My Pokémon Journey Part 1: 2007-2010

[freshfeeling]

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!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I ought to start at the beginning.

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While there's a personal beginning, I'll start by saying Pokémon came into existence when I was a young adolescent, and I was in my mid-20s the first time I ever played a Pokémon game. I had been a Nintendo Power kid, subscribing first between 1991 and 1995 or so, and then doing another little stint to support a kid's fundraiser around 2008. I was somewhat aware of Pokémon in the public consciousness but I associated it with bad animation, repetitiveness, "kiddiness", and the predatory nature of mass media. Naturally, I opposed this as part of the establishment during my edgy teenage years, and never really paid Pokémon any attention at all for a long time. I legitimately didn't even realize it was an RPG!

I don't know what it was about the year 2007 that changed this for me. I think it may have been that this was the era when I was enraptured by TASes, and seeing the early Pokémon Sapphire runs by kirbymuncher and FractalFusion opened the eyes to the style of gameplay and the interesting mechanics in the background.

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.

At the time, I said something like, "If you're going to call your monkey 'Turkey', what are you going to call your eventual turkey?". Eventually - a couple days into playing - we did the thing where one of us (her) reset the game 5 times so that we each started with a full starter trio. Eventually, I got a Chimchar from her named "Donkey" - like a continuation of the "animals that end in 'key' that are not 'monkey'" phenomenon. Donkey was also a core part of my first team.

Though in modern times I hear a lot of complaint about Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, mostly about the weird Pokédex where there’s basically a single fire type in the whole game, I still really enjoyed playing it. It was also really fun having a close friend playing the game and being able to trade and discuss.

The game also had pretty good online features, like GTS and online trading. I’ve got a specific memory of doing a trade with an online-only acquaintance I’d known for over 10 years and never spoken with. I had the volume off on my DS, and didn’t realize that when you did online trades, your DS’ mic automatically goes live and your sound transmits to the other person. I had been idly singing to myself as we traded and didn’t know at all that they were hearing me sing! It was quite a shock getting IRC messages about my singing afterward. While it was unintentional, this was effectively the first game I ever played with voice chat.

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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