A Sense of Urgency

     The first goal of my pokédex quest is to try and get a special Magearna by collecting all the 151 original pokémon from Kanto before a month has elapsed since starting my Pokémon Home account.  I was looking on the cellphone app today, and I started twenty days ago.  I have a short ten days to play through Let's Go Eevee (which arrived yesterday and my kids are loving), and to beat the Elite Four of Black 2 and transfer over all the pokémon I need from Diamond.

     This urgent push has left me desperate, and maybe I'm doing things I normally wouldn't, like moving my clock forward this morning so it was dark in the game so I could evolve a Sneasel into a Weavile to help beat Iris, the champion.  Or uninstalling and reinstalling Pokémon Dream Radar so I could catch a bunch of pokémon all over again.  They say desperate times call for desperate measures.  

     So, I'm up to 59 of the original pokémon registered to home, and I'm scrambling to catch them all.

The Great Pokémon Quest update

     So, I'm currently in a mad scramble to beat the elite four in Pokémon Black 2, as that is currently the lynch pin in my process of updating all the way from the Gameboy Advance games all the way up to the Switch.  I've honestly been playing almost nonstop since Wednesday, and my wife has been a little upset, leading me to put playing on hold for Mother's Day, and just take a break.  Consequently, I'm feeling a lot of stiffness and soreness in my left thumb, which I did attribute to the gardening I spent some time on while i waited for my 3DS to charge, but again, my wife pointed out that this was a side effect of playing too long.

     All this mad gaming marathon happened because I had no idea where I was at in my original Black 2 save, and I hadn't picked up the game in probably six years.  Fun fact I learned when doing this, though, is that Game Freak put in safeguards against overwriting you game save in Black and White 2, so the game would let you start a new game from the menu, but you couldn't save it to the cartridge unless you had done a manual wipe of the last save.  It gave me instructions on how to do a manual wipe, but I had to lose four hours of gameplay just to do it.

     I also played around seven hours of FireRed, as well, to capture a single Zapdos, (Let's Go Eevee hasn't arrived yet, so I'm seeing if i can get Zapdos transferred before it arrives).  He was the only legendary bird of Kanto I didn't have already on a GBA title, or Diamond where I've been storing the bulk of my old collection.  I must have traded him at some point, because all of the old saves had him in their pokédexes, Zapdos just wasn't saved in any of their boxes.

Gotta Catch'em All! (Pokémon Shield)

     My son got me sucked back in to the world of Pokémon recently with the release of Pokémon Shield.  He's been really competitive about the game, and very proud of the fact he's already beaten the elite four and I just got past the first gym.  But since we have been on shelter-in-place, my son has had to continue to do his schooling, while I have been unemployed.  He has had to watch on in horror as I have been catching up.

     And just to rub salt in that wound, I've been trying to figure out how to get some of the more powerful pokémon into my roster on Shield, which led me down a dark path of discovery.  There I learned that through some serious pokémon voodoo, you can trade up pokémon all the way from Ruby and Sapphire into the Pokémon Home app, in turn making the compatible pokémon available in Sword and Shield.

     I've now committed myself to a terrible task I share with you all now.  I propose that by 2021 I will have traded my way into a complete pokédex.  To achieve my goal is going to take a large number of games and quite a few trades.  So here's the list of titles I'll be using to try and accomplish this mission:

1) Pokémon Ruby

2) Pokémon Sapphire

3) Pokémon Emerald

4) Pokémon FireRed

5) Pokémon LeafGreen

6) Pokémon Colosseum

7) Pokémon Colosseum Bonus Disc

8) Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness

9) Pokémon Diamond

10) Pokémon Black 2

11) Pokémon Y

12) Pokémon Ultra Sun

13) Pokémon Shield

     Also, I'll be procuring Pokémon Let's Go Eevee to help make this process easier.  I'm going to see if I can accomplish all of this with just these titles, but I may need to add more to facilitate a faster transfer of legendaries.  Wish me luck, and I'll try and update as frequent as I can.