Yet another new feature of Pokémon Ruby Sapphire. Pokémon contests take trainers away from the intense battling and put them in a competition against other pokemon to see which pokemon is the cutest, toughest, smartest, most beautiful or the coolest.

Pokemon contests have two phases. The first one is the preliminary judging. This section takes the audiences votes to see which pokemon is the ______est. Trainers may enhance this stat by giving the pokemon certain pokéblocks. Once this section is over, the second phase begins.

The second phase is the most important part. Players use these moves to sway the judges opinion. Moves can have certain effects. Most moves just give you hearts. The more hearts you have, the better your chances of winning. Another common move is jam. These moves take away hearts from other opponents. Startling moves are also quite popular. If the startling is successful, the opponent cannot move that turn. Because of this, many pokemon have a protection move. This move stops pokemon from jamming your pokemon, although they yield less hearts.

There are 4 ranks of contests: normal, super, hyper and master. In order for a pokemon to participate in say a master contest, that pokemon must first have won the hyper contest. In other words, a pokemon has to start from the normal rank and make it's way to the master rank. If you win the master rank by quite a large margin, then a painter comes up to you after the contest to ask you if he could paint your pokemon. You'll need 5 paintings (one for each rank) for a Trainer Star.

There's also a certain item that will help you in your pokemon contests: scarves. When you max out a pokemon's contests stat with Pokeblocks, and you go to the brown house next to the Pokémart in Slateport, he'll give you a scarf, whose colour is the same as the maxed out stat. For example, if you have the cool stat maxed out on a Swellow, and that Swellow is in the first slot then the man will give you a Red Scarf.

So that's pokemon contests. There's just one thing you should know:

• There are certain combo moves that can get you more hearts, such as using surf after dive, or hydro pump after rain dance.