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Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire hard-reset the series for Game Boy Advance and introduced abilities, natures, and double battles that never left.
Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire launched in 2002 on Game Boy Advance. It hard-reset the series for Game Boy Advance and introduced abilities, natures, and double battles that never left. It sits on the canon-defining RPG backbone that decides regions, monsters, battle systems, and the assumptions every other Pokemon project eventually reacts to.
Example
Its 2002 release on Game Boy Advance immediately became part of the benchmark fans used to judge its whole generation.
Why it matters
Mainline Pokemon releases are the load-bearing beams of the franchise. If you want to understand why the rest of Pokemon looks the way it does, these are the games that set the rules.
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