Getting to play a console Pokemon game with an actual story was a dream back in the 2000s when this game and its predecessor came out. In my opinion, the original is narratively stronger, but the mechanical additions make this more fun to play. Adding the purify chamber means that purifying shadow pokemon is far more painless and quick. The simple change that opposing trainers can have more than 1 shadow pokemon means that the potential roster is so much larger. Also, the ability to catch wild pokemon makes transferring from R/S/E actually viable as you don't have to give up any Pokemon from the limited roster to do so. I distinctly remember catching a ton of Pokemon, so I could import every Pokemon I had off a rented copy of Sapphire before having to return it to the store. A small gripe is that I wish there were more new locations, but I recognize the value of being able to reuse assets in game development.

This game maintains all the good from Pokémon Colosseum and greatly improves all of the bad aspects. You can now save at any time, shadow moves no longer hurt the Pokémon using them, purifying Pokémon is much faster and the purify chamber makes it so much easier to purify all of the shadow Pokémon you catch. The ending is 100x better and more climactic than Colosseum and the final battle is great. There's a lot that's still the same as Colosseum, like many of the locations are reused which is a bit lame. There are more Pokémon to use and a better selection overall, though the distribution isn't very good as you get most of them (especially the coolest/best ones) in the last part of the game. This game is so much better than Colosseum in the most important ways, and I would recommend everyone just skip over Colosseum and play this game only. Objectively, this game probably doesn't deserve such a high score, but I just have so much love and nostalgia for it. This is my favorite Pokémon game and one of my personal favorite games of all time.