Today’s game is some more Pokemon Emerald. I’ve been working on the Pokédex the last few days. And when I say working on it I mean really working on it. I’m trying to assemble a living Dex which is my main goal. It’s an interesting challenge, since I sometimes have to catch double. The roaming legendaries have been fun too. I found Latias today for example. I just bumped into it while trying to hatch eggs.
I also bumped into Steven in Meteor Falls. I had no idea you could find him here so that was a pleasant surprise.
That’s something I really like about these older games. I like the open style of the newer games, but with these more narrow style games It feels like it makes more nook’s and crannies to search. Kind of a little more rewarding for snooping around.
So far today has just been catching and breeding. That’s probably what tomorrow will be too just so I can finish it up. Then back them up and figure out what I’m gonna do next this hunt has been a lot of fun. My last complete Dex was Shield, and this feels like a challenge in comparison. It’s like comparing Halo 2 Legendary to Halo 3. Halo 2’s was difficult but so satisfying to do. This game’s Pokédex is similar.
Anyways, so my game-plan for tomorrow is fill out Dex hopefully and pick out another game.
I remember trying to get my living Dex sent over to gen 4 via the pal park. It was before heartgold and soul silver, so 6 pokemon a day. I’d do things like get middle stage Pokémon ready to evolve by getting them one level away, or holding the stone they need, etc, then as soon as I got them in Platinum, I could evolve them immediately and go get an egg. Called it “compressing” them, because the pal park was such a bottleneck, it was easier to rebreed them. Level 31 bulbasaur, for instance, send it, get it to 32 for a venusaur, get two eggs, hatch them, get one of those bulbasaur to evolve into ivysaur, so then I could store the proper living Dex trio in gen 4. Good times.
Back on Gen 6 I organically filled a full dex (721 mons at the time) through a combination of Pearl, Black, X and Alpha Sapphire, with occasional exchanges with my sister who had the counterpart games. Also a few spin-off exports like Pokémon Ranger and Ranch.
At that time there was a distribution for the mythical pokémon too, so with all that I had everything.
After that I played through Gen 7 (Moon and Ultra Sun), and then completely lost interest when I learned the next gen wouldn’t even let you use mons that are not in its regional dex (and then the reports of terrible performance. 3DS was already barely tolerable).
Of all I played, I’d say the most fun were Gen 5 (Black) and Alpha Sapphire. Pearl felt like a chore.
Every time I played a Pokemon game throughout the years, I thought “This time I’m going to fill the dex!” But there was always some you just couldn’t reasonably get so I always gave up. Big disappointment, it’s really the reason I didn’t play the last few.
It’s impressive you managed it in Gen 6.
It was just me being very stubborn really.
Technically I went a bit further since I got full Sun/Moon dex next (though if I remember correctly not Ultra, I was missing one or two of the new Ultra Beasts).
It probably was just the right time really. The DS gens (4-5) are forever compatible because they just need local wifi to transfer. But 5 to 6 (and 6 to 7) need the pokémon bank and thus 3ds e-shop. I am not sure, but unless there is a third party way to do this, I believe that DS-3DS link would be broken today. And it’s probably too late to transfer them to Switch through… Pokémon Home? I think? Is that still a thing?
And I did that right on time for that mythical pokémon distribution, because even in the past games they were only distributed in time-limited events. So I’d have no other way to get most of these.
Except for Mew. Pokémon Ranch on the wii had a way to get a Mew if you had Diamond/Pearl and transferred ONE FREAKING THOUSAND POKÉMON from it. So, of course I did it, like an idiot.
By catching double, do you mean you have one of each final evolution, or that you have one of the entire evolution line? So for example, do you own a Beautifly and Dustox, or do you own a Wurmple, Silcoon, Cascoon, Beautifly, and Dustox? I’ve heard of people doing the latter, but that sounds like a pain in the ass even for me lol.
Gardevoir has a decent level.
