FreshFeeling Gaming

Part 1 was an introduction, and part 2 was the tumultuous death and return of Pokémon in my life. For part 3, I'll be discussing what I've actually been doing so far this year, which is creating a pipeline of powerful pokes to pour into my kids' modern games - and my own. While I don't think this page is the place anyone would come for a guide, here's how you bring a from Generation III into a Switch-based Pokémon game. Or rather, here's how I'm doing it right now.

We're going to start with the Pokémon that I've been discussing most: Thor's Blastoise, a Gen III Weezing named Puffy, Thor's Mewtwo, F-Shady's Imbruglia, the MATTLE Ho-oh, Emeralts, and the Turtwig I just hatched on the Skyarrow Bridge who is named Young Stik.

As an early disclaimer: the transfer of Pokémon between the 3DS games and onward to Pokémon Home is in an odd state. The tools are official, free (mostly) and authorized but unless you have a 3DS that already downloaded Pokémon Bank and Pokémon Transporter prior to the 3DS service shutdown in April 2024, you can't access this on an unmodded 3DS. If you can still access the software by any means, the tools work. This can be a barrier to entry for some people new to this process.

It's also probably self-evident, and the games themselves provide ample warning, but any step that goes up a generation is generally a one-way transfer. Trading between Generation I and II doesn't always have this limitation, and Pokémon Home does allow transfer from Generation IX to Generation VIII with certain caveats.

Gen III - Start from a Cart: If it's from Pokémon Colosseum or Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, transfer it to a cartridge-based Generation III game that has trading unlocked. Some Generation III games required a certain level of completion to be able to trade with other games. This requires a GameCube-compatible link cable. I did this with F-Shady's Imbruglia and the MATTLE Ho-oh a long time ago.

Gen III to IV - Pal Park: Using a DS or DS Lite and a copy of a Generation IV game that has beaten the Elite Four and gained access to the Pal Park, put your GBA cartridge in the GBA slot. Pal Park works like it always has: select exactly 6 Pokémon from the storage in the GBA cartridge, then run around and catch them in different biome-themed areas. These aren't battles; you can't lose or fail, but it's smart to have a Pokémon with Surf for this since you need to catch all 6 Pokémon, including any that live in water, in order to finish the transfer. Once you've caught all 6, save the game. There is no in-game cost to using this, and there's also a minor prize of a berry each time you do it. Note that Pal Park can only be populated once per day on each Generation IV game. This transfer method does allow you to transfer items, including cloned items, from Generation III to Generation IV.

Thor's Blastoise, Puffy, Thor's Mewtwo, Imbruglia, the MATTLE Ho-oh and Emeralts migrate to the Pal Park.

Within Gen IV - Pokéwalker: I actually haven't tried using my Pokéwalker this year! I'll almost certainly have to replace the battery at the very least if I want to use it again. Luckily, the IR used for Pokéwalker is built into the HeartGold / SoulSilver cartridges so this will work in any model of DS. You can transfer from the Pokéwalker on the main menu of these games.

Gen IV to V - Poké Transfer: Using two DS-family systems (DS, DS Lite, DSi, 3DS, etc.) and a copy of a Generation V game that has obtained the National Pokédex, go to the Poké Transfer Lab on Route 15. Speak to the person there to attempt to use the Poké Transfer and select 6 Pokémon to transfer. Then, on the other DS, make sure it has the Generation IV game you want to transfer from, but don't start the game. Once the transfer is started, do DS Download Play to play a super annoying touchscreen-driven minigame. When you win, the Pokémon are transferred into boxes in the Generation V game. This will not transfer held items. The game is scored, and it is unfun enough that you would expect there to be prizes, but there aren't any.

Setting up the Poké Transfer, with the broken DS Lite with the Gen V game in it on the left, and the 3DS with the Gen IV game in it on the right.

This minigame basically sucks; the good news is that it's hard to lose.

Within Gen V – Dream Radar: While the Dream World no longer exists, you can still play Pokémon Dream Radar to catch several species of Pokémon with their hidden abilities. When you finish, you can send the results to Pokémon Black 2 or White 2, and receive them by selecting “Unova Link” on their main menu, and then “Nintendo 3DS Link”.

This game is both a bit more fun and a bit more rewarding than the Poké Transfer minigame.

Here, in addition to the seven Pokémon named above, we're adding an un-nicknamed Slowpoke, Porygon, Hoothoot, Igglybuff, and Munna who were all caught in Dream Balls and should have hidden abilities. If you like nicknaming Pokémon as much as I do, you should know that they can only be named by their OT from Black 2 or White 2 bringing them to the Name Rater in Castelia City.

At this point, we've got Thor's Blastoise, Puffy the Weezing, Thor's Mewtwo, Imbruglia, the MATTLE Ho-oh, Emeralts, Young Stik and our five new Dream Radar friends all in a single storage box, ready to transfer out of Pokémon Black 2.

Gen I, II or V to VI or VII - Poké Transporter: With either a Generation V game cartridge inserted OR any 3DS Virtual Console Generation I or II game, launch Poké Transporter. When you select one of these games, it will transport every Pokémon in Box 1 of that game (even if you've renamed that box, so be careful!) into a box in Pokémon Bank called “Transport Box”. To do this more than once, you have to access Pokémon Bank and empty all Pokémon from the Transport Box. I've intentionally made my original "Box 1" into my "Extras 1" box, starting my living dex in these games on the original "Box 3".

Moving Gen V Pokémon into Bank using Transporter, and then moving them out of the Transport Box in Bank.

The transfer from Generations I and II is really strange, because Pokémon stats and mechanics have changed a lot in that time (the biggest change was between Generations II and III). The stats of the transferred Pokémon get altered considerably; it's actually kind of neat how the Pokémon data structure has changed gradually over time in a way that each of these transfer processes has incrementally contributed to, but the Generation I → VII transfer does it in one, gigantic leap. Although all of the supported games will deposit these Pokémon into Pokémon Bank, unlike Pokémon transported from Generation V, the ones from Generation I and II are not compatible with Generation VI. Nothing will move from Generation I or II into Pokémon X, Y, Omega Ruby or Alpha Sapphire.

Gen VII and Older to Home: Pokémon Bank has an export to Pokémon Home feature built into it, as long as both instances are associated with the same Nintendo account (or maybe it's a Trainer Central account? I have trouble remembering the difference.). It works on a full-box basis, so move all the Pokémon you want to transfer forward into specific boxes and remember them so they can all be transferred. There are actually a few ways to do this: you can do a two-sided version of it using a key on your 3DS to specify which boxes to transfer, or if you don't have access to your 3DS it can be initiated on the Switch or mobile versions of the Pokémon Home app – but this will literally import your entire bank's contents at once rather than letting you specify which boxes to transfer. This latter option is faster and easier but not ideal if you're still actually using Pokémon Bank.

I happened to do this through the mobile version of Pokémon Home, but despite the startling lack of feature parity this is also entirely doable using the Nintendo Switch version. Unfortunately, this particular feature is not free! It is only available for subscription-paying users of Pokémon Home.

Pokémon GO to Home: This transfer is a little bit like the Poké Transporter in that it takes a specific, selected set of Pokémon from Pokémon GO and moves them to a temporary holding space that you have to empty manually. Once you've connected the accounts on your phone, you go to settings in Pokémon GO and select to transfer them to Home. After this completes, you get candy for each as if they were transferred to the professor, and then you need to finish the process by accessing Pokémon Home - you can't transfer again until you've received the previous batch. As soon as you open Pokémon Home, you get a notification saying, “One or more Pokémon have been transferred from Pokémon GO”, and then they get imported into successive blank spots in Home.

Despite the gigantic logos suggesting the opposite, the first two images here are from Pokémon GO and the last one is from the mobile version of Pokémon Home.

Unlike the transfer from Bank, this works just fine with the unpaid version of Pokémon Home. It's free, from both the Pokémon Home end and the Pokémon GO end. However, the unpaid version of Home only has one box with 30 spaces. Right now the paid version has 200 boxes, or 6000 spaces; there's no option between 30 and 6000, which I think is pretty funny.

Pokémon GO to Let's Go: There's a foible of Pokémon: Let's Go, which I guess is considered a Generation VII game, in that Pokémon from Pokémon Home can only be returned to Let's Go if they are originally from a Let's Go game. Thus, it's sometimes beneficial to transfer from GO to Let's Go instead of doing the much easier transfer from GO to Home (since that makes these Pokémon unusable in Let's Go). This is a direct connection between your Pokémon GO app and account and your Pokémon Let's Go save file that can be used at the GO Park in Fuchsia City.

There's also a bit of setup for this transfer, but the in-game guide works pretty well for it. The official web-based resources are slightly out-of-date right now, where the menus in Pokémon GO have clearly changed over time. As well, it wasn't immediately apparent to me that the way you start the transfer is by clicking the little Nintendo Switch icon at the top-right of the Pokémon list view. In brief, on both your phone and your Switch game, there's a "setup" you need to do and then the "transfer", but these closely-related and interdependent features aren't in the same place on either piece of software - so you'll be muddling through menus a little bit. But it's really not that bad.

Getting these Pokémon in the GO Park requires re-catching your own Pokémon with your own berries and balls, unlike the Pal Park and other transfer mechanisms which don't consume in-game resources. Frankly, this is a bit annoying in a game with relatively slow and limited cashflow, but it was the best way for me to get things like Alolan forms and some of the version exclusives. The game also isn't particularly balanced around the Pokémon from GO; it's not uncommon that they come with such high CP that you could spend a dozen Ultra Balls catching something relatively ordinary. This Nidorina and Vileplume weren't too bad, though.

Pokémon from Pokémon GO that are moved into Let's Go can then be traded via Pokémon Home's GTS to other Let's Go players.

Home to Modern Games: As of right now, Pokémon Home will allow you to move Pokémon to and from Pokémon: Let's Go (although only Let's Go-originating Pokémon can move into it) and every Generation VIII and Generation IX game. That said, modern Pokémon games don't have models for every Pokémon ever so many of them can't be used in every game. There are also a lot of unsupported moves in the more modern games, so Pokémon's moves tend to get altered considerably if you swap them between games – usually to their default learned moves for their levels. (The last generation with a completely playable National Dex was VII.)

Transferring between Home and Let's Go, Pikachu!
The red slashed circle icon indicates that Pokémon can't be transferred to this game, in this case because they don't originate from Let's Go.

Besides breaking out the Pokéwalker again, I've been doing all of these things this year. There's a continuous transfer path from Gen III → IV → V → Bank (VI/VII) → Home (VIII/IX), and another from Gen I & II → Bank (VII) → Home (VIII/IX). It is… rather time-consuming! And it may require a lot of hardware.

There are a few nice infographics floating around lately related to how Pokémon can be transferred among games and related systems now… where the thing that worries me is how it'll be impacted when Nintendo chooses to end the Pokémon Bank service. Given the recent Switch ports of FireRed and LeafGreen I worry that could be fairly imminent. Everyone ought to take care with these infographics since they tend to require updates at least once per year.

This infographic is still pretty accurate from CengizMan on Reddit in 2024.

I did start playing Pokémon GO with more-or-less daily regularity as of late December, and I still have my living dexes (and the breeding capacity that comes with that) in Pokémon Diamond, Platinum, HeartGold, White, Black 2, and Y. But I couldn't tell my kids that I could get them any cloneable or breedable Pokémon they want in this state, right? I had still never beaten my copies of Pokémon Omega Ruby, Pokémon Sun, or Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!

Beating Sun

It felt like I should do these in order. I tried to play Pokémon Omega Ruby, but then I found that although I could see the Pokémon from that game in Pokémon Home, the game wouldn't run. Pokémon Sun worked, though. I picked up my save from literally Alola Route 1 and beat it including Alola's regional dex and most of a living national dex by the end of February. The only real barrier was a Drampa requiring a trade from Moon/Ultra Moon, and at the time this was my only Generation VII game, so I had to find someone to do this. Even this still left me with a small number of gaps that made me think I should finish Omega Ruby first.

Beating Omega Ruby

Omega Ruby still wasn't working. I found out that there's a certain generation of 3DS games – a few titles in particular – really prone to developing read errors. Oddly, this experience of Pokémon Bank still being able to access stored Pokémon while the game won't run by any means is pretty well known. I tried a lot of cleaning and alternative fixes that my modded 3DS made possible, even letting the 3DS Cartridge Fixer Tool run for (I'm not kidding) ten full days. Nothing was working. Eventually, I decided to get a digital copy of Omega Ruby (which I legitimately owned but could not play) by other means. Despite substantial effort, I couldn't figure out a way to salvage my existing save data, so I used Pokémon Bank to transfer every single Pokémon I had caught in my original playthrough to a brand new playthrough. I then beat Omega Ruby end-to-end in March and early April, including a finished living dex. Starting with a ton of partly-trained Pokémon from the prior playthrough and even transferred from other games made this rather easy.

Beating Let's Go, Pikachu!

In between playing the 3DS games, every so often I have been going back to Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!, and the two-player mode means I can play that with my kids. My oldest son, Wyldstar, joined me for catching Zapdos and we had a heck of a time with it. My son had an experience of Zapdos being a jerk to catch with me in Let's Go and Articuno being a jerk to catch in GO; Moltres is the only bird that has not wronged him (...yet?). He has insisted he wants to be there with me when I eventually do Articuno and Moltres. This has sort of stalled my progress with 6 badges, but I've had lots of opportunity to use the GO Park to such an extent that I've nearly completed that living dex, too.

This is sort of like a "living dex". Missing some birds!

I still need to finish this one, but it ought to be quick if I can concentrate.

Beating Pokémon Yellow

To fill out the last bits of my living dex in Pokémon Sun (and maybe other future games), I thought I should have an endgame save in Generation I and II on my 3DS. As of this writing, I am 4 badges into Pokémon Yellow. I've never actually played a Pokémon game this old, and it's... not my favourite. But it is for the greater good!

The Future

Pretty soon, I'll be done this backlog of games from Generations I-VII! The problem, of course, is that now that my kids are into Pokémon the collection keeps growing. We recently got Pokémon Legends: Arceus as well as Pokémon Violet's DLC. We'll almost certainly end up with Pokémon Legends: Z-A before the new one comes out next year, too.

My goal, I guess, is to have a reasonably complete living dex for all the games I own! I've just got, like, 3 or 4 more to go. Then I can start acting like a normal person and play a Final Fantasy game.

Back when World of Warcraft was very mainstream, I had three close friends playing it regularly. I used to make fun of them, because I found it so silly that they had commitments to the game and their fellow players where I told them playing WoW was like having a second job but you paid to work. From my outsider perspective, it really felt that way. Well, sometimes when I'm playing Pokémon in such a goal-oriented way with so much repetition, I'm sure it comes across more like duty or… addiction. However, it's not an embellishment that I have a great deal of fun catching, breeding and levelling up these little idiots – even better when friends and family are part of the experience. I haven't really discussed that, but besides my kids it's come to light that several of my colleagues from work are also big Pokémon fans and we've had a lot to talk about.

Even my older friends are still pretty interested! I recently offered Thorassic to give him back his Blastoise, Mewtwo, etc. from ~18 years ago.

We made it! All present in Pokémon Home:
Thor's Blastoise, Puffy the Weezing, Thor's Mewtwo, Imbruglia the Lugia, the MATTLE Ho-oh, Emeralts the Gardevoir, Young Stik the Turtwig, and the five new friends from Dream Radar.

He wasn't interested. :(

Well, it's been nearly four months with no posts, which is pretty unusual for me! While it's not uncommon for me to go four months without streaming, generally there's some kind of weird gaming I can document or something. That's not really the case this time.

Instead, the reason that I haven't updated at all is Pokémon! I sort of foreshadowed this in my Year in Review for 2025 post. One of my children bought Pokémon Violet in November 2025, and then we didn't get a lot of brand new games until near the end of last year's Christmas season. Consequently, during all of our time off, suddenly all of my kids were playing Pokémon Violet and even other Pokémon games. One of my sons had also been playing GBA Pokémon games on their Miyoo Mini.

With the renewed interest in Pokémon games all around me, I said to my kids, "I'm pretty sure I can clone legendaries in Emerald and transfer them into the modern games, if you were interested..." - and they were. Suddenly, I was cloning in Generation III, breeding in Generations IV and V, trying to recover save data in Generation VI, and even newly playing Pokémon GO, all at once!

My First Pokémon Game

I am pretty sure the day I bought my DS Lite with Pokémon Diamond as my first Pokémon game was July 29th, 2007. I had a week's vacation in the mid-summer at the same time as a close friend. We were going away to a cottage at a beach, but I thought I should have a fun, new gaming option in case there were rainy days. When I bought my DS Lite, my friend bought herself a DS Lite and Pokémon Pearl at the same time.

My first starter was Turtwig, and my friend's first starter was Chimchar. She named her Chimchar "Turkey" which I found funny just because it's quite literally not, and this is oddly memorable to me, moreso than my own first Turtwig's name, which was Stikdawg.

Catching ‘Em All – Generation IV Part 1

I understood that there was some kind of imperative that I gotta catch 'em all, so I decided to do that. Prior to the release of Platinum, HeartGold, and SoulSilver this was quite a daunting task! It would require getting multiple GBA games, and either using DS features to access new post-game Pokémon or importing directly from those games. Well… in for a penny, in for a pound.

The second game I got was LeafGreen. I enjoyed that a lot, too, and used its dongle features and imports to fill out my original Pokémon Diamond dex considerably. As well, I had a couple of friends who had either FireRed or LeafGreen, so we did a lot of trading between those to fill gaps in both. This included my friend Thorassic's original starter Blastoise and his Mewtwo, among others. The images here are dated a little bit later, and that's for a reason that'll be discussed shortly.

Next, I got a used copy of Pokémon Colosseum. While it’s a different style of game, and it plays really slowly in general, I found the battles quite a bit more strategic and engaging than the other games I had played to date, and the tension of needing to catch shadow Pokémon as the only source of new allies was actually really exciting. I’m honestly confused that the Pokémon games never really returned to this format more recently, since the battles in the GameCube titles felt like they had the highest stakes in the series. The animations in this game honestly still kind of impress me a bit; I don’t find the more modern 3D games to have distantly better battle animations and the different Pokémon species show a ton of personality. The developers were really clever with the way the camera would cut. It’s quite a cool game.

Anyway… I took purified shadow Pokémon from Colosseum, traded them into LeafGreen, and moved some of those forward into Diamond. This included the MATTLE Ho-oh that you could earn by completing Mt. Battle.

That, unfortunately, still left gaps in my Pokédex. I didn’t have a source for some of the Generation III Pokémon – notably the legendaries. To fill the gaps, the next game I got was Pokémon Emerald (which wasn't so hideously expensive in 2007-2008). To date, I've never actually played Ruby or Sapphire myself, and I don't feel bad about that: Emerald is an excellent third version. I had already seen Sapphire in those TASes, but Emerald remixed the original games enough to keep things interesting for me. And it was!

Gotta Clone ‘Em All

Partway through completing Pokémon Emerald - during this phase in my life in which I spent tons of time in my overnight desk job perusing Bulbapedia and Serebii - I learned about the Battle Tower cloning glitch. I wanted to beeline completion of Pokémon Emerald with urgency so that I could make use of this. This resulted in one of my favorite Pokémon gameplay memories: the tale of Emeralts the Gardevoir more-or-less soloing Hoenn's Elite 4 below level 50. It really was epic although I have to admit I probably had to load saves several times to do it. Emeralts would go into each fight and use Double Team 6 times, then Calm Mind 6 times, and then sweep with Psychic. It took some attempts, but probably not as many as you might think! It was awesome. Of course, there are some dark-types in Hoenn's Elite 4, but Future Sight being indirect as it is allowed Emeralts to blow through them, too.

Once I got access to the Battle Frontier in Emerald, I could clone various legendaries from LeafGreen, FireRed, Colosseum and Emerald at will, transfer them into Pokémon Diamond, and put them on the GTS to essentially get whatever I wanted – as long as I had seen it. I even got a Mew from Hayley in My Pokémon Ranch.

This cloning technique is why I had differently-dated Pokémon from Thor in FireRed and a differently-dated Emeralts. I had different copies of the same unique or fully-evolved Pokémon and I imported them into various games over time. Some games discard certain information about the original games when Pokémon are moved between them, and in the case of these screenshots from Generation IV games, they use the dates the Pokémon were received.

The only real problem here? Lugia.
Would you believe I bought Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness expressly for the purpose of getting and purifying shadow Lugia? Cuz I did. I didn’t like Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness nearly as much as Pokémon Colosseum. Given that the battle system is essentially the same, it’s hard to say why that is, but the main character looks like a dork instead of Colosseum’s action hero, Wes. Wes starting with a paired Espeon and Umbreon adds further coolness points. I muddled through Gale of Darkness anyway and got the Lugia. For some reason, I named it Imbruglia, a choice that haunts me today as every Lugia I've cloned out of Emerald into modern games is still called that. You might even say I'm torn about that choice.

I’ll also say: I had already transferred my MATTLE Ho-oh from Colosseum from LeafGreen into Diamond, so to have a Ho-oh to clone in Emerald I actually completed Pokémon Colosseum end-to-end a second time. If everything in that game moved 50% faster it might be my favourite, so I didn’t mind too much.

Given my access to Emerald’s Battle Tower cloning glitch, I went ahead and made sure every that every cartridge had a copy of every full-evolved Pokémon and every legendary. Although, actually, I still don’t have a Generation III Latias because I stupidly picked “blue” in Emerald and among our friend group somebody transferred the Latias from Sapphire to a newer game.

I wish I had better means to capture this, but at least for now I don't.
Note the extra Blastoise, Weezing, Mewtwo, Lugia, Ho-oh, and Gardevoir.

With every evolutionary line through Generation III available, I then mass-bred Pokémon, mostly in Sinnoh's Solaceon area (it is cozy), and completed a "living dex" in LeafGreen, Diamond, and my eventual used copy of Platinum.

In some cases, I would just pass rarities like Mew and Manaphy around among games since I could get one off the GTS as long as I had seen it once. The mythicals I had were very gradual and probably not fully legitimate, although they were traded to me, so who knows? Personally, I find no problem with less-legitimate means to get things that are fully inaccessible in the games anyway. I guess we all draw our own lines on that... but let's recognize this is a blog full of romhacks and cheats and stuff. Very little of what's here is "pure", but there are always rules.

As the song had demanded, I caught 'em all... again, and again, and again.

Catching 'Em All - Generation IV Part 2

By the time Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver were released in North America in 2010, I pretty well had access to whatever Pokémon I wanted, but I still played my copy of HeartGold to full completion and did another living dex there. Despite having easy means to slowly chip away at the Pokédex completion, I instead embraced all the new and interesting ways to catch cross-generational Pokémon, like the customizable Safari Zone. I also really enjoyed the Pokéwalker feature and used that a lot myself, and also enjoyed attaching it to my niece and nephews when I was feeling lazy.

I played a lot of Pokémon in the years of 2007-2010. In those years, I was a young adult with few responsibilities. 2010, however, is the year that I met my now-wife… so, to end all forebodingly: that’s the end of part 1.

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