Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire (2003)

Best: Double battles. People often poke fun at Pokémon games for being “glorified rock-paper-scissors,” and for a while there, you could broadly see how that case was made. Pokémon are each affiliated with types; each type has a number of other types it’s either strong against or weak to. Water beats fire beats grass beats water, and so on. You could just swap types to ensure you had the advantage. That changed dramatically with the introduction of double battles, which allowed each trainer to put two Pokémon on the field at once, allowing for defensive combos—and a whole new dimension in high-minded strategy.

Worst: Dive. Maybe I’m just claustrophobic, but I couldn’t stand Ruby and Sapphire’s underwater sections. That they were tied to Dive, a water-type move that took two turns to perform and barely dealt any damage at all, was a travesty. Pokémon hit its nadir of requiring annoying hidden machines—battle moves that could also be used for traversal out of combat—with Ruby and Sapphire. And Dive was the worst of them.