b e a r d
gen 3 was the best gen ever man. maybe it's true that whatever the first gen you played will always be your favorite, but idk it was at a time where gaming was still so magical and the tech was there to actually realize a lot of the vision that those old devs had.
and the music, man... the music... every time i listen to it i'm whisked back to being a kid again. playing on my gba. lying under the dining room table trying to translate braille. i lost my gba and emerald for a couple of years and assumed it was missing but when we moved i found it inside of the couch. cried my eyes out.
that's one of the only relics from my childhood i still have, the gba and that copy of emerald. unfortunately the battery died so i can't save the game anymore and i lost my old save, but the memories are still there. i wanna go back 
@beardalaxy I forgot to include this incredible Gen 3 medley composition by Dr. Pez. I listen to this one often!
@beardalaxy I always thought Gen 2 was the best until I played it again recently, it's good but you can really tell that Kanto was just an afterthought. Gen 3 was where the aesthetics really found solid footing. I mean maybe on paper Gen 4 and 5 are better, but Gen 3 really was so much more of a jump than the following games. And gameplay wise every part of the game felt so deliberately thought out and there wasn't tons and tons of random junk there to just be a gimmick like the games are now... The only thing I ever wanted for Gen 3 was a day-night system like GSC, but it is fine without it.
Also I think the battery in the GBA games is just for the real-time clock, it can probably still hold a save... And it's always fun to start a new game and experience it again. :)
@arc if that's true, i wonder what happened to my old save then :P maybe a sibling got a hold of it at some point and erased it or something.
@beardalaxy I have a similar story about my copy of Crystal that went missing for years only for me to find it again inside the couch one day. lmao
Gen 3 is absolutely goated but I actually never got to play the original games and only touched it after the 3DS remakes came out. For some reason despite owning a GBA and a few games for it, I completely skipped Gen 3 because I was still playing my copy of Crystal for years after I found it. Even though the remakes were a bastardization of the originals (missing battle frontier, etc), the music really helped to pad the bad aspects of it a bit. This generation has some of the most memorable and beat tracks of any generation imo. I also still really enjoyed the Hoenn map. I would say Hoenn is tied with Johto as my second favorite generation despite not giving a single fuck about any Pokemon in Hoenn except for Metagross, who is actually my 3rd favorite Pokemon of all time. The music and map are just that good to me. Gen 4 (Platinum) is still my favorite and despite playing Gen 2 a lot, I really feel is tied with Gen 3. I also don't really care about any Pokemon in Gen 2. Even a bastardized version of Gen 3 had that much of a good impression on me.