Looking back, I am starting to take back my call of bad selection and blame it on the access to those legendaries (That's right Red, put yourself deeper into a hole). I'm basing this off my own personal experience so don't hate TOO hard.
No, I think this is definitely a valid reason, personal experiences are what shape my opinions the most :o I definitely agree that a lot of the legendaries became less accessible, mainly due to so many of them being event Pokemon. I mean, to date, the fourth generation is the one with the most event exclusive legendaries, including Shaymin, Phione, Manaphy, Darkrai and Arceus. Generation 5 was also kinda bad with its 4 legendaries. I understand why they did start to include more event exclusives, since, with the access to wifi, you could now simply download them instead of having to send your game somewhere when an event was held in your country/area. But still, 5 event legendaries is a lot, and it just adds a lot to the feeling of the generation having too many legendaries.[/quote]
GEN1: Moltres
GEN3: Deoxys
These two I'm interested in hearing more about :o It's not that they're odd picks for favourite, I would just love to know why. Moltres I'm mainly interested in because my own favourite has always been Zapdos, and I just love to hear why people prefer the others :D Deoxys is more because it isn't really the typical generation 3 favourite, but it has a really cool feature with the form changes, so I see lots of reasons to like it :D
Hmmm... I am currently looking up all the legendaries in that Gen and I had NO idea Shaymin was in that Gen :o The others I haven't heard of was also Heatran (Really is a stupid idea for a legendary, Groudon pretty much trumps him in the background story), Phione, Cresselia nor Girantia through the game play of Diamond... I really do need to start reading up on my lore XD
to briefly tie into the current discussion surrounding Gen 4, i definitely think it had too many Legendaries... some of which i definitely think were not necessary. Heatran, for one, but also Regigigas, and perhaps Phione. then again if you think about it, Gen 5 also had a lot, in fact only one less than Gen 4 did, which i also thought was overkill. ( ´ ▽ ` )ゞ
I see I'm not the only one who's always found Heatran pointless. I think the main reason is, that it's one of the only Pokemon without any lore tie-ins to the world creation, that is obtainable without an event in the fourth generation games. Because personally I find Pokemon like Shaymin, Phione and Manaphy even more pointless, and it's not just because they're cute legendaries. They honestly just feel like ones that were thrown in just for the sake of having cute legendaries, but they don't really have anything to add story-wise, which there was such a heavy emphasis on in the fourth generation. I wouldn't really have minded it if there weren't so many legendaries in that genreation. i like the Pokemon, but I just don't feel like there was much point to adding them haha :D
And なぎ's right that the fifth generation was just as bad, but I'm just less familiar with that generation, so I haven't focused too much on it. But from what it seems, most of the legendaries included in that generation at least fit in with each other or with other previous legendaries. The Tao Trio is obviously related to the story, and tie in together with each other, the swords of justice along with Keldeo seem to have the purpose of protecting the Unova region, the kami trio obviously tie in with each other (god there are so many trios in this generation, that's probably why :D), and Genesect kind of has a backstory relation to Mewtwo, both being artificially created Pokemon. The only ones I feel fall into the same category as Heatran and the cute legendaries from the 4th generation, are Victini and Meloetta, coincidentally also cute Pokemon. So yeah, it seems more like each generation they just want to introduce some kind of cute Pokemon, but don't know how to tie them together with other legendaries D: