Once again, I followed a speedrun. This one is especially interesting because I need to do all the post-game content, which requires having the National Dex, and therefore 60 caught Pokémon. The speedrun for this is incredibly cool and may have become my favourite one. Since the route depends on which pokémon you find, there's a lot of improvisation and thinking instead of just following some notes.
I followed this guide by Gunnermaniac which was so incredibly helpful. It's great that this resource is available to everyone. In the end I beat the postgame (minus Mewtwo and the Elite4 Round2) in 4h48, to their 3h09, which is great.
Also, fun fact, the exact day that I did this, the World Record for this category was broken by over a minute!
I left this game on pause for the weekend as I needed to trade my catcher pokémon to make things easier, and today I've finished catching everything. I thought I got lucky because the !-Unown appeared on the 5th encounter (with a 1% rate!) but then it took me one hour and a half to find the other one, which at ~2 encounters per minute is around double odds... never lucky
Anyway, here is everything from that game! As usual, everything is in regular pokéballs. There's the Oddish line (with gender differences), the Mankey line, Growlithe (I already had Arcanine from Let's Go), the Grimer line, two Scythers, two Unowns, and Mew.
And yeah, about Mew... I've ranted about this before. There was one option to get Mew from Kanto, in a pokéball, and with my OT, but that was like 7 years ago and it costed 60 euros. So I've settled for the next best option, which is getting an event distribution here. It's from Kanto and in a pokéball, but the OT is not mine. That's fine and I'll be counting it for the dex (it's happened with other mythicals), but if it is ever released again with my OT, I'll be sure to get it.
Before updating the tracker, I decided to play Leaf Green and quickly grab Sandshrew. This is fairly quick, as it can be found in Route 4, which takes around 30-40 minutes playing chill. I caught two of them to get all of Kanto out of my way.
So here's how things are standing at the moment! This is what I'm missing from gen 1: World Cap Pikachu: This was only distributed in Sword and Shield and unfortunately I missed it. Hopefully they distribute it again. Alolan Vulpix and Ninetales: I'll get them from Ultra Sun Hisuian Growlithe, Arcanine, Voltorb and Electrode: I'll get them from Legends Arceus Galarian Slowbro, Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres: I'll get them in the Sword DLC Paldean Tauros-water: I'll get it in Scarlet
Just like with Ruby, I am not sending them all up to Home since I'll wait to have the proper hardware when I meet with Raquel again. I've still updated the tracker though:
Origin: 1140/1391 Form: 1152/1391
It's interesting to see how the two dexes get ever closer, as I keep catching more pokémon!
I've enjoyed going back to gen 3 and replaying the games from my childhood, they are all great and timeless. Just one more thing before moving to more modern times...
I had already caught all four forms in Alpha Sapphire, but the way I did it never sat right with me. Three of them were caught in a master ball, and reloading a save right before its fight is kind of lame. So I have decided to redo this!
Deoxys was actually first introduced in FRLG. In gen 3, its form depended on which game it was in: Normal for Ruby/Sapphire, Attack in FireRed, Defence in LeafGreen and Speed in Emerald. So, since I had already caught it once in (Alpha) Sapphire... why not get it in each of the other three games? Especially since I've already played them!
In this generation, you need the Aurora ticket to go visit it, in Birth Island. Then, you have to solve a simple puzzle and you get to battle it. The odds are low but eventually it stays in the ball. I managed to catch it in FR, LG and Emerald!
The answer of course is cool as fuck! I used Arbitrary Code Execution, or ACE, to get the tickets. It's very easy to do, even if it looks scary! For Leaf Green, I had to advance in the story until I got to Celadon City, but that was pretty quick.
This is the best guide on how to set up ACE in FRLG, which abuses the mail glitch. For Emerald, I had already done this months ago when I was doing RNG manipulation there, and I followed this guide.
After obtaining a pokémon with a certain species number, you need to write certain characters to the PC boxes, and then activate the code and it will treat those characters as runnable code, letting you do pretty much whatever you want.
I only used this to get the ticket, obviously I'm not using it to make pokémon out of nowhere, only when it is strictly necessary.
So, that was a cool thing that made me visit Kanto and Hoenn for the last time! Now for real, we leave the GBA era behind and move to more modern games!
And now, we skip Sinnoh and go back to Unova. It's time to play Pokémon White!
I want to play the remaining games more or less in order, since this way I can re-use the catcher pokémon, and it will be more efficient after all.
However playing this game just a week after Pokémon Black made it a bit of a slog. The story is nice but this time it felt more repetitive, and although it didn't take me long to beat, I took a few irl days because I kept putting it off.
As usual for replays of a region/story, I followed a speedrun. There isn't really much in gen 5 in terms of speedrunning, but in the end I found this video from GDQ which has the "modern" route of using Stoutland as the main pokémon.
The older speedruns that use the fire pig don't work for me, I needed Snivy to be my starter in order to get Panpour gifted, which I was missing. The main reason to use Stoutland is because the battle start animation takes less time than Emboar, but in the end mine had Intimidate which activated all the time, lol.
Anyway, I beat the game in around 5 hours (I think? I'm not sure) to their 3:30h, but it's not comparable since starting after the 5th gym I was using high level pokémon to one shot everything.
Anyway, I caught everything I needed in this game! All the version exclusives (including Zekrom and Thundurus), which didn't take long since there were just a dozen.
There are also Panpour (gifted) and Archeops (fossil) that I was missing. At the end I bred to have two of each. As usual, they are all in pokéballs.
In this pic there is also Landorus, which can only be spawned in specific conditions. You need to have both Thundurus and Tornadus in your party, but since they are version exclusives, you need to transfer them. Also, one of them needs to have your trainer ID.
After all that, Landorus will spawn. Fortunately, it's not a roamer, but it was lvl70 and it's very strong, so it was 2-shotting my Gallade with Earthquake. In the end, I managed to capture it, first in White and then in Black, which is necessary as it has two forms. The therian form however, did not exist in BW1 so I'll change the forms later.
After all of this, I sent everything up to Pokémon Home. This time, I made sure to catch high level pokémon to avoid having to use many candies in evolving them (including a lvl50 Rufflet), and fortunately, I still had enough.
I also sent Keldeo to Pokémon Sword (which I got through the same event as Black, but in the other game), and taught it Secret Sword to change its form to Resolute.
Finally, I moved one of the two Landorus to Sword to change its form to Therian. And by the way, I'm happy about having done this since Landorus is pretty hard to get, and if they ever add it to Champions, chances are I'll want to use it.
- Hisuian Samurott, Lilligant, Basculin, Zorua, Zoroark and Braviary, which I'll get in Legends Arceus
- Tornadus and Thundurus Therian, which I'll get in the Dream Radar.
- Genesect, which I'll get from an event in BW2.
Pretty close to finished! Here is the updated tracker:
Origin: 1158/1391 Form: 1162/1391
Honestly, at this point I think I'll be dropping the second tracker because they have converged and are pretty much the same thing (which is good! It means I'm missing very few pokémon). I am also almost done with Unova which means the pre-Switch games are still progressing very well, even if I am struggling a bit to continue.
I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, my second-to-last older game is Pokémon X!
For this one, I don't need many things, since I caught most of gen 6 in Pokémon Z-A last year. However, I have to play the full story anyway since I have to catch Zygarde. In reality, I had to dedicate quite a few hours to this game, as you'll see soon.
Originally, my plan was to play normally, since I've never played the story of these games. However, I've played so much pokémon recently that I just couldn't do it, and I started following a speedrun after the first gym, this one. I am so tired right now that I decided to inject a lvl25 mega Gengar from an event that easily carried me through everything, which... yeah, whatever, it worked.
I don't think I missed much by doing this, the story isn't that good anyway, and the friends/rivals are also quite forgettable. In the end, I beat the game in 5h29 to the speedrun's 3h55.
So, after beating the story I went and caught Zygarde, with my trusty Gallade that I'm using in every game. I also caught two Pumpkaboos of each size, since they are easier to distinguish here than in Z-A. I didn't plan on catching the XL ones here since it's just a 1%, but... I had three of them appear before I got two of L size (which have a 10%).
After this, there was only thing remaining. And that is... shivers catching butterflies!
I need Vivillons of all 20 different patterns, since in ZA all Vivillons have the same one. Thing is, this pokémon works in a special way: all wild Vivillons you find will have the same pattern, and that depends on the country and region your 3DS is set to when creating the game! So if you want one of each, you have to repeat this process once per pattern: Go to 3DS settings and change region Open the game and restart it Play until route 3, catch a Scatterbug and drop it in the PC Go to 3DS setting and change the region back to Spain (otherwise Bank won't work) Open Pokémon Bank and deposit the Scatterbug
This is absolutely soul draining and takes over 20 minutes each time. Fortunately, the Geoguessr world cup is this week and I could watch it while doing it, which made it more bearable.
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