>>16429532I had to drive an hour and a half to the next closest Disc Replay (there's two near me and neither had gotten a copy of Emerald in for months) to get a copy of Emerald, and it cost me $35 bucks. I think it's probably so sought-after because for the reasons the other anon stated somewhere (too lazy to quote him) and because of the fact that it's the third version it's generation, and thus you can get the "most" pokemon out of the three in the one game (for example, all three box legends, as in every "third" game in a generation not to mention the variety of pokemon that are version exclusives in the first set of games in any particular gen) and also, not to mention the fact that lots of kids pop a rager for Rayquaza. So they tend to hold onto it rather than selling them for various reasons, and thus Emerald is typically more expensive/harder to come by.
I got lucky when I got my copy, as whoever had it was apparently a somewhat competitive player. It was loaded with all kinds of Pokemon including the "special" or event pokemon of the time (it had Deoxys, Ho-Oh, both Lati@s, etc) and I came to realize after doing some calculations on a few pokes, that a good many of them were EV trained. So it was worth the money, to me. I mainly used it (along with my other games, namely Pearl, Heart Gold, and Fire Red) to assist in completing my Pokedex in Black 2, and then I used it to fuck around with when I was learning about RNG abuse and practicing doing so.
