Playing it now for the first time after having only played Diamond back when it came out. I'm not to the postgame yet, but it's fairly average. Doesn't really exceed in any regard during the story, at least so far. Pokemon variety isn't as good as it could be, there are a few too many annoying roadblocks, too many HMs, and it has a few problems that are only problems in hindsight like limited TMs, still going through Deposit and Withdraw options in PCs, and having Pokemarts separate from Centers. Even so, routes and dungeons are reasonably fun to explore, the battles and difficulty curve are good, and it doesn't really fumble in any way other than not having improvements it can't really be blamed for not having.
I will say that if it doesn't do anything impressive before postgame then I'm going to consider the monumental praise it gets around here to be a huge fucking meme. The game is good so far, and postgame content is great and should be standard given how much there is you can do with the core gameplay that never gets done in the story, but it doesn't elevate a whole game into masterpiece territory. HGSS has some of the same problems Platinum does (HMs, mon variety) and has a battle frontier as well yet doesn't usually get rated as high as Platinum does, so I'm not counting it out yet.
