatures into Pokémon Dash (and Pokémon Coliseum with a GameCube link cable too) and the fun multilayer battles reach up to four players.
As we said, it's a package that hangs together extremely well for the 30 plus hours it takes to explore most of its delights.ince the early days of the franchise Nintendo has fanned the fires of random with hundreds of pieces of Po kémerchandise but only a few core games. By the time Pokémon Emerald came out on the Game Boy Advance the world had been saturated with pocket monsters for nearly ten years. To those who grew up on Red and Blue the series seemed tired, making up for a lack of innovation in core design by adding in more and more collectible creatures. Unfortunately Emerald was not the game to turn it all around; instead as an amalgamated companion to Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire it was more of a stopgap between two generations of RPG’s. It trod much of the same ground as its GBA brethren, squished the two stories together and re jigged some of the structuring, but was essentially the same.
Your enjoyment of Pokémon Emerald will depend entirely upon your relationship with the series as a whole. Absolute Po kémaniacs will love hunting down all the new critters in the time-honoured tradition albeit with slightly improved graphics, but for first-time trainers Emerald makes for the perfect introduction to the ins and outs of the franchise. To those gamers who fall somewhere between the two, especially those who’eve dabbled in Pokémon before, Emerald makes for a less exciting prospect, because at times the game can just feel too familiar. Everything is instantly recognisable: the art style, the four direction movement, the music; they all evoke fond memories of the series’ older entries in an updated form. Some elements aren't updated, such as the 8-bit-quality battle cries of the first generation Pokémon that could have been lifted straight out of Red and Blue. And yes, they still sound like a computer drowning. The problem is that Emerald vehemently sticks to the Pokémon formula even when it was fast becoming outdated.
hat’s not to say that the formula sin’t a good one, it’s just in need of sprucing up. For those of you that have been living under a Geo dude since 1996 this is how a Pokémon game goes down: starting off in a small town your character is given a Pokémon and promptly sets out on an epic adventure to fight and capture monsters in Po kéballs, then train them and battle to the Pokémon league by defeating the region's 8 Gym Leaders. The player is also tasked with cataloguing the critters they meet in the Pokédex: a handheld encyclopaedist of sorts. Extra geek points go to players who manage to ‘Catch ‘Am All’, although with nearly 400 of the little buggers to get it’s not as easy as it used to be. So Pokémon was in ’96, so it is in Emerald and so it has gone on to be in later games. This makes Emerald instantly accessible to anyone who has ever played a Pokémon game before, but it also means it is in danger of ret reading much of the same ground, and this is only exacerbated through sharing the Hon region and much of its story with Ruby and Sapphire.
It’s the story and its similarities to those of the past that most gamers will take issue with. How many times can a young boy or girl leave home to wander around filling a Pokédex, becoming a master trainer just because a local Professor asked them to, and their parents are absolutely fine with that? Indeed the story in Emerald has about as much driving force behind it as a bike without pedals – you literally go because you are asked to. Along the way you get caught up in the dirty doings of the Eco-conscious yet slightly sinister Teams Aqua and Magma who are trying to awaken warring legendary Pokémon Gordon and Kyogre for their own mischievous ends. The misguided Team Magma hope to expand the land to build more homes for people to live in and the Aqua's want to expand the sea… because they want everyone to live in boats? On the whole the plot’s a bit ropey and just serves as an excuse to throw you into ever-increasing volumes of battles.
Random battles are still the order of the day and although they're not to every one's taste, this slightly archaic J-RPG mechanic always seemed to fit Pokémon quite well. The feeling of discovery when searching out creatures to catch always made the staple screen flash and music sting that signals a random encounter an exciting prospect – but by the time you’eve slogged your way through Victory Road and its two-step random battles you’ill start to think that maybe the mechanic has had its day. Surely if 99% of the fights are against Zubats then surely that removes some of the ‘randomness’ from the random battle, so why not just go the whole hog and remove them altogether?
Players who gripe at the archaic battling probably won’t enjoy the return of H's. The ‘Hidden Machines’ that have been a standard part of the series since Red and Blue have become somewhat of an annoyance in recent years. Most of these supposedly ‘useful’ moves are used in one specific area and then are never used again; this is annoying when you consider that each Pokémon only has four available move slots, meaning that you’ill either have a valuable team member learn a relatively useless move sacrificing a space for better moves or take up a valuable slot on your squad with a low-level HM-laden Pokémon.
viewing a game like Pokémon Emerald retrospectively opens up a whole can of Wurmples. Time has a tendency to show things in a different light and unlike time, the Pokémon franchise has almost been standing still, trapped somewhere in 1996 constantly reliving its glory days. This is both good and bad news, as the games are always well made, solid good fun and ever so slightly addictive, but it also means that the mechanics haven’t moved with the times and feel archaic by modern standards. Emerald bears the brunt of this backlash, being just too similar to Ruby and Sapphire to feel like a must-have entry in the series. Although it may not be the jewel in the franchise's crown, Emerald still has some sparkle, while the series as a whole could do with a thorough polish to make it gleam again.

Local Mods : this review seems to have some plagiarized stuff from this link: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/r_pokemonemerald_gba

Please don't do this again since its illegal.

Really man?

tgags123 : I admit I copy and pasted it but I only placed it on one game, I don't know why it's showing on other games