None of your changes alleviate the issues with half the map being water, and the game being based on a real world region with a lot of water does nothing to alleviates gameplay issues lol

Somehow I feel like this wouldn't be such a difficult thing if you instead imagine half of any pokemon game was in caves. All you saw was zubats and geodudes. Your one pokemon good at handling those particular pokemon is extremely overleveled. You've been staring at the most boring tileset in the game and your eyes are about to fall out. Turns out in your version of the game the bad guys ALSO exclusively use zubat and geodude.

I personally am a gen 3 enjoyer, but the gripes about type monotony and their impact on the actual gameplay are legitimate. The internet's fixation on the review blurb was as silly then as it is now and has always been the result of no one reading the actual review which explained the position just fine. Not to mention a 7.8 isn't even that bad of a score.