We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I thought the animated sprites made the battle screens look much more alive and their idea to create a region composed entirely of new Pokemon made the singleplayer experience feel far more fresh and exciting, as while you might miss old favourites it meant that a similar air of mystery to the first games could make a return.
It added a lot of quality of life features like reusable TMs that should have been in from the start and reduced the ridiculous HM requirement from DP back to a manageable level (although still not the "zero, you just need to have the items in your bag" I would have preferred). It was possibly the first one that had a story worth listening to outside of the Colleseum games and also (a large plus point for me!) they finally made some bug pokemon that weren't complete ass for actually playing with.
This is in stark comparison to Diamond and Pearl which I easily felt were the weakest of the whole series, requiring you to devote at least two sections of your party to pokemon with moves you wouldn't even want to use, an ignorable storyline and just generally sluggish progression and gameplay.

That comment about pokemon selection alone was a huge part of the charm and I'm slightly sad that they don't seem to be continuing it for XY, as the 3DS is still compatible with DS games they wouldn't have had to worry about old-gen pokemon being hard to obtain because they purposefully seeded the last two DS ones with ones from every other game.