I'm not sure I like the setting much, but there were a lot of QoL improvements coming from Omega Ruby/Y. Seeing if a move you have is super effective if you've run into the Pokemon before is really nice, as is the dedicate pokeball-throwing button and the details on stat changes in effect in the current battle. The riding pokemon that deprecated HM slaves were great as well. I got partway through this game shortly after finishing my years-abandoned Omega Ruby save. I thought I was gonna play through all the games I missed and catch up to the new one around when Scarlet/Violet were coming out, but I kinda burned out before I made it that far. I had wanted to play through the standard version of Sun and then maybe Ultra Moon next to get a taste of some of the changes they made, but playing through a mostly-similar game twice in a row may be a bit much for me, if I ever even finish Sun.

My most-played game on Steam with over 1000 hours, and there's still a lot of stuff I haven't done in it. That's without any mods even. I would say vanilla Terraria is on-par with modded Minecraft and I've never felt the need to mod it. Cheap base price, goes on sale frequently, and the devs have supported it for over a decade, just updating the game, not making paid DLC or sequels. It's basically the gold standard for video games for me. Multiplayer is a blast, but the singleplayer can be very satisfying as well. I spent most of my hours doing multiplayer runs with various combinations of friends, but when I last played the game I did my first full singleplayer run and it was amazing. I didn't have to share loot with anyone, I felt more skilled for beating bosses by myself, and the extra challenge got me to research strategies a lot more.
I would say there are two things worth warning people about. One, this is definitely a "wiki game". You will want to reference the wiki regularly while playing. Some people are really bothered by this, so worth mentioning up-front. The other thing I would say is that the game might not click with you right away. There is a ton of progression in Terraria and it alters the feel of the game dramatically. When you first spawn in with your slow tools and limited movement, it might not feel that fun. One of the turning points for me when I first played was getting a grappling hook. No more ugly dirt pillars everywhere, no more dying to fall damage (if you're quick to grapple), you can explore caves from the ceiling and skip past enemies, you can make taller houses/bases and still navigate them, you can get around way faster. It's huge. There are other movement upgrades like a double jump, rocket boots, wings, mounts, and so on, but I think the grappling hook is really the most important.
On my last singleplayer run I decided to get every achievement. Achievements weren't even a thing most of my hours I owned the game, so a lot of them were easy to get from just playing the game, but several I had to go out of my way to get. The fishing quest achievement is bullshit and takes way too long, but aside from that they were pretty fun to get. I also found it weirdly entertaining to collect all the types of glowing moss and create farms for it at the end of my run. It's awesome that there's always stuff to do. You can speedrun the game or you can live inside it doing all sorts of things for as long as you want. Each run can be very different depending on what weapons drop for you or which class you play as. One of the greatest games of all time for sure.

Really great game. Nice art, satisfying gameplay. Controls are just barely simple enough for it to be playable on my Flatbox. No analog sticks or mouse needed. Lots of fun with friends. It's got some rough edges and bugs that will probably never be fixed due to there being 1.5 sequels out now, but still worth playing. Controller support has a lot of issues and you will probably have to reset your controls every 3 sessions or so. Survival mode has some balance issues like Paladin's shield not blocking magic projectiles, making the later parts extremely difficult. I hear in later games they made the shields block magic. Some menus can't be fully navigated with a controller, which would probably be easy to fix if they wanted to. The secrets in the campaign approach unreasonable territory. I think they're trying to emulate very old games and get replay value via artificial difficulty. If you want all the achievements you're pretty much going to have to use a guide. One achievement requires you to screw up in a very particular way during a campaign run which is annoying. Between the separate achievements for beating bosses on Medium and Hard, all the secrets, and the requirement for at least one semi-failed run, you'll probably have to run through the main campaign several times to get every achievement.
If this game were free software I think the community could polish it up nicely. The core of it really is good, but the more I play it lately, the more the little issues start to bug me.