The biggest appeal is probably that anyone can learn to play it. You honestly could give a copy of any of the games to your friend and you wouldn't have to know the previous storyline or what bad guys there were last time. You could just jump right in and play the game without thinking about it. It's also a great start to get into video games and well, it was wonderful for the time as well. Honestly, the biggest appeal of the Pokémon games is that anyone can get into them. Another thing, who wouldn't want a five foot tall puppy? The biggest appeal has always been its fantasy and the wide open sandbox and the idea of being the "best". So of course it's a widely popular game.

Okay  so like, generally I've been playing Pokémon Ruby a lot recently so I had the controls set up like B for speed and A for A and the up/down/left/right buttons all for moving but then the b key is  stuck somehow but it's only stuck with the controller because obviously it's not stuck when typing and it's confusing me and I just want to be able to play my frigging game! How do I fix this?

BluemageKyle : Thank you for using 46 words to tell me exactly what a review is - never mind the fact I did touch on the graphics but that was not the overall point of my review. I could pad a review with useless gushing of the graphics, the sound (oh boy, 16 bit sound from an 16 bit game), and completely ignore the dub induced plot holes. Thank you for telling me that my 200+ word post was not a review - but it was 200+ words. I don't waste time gushing over things I know to be fine for a 16 bit game! My concerns lay in the fact of the dub that needs to be checked over and the fact that there are parts of the story that are nonsensical otherwise!
Please, if you are going to tell me what your idea of a review is versus something that I was discussing about that was completely fair to be reviewed (dub induced plot holes are a major sore spot for me as an animator). However, thank you for suggesting I pad reviews with things that are useless to the point of my review in favor of perhaps checking for dub induced lack of quality that unnecessarily ups the difficulty of the game. Or maybe I should have focused on the fact the 8 bit flowers look like 8 bit flowers instead?

Normally, I wouldn't post anything on this, but it seems so very strange... that in fact, the problem with this game is that it plays a bit like a poorly dubbed hack. Some characters that should be considered critical to the story say nothing but nonsense (IE, Oak stating "you is strong", something unintelligible, and then finishing with "get badges"), an odd moment where the character claims Oak is their father (nonsensical and does not fit canon) and then appears to jump over a ledge when there is not one. It also appears to have other games strung to it (same broken bridge from Ruby). I haven't gotten very far, but the computers are inaccessible in your room and it's rather unfortunate how poorly this game plays. I would have expected slightly better for a game I had been looking forward to playing. Nothing like I remember, but overall,  still decent. Maybe I'm the only one who has a problem with poorly dubbed games? Either way, not the best dub and a very strange beginning. Also, the game play severely segregates from the story in the most nonsensical of ways. Maybe it's a dub induced plothole?
Either way, this game needs to be rechecked for dub that doesn't make sense and check to see if this is indeed Platinum... or a hacked version.