gotta catch 'em all!

i remember playing this for SUCH a long time because for some reason, my dumb ass thought i had to try and complete all the requests posted at the post office. girl. those are never ending. just do the story events. i'm pretty sure i got bored of the game BECAUSE i was getting tired of the side quests LMAO.

i'm not sure i like a dungeon crawler game, but i did like seeing a world where all the pokemon had their own little community and talked to each other like people!

this was the first mainline game i actually made some progress in! i had fun really exploring the world i'd already seen various interpretations of (in manga, anime, fanwork, etc) for the first time by myself and experiencing the trainer's journey.

however, because i was like, 10, i had no sense of strategy (the idea that i know anything about strategy now is up for debate as well) and very little patience for the grind of training my pokemon. it's a wonder i made it though all eight gym leaders with my very arbitrarily-picked and poorly-trained team, lol.

i got bored fighting all the trainers on victory road and stopped before i could face off with the elite four. based on my experience playing bdsp years later, i don't know if i could have even survived with my childhood diamond team so maybe that was for the best.

actually, i was bad at a lot of the side gimmicks of the game too... poffin-making, contests, finding gems... still it was fun! all i wanted was to have my own team and run around, and i finally had that.

FAVORITE ENCOUNTERS

• pokemon: roselia! my favorite color was purple then, so i was particularly enamored by shiny roselia. i only ever caught the normal ones though – i'm no shiny hunter now, so i was hardly one when i was ten years old lol
• character: man, i don't know. i guess i kind of liked barry? no one really stood out to me as a kid.
• area: hearthome city – i loved that you could walk around with your pokemon! this area's atmosphere made such an impression on me that i made it my gym leader OC milly's hometown.

i bought pokemon sun in 2019 – very very late to the game, lol! i started playing as soon as i bought the game, but i was busy with college + lots of other interests, so it kind of fell by the wayside.

but this was the first game i bought that... wasn't pirated, lmao... so i was very excited to start trading! i remember posting on my school facebook group's page asking for someone to help me evolve my haunter in exchange for buying their groceries. i'd loved gengar forever, so this was a big deal. we made the exchange and it was everything i ever wanted.

when the pandemic hit, i picked it back up again for real, and played it through to the end! it was my first ever completed pokemon game, which reassured me that future pokemon games were a good investment because i could actually complete them.

(sidebar: i just found an old tweet in my archives that said i let my brother battled the final kahuna for me LOL... i think i stopped at moments like this bc i didn't want the game to end and he was like "that's ridiculous give me that")

FAVORITE ENCOUNTERS

• pokemon: shellder... this was the game when i fell in love with him.
• character: ALOLAN GRIMSLEY, oh my god. i never knew him before this game (i didn't play BW) but i saw his sad sunken eyes and immediately wanted him. also nanu!
• area: route 15, where you meet grimsley. seriously he changed my life

shield has a special place in my heart. while sun was the first one i actually completed, shield is the first one i completed in essentially one sitting, without huge breaks between!

it gets a lot of crit for being kind of lame, but i think it was the perfect reentry for me into playing pokemon. it had lots of things that appealed to me! i liked the dex and how it had so many pokemon i thought were both cute and strong – it was the first time i got to have a gallade on my team. the overworld pokemon in the wild made the world more real to me, which i love. there weren't too many side gimmicks and it was super straightforward, but i liked that, as someone who doesn't really maximize minigames.

and the characters! after not vibing with the rivals in SuMo (sorry), i was so delighted by how much i loved hop, marnie, and bede. i thought all the gym leaders were so cute and fun. i'm pretty sure the character fanart was what got me to buy the game, because i was so curious about piers and raihan and all the gym leaders' dynamics. i'm glad that the Acacia MV highlights swsh's set of gym leaders.

i loved the camping feature, and while i was sad to not be able to pet my babies in this one, i loved that you could play with them and watch them interact with each other. to me pokemon is about the experience of raising pokemon and growing with them over the course of the game!!!! so even if it was kind of a nothing story, my experience of the game was a really special one, and helped me reimmerse in a franchise i always loved.

FAVORITE ENCOUNTERS

• pokemon: inteleon. i guess you don't encounter him so much as raise him, but he's my answer! i've never loved a starter's final form more.
• character: PIERS, although i actually really like all the characters in this game, i cannot say this enough
• area: the wild area! it was just fun to roam around. i spent my first night playing the game just catching a whole bunch of ralts lol.

i generally hate a gacha game, but i heard piers was going to be added to it so i got it lmfao. i really only played the story and did everything else to get gems to roll for characters with (i wasn't gonna spend real money). after acquiring piers and then the two grimsleys, i was mostly over it. (although i did really like lear, who only shows up in this game, i believe.)

they later added grimsley in his alola fit (MY FAVORITE GRIMSLEY, the miserable one), so i went and nabbed him too before deleting the game again. i think grusha was added recently as well... i'm not sure if i care enough to redownload it yet again just to roll for him though. nothing about the game itself speaks to me and i don't think i even really know how to play it, still.

FAVORITES

• sync pair: piers and obstagoon. i know i got it for them, but they ended up being really useful supports lol
• character: i mean everyone is there, so i'm going to go with a character who is only in this game - lear! i love the bratty sadstuck backstory prince.

my siblings and i bought a regular switch (as opposed to the lite that i'd been playing on) and i took the opportunity to get a game that would be great to play on the big screen!

i am really not good at this game. my hand eye coordination sucks, and i always forget which buttons do what action, so i end up bonking the pokemon with fruit when i don't mean to. still, i really love it. i loveee when pokemon does stuff like this, makes the creatures seem real by showing them in the world doing regular creature shit. it's so nice to see!

i wish they'd include more pokemon though. what i wouldn't give to see shellder at the beach. (i know he's in the original game, but i didn't play that one!)

FAVORITE ENCOUNTERS

• pokemon: scorbunny! he is such a good boy
• character: who cares about the human characters in pokemon snap...
• area: the sea one. it was super cool to explore underwater!

this game was pretty much a 1:1 replica of the original game with some QoL enhancements, wasn't it? that was something lots of people complained about, and like, i wasn't fond of the graphics either lmao. BUT i think it's a great game for:

a) young players who want to experience old titles in the main game series, but don't have the consoles or game cards or piracy skills; or

b) me, someone who has those things but no longer has the patience to grind and use HM slaves on the original game lol.

for that reason i enjoyed completing BDSP! it was nice to re-experience the world and actually remember it as a person with a functional brain and understanding of games. i don't know if i would play it again, but i'm glad it let me redeem my 10-year-old self and give her some closure.

FAVORITE ENCOUNTERS

• pokemon: scizor, oh my god. i worked so hard to find a metal coat to evolve my scyther into this handsome boy!
• character: SATURN. i have a crush on him. i also thought riley was cute, but doesn't everyone?
• area: THE GRAND UNDERGROUND. i was so bad at this when i played diamond, but thankfully i played bdsp at the ripe old age of 24 and understood what to do. i also learned that mining with other players yielded better results, and spent an hour or so with a stranger who was down to mine together silently, communicating only by waiting for each other to catch up while walking to a new area to mine. very heartwarming... i hope she is well

honestly probably my favorite pokemon game, gameplay-wise! I LOVED IT. it was so refreshing, and i still come back to it every now and then to try and fill up my pokedex. i love how many ways you can learn more about the pokemon and fill out the dex - so apt.

i liked seeing a different perspective on a world we'd become so familiar with. pokemon portrayed as hostile to humans, variations of pokemon that used to exist but no longer in modern day... i'm not a lore person so everything about almighty sinnoh kind of went in one ear and out the other, but i am a passage of time person. talking to the characters in the moment and realizing they're long gone in the events of pokemon diamond, seeing the rugged areas that eventually become cities in sinnoh... it makes me feel lots of things!

FAVORITE ENCOUNTERS

• pokemon: hisuian zorua. his sad sad lore, and cute downturned eyes, and mouthless face... that's my baby. he's my runner-up favorite pokemon for sure.
• character: volo, by far. love a fucked-up guy
• area: there's some ruins in i think the highlands where you can find a bunch of ralts just milling about. i also like the secluded, flowery area where you can find clefairy.

i was just as wary as everyone else about this game in the beginning, but turned out to enjoy it a lot! i was less concerned with the quality than i was with how ambitious it was – as someone who gets overwhelmed by side gimmicks, i was nervous i wouldn't like how big team star's & arven's quests were, alongside the gym battles. but once i was in it, i found it not to be overwhelming after all, and really liked how much there was to do.

the characters were cute (though, imo, not as cute or cohesive as swsh's, but not like the game needs them to be) and the penny-nemona-arven squad is charmingly mismatched in a way that feels real. but in this game i focused a lot more on my team! i don't think i've ever had as big a rotating team as i had in violet, because the dex was so good. i was finally able to assemble my hot boy squad, and this dex was the first i ever completed! (before the DLC)

the DLC was a game changer for me. i didn't expect to be so enamored by kieran, although he fit my type well enough LOL. i think that's when i realized that this was the first game where i felt the player character could be anyone you wanted them to be – i'd always thought of my player character in previous games as variations of dawn or gloria or whoever the designated protag was, and not me or some OC, but in SV it felt like my own gal, and that was fun. it let me come up with fun variations of the canon, and my favorite thing about pokemon is the sandbox environment for fun thought / creative exercises, so i appreciated that about SV.

FAVORITE ENCOUNTERS

• pokemon: charcadet and ceruledge!! pokemon's still got it (the ability to make a hot humanoid creature)
• character: kieran, closely followed by grusha. i really liked carmine and rika too... and who could forget larry
• area: suddenly i am forgetting the entire game. oh, i liked the bamboo forest near eri's challenge.

in the spirit of redeeming my past self and getting closure on games i never finished, i tried mystery dungeon again!

a friend from work lent me his copy of the game and i've been playing it, trying not to do as many unnecessary side quests after learning from my first mystery dungeon. i can never really tell though if i'm adequately prepared for a main quest, so i still end up doing quite a few side ones to practice...?

for this reason i've not been able to finish the game or continue it... i think i'm at a standstill. i don't know if i'm really into this sort of game anyway so i might just return the copy. i wanted to like it though!

NOTABLE POKEMON

• who i got: torchic - the sassy type. (by the way, the description for this type is much meaner than everyone else's, i think??? it was upsetting to read lmao...)
• who i chose to be: squirtle, my OG.
• my partner: charmander!

i thought this app would fix my sleep but it did not, lol. still, it was nice when i was on it! it was always nice to wake up and see which pokemon you attracted while snoozing. i just don't think it was worth keeping my phone working so hard overnight.

NOTABLE POKEMON

• bestie: squirtle! i had two, and evolved one into a wartortle. i think i planned to keep the other one a squirtle, for cuteness.
• favorite: riolu - i was so proud to get him.
• special: i got a shiny gulpin!