>>55260918Sword and Shield are personally some of my favorite games in the series because they allowed for a lot of customization features for Pokemon that I enjoyed. They mass released Apricorn Balls again, they introduced marks and gave us ribbon titles as well for literally every single ribbon since gen 3 (that didn't later get collapsed into a singular ribbon), they had a very good collection of Battle Competitions, Dynamax was a good mechanic for VGC and I played the most VGC out of any game in it, they had a local tournament option I used to host a 40+ person monotype tournament, you could collect trainer cards from people, Restricted Sparring and Endless Dynamax Adventures were good battle facilities, and shiny hunting struck a good balance (outside of Dynamax Adventures) AND had marks to make it much more enticing for rarity purposes. Oh, and training was literally the best it had ever been. It was genuinely fun and my only complaint was that they didn't utilize amiibo for anything.
Diamond and Pearl are that high up as they are still the only games outside of Japan to be able to connect with My Pokemon Ranch. At the time, those crossgen evolutions were very rewarding to find and I cannot ever get over the inclusion of the WiFi Tower and the GTS. And then Platinum came along and made the GTS even cooler anyways. But they do have some glaring flaws, which is why I put them in my C tier (with C tier being average for a Pokemon game).
