This generation has successfully rekindled my interest in pokemon, because it feels like they really sat down and worked out how they could make the series feel new and refreshed without decimating what makes Pokemon fun in the first place. I hated Gen V, started Black and played for 5 hours before putting it down and never touching it again. To me it was just more of the same shit they've been doing and it stops being fun when you're basically playing the exact same game for years.
Pokemon X & Y have genuinely useful improvements to the UI, it's a lot faster to get around menus than it was in previous games - something I've bitched about for years as it was just plain bad UX the way they had it before. Also, you can now assign more than one key item to X, which again is something I've been fucking wanting for years. When you press X with multiple items assigned to it, it opens like a sub menu where you press a direction on the D-Pad to access the item you want. I makes having a bike and a map easier.
I've said this elsewhere but I still think the movement controls are lacking. They've sort of improved with the analogue movement on rollerskates and the bike, but the skates are velocity based movement making it insanely difficult to be precise, forcing me to use the D-Pad for movement if I want to do anything accurately. I hate that tile-based movement, as it sort of shows that even though the game has 3D models now, it's still using the same engine it's had for a long time. If they had just stuck with a more controllable analogue movement, that wouldn't be a problem to me, but the standard tile-based movement gets annoying fast when they're constantly changing the camera angle on you, especially because they have it so that up means forward one tile no matter what the angle of the camera is, so if it should be Right = Forward I get really confused.
So far the story has been so-so. I haven't had as much time to play it as I'd like because I'm sharing my 3DS with my girlfriend who has X (I have Y), and I've been playing a lot of GTA V while she plays X, but I'm really waiting for the story to pick up and introduce some sort of reason for me to keep progressing other than fighting gym leaders. Some kind of conflict I need to overcome and figure out. As of yet I'm not really feeling any sort of urgency to progress so I just grind a lot.