Today’s game is Pokemon Emerald. I’ve been kind of wanting to play through this ever since I saw FRLG were getting released. I have nostalgia for this one because it was my first Pokemon game. I didn’t grow up with it being my generations Pokemon, but I remember loading it onto an emulator on my old phone, and having to speed run it under a week in Middleschool. I had an iPhone then, and if I didn’t speed through then the “certificate” would expire and id be stuck without and my save gone.
Anyways, because of that I’ve played this game so many times. It’s one of my favorite of the old generation of games, and setting it up under an emulator helped breathe some new life into it. I had wanted to pick up a GBA and a Flash Cart and play it that way, but I got a little impatient so this works too.
There’s not much to show in games like this, so I’ll just say that I made it past the 3rd Gym. Younger me would be proud seeing this kind of progress in one day. But because of this lack of interesting stuff today will be a bit shorter with less pictures and more talking.
Now that I’m not on a timer, I want to fill out the Pokédex. It’s been a goal I’ve been working on in the background to fill out the National Dex in Pokemon Home with all the Native Pokemon from their respective regions. I’m doing this by using a modded 3DS to transfer it all up, hopefully before the Pokemon Bank servers shut down. So far I have Platinum, Black and White, and I had started XY (But gave up as something bothers me about them so I’ll come back later)
I also enabled Retro Achievements which makes this more fun. It’s like having a checklist to full 100% which is a fun experience. I just wish there was 3DS integration so I could play that way and make it truly portable. I’ll take what I can get though as this is fun. I ended off my night just by looking at the page to see what all so I can do.
I’ve never touched actually Red and Crystal. I plan too at some point but those generations I’ve never been big on. I almost considered the rereleases because I know my friends would probably shell out the 20$, and having friend to play with would almost justify it for me and motivate me to play it. But I just couldn’t justify the purchase to myself (plus I found out all my friends that are still local are passing on it). Maybe if it ever goes on sale for cheaper, but being digital only and 20$ makes it hard for me to look at it.
Also, yeah, I’m in the same boat with waning motivation. I almost filled out the Hoenn Dex in Omega Ruby but just got overwhelmed when I accidently unlocked the National Dex.
I saw the mudkip only challenge on RA, I kind of want to attempt it once I finish my base game run. It’d be a fun challenge.
Even though Black and White were newly out by the time I got into Pokemon, the only one I had growing up was my older brother's Blue. So I've always been a fan of the originals even if they're missing a LOT of polish, though the gen 3 remakes like Leaf Green are much better in about every way. I mostly just did Gen 1 and 2 for the nostalgia and RA achievements.
I just pirated the ROMs and played them on RetroArch. I've owned the physical games before, and, personally, I'll never feel bad pirating from Nintendo regardless.
The mudkip vs the world challenge is pretty fun (I got to the 5th gym before deciding to pause it), but from what I saw in the discussions board, a certain post-game(?) section is absolutely brutal to an unfair degree and is like 99% of the challenge's difficulty. I saw people recommending keeping mudkip leveled as low as possible since trainers there scale with you, and to stock up on tons of the PP-restoring berry. So I look forward to whatever the hell is up with that whenever I continue.