Soulsilver. I love Lugia, and with it being the first ever Pokémon game I was gonna receive, I couldn't wait. The wait was well worth it, though, as it took my heart and placed me in the world of Pokémon. No other game has done this, apart from PMD 2.
Definitely ORAS. As a Hoenn fanboy, I was SO excited to have the remakes come. It is still the only Pokémon game I bought on release day, and it didn't disappoint. It's an honest remake with the improvements all in the right area. Definitely a good purchase.
Despite the disappointment, I'd actually say XY was my favourite launch because of how well content releases were handled prior to that. Generally Nintendo announce a game and then keep annoyingly silent about it, but they were drip-feeding XY information to us for almost an entire year. It even got ME excited for the games, and I was disgusted with Pokémon generally after Gen V effectively killed my interest in the franchise. The run-up to XY definitely re-kindled my interest and, whilst the games themselves let me down significantly, I hadn't been that excited for a Pokémon game since Gold and Silver. Also, it was a simultaneous worldwide launch, and that meant a lot to me - up to that point, EU territories had ALWAYS been pushed to the back of the queue when it came to releases. It wasn't uncommon to have to wait months for a game released in the US to come out over here. A lot of the earlier Pokémon launches were ruined for me by those differing release dates. From Gen II to Gen IV, I had the games well before the UK release because I just imported them. Later launches, like ORAS and SM, were ruined because Nintendo released them a week late for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
Tough call. See, I never paid much attention to the launching of games until far late into the series; despite my enjoyment of videogames I was actually very much disconnected from them, in a general sense, for a long time. For example, I had never even heard of the franchise 'Final Fantasy' until my brother-in-law (who was merely my sister's fiance at the time) introduced me to the series with FF8, and Pokémon itself was an unknown until I got to play Blue on a bunkmate's Gameboy at a Boy Scout summer camp. Even after all that, I still didn't often see commercials for games, and knew very little beyond even those; E3, TGS, ComiCon - those were all foreign concepts until much later (if I had to estimate, as my memory is rather hazy, would be around the time Gen4 was coming out). Even then, due to my depression I never cared to follow hype or news, even for game series that I loved, so it wasn't until X/Y that I was able to properly (both in the technical and emotional senses) follow the launch of a Pokémon generation. Much of that hype, from my memory, came from the all-new Fairy-type, but I do recall there being much let-down from after the launch. Personally, I was more excited for ORAS due to my personal connections to it, and unlike X/Y that actually lived up to its hype (for me, at least).
XY. It was the game that really brought me into Pokémon as a whole, and it was the first one I'd experienced. I still remember raging at the Berry Picker minigame and petting Fletchlings whenever humanly possible. Good times.
Probably the launch of XY, I even got the 3DS LE along with it (The blue one), being the first mainline game to be in 3D, that was huge.
I remember that I was super hyped during B/W's launch. I was looking up what I could on crappy internet, already making up a party with what limited Pokémon we knew, and even used some with their revealed Japanese names in a Pokémon Roleplay because I just could not wait to see them. haha..
