It’s Warp Week 2002, bay-bee. As soon as Ken Shepard and I knew we would be warping back to 2002 for a week of 2002-themed stories, we both immediately honed in on the Pokémon titles of that year: Ruby and Sapphire. We obviously had to talk about them. Both of us are massive Pokémon fans who don’t make any secret of our love for the games, and we were both Pokénerds all the way back in the third generation of games that launched in ’02, even though we were both pretty young at the time.

So here’s our little chat about our memories, impressions, and experiences of Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, originating in 2002 and continuing all the way up until today. If only young Ken and Reb could have seen us now.

Kenneth Shepard: we are now entering the pokémon zone.

Rebekah Valentine: i’m ready to catch some of em. probably not all. they’re not all in ruby and sapphire.

KS: only as many as they’ll allow, while not letting us trade our old ones for the first time.

RV: Gen 3 really felt like a breaking point of sorts, huh, between that initial sketchy feel of what Pokémon was and this sort of newer, polished, “oh no we need to get it together because this has become way more popular than we realized” thing.

KS: It is kinda fascinating to look back on it in that way, because I think even as a kid I didn’t quite realize what a significant moment it was. Yeah, it was on a wider screen on this new Game Boy that I had only gotten a few months prior for Christmas, but I was nine, I had no real concept of a video game franchise’s legacy or what this would mean in the future.

RV: I was a little older than you, 12 when it hit the states, and I had become a Pokémon fan just two years before. I actually have a weirdly vivid memory of hating these games initially. Like, I hated the new look of them, I hated that you couldn’t transfer Pokémon or catch all the old ones (can’t believe I was a proto-National Dexer), I thought the protagonists were lame, and I hated the trumpets. To me, two years of Pokémon was a huge chunk of my life, so this felt like such a major change. This wasn’t my Pokémon.

But then, like, I think I must have put hundreds and hundreds of hours into Sapphire. I had to go to an after-school program every day until my parents could pick me up, and the other kids and I devoured these games. We had so much fun making secret bases, trading (fake) playground secrets about how you could get rare Pokémon, it was grand. And now I look back on that time very, very fondly (and love the trumpets).

What was your history with Pokémon before this?

KS: My twin brother and I had gotten into the series in first grade, initially through the anime because we were in the boonies and TV and VHS were much more accessible than video games. I remember kind of feeling like a trendsetter at the age of seven because once the two of us got into it, our childhood best friends got into it (our favorites were the four Kanto starters and that “brand” followed us throughout grade school), and then within weeks it felt like all the other kids had gotten into it. Sure, you had your contrarian detractors, but by and large that elementary school was in full-blown Pokémania. To the point where the school tried to ban everything. Games, cards, toys. If it was a Pokémon, it was supposed to be confiscated. Then eventually that became unenforceable.

The weird thing was, and I think this is something a lot of Pokémon fans can relate to, after a year or so of Gen I hyperfixation, there was a severe backlash to the series just in general. Kids who didn’t want to appear childish by still playing the games or even just liking the little guys. Which I remember as being one of the first times I really felt alienated by my peers because Pikachu was my guy and I wasn’t about to pretend I never liked him to try to look cool or whatever.

And surprisingly, Ruby and Sapphire got a lot of people back into the series. We were all kids, so I don’t think there was any grand reason for it beyond kids just coming back to something after pretending to be too cool for it. But my elementary school library, despite trying to ban Pokémon prior, was giving out free bookmarks for the games even before they were out I think, and that surprisingly nudged us all back to it.

RV: Oh man, I also had that backlash, I think at the same time. The kids I was playing with in that after-school program were younger than me. Some only by a few years, but at one point I was a middle-schooler playing Pokémon with first- and second-graders. My only friend my age who played it too was my best friend, so we ended up keeping it a secret as much as possible. Maybe that’s why I felt so irritated with Ruby and Sapphire? Because I wanted to fit in? I genuinely don’t know.

I will say, while I’ve come around on basically every aspect of Ruby and Sapphire in the years since, one thing I still don’t care much for are the third-generation Pokémon designs. There are some I like all right, but I’d be hard-pressed to name a Pokémon from that generation that I genuinely love. I’m scrolling through a list right now trying to figure out what I don’t care for here, and I think it’s that a lot of them seem…rougher? Angrier? More abstract? I’m not sure.

KS: It definitely feels like Ruby and Sapphire were a point at which the series kind of changed visual styles, with more elaborate designs and a language that feels more akin to what we have now. Since then, there have been other generations in which it felt like another big step happened, like the much more alien looks of things in Sun and Moon. But Ruby and Sapphire feels like the game in which a lot of the modern Pokémon look was established. Which is probably why Ken Sugimori’s art from Gen III is still standardized and used in so many official works.

Two of my favorite Pokémon ever are from Ruby and Sapphire (Latias and Beautifly), and I think I tend to look at most generations as a sort of “I have a few favorites but most of them are obstacles between me and my badges.”

RV: If I remember right, we tend to pick our teams very differently, right? I think from the beginning I’ve always liked trying out a team that’s entirely new to me in each game. But also, I remember very clearly my team for Sapphire, and it was deeply imbalanced because I didn’t know any better back then. I had Mudkip as my starter and just loaded up on water types. So I think I had Swampert, Ludicolo, Kyogre, Breloom, Plusle, and Castform when I first fought the Elite Four. Just an absolutely asinine team, really.

KS: Yeah, I kind of approach Pokémon games like Ash did in the anime. He has Pikachu with him in every region, and then kinda fills in the spaces around him. So I have a handful of favorites who more or less have “reserved” spots in each game if they’re in them, and then I find what I need to fill in the gaps. So my Hoenn team typically looks like Raichu, Beautifly, Latias, Sceptile, Kyogre, and Salamence. I suppose there’s a mix of cute and edgy there, which if nothing else, does illustrate Hoenn’s stylistic shift. Ruby and Sapphire definitely felt like them expanding the definition of what a Pokémon could be. I can’t even imagine some of the Hoenn staples showing up in the original games. Gardevoir or the Regis definitely feel of a different era.

RV: God, the Regis TERRIFIED me as a kid. I think it’s Regice that has a sort of haunting, digital-sounding cry when he appears? And in this temple at the bottom of the ocean?

Ruby and Sapphire really stick with me as the last time I had that “playground” experience with Pokémon. Where things still felt mysterious like that. Stuff like Mirage Isle showing up randomly, or finding a secret base I didn’t know was there. Like I remember the “Berry Glitch,” this thing that happened with all carts where eventually the battery would dry up and the internal clock would screw up. Berries wouldn’t grow anymore, random events wouldn’t happen, weather wouldn’t change, and I remember very specifically that the successful rocket launches at the Space Center were set to like, 9999 or some absurd number. You could get it fixed by mailing it in, or taking it to a GameStop or something and using a kiosk, and you’d get a shiny Zigzagoon for that. But it took word of that a while to get to my friends and me. So for a few months we were all FREAKING OUT that TIME HAD FROZEN in our Pokémon games. What did it mean? I think we convinced ourselves that we could get Deoxys somehow out of it. The reality was a bit disappointing.

Are there any big moments or feelings that really stick out to you from playing it around that time?

KS: That was definitely the experience for me as well. By the time Diamond and Pearl came out in the U.S., I had consistent internet access and the games had almost no secrets left for me. Ruby and Sapphire had the mystique of a bunch of kids with zero resources just trying to find their way through the game, so those urban legends more or less spread through my school because nobody knew anything, we were just trying to figure it out. One kind of sad thing about growing up is that you start to recognize that  video games are all code that is finite instead of something where some new, mysterious secret nobody knows about could be waiting.

From a vibes standpoint, some of my most vivid memories of Ruby and Sapphire involve that feeling of exploring a new side of the Pokémon world that felt like this vast, unknowable thing. I feel like I played Gens I and II so close together that they felt like one “moment,” and there was a distinct feeling that Ruby and Sapphire was something we hadn’t seen before. Being able to do things that are now standard felt like such a big deal, like running thanks to the running shoes, and I felt such excitement when I would see two trainers paired up and get to do a double battle. I was so easily entertained. “Woah, Raichu and Beautifly are both on the screen at the same time!”

But I think something that still sticks out to me after all this time is that this was when it felt like Pokémon was really starting to dive into the sort of cosmic makeup of the universe. Groudon and Kyogre created the land and sea, and the sort of scope of the adventure just opened up and started to feel like something we might see in the anime movies. I remember feeling like my understanding of what a Pokémon game could be was changing, even if now I recognize that a lot of that world-building was kinda half baked at the time and got filled in through future games and anime.

RV: Ooh, yeah. I don’t think I was quite as enamored with the cosmicness of it all. And I remember thinking Team Aqua and Team Magma were super hokey compared to Team Rocket. Rocket actually seemed like a serious crime org (well, not in Gen 2, but the continuation from Kanto still made sense to me), but these guys’ evil plan was just idiotic to me. Why would you cover the whole world in water? We…literally need land to live on??? But it was still SO cool when Kyogre was unleashed and the scary rain was going on all over the world, no matter where I went.

And I did still get a greater sense of Pokémon being just this big world, this universe, with its own rules and mysteries and things beyond the borders that we couldn’t see. For me, a lot of that came through in the environments. Ruby and Sapphire are kind of all-timers with some unique routes, despite like a third of the game just being ocean. I love Route 113 with the falling ash, and Meteor Falls with the giant craters, all the tree houses in Fortree City, the white rock of Sootopolis, and the rafts in Pacifidlog Town. None of those ideas had occurred to me as the kinds of places I could visit in a video game before, so they really stuck.

I think this was the moment it occurred to me in some way that Pokémon was not just a one-off, moment-in-time kind of thing. We were going to keep having adventures that would take us places for a very long time. That was very exciting to me!

So I need to know where you made your Secret Base, obviously.

KS: That is one of the ways you can really see the technical jump aiding in fleshing out the world. I love Gen I and II, but a lot of the distinguishing factors of their routes and cities are typically in things like music and the monsters you find there, where Ruby and Sapphire really gave every space a visual identity. I’ve always been fascinated by how the Pokémon world evolves as video game tech does because the series is obsessed with making things like mechanical changes diegetic, so as the game’s quality-of-life changes come through, it’s usually a sign of change in the universe. The visual elements are kind of an underrated side of that, in that you see how technology or different kind of biomes form because Game Freak had the tech to render those.

Oh god, I know I went and opened probably every Secret Base, but the one I remember most was close to Fortree City because I think I really liked the idea of making a Secret Base specifically in the wilderness hidden away. I remember setting up the Pikachu doll in there and my brain was like, “Well, they won’t let him follow me around like they did in Yellow, so I can pretend this is real.”

RV: Hahahaha oh my gosh. The dolls were great. I really liked them in Gen 2 but they really only ever went in one spot in your room at home. Being able to decorate a whole base of my own with whatever I wanted was the best, and they had so many fun little toys like the music pads, too. I built my base in a very specific spot, inside a bush also near Fortree (all the best spots were over there). It was behind this cuttable bush, so it was “hidden,” and it had a patch for berry growing just outside. It was always raining so I never had to water it, and then the inside of the base was nice and big so I could fit lots of stuff in it. I remember trying to squeeze as many dolls in as possible. I still have my old cart of Sapphire, I wonder if any of my old schoolmates’ bases are still on there? Wow.

You just mentioned the music, which I alluded to at the top, but I really do think that how different it was contributed to my initial sense that this generation of Pokémon was so different. The instrumentation was just like nothing else, not any other Pokémon game before (which couldn’t have handled it) but also unlike any other GBA game that I played. And also unlike any Pokémon game since. They really never went back to that sort of swingy, wonky sound.

Got a favorite track? Here’s mine: always felt very triumphant, penultimate to me. It’s the last route before you hit the ocean! Though, this is also the route my secret base was on, so that’s maybe why I love it.

KS: The Littleroot Town theme is burned into my brain. Just such a homey, cozy vibe that is one of the first pieces of Pokémon music that pops into my head if you ask for my favorites over the years. I will say, it is funny looking at the town and realizing it’s almost identical to Pallet Town. I still largely consider Kanto my “home region” of Pokémon, but Littleroot is pretty close. I remember even when I was writing an original Pokémon story in high school, my main characters were based out of Littleroot. So its theme has me feeling some type of way when I hear it now.

RV: Do not get me started on writing Pokémon stories in high school, no one wants to hear that about me. :sweat_smile:

KS: Well, we’ll discuss our high school Pokémon stories elsewhere because I want to hear those stories.

RV: I had one other thing I wanted to ask about, which was how you felt about the 2014 remakes. I really liked them! I know some folks were disappointed they didn’t do more with Emerald features, but I had never played Emerald, so that bounced off me. I thought they did such an amazing job of realizing that world in 3D, building off Pokémon X and Y. It was so striking and colorful, and I thought the addition of Mega Evolution really brought some energy to some of the monsters I hadn’t liked as much. Also the flying mechanic on a 3DS really blew my mind. I thought for sure that was going to be the future of Pokémon there for a while!

Trumpets didn’t go hard enough though.

OH AND ZINNIA! My girl!!

KS: Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire came out at a really odd time because it was during the era when I was just not invested in Pokémon in the same way. Which is kind of crazy considering how Latios- and Latias-heavy those games are and that’s my girl, ya know? But after picking the game up and putting it down for years, I finally wrapped it up in, god, 2023? Finally played the Delta Episode almost 10 years later, which I was glad to finally wrap after years of having not finished it. There are a handful of Pokémon games I never finished because I was just not as obsessed with the series for a few generations. So I was happy to go back to it and appreciated a lot of those changes they made.

RV: I do remember being sort of disappointed that the “Delta Episode” wasn’t the first in a series of “episodes.” ORAS had a really nice post-game, where you could fly around and find all these legendaries in these little universe pockets. They also did some wild stuff with canonizing that Pokémon was a multiverse and remakes took place in different universes than the originals…maybe I’m just betraying myself in enjoying this stuff when it’s Pokémon but not so much when it’s Marvel, but I thought that was kind of cool at the time.

Last question: ever want to go back to Hoenn, or do you think we’re done there?

KS: I do think the well has probably run dry for Hoenn at this point. Like I try to think of, for instance, a new Legends game spent in that region and I don’t think there’s much that most people would be clamoring to see? Maybe I’m just tired of seeing Rayquaza at this point, haha. Especially because, oddly enough, Legends: Z-A‘s Mega Dimension was so focused on the guy. I know Kanto obviously gets more love than any other region but Hoenn has had plenty of time in the sun. Let’s go somewhere else for a while.

RV: Johto????

KS: Show me the origins of the Burned Tower, Game Freak.

RV: We demand it!!

The story you just read is part of the 2002 edition of Warp Week, a Kotaku series that takes readers back to gaming’s past through a mix of time-dilated reviews, retrospectives, and on-the-ground reports.