I believe my mom bought the game for me, so I was never really part of choosing which of the games I wanted, but it never really mattered much to me :p Basically I just told her at the time that I wanted the new Pokemon game, as I found out one of my friends had a third gen game, and she came home with Ruby one day. This lead to Ruby always being my preferred choice of game when it came to picking favourites between the third gen games, but that's honestly just due to bias, and barely has anything to do with the content. Although I will admit that I find Team Magma to be generally a lot cooler than Team Aqua :D But yeah, over the years, I have played through all 3 games, although Sapphire and Emerald have both been borrowed from friends. It's definitely clear that Emerald is the better game, with the expanded features though, but Ruby still remains the best in my heart 8D