Choosing a pokemon and embarking on the journey for Ribbon Master is a very gratifying experience. It takes a pokemon you're already close to and transforms it into a trophy of its own that you can take with you into compatible games, always showing off the work and dedication you've put into it, and with the introduction of Titles in Pokemon Sword and Shield, this is made even more special by seeing the respective ribbon or mark's title when your pokemon enters battle.
Here, I will be ranking my experience with the ribbons gained for my shiny ribbon master mew, Azure.
I had been trying to obtain a shiny mew for a while, and I poured many hours of encounters in Emerald, knowing that its faulty starting seed of 0 would mean soft resets would be made difficult. A long time was spent encountering, running from battle, and running back to the Battle Tower to save a battle video in order to save my progress (battle videos in Emerald store the frames the game was on where it was recorded). And then I learned how to do RNG manipulation. And so, I had obtained my legal shiny mew, my beautiful prize. It was time to look into how to become a ribbon master. For anyone else interested, you can read Athis' Ribbon Master Guide, which outlines where ribbons needed can be obtained and in what games. I have some bones to pick with the lack of preparedness this guide offers, which you will see as this list progresses. I will be ranking ribbons based on difficulty to obtain them, from least to most difficult.
19. Every single Champion Ribbon
Titles: Azure the (Region) Champion (exception: original Hoenn Champion Ribbon)
A courtesy experience every time I entered a new game. With a high-leveled fully EV trained pokemon, it's just a complete wash for the Elite Four. There just isn't anything else to say about them otherwise.
18. Legend Ribbon
Title: Azure the Living Legend
I tore Red's stupid bitch ass UP, LOL.
17. Effort, Artist, Footprint, and Best Friends Ribbons
Titles: Azure the Once Well-Trained, Azure the Great Friend, Azure the Strutter, Azure the Model for Paintings
This accounts for a small chunk of the Memorial Ribbons. The original effort put in to get the Effort Ribbon was time consuming in gen 3, but the experience wasn't difficult and I didn't find it excruciating. Once you have these EVs, they always carry over to other games and other circumstances, barring any need to restat the pokemon. It's one of the first things you'll need to do in order to get a Ribbon Master so that you can challenge the Battle Tower... using a pokemon that is eligible, unlike mew. In gen 3, you have to make sure to do all the training before level 50 because these games didn't have level flattening yet, and pokemon that are over 50 are banned from the Level 50 tower. Unless you just use PKHex to reset the level to 50 LOL.
Best Friends and Footprint Ribbons are Affection and Friendship mechanics respectively within their first respective entries in the games. Artist Ribbon is obtained when winning a Master Ranked contest in gen 3 with a high score. You have to speak to the curator in the Lilycove City Museum in order to unlock this feature. You will almost certainly just get this ribbon during obtaining the contest ribbons, but I didn't unlock the feature before entering, so I had to do one extra contest to get it. I will touch on the experience with contests shortly, but the Artist Ribbon being lumped in the easiest ribbons should tell you how my experience with them went.
16. Training Ribbon
Title: Azure the Tried and True
This is only above the other Memorial Ribbons because you have to go through a whole regimen to get it. But with a completely EV trained pokemon, it's easy. You just have to have coordination better than a child's and aim at goals to win.
15. Gen 3 Contests
Title: None; Lumped in with Azure the Treasured Memory
So many ribbons, so little time. Part of me understands why they consolidated the ribbons like this post gen 5, but also I don't like it. I miss when they gave you a ribbon for every single tier of the contest. It made going through the motions worth it. Anyway.
I thought the gen 3 contests would be a lot harder than they turned out to be. It turns out, with mindfulness toward contest statting and a good move combo, these are hilariously easy. Stat your pokemon (CAREFULLY!! You can't redo it, so pay attention to guides.), teach it Rest and Snore. Win. The only times I ever lost a contest was due to competitors inducing nervousness at inopportune times. Rest + Snore is not the only winning combo, but it is the one that most pokemon can learn. If you're doing a non-legendary, you'll have the BP you need to afford the Snore tutor after doing Battle Tower. I found gen 3 contests fun, if repetitive to do all in one sitting. Still, it really doesn't take that much time.
14. Battle Tree Great Ribbon
Title: Azure the Tree Victor
The first Battle Tower ribbon that has the no restrictions ruleset. As a result, you beat the absolute shit out of every trainer set in this mode because they're locked at level 50, and your level is entirely unrestricted. You also only need to keep a streak of 20 in order to beat the Battle Legend of your choice. A cakewalk.
13. Gen 6 Master Contests
Titles: Azure the Former Star, Azure the Vintage Beauty, Azure the Former Idol, Azure the Historic Genius, Azure the Formerly Buff, Azure the Shining Star
Jumping ahead to gen 6 contests because they are almost as easy as gen 3 contests. In some ways easier, and in some ways harder. For instance, the move combos aren't as powerful outside of contests that match their type. In fact, you'll often receive a penalty for using certain contest move types within the other ranks. I had to swap moves out for every contest type or lose points. Admittedly, one big thing that made this trivial was that I had never completed the Contest Spectacular mini storyline in this game before, so Lisia and Ali were not a competitor I had to worry about. Had I done that, this would probably be ranked a lot higher for frustration. In addition, in ORAS, you can max out every contest stat to 255 with no feeding limit, so there's no reason not to do it because it's always best to have all the stats you could possibly need for the future. Once you complete the Master Rank for all contests with one pokemon, it gets the Contest Star Ribbon.
12. Itemfinder and Gourmand Marks
Titles: Azure the Treasure Hunter, Azure the Gourmet
Now we're starting to get a little annoying. These marks are obtained through random chance while doing certain things in Scarlet and Violet. The Itemfinder Mark has a 1/100 chance of being applied to a pokemon that picks up items in Let's Go! mode, and the Gourmand Mark has a ~1/33.67 (3/101) chance to be applied when eating food, such as from picnic sandwiches or from shop food. The Itemfinder Mark came to me fairly quickly. There are many places in the game where items on the floor are extremely abundant. Gourmand Mark took a bit longer because preparing food and going through the cutscene to eat is time consuming (pun? sure.). The fastest way is to buy cheap food from shop stands, but this isn't particularly engaging from a gameplay standpoint. They're lumped together in this rank because it wasn't so horrible that I feel like separating their difficulty.
11. Syndicate Ribbons
Titles: Azure the Gorgeous, Azure the Royal, Azure the Gorgeous Royal
Ummmmm, these probably should have been a bit more time consuming if I didn't already have a completely bonkers Pokemon Diamond save file that I used an Action Replay on as a child. So, my experience is a little bit skewed here... But it's not like I'm going to look a gift horse in the mouth and not use the resources at hand. The final ribbon costs 999,999 PokeDollars, so I still had to grind for money, and the aforementioned bonkers save file has broken its ability to use the VS Seeker at all from who knows what thing I did with the AR. So my only way to make money was to challenge the Elite Four over and over and over. Wait for it. This is like foreshadowing.
10. Daily Ribbons (Alert, Shock, Downcast, Careless, Relax, Snooze, Smile)
Titles: Azure the Once Vigilant, Azure the Once Cowardly, Azure the Once Shaken, Azure the Once Imperfect, Azure the Once Well-Rested, Azure the Once Sleepy, Azure the Once Cheery
Tedium sets in. The generation 4 games hate it if you try to meddle with your time settings, so you're in for a week-long wait. That is, unless you use an emulator and RunAsDate, like I did. This program injects the date and time into the program, and seems to bypass the game's checks against the save file's saved time and the system's current time. I should have tested it in Pokemon Diamond like I was doing when I was originally going to try doing the trick where you set the time before midnight, then wait for it to roll over. That trick didn't work and locked my time events for 24 hours, so I moved on to SoulSilver. The ribbons are obtained from different NPCs that you have to hunt down in the Johto remakes. I did not enjoy this. RunAsDate made this bearable and allowed me to obtain them all in one sitting, as impatient as I am.
9. Partner Mark
Title: Azure the Reliable Partner
This mark is not difficult to obtain in that you need to personally jump through many hoops in order to get it. However, it's... stupid chances. There is a 1/100 chance in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet for a party pokemon to be granted this mark every 10,000 steps if their Friendship has a value of 200 or higher. I left my game on with a rubber band on the joysticks for two full days just going in circles before this mark was given to Azure. It could have been worse if math weren't in my favor.
8. Earth Ribbon
Title: Azure the 100x Victorious
Tedious. The type of tedious that lulls you into a false sense of security. You're early on in your Ribbon Master challenge, you're still in gen 3, and you have high level pokemon with moves that target multiple pokemon. You also have 2-3 hours to kill. You start to think, "maybe this challenge won't be that bad", not knowing what lies ahead and what it will do to you. So you wipe the floor with everyone and you get the ribbon. I hope it was worth it.
7. Tower Master Ribbon
Title: Azure the Tower Master
The second Battle Tower with unrestricted pokemon, but plays with flat rules, meaning all levels are flattened to level 50. It gives more trouble than the unrestricted Battle Tree due to this, but it uses a rank system with loss prevention-- when you rank up, you can't rank down. You don't need to keep a streak in order to progress toward the ribbon. You can Dynamax, and no other trainer can, except Leon. I would wipe the floor with his stupid charizard with a Max Geyser from my latios. His aegislash ruined my day more often.
6. Gen 4 Contests
Title: None; Lumped in with Azure the Treasured Memory
"Oooh, gen 3 contests were easy as fuck, these shouldn't be that bad! I already have the stats!!" Kills myself. I hate rhythm games forever. The stats won't carry you through a bad dance performance in master rank. They also won't carry you through a bad visual competition, and you can look up which costume items give points for which random category. I was also screwing around on stream, stacking items on my mew to the ceiling, but it turns out some of the items were likely not being counted as "attached" by doing that. So I was kneecapping my own self. This experience was... miserable! I hated it! Every time I saw Fantina and her stupid drifblim I wanted to appear on the news.
Your reward for your efforts is to have all of your ribbons consolidated into the Contest Memory ribbon. But you get a gold one instead of a blue one for getting all of the contest ribbons. Wow!
5. Battle Tree Master Ribbon
Title: Atticus the Tree Master
Welcome to hell, welcome to hell!! Okay, why is this on the list? Mew isn't eligible for the Battle Tree Master Ribbon. The Super category of the Battle Tree uses previous Battle Tower rulesets that disallow the entry of "special" pokemon. Sike! Secret category!! I also went ahead and started making my shiny silvally into a Ribbon Master. Okay, so, you need 50 consecutive wins in Super mode in order to reach the Battle Legend and get the ribbon. I think I could have stood to use a different set than I was using, but the Special Trainers (who appear every 10 battles) would fuck me uuuup. Kiawe kept ruining my time. I did cheese this with emulator save states because I think I would've died. But y'know. Hindsight, maybe. I spent days grinding this tower. A lot worse than Emerald's Battle Tower for me.
4. Twinkling Star Ribbon
Title: Azure the Twinkling Star
Oh my god. I never even wanted to buy Brilliant Diamond or Shining Pearl. I was entirely dedicated to not doing this. Aaaaand I still didn't!! Fuck youuu! My friend let me borrow their copy of Shining Pearl. And after playing it to completion, my mind is unchanged and I will not be buying this ugly little freak game. But I was able to redeem the free mew you get from this game!! That's a plus for me. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is not a plus. And it is inextricably linked with the experience getting this ribbon. The whole game slides by in a mindless bland slog because it's just gen 4 again, but this time styled like Playmobil. Oh, but it runs at normal speed, unlike the originals. You really get to see how little content is in a normal run of Diamond and Pearl when you aren't having your time stolen from you by the loading speeds.
Oh, right, WHY did I have to play the entire game just to do the contest, again? Hearthome City is right in the middle of the game. Haha, that's because the Brilliant/Shining Contest isn't unlocked until you beat the Champion. Great, so that means with my contest stats being maxed at 255 from ORAS, it should be fine, right? You idiot. Welcome to DANCE ONLY, NO ITEMS, FINAL DESTINATION. In the Shining Contest, your stats do so little for you. It's not a specific contest geared toward any one stat, so it uses the combined forces of all of them. You'd think that would sound better, because it does on paper, but in practice, that's not what happens. The entire competition is ONLY the rhythm game, and if you fuck up, you are not winning. You also need to have ball capsules or you won't win. You have to fill it up completely for any helpful benefits. Just any capsules? Yes. But also no. You need specific ones.
Athis says, "For the Brilliant / Shining Contest only the Show Master Sticker (Beat all master ranks with one Pokémon) and the Champion Sticker (Beat Cynthias rematch team) provides extra bonus. That being said you don't need to have a capsule full of positive stickers to beat this if your Pokémon has maxed Condition, just make sure to fill the capsule with as many stickers as possible. If it is still too hard, beat the league a couple of times and try again with some Champion Stickers." ... which does NOT prepare you for the steps you actually need to take here. Because I had already done all Master Ranks in ORAS for the Contest Star Ribbon earlier instead of right now, I didn't have the Show Master Sticker for the ball. I'd have to do all the contests again. I didn't end up doing that. Instead, I opted for the latter option, the Champion Sticker. "Beat Cynthia's rematch team". Alright. This doesn't prepare you for the sidequest that unlocking the rematch team is.
To unlock the E4 rematches, you first need to complete the regional pokedex by seeing every pokemon. Thankfully, catching them is not required, which makes it less daunting, but meant I had to backtrack. This allows you to climb Stark Mountain, where you have to complete the sidequest with heatran and Buck. Like. Man. I'm trying to do contests, I didn't wanna haul my ass through this mountain system twice. That was a diversion of a good 2-3 hours. I'd also not known this prior, so I wasted time challenging the E4 more than once, only to not get the sticker I needed. Oops! You might point out that these are same steps you take in the original in order to unlock the Elite Four rematch teams. And what if I told you, due to earlier foreshadowing (Action Replay), that I never did this before? My point is, the roadblock in front of me was placed here by the devil. I just want to put my child into the unethical child pageant, is that so bad?
But the rematch teams are unlocked now (annoying), so... just a sticker, right? Okay, well, how about more of them, actually? One wasn't enough. Two, also, was not enough. I had three or four Champion Stickers on my capsule by the end of it. Oh, ummm, is rematching the Elite Four that many times in one sitting fun? No. I think by the end of my runs in gen 4 games, I'd rematched the Elite Four upwards of twelve times. I'm never playing Diamond or Pearl again.
Aaaaand the competition itself is frustrating. My wife did it for me because I would have lost my marbles if I beat my head against it that many times only to lose. She likes rhythm games and keeps her cool! She's so awesome. But we had to try the Shining Contest over and over and over. I was so over it. I was glad to finally port everything I cared about into HOME and be rid of this game.
3. Mightiest Mark
Title: Azure the Unrivaled
Ordinarily, the Mightiest Mark is only given to pokemon who are captured from special seven star raids. Mew is one special exception. When a mew is brought into the Mightiest Mewtwo raid, it gets a special stat buff during the fight, and also gains the Mightiest Mark upon defeating the raid. This event was only active for a short period and has not since returned.
This raid is stupid hard. It's the hardest Mightiest raid by a lot. During its original run, I did not defeat it, but I didn't have Azure yet either, so I wasn't quite as motivated. Furthermore, my knowledge of EV and IV training was severely lacking. Still, even with a properly trained mew, this raid is nearly impossible to defeat alone. Ideally, this raid is completed with four players all running mew, who are all coordinating with one another. This isn't really about strategies for this raid because there is more than one way to crack an egg, but it is about how I came to finally beat this.
So, as I mentioned before, I missed the original run of this event. However, the thing about raid events is that you download them from the internet, so if you just... never reconnect online, the raid event never ends. That makes completing an expired event legal from the game's perspective. And if you, like me, have a friend with a hacked Switch who can inject the event seed into their game... You see where I'm going with this. The same wonderful friend who loaned me Shining Pearl also had these resources at hand. I traded Azure to them and they gave it several goes with two Switches in hand and two mews. They couldn't do it, the raid is just too hard. My wife and I went over to their house so we could have that four mew fighting chance at defeating it. After an unfortunate disconnect that caused one loss, we did it! For my end of things it required (EVs) 252 Attack, 252 HP, and the moves Leech Life at max PP and X-Scissor for the end when the PP runs out. It's a long fight, especially if you don't come prepared. I had actually resigned to not being able to have this mark due to the event period end, but it's a rewarding thing to have now.
2. Battle Royal Master Ribbon
Title: Atticus the Royal Master
I hated every single second of this.
This is yet another ribbon that mew is not eligible for (the Battle Royal uses Battle Tower rules? why.), but that my shiny silvally would be. Wow! I did not know what I was getting into. I don't even know where to begin. This is like, one of the most unfair formats in a pokemon game. They really wanted to find a way to make quadruple battles work and it fucking sucks.
Athis says, "The battle dome is really simple, it has 4 ranks, when you beat a rank you unlock the next and can attempt that rank at any time. All you need to do is win 4 total battles (or 1 if you have master rank unlocked already)
"Strategy here is pretty simple, try to survive and KO as many Pokémon as you can before any trainer loses all their Pokémon. Bringing a fast Pokémon with good type coverage is a good way to rack up KO's, and when you feel like you have a lead you can try to end the match by targeting the trainer with the least Pokémon. There will be times when the AI will gang up on you and that sucks, but you don't lose progress here so worst case you can just try again."
Where to start. The Battle Dome is... simple! When you say what it is in text, sure, it's. Simple. You only need to win four matches. How wonderful. "There will be times when the AI will gang up on you and that sucks" <-- secret landmine has been planted under your desk. I got owned in this format so many times I thought I was going crazy. This is "three high-level Battle Tower trainers all gang up on you", the format. It didn't seem to matter what I did, I would lose every time. Also, they nerfed moves that hit several pokemon at once for this format. Okay, I understand that from a dev perspective. You don't want everyone swept by the AI in one turn, or alternatively to make it too easy for the player. But before I knew this, and I used Surf and it did almost no damage, I felt like the game was gaslighting me. Especially since it seemed like the AI's AOE moves were rupturing my ass every time. Go figure.
In the end, the strategy that won me the match, that I looked up on Reddit, was Minimize Alolan muk with Substitute and Shadow Sneak so that you can cheese and snipe kills from the AI. I was just bringing too many vulnerable pokemon prior to this, I guess, but this netted me the win so I could get the hell out of there.
1. Master Rank Ribbon
Title: Azure the Rank Master
We're finally here. The worst ribbon. This was so vile. I had been dreading this ribbon since the beginning because I hate online PVP. And for a time, it looked like I'd lucked out. Mew was not eligible for the Battle Stadium, as likewise the other mythicals, and so a lack of entry meant there was no requirement to do it, and that meant Azure would be a Ribbon Master with nothing left to obtain. And then Regulation J was announced in August 2025. This new regulation allowed the use of previously banned mythicals. Fuck.
I mean... Yay!! Agh. Well, in the run up to this regulation being announced, I had been bemoaning to my friends the way in which certain mythicals are banned from things like Battle Tower. The thing that bothers me particularly is that most of them just aren't very good, so there is little reason to ban them. Mew, for instance, is not good. It just has no place in the current meta because it has lackluster stats that don't excel over anything else that threatens it, and it has a useless ability that doesn't allow it to make use of its versatility. Mewtwo has a Hidden Ability in Unnerve, and mew has... nothing! Mew only has Synchronize. It should get Prankster, if you ask me. That could actually make it useful. Okay, whatever, I'm not here to complain about what could have been, I'm here to complain about what is, and what is, is a nightmare of epic proportion. No, I didn't really try to make serious use of mew in Regulation J. That just wasn't ever going to work.
Similar to the Battle Tower in Sword and Shield, the online Battle Stadium uses a rank system with a level of loss prevention. A level of. The ranks are Beginner, Poke Ball, Great Ball, Ultra Ball, and Master Ball. Once you go up a Ball tier, you can't fall out of it, but there are ranks within the tiers that you CAN fall out of. You can find yourself sliding all the way back down to the entry point on your tier and have to virtually start from scratch climbing your way back up. Yeah, well, I'm describing basic tiering systems now. But the unpredictability of PVP is what made this into the nightmare it ended up being. There was one match where it was the penultimate match before I would finally rank up to Master and be free. And then I lost. And not only did I lose, I kept losing and slid all the way back down to the beginning of Ultra.
Athis says, "If you are not very experienced with PvP or competitive Pokémon this will likely be a hard ribbon to obtain, but luckily ranked battles share the same rank system as the battle tower (explained above). That means that there is a level of loss protection involved, so with enough persistence you should be able to get it." ... very insightful stuff. Sure enough, there were enough persistant idiots in Ultra who tripped over their own balls to get there. I was one of them.
The meta for Regulation J is largely ghost-types and making plays to combat ghost-types. This is because the big players right now are calyrex-shadow and flutter mane. In addition, fairy-type is a powerful defensive and offensive type. The team that won me the most matches was Annihilape with Choice Scarf, Final Gambit, and Shadow Claw; Flutter Mane with Booster Energy, Thunder Wave, Taunt, Moonblast, and Shadow Ball; and Calyrex-Shadow OR Crowned Zacian in the back as a finisher. I call it the "Fuck You Ape" strategy. Annihilape with Choice Scarf could Final Gambit almost anything to death first turn, leaving the opponent having to make another choice about setup options.
This made me die so hard. I streamed the entire ordeal, and I had several people joke about how miserable it seemed because of how often they'd check in and I'd be yelling about something. It's true. Don't do this. But I put some good back into the world by giving people free rides to the ribbon for the rest of the month I remained in the tier once I had finally achieved Master Rank.
