Pokemon Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire is Underrated

When thinking of Pokemon there has never been a huge debate among players for which games are the best. The Pokemon community as a majority has a solid stance of gen 4 having the best games Pokemon had to offer. HeartGold and SoulSilver alongside Platinum was agreed as the peak games of Pokemon which are valid choices as they have earned the spots respectively, however I feel like another set of games actually challenges these for the top spot as well and that is Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. 

Why do I consider these games to be top tier games? Well first let's address that the community actually puts these games near the bottom, even far below the original game. The community view this game as an abomination and insult to the content that Emerald had. I'll go over the flaws that has been pointed out about this game; The story is hand holding and ruined the original journey, The legendaries are handed to you, the music was butchered, and last but not least which is the biggest of them all, the battle frontier was not added in. All of these are all valid and fair criticisms to make about the game but that is all people seemed to really focus on when evaluating this game.

The community only seemed focused on the negative things that the game skipped out on. Battle Frontier not being in alone especially sealed the deal for a lot when determining if this game was actually bad. What I want to now point out is what all Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire improved upon as well as added and expanded upon. There is an actual full post game, there are many events, all previous legendaries are accessible,  secret bases have been revamped along with having online features, expanded and reworked areas from the original, flying across the whole region on a pokemon, and gen 6's pss, super training, and pokemon amie are included. To me it looks like even though there are some problems with this game, there are a lot of more boons than banes from the original already.

So now to get back to the point of this topic. Why am I considering Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire to being among the best Pokemon games? When discussing the top games Emerald already is also up there in the community's radar as one of the best games so from the list of what Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire has over Emerald you might as well place those games near the top already. So now we have to discuss what these games have over HGSS/Plat. Already without a doubt ORAS has the post game down. In terms of story in my opinion ORAS by far has the best postgame no contest over all current 8 generations of Pokemon. The post game is so good that it trumps the main story even(not that it's hard to beat a Pokemon plot line in the first place). No other game has had you be able to manually fly across an entire region while visually seeing the landscape. Other than battling you not only have contest but also secret bases with(borderline) online interaction giving you a variety of fun engaging things to do. ORAS took the best features from XY and just slapped it on this gen 3 remake which was the only thing praised with the gen 6 games. So what does Plat/HGSS have over ORAS? For Platinum it's literally JUST battle frontier and i guess tht buying villa thing which is just a minor slice of life thing and for HGSS it also has battle frontier but also has Pokethlon and the ability of Pokemon following you.

So who has the better feats overall? In my opinion low key whether we want to believe it or not even though the Pokemon community puts these games at the bottom, I truly believe that after all's considered and said, we should acknowledge that this game is one of the best if not THE best mainline Pokemon game. My belief as to why a lot of the community so strongly dislikes this game is solely because they didn't get their battle frontier in which they felt was essential to what this remake should have had most. Most big fans of Pokemon hold gen 3 to one of the highest standards so it felt like a betrayal to them when this one feature didn't make it in and while i do agree that it should have been implemented, that shouldn't discount all the other great things the games has offered. 

So how do you feel about my stance on this? Am I wrong about how the community views ORAS? What are your feelings about the games? Do you think I'm overselling it? Also let me know if I may have missed some things pertaining to what each games had.

I really enjoyed gen 3 as sapphire was my first pokemon game. I was super hyped to play ORAS because I couldn't wait to go on a similar journey to the one I did all those years ago. What I got instead was a game which held my hand through the whole story and babied me far too much. I didn't really get much enjoyment from the story of the game (maybe because it was familiar?) and it just felt unenjoyable for me with how much they babied the player throughout the game. It's funny really, I have more memories of playing sapphire when I was like 6 which was about 18 years ago than I do playing ORAS which was only like 6 years ago. 

I did enjoy the battle frontier a lot in the old games but I didn't really miss it. I think what games like HGSS and platinum have which ORAS doesn't is a soul. Sounds silly I know, but the game to me just didn't feel like much love and effort went into it compared to the older games. Sure, there was some stuff in the game was really good such as the things you mentioned, some of the music and things like that but a lot of it felt mediocre to me.  Even after I finished the game and moved to competitive battling I just felt unsatisfied. I loved X/Y but ORAS was a weird case where I just felt like something was off. I don't think it's a coincidence that I started losing interest in the games after playing ORAS. I quit playing mons for like 2 years because of this and then S/M came out and I tried to play that game but ended up feeling the exact same way only way stronger. I just felt like the games didn't feel right anymore and were missing something. Like they were bland, uninspired and too easy.

I do feel like you're overselling it a bit, but the game was definitely not as awful as most people make out. Overall I just felt like the move to 3D just didn't do the region justice. The meta wasn't fun and the game just didn't satisfy me as much as other games I played before it.

ORAS to me has a lot of soul in it moreso than most of the other games. It's probably due to the game just being different from the original that mainly throws u off. All the things hgss had is great but oras also has many wonderful mind blowing things just the same. Gen 6 era was the beginning of the 3D era though so it is understandable how because of that it probably doesn't feel as great in comparison to the comfortable sprite artwork. 

The story was definitely a turn off for most which is completely understandable especially the free latias/latios portion but aside from that mechanically wise it had nearly everything that was great within that generation. That's probably another great reason people felt turned off since the story didn't fit the bill so all the other content didn't even matter to them.