I'm Making a Living Dex

[falinksedin]

(This is going to be very wall-of-text-y. You have been warned.)

At the time I'm starting this thread I'm actually a fair chunk of the way through this. I kept meaning to write up my progress/experience with it somewhere but didn't get round to it until now and here seems like as good a place as any. Hopefully someone finds it mildly entertaining/helpful to know what to do/not to do for their own living dex.

I've liked the idea of making a living dex ever since I properly got back into Pokemon in 2020 - the appeal of catching 'em all is fairly obvious. I'd never actually started one, though, because I knew that I'd never be able to finish it; any event Pokemon I had from back in the day were long gone, and I had missed a ton of distributions in my years-long hiatus, so there were mythicals I just didn't have, and didn't have any way to obtain in the foreseeable future. Sure, I could have done a full dex except for the Mythicals I was missing, but having it sit indefintely at like 99% complete would have frustrated me. So I just kept the idea in the back of my mind.

I diligently grabbed every Mythical I could whenever they became available over the years, and following Meloetta being made available in the Indigo Disc DLC, I was missing just two - Diancie and Hoopa. I still thought it could be years before either of them cropped up anywhere, but then Gamefreak announced that the next game to be released was a Kalos-based Legends title. Given that PLA had made all the Sinnoh mythicals available, Diancie and Hoopa (along with Volcanion, but I had it already) seemed like safe bets. And thus, I vowed to finally catch 'em all once ZA released.

Because I just have to be cool and quirky and make life difficult for myself, I decided not to do just any old living dex, and introduce some additional conditions for the challenge. The full list of rules is as follows:

1) It's a living dex. If you're unfamiliar with the term, this means that you have to have a living example of every Pokemon. While catching a Bulbasaur and evolving it into Ivysaur and then Venusaur might tick off all 3 in your in-game Pokedex, a living dex requires catching 3 Bulbasaur, then evolving one into Ivysaur and another to Venusaur so that you have examples of all 3 simultaneously.

2) It's an all forms living dex. Just getting an example of each species to tick off the dex entry isn't enough; any Pokemon with multiple forms will need all their forms caught (for example, I'll need 6 Rotom total - one for each of base Rotom, Frost, Heat, Mow, Fan, and Wash). What exactly counts as a "form" is a little nebulous - there's no one absolute definitive list by an authoritative or reputable source and everyone considers them slightly differently. This is my living dex, so I'm going with "it's a form if I say it is". Really the only stuff I'm excluding are the numerous very slight gender differences a lot of gen 1-4 mons have, because they're so subtle it seems a bit pointless. The other types of forms I won't be bothering with are ones that rely on items, because Pokemon can't hold items in Home. Ogerpon-Hearthflame is very much a separate and distinct form to base Ogerpon, but it has no way to exist in Pokemon Home, and therefore can't be part of the living dex. I'll be attaching screenshots of my progress to each update, so you can see there what I consider distinct forms if you're curious.

3) I must adhere to my rules on Poke Balls. This is just something I do generally - most Pokemon go in regular Poke Balls; Legendaries go in Luxury Balls; Shinies go in Premier Balls (though that won't be relevant here); and the two other niche cases are Paradox Pokemon, which go in Timer Balls, and Ultra Beasts, which, imaginatively, go in Beast Balls. This rule isn't super impactful most of the time, but there a few niche cases where it affects where and how certain mons have to be caught.

4) Everything must have my OT. This is pretty self explanatory. I have to catch 'em all - I can't just trade for something that'd be a hassle to catch.

5) Everything must be caught in its region of origin. The first 4 rules are probably relatively standard; this is the one where I'm really making life a bit harder on myself. All 1025 Pokemon are now available on the Switch in at least one game, but I figure it'll be fun to have all my Galarian mons come from Galar, Johtonian mons come from Johto, etc. The specific game doesn't matter, so long as the region is correct. For example, a Kanto Pokemon could come from RBY, FRLG, or LGPE, but a Magcargo caught in FRLG would be no good - it'd have to come from GSC or HGSS. Regional variants are considered as being from the regions the variants were introduced in: even though it's under the dex number of Ninetales - a Kanto mon - Alolan Ninetales is, as the name suggests, Alolan.

6) Every Pokemon must be of a specified gender. This one is definitely overkill but it popped into my head and I figured why not add yet a bit more challenge. I've definitely always seen some Pokemon as being of a particular gender - for example, Primarina strikes me as female, Incineroar is male, etc. And there are Pokemon that I associate with being a certain gender for other reasons - for example, Ampharos is male because my "canon" Ampharos was a male one who carried me through a HG nuzlocke, and Eevee is female to me since it reminds me of my childhood rabbit, who was female. I wanted the living dex examples of these Pokemon to be of these "canon" genders, but I figured if I was taking this extra step for some mons, I might as well do it for all of them. So every Pokemon (aside from genderless ones, of course) will have to be of whatever gender I decide for it. (For a lot of them, it's super arbitrary, and the whole rule is kinda silly, but it's my autism and I get to choose the nonsensical rules to live by. It doesn't factor in much for the overwhelming majority of Pokemon anyway, but I'm including it to set up for a rant later about Dratini lol).

For rules 3-6, there's an asterisk of "as far as possible": the big, obvious exception is event Pokemon. For example, the only Victini I have is the Worlds 2022 one, which is not in a Luxury Ball, not my OT, and not from Unova. So it's a case of, "I'll try to adhere to the rules as far as possible, but if securing a Pokemon for the dex is impossible otherwise, I'll break them where I need to."

So that's everything. I'll probably just go region-by-region with posts about this. The vast majority of Pokemon don't really merit much discussion, but every region has a few that, for one reason or another, are huge pains that should hopefully at least make for good stories lol.

 

[falinksedin]

Region #1: Sinnoh

I decided to start off with BDSP since it felt like a good balance of not being too easy but also not going in totally at the deep end (the ones I was dreading were the DS/3DS regions, purely because that volume of transferring was going to suck). I had a couple of complete BDSP files, so had plenty to work with in terms of quickly cracking on with catching. I went in dex order (which would be the general strategy for the whole challenge), and began with breeding some eggs for the starters and blasting through the early route Pokemon pretty quickly. The first speedbump was the Burmy line.

Burmy, like a number of other Sinnoh Pokemon, is a Honey Tree encounter. To get a Honey Tree encounter, you have to slather honey on a tree then come back 6 hours later. Changing the clock doesn't work, and once you get the encounter, it's still pulling from an encounter table, so there's no guarantee you get what you want first try and don't have to wait another 6 hours. I realised pretty quickly how much this was going to suck, so made the executive decision to skip honey trees entirely. I brought a Mothim from PLA into BDSP through Home, and just bred some eggs. I don't care about specific met locations - all that shows up in Home is the region - so hatched Pokemon are totally fair game. I did the same for Combee immediately after, and then later on any other Honey Tree Pokemon that couldn't be found in the Grand Underground (fortunately, Munchlax does show up down there). Maybe I'm a fake gamer for not grinding a legit Honey Tree Munchlax, but I'm doing this dex for me, and being a fake gamer with several hours of my life saved is fine by me (with the amount of grinding ahead, I'm happy to save every minute I can).

Drifloon was the next remotely notable encounter: it just required setting my Switch's clock to a Friday, because I'm impatient and didn't want to actually wait. A few more simple catches and then it was time for Spiritomb. In the original DPPt, Spiritomb required talking to other real people in the Underground. That was changed in BDSP to require talking to 32 distinct named NPCs in the Grand Underground. Which NPCs show up is pure RNG, so all you can do is keep a list and run around frantically talking to everyone until you get to 32. After an hour or two it was done, and I interacted with the Hallowed Tower to claim my reward. It was pretty tedious, but nothing too egregious.

After Spiritomb, it was plain sailing. I skipped some Great Marsh encounters with more breeding cheese, because that seemed faster than clock-change spam, and had a brief moment of panic thinking I'd need 5 more saves for Rotom forms before I remembered that despite its presentation, Rotom isn't a legendary and can be dropped in the Day Care like any other regular mon. I'd already completed Ramanas Park and redeemed all the Mythical distributions back when BDSP came out on this save (I'd actually redeemed the distros on multiple saves, so I had an extra Shaymin on hand for Sky Forme), so all of those were ready to go straight into the dex.

And that was Sinnoh done! Surprisingly smooth sailing for the first region. Next up would be Galar, and it would definitely pose some harder challenges than Sinnoh...

Region's hardest Pokemon: Spiritomb
Pokemon caught: 121

 

[falinksedin]

Region #2: Galar

Galar started much as Sinnoh did - hatch eggs for the starters and then fire through early route mons. I say "early route mons", but to cut down on the amount of evolving I need to do, I generally tried to just catch evolved Pokemon straight up from later areas wherever I could, which in the newer games is pretty often thanks to the Wild Area and its open-world spiritual successors. Everything was going great right up until Sinistea.

A lot of "all forms" lists of Pokemon don't actually count Antique Sinistea, and the Home sprites are identical, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a distinct form. So I'd need four Sinistea total - two Phony and two Antique (so I could evolve one of each). I've always heard that Antique Sinistea is a 1/100 chance, which, as it turns out, is kind of only half-true. I assumed this stat was like shinies - when we say Masuda method shinies are 1 in 512, we mean that on average, 1 in 512 of the Pokemon you hatch will be shiny - and as such, on average, 1 in 100 Sinistea you see will be Antique. But that's not the case. 1 in 100 refers to the entire encounter table, which in the case of SwSh's base game, is the Glimwood Tangle. Antique and Phony Sinistea are separate entries on the table, as opposed to a separate roll on one table entry. For something like gender, nature, or shininess, the game rolls for the species based on the encounter table, and then further rolls occur for all these other attributes. I'd assumed this was how Sinistea worked, having never paid it much attention before now (I'd gotten Antique Sinistea in SV before, but never SwSh, and having freecam changes the nature of the hunt drastically in the Paldea games) - you have to hit the roll of getting a Sinistea, say, 10%, and then, subject to a second roll, 1 in 100 of those will be Antique.

In actuality, Antique Sinistea accounts for 1% of the Glimwood Tangle encounter table, while Phony Sinistea accounts for 10%. So actually, 1 in 11 Sinistea on average will be Antique - much better odds! The problem here is that this is the hidden encounter table, so given that you have no way to know what you're encountering beforehand, you're still dealing with functionally 1 in 100 odds, because there's no choice but to deal with the whole table. Fortunately, the Crown Tundra saves the day. Its Old Cemetery has overworld Sinistea, with Phony being 19 or 20% (depending on weather), and Antique at 1%. So 1 in 20 or 21 Sinistea on average will be Antique, and you can just ignore everything that isn't a Sinistea. Simple!

Being so pleasantly surprised by the maths of this hunt, I expected it to be pretty straightforward. I encountered probably upwards of 100 Sinistea before I had both Antiques I needed. I think I was over odds regardless, but part of the issue is also that the only way to check is to try using the evolution item (Chipped Pot) on the Pokemon once you've caught it, and in the Crown Tundra, Sinistea is high enough level to know Memento, so I may well have missed out on some Antique Sinistea due to self-KOs. That's what I get for talking maths, I guess.

With the tea line taken care of, I got back to regular catching. Obstagoon and the run of Pokemon that follow it (Perrserker, Cursola, Sirfetch'd, Mr. Rime, and Runerigus) were funny because I was grabbing the evolved Pokemon without their pre-evolutions. Because these mons have their own dex numbers, but evolve from regional forms, who share dex numbers with their original variants, I decided to just focus on grabbing the distinct mons for now and worry about the regionals when I did their respective dexes. I'd still be catching a Galarian Zigzagoon and Linoone in SwSh, I'd just only do so when I was also catching regular Zigzagoon and Linoone from Hoenn, rather than grabbing the Galarian ones now and leaving them sitting somewhere and likely forgetting where before I got to Hoenn. Also, I love the evolution methods for mons like Sirfetch'd and Runerigus. Feels like Mew-under-the-truck playground rumours made real.

After Runerigus came the Alcremie line. Alcremie has 63 forms - 9 cream types with 7 sweets for each. The cream type depends on the direction and duration of making your character spin with Milcery in your party, and the sweet is determined by the item you give it to hold. 63 is a lot of forms, but this honestly wasn't too bad. I just bred 63 Milcery eggs in the Day Care (the Alcremie line is 100% female, which makes life easy, as otherwise the gender rule might have made this one a lot harder), hatched them, and then evolved them in batches (each cream type only took two goes, as you can do 6 at once and then one more go for the seventh sweet type). I actually moved them over to Violet to evolve them, since the sweets are much easier to come by there than in SwSh; I already had like 100 of each just from running around the Terrarium. Plus, I only messed up and had to redo the spinning for one batch!

The next interesting one after Alcremie (aside from Falinks, who wasn't hard to catch or anything but is a goated mon) was Indeedee. The genders of Indeedee are version exclusive, but breeding an Indeedee in either game can produce eggs for both - something it shares with Volbeat and Illumise and the Nidorans - which is neat. So I was able to just grab both in Sword (a note on exclusives: I'm fortunate enough to own both versions of most games, so version exclusives aren't a huge deal - it's just a case of grabbing the relevant mons from the other game. It's just nice to be able to do as much as possible on my "main" save).

The fossils were a funny one - all fossils are obtainable renewably in both Sword and Shield from the Digging Brothers by the Wild Area Day Care, but the odds for each one change depending on the game, with two being more common in Sword, and the other two more common in Shield. Which means it's gambling time! Spam enough Watts into the quality brother (I forget their names but one is basically quality over quantity - ie. his loot table is better but he produces fewer items per dig session on average - while the other is quantity over quality) and you'll get the two of each fossil you need to resurrect the full set.

Finally, it was Legendary time. I already had most SwSh Legends sitting around, though I didn't have a Zacian (I had one on hand, but I wanted to keep it around for VGC stuff). Which meant it was time for the Suicune speedrun! I've done this enough times (for various once-per-save mons that are super useful for VGC) to be very familiar with it. Because the initial fight with Peony doesn't actually require you to win to let you access the Crown Tundra DLC, you can just challenge him with your level 5 starter, lose, and then head straight on to the Max Lair. Dynamax Adventures gives you appropriately-levelled rentals regardless, so you can immediately embark on one and catch a Legendary (scripted to always be a Suicune for your first run). Unlike most Pokemon, DA Legendaries will always obey you regardless of met level, so within less than an hour of starting a playthrough, you can have a level 70 Suicine in hand and ready to sweep every gym in Galar. From there, it's just "mash A through 'my brother Lee and his Charizard are unbeatable!' until the credits".

Kubfu was a problem on paper, since it's once per save and I'd need 3 total - Kubfu itself and both Urshifu forms - but I have so many completed SwSh saves and I've never bothered to get Kubfu in most of them since I refuse to use the Bear of Healthy Meta, so it was no bother. You can also completely skip the process of maxing out friendship with Kubfu - normally a prerequisite to evolve it - by dumping it in Home. If you talk to Mustard without Kubfu in your party or any of your boxes, he's just like "Oh, OK. You can just go in the towers I guess."

I'll skip Zarude for a second to briefly cover that the Regis, Calyrex, and his horses were no issue either - getting both Eleki and Drago, and both Glastrier and Spectrier, was the reason for my first ever Suicune speedrun, so I had all of these on hand. I will shout out that Spectrier is my favourite legendary - it looks cool and I love the kelpie basis for what will likely be the only time we see Scottish inspiration in the Pokemon world.

So Zarude. This was where I realised a small problem (actually, I realised it with Vivillon, who I was already working on by this point, but I'm going in region order to minimise jumping around and I hadn't started the full Kalos dex yet so we'll pretend it was Zarude). I'd put off doing this dex due to not being able to obtain certain event-exclusive species of Pokemon, with Diancie and Hoopa being the last two. But sometimes it's not species that are event-exclusive - forms can be too.

I had a Dada Zarude, because that was the distribution I'd grabbed late in SwSh's lifecycle. It's one of two Zarude forms, the other being the regular one (it doesn't really have an official name. The lore of Dada Zarude is something to do with an anime movie I think. I haven't watched it - I just play the games). Since Zarude itself is a Mythical, both forms are exclusive to whatever distributions are done for them, and having only Dada Zarude, I had no way to get the regular one myself. Fortunately, event Pokemon are pretty rigid in terms of their attributes. They're usually in Cherish Balls, have OT names that reference their event in some way, and their region of origin is just the region of whatever game the distribution took place in. All of this is true regardless of who redeems the event.

Therefore, I can trade for these elusive forms without breaking any of my rules any more than I would if I'd redeemed the event myself. So we're back in business! I posted in every Pokemon community I'm in begging for help with the forms I was missing (example here, and yes, in a way this post is a long-winded advertisement, because at time of writing I'm still missing some stuff), and was able to get my hands on a regular Zarude in time for the completion of the Galar segment of the dex.

Next up was gen 8's weird epilogue: Hisui. It's only like 10 mons, how bad could that possibly be?

Region's hardest Pokemon: Sinistea
Pokemon caught: 278

 

[falinksedin]

Region #3: Hisui

This isn't going to be a long post but it really felt like the worst ratio of effort:mons yielded thus far. Due to the aforementioned stuff about regional variants, all I was grabbing in Hisui for now were the Pokemon with unique dex numbers (ie. I needed Sneasler right now but would come back for Hisuian Sneasel later). That makes for a total of 7 species, with 10 mons total once forms were accounted for.

Wyrdeer was no problem (though I find PLA's "unique" evolution methods much worse than SwSh's. "Use a move a bunch of times" has far less whimsy than whatever esoteric madness Runerigus has going on). Kleavor took a bit of running around on the ride Ursaluna to get a spare Black Augurite, and so did getting a Peat Block for my own Ursaluna. Next up was the first example of the reverse of what I keep talking about with regional forms. Ursaluna-Bloodmoon is a Paldean (or Kitakami-an? Regardless, Kitakami and Blueberry Academy are part of Paldea for the purposes of this dex because devoting a whole box to like two Pokemon feels silly) Pokemon, but its dex entry is in the Hiusian section since base Ursaluna is a Hisuian mon, so I had to grab it here.

Also, in case you were wondering, the Poke Ball rule is somewhat redundant here since it's all ultimately going to be Strange Balls anyway once they hit Home, but for the sake of being thorough, all the regular mons went into Hisuian Poke Balls, and I chose Hisuian Ultra Balls for Enamorus, since they felt closest aesthetically to Luxury Balls.

Fortunately, I have several Bloodmoon Ursaluna lying around from various SV playthroughs (like three of four total; I don't even remember why. One from my main playthrough and another for the Scarlet exclusive Paradox Legendaries, but I don't remember the reasoning for the other two), so I was able to just drop him straight in. Two Basculegion, a Sneasler, and an Overqwil were all similarly straightforward.

Then came Enamorus.

Enamorus is a once-per-playthrough catch that requires beating PLA's main story, then all of the postgame quests that are required for the true final boss, and then one more questline where you catch the original three genies. Enamorus has two forms. You probably see the issue here.

I had one Enamorus already from my original playthrough, but I now had to do another entire playthrough just for a second Enamorus. I didn't love PLA the first time around, and the chore-ish nature of the gameplay really got on my nerves here. Each stage of the game is gated off behind progressing the Pokedex, which requires catching, KOing, or otherwise interacting with several of each Pokemon species. What's especially annoying is that the game presents the idea that you can catch Pokemon without battling them, but aside from like three Pokemon in the starter area, almost every mon has an aggressive temprament and aggroes you on sight, meaning you can't actually catch it without entering a battle (yes, you can get around this by kitting yourself out with various consumables, but the point is that so many Pokemon being aggro kills the "just catch them" proposition). Even with moving the entirety of my pastures from my original save into the new save through Home to register as much stuff as I could out the gate, I only skipped the first two rounds of dex busywork, and making it to the end of the game required what felt like an eternity of grinding.

Eventually, after 10 hours or so, I made it to Enamorus and finally obtained the one Pokemon the entire playthrough was for, and finished off the Hisui portion of the living dex. It was still a lot shorter than most other regions, but the gameplay of PLA is just not my thing, and the number of hours is particularly high relative to the number of Pokemon, so I resented the time spent more than the other regions. But, as with any tedious grind, the longer it took, the better it felt to have it over and done with.

Next, Paldea, which should be an easy one.

Region's hardest Pokemon: Enamorus
Pokemon caught: 288

(Ignore the Hisuian forms in the bottom corner, they're just hanging out here until ZA gets Home support lol)

 

[falinksedin]

Region #4: Paldea

Still determined to procrastinate transfer hell, I continued knocking out the Switch regions. Paldea was yet another case of "hatch some starters then grab the early route mons", though for the first time, one of the starter lines needed to be female. All starters have a gender ratio 7 males to 1 female, so females are considerably rarer than males. Getting 3 female Sprigatito took nearly 2 full boxes of eggs. Maushold would have been the next tricky one, with its Family of 3 form being a 1/100 chance upon evolution, but it can show up in Tera Raid Dens, and I'd grabbed one when I saw a den with it ages ago, so I had it on hand, which was nice.

In fact, I had a lot of Paldea Pokemon on hand - I actually had full living dexes for the SV base game and its DLCs already in Home, which I'd put together for the purposes of quickly accessing the DLC Paradox Legendaries from Perrin's quests in new saves, as well as the shiny Meloetta you get as a reward for catching every Paldean Pokemon. Having these made life a lot easier for the Paldea chunk of the full living dex, but I hadn't paid attention to gender when putting them together, so the work required on Paldea now was just a case of going back through for anything that needed re-caught (this was part of the reason I added the gender rule - skipping Paldea entirely would have felt weird and gender was the simplest attribute to base an update on).

I can really just skip all the way to Dudunsparce - everything else I either already had, or was easily re-caught - who, like Maushold, has a 1/100 rare form upon evolution. Unlike Maushold, though (whose rare form was never going to have this problem due to Maushold being a genderless Pokemon), Three-Segment Dudunsparce needed to be re-caught, as I had a female and wanted a male, to match the Three-Segment Dudunsparce Tonto from my playthrough team.

Dunsparce evolves when levelled up while knowing Hyper Drill, which it learns at level 32. It can also be passed down as an egg move, however, so you can breed Dunsparce with Hyper Drill and immediately evolve them at level 2 right after hatching. I had done the egg method in the past for my story playthrough and existing Paldea dex Three-Segment forms, but decided to mix it up a bit by just catching Dunsparce this time. With a level three Normal Encounter Power sandwich, the caves below Area Zero spawn only Dunsparce, and they're easily high-levelled enough to know Hyper Drill (they're actually levelled well past it, and need to have it taught from the menus). This way, I could catch only male Dunsparce to avoid the pain of hatching a Dunsparce that turns out to be a Three-Segment Dudunsparce, but that's female.

I went over triple odds for a Three-Segment Dudunsparce. I've only got myself to blame for introducing the silly gender rule, but (as someone who's done a fair bit of shiny hunting and is used to much worse odds than 1/100), 1/100 felt pretty attainable and so I didn't anticipate this hunt taking too long. Going so far over odds was not fun, as I fell into the trap of repeatedly telling myself "well, I'm over odds now, it must be right around the corner", only to keep going and going with no sign of the extra-long snake thing. But I got there eventually, and once again, the longer the grind, the better it felt to be done with it.

There was little of note for the rest of the base game dex. Everything I either already had, or could easily catch. Roaming Form Gimmighoul was Go-exclusive (another example of where the met-region rule is broken by necessity), but I was already faffing with Go for reasons I'll explain in the next post, so it was no problem. The next interesting Pokemon came once I hit Kitakami.

For whatever reason (the reason is laziness), when assembling my previous SV living dex, I never bothered with Masterpiece Sinistcha and Poltchageist. So it was back down into the tea mines. Fortunately, SV has two tools to make this hunt easier than in SwSh: sandwiches and freecam. Firstly, sandwiches let you manipulate the encounter tables to see the maximum number of Poltchageist at once. Secondly, freecam lets you check the Pokemon before you even do the encounter - much faster than Galar's faff of catching each Sinistea, opening the bag, and checking if the Chipped Pot would work. Just stand close to each Poltchageist, pan the camera down towards the floor, and look for the little square mark on its underside denoting its Authenticity. If it's not there, KO the mon with autobattle, and go check another. All of these tea-authenticating improvements made this hunt far better than SwSh's (everything I've described here also works for hunting Sinistea in SV, which is entirely possible; I just had to get my Sinistea and Polteageist from Galar due to the met-region rule).

From there, it was just a case of moving over the last few DLC Pokemon from my existing living dex, and the newest region was done. Next is where things really get interesting: Kalos.

Region's hardest Pokemon: Dudunsparce
Pokemon caught: 419

 

[There Is No Arceus]

are you gonna count the various pikachus in a cap as separate forms?

Also, what about the Johto mons that are only ever found in Kanto in those games?

 

[falinksedin]

are you gonna count the various pikachus in a cap as separate forms?

Also, what about the Johto mons that are only ever found in Kanto in those games?

I'm gonna do the Kanto writeup with full explanations of both of these shortly (it's the most recent one I've done at the time of making this thread) but in short, the cap Pikachus count and the Kanto-only Johto mons kinda just count as Johto anyway because Home is a bit silly (though I may impose some extra rules around them, I haven't fully decided yet).

 

[falinksedin]

Region #5: Kalos

Time for the game that's making this whole living dex possible: Legends Z-A. This time, there was no breeding of starters, as there's no breeding at all in this game. I had to catch them the old-fashioned way. Because there's only one of each Kalos starter in their respective wild areas, ZA having a timer before a caught/KOed mon respawns, and me taking a while to get the knack of sneaking up on skittish Pokemon like Froakie and Fennekin (the latter of whom loved straight up throwing itself off a rooftop rather than letting me catch it), getting the 9 total starter Pokemon I needed took probably about the same length of time as the entire rest of the regular dex. Fennekin also required some resetting as it needed to be female, though Z-A saves Pokemon in place when you save the game, so once I got a female Fennekin, I could save and reset if I failed it.

I then quickly grabbed two would-be early route lines (Diggersby and Talonflame) before it was time for one of the most involved (and coolest) lines of this entire living dex: Vivillon.

If you're not familiar with how Vivillon works (I wasn't 100% on it before getting into all this), it's a butterfly with 20 forms, each one having a different pattern on its wings. Unlike most other form Pokemon, where the form is inherent to the Pokemon or based on some inherent attribute like gender or stats, tied to in-game locations, or changed via items, Vivillon's forms depend on your real-world location. In Gen 4, the Masuda method - a method of shiny hunting where the odds of a shiny hatching from an egg are boosted if the parents came from save files with different set languages - was introduced to encourage players to engage with the new internet-based GTS, which enabled trading with anyone in the world over the internet for the first time ever. Similarly, when Generation 6 launched with X and Y, the PSS functionality was intended to make global trading easier than ever before, and Gamefreak once again wanted players to engage with it. This time, their mechanic of choice was butterflies.

When you created a new save for Pokemon X or Y (and subsequently, any other 3DS-era game, as the Vivillon line could be caught or bred in any of them), the game looked at the region setting on your 3DS. Depending on where in the world it was, the game would then set that save file's Vivillon form to one of 18 patterns. Any Scatterbug, Spewpa, or Vivillon you caught in that save file would then always be of that pattern - the one determined by the real-world location set on your 3DS. This is, in my opinion, a super cool and unique feature that makes the Vivillon line feel really special.

There's just one problem: we're not on the 3DS anymore. Vivillon was dexited from SwSh, and in ZA, all Vivillon just have the Meadow pattern (the one associated with real-life France in the 3DS games). So how do you get the other Vivillon patterns in a post-3DS-server-shutdown world?

Enter (of all things), Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. By default, all Vivillon in Paldea have the Fancy pattern - one of two patterns that was originally event exclusive, made regularly available here for whatever reason. However, a while after launch, SV got an update that added some interactivity with Pokemon Go. One part of this was the aforementioned Roaming Form Gimmighoul being made available, but the other was to do with Vivillon. When you spin a Poke Stop in Pokemon Go (something that's necessary to do regularly to stay stocked up on Poke Balls), you also get a gift, which you can send to anyone on your friends list. This gift gives them various useful in-game items, but also comes with a postcard, whose picture is based on the real-world location of the Poke Stop you got the gift from.

When you receive a gift from a friend, you can save the attached postcard in a virtual scrapbook (I don't really play Go, so I don't know if this functionality existed prior to the SV compatibility update), and from there, you can send one postcard per day to SV as a mystery gift, which changes the pattern of all Vivillon in Paldea to the pattern associated with the region the postcard was from for 24 hours (sending the postcard is also what triggers Roaming Gimmighoul appearing in Go, handily).

Knowing that getting postcards from all over the world would take a while, and that getting everything in Scarlet and Violet would also take a couple of weeks because of the one-per-24-hours limitation, I'd cracked on with this ahead of doing the majority of the Kalos dex to get a head start. I'll spare you the play-by-play, but over the course of a couple of weeks I exchanged postcards with people from the 16 Vivillon regions I needed (as mentioned earlier, Meadow is obtainable in base ZA and Garden is the set pattern in the DLC, so I didn't need those). This was an extremely cool experience. I'm glad the interactivity concept behind Vivillon has been kept alive in the Switch era (and I think the postcards are kinda cooler, since you actually see the locations they're coming from), and exchanging postcards with people from all kinds of locations all over the world was not something I thought I'd be doing when I set out to make a living dex. Here are all the postcards I received (not going to post them one-by-one for the sake of keeping the post readable but hopefully the pictures look cool and the languages give an indication where they're from):

If you want to do this yourself, the Vivillon Collectors subreddit is a great resource - I got most of the patterns pretty quick just by checking threads there a couple times per day. For some of the rarer patterns, Leek Duck proved invaluable. Elegant is Japan-exclusive (and thus hard to come by on the English-speaking internet), and while Tundra and Monsoon are only in fairly remote, sparsely populated parts of the Western world, they can be found in Hokkaido and Okinawa respectively, so being able to exchange friend codes with Japanese players was super helpful. And if you just want to see what locations give what forms, this map is super handy.

Anyway. We're not actually done with Vivillon, but for the sake of variety, I'll move on and circle back (this is gonna be the longest post by far - I did say it would be interesting).

Next somewhat involved mon was getting all 5 colours of each Flabébé (and Eternal Floette, which, while I'd have done it anyway for the sake of completionism, was extremely tedious to go for. The Infinite Z-A Royale is not fun enough for me to want to do 15 rounds of it non-stop). More easy catches (I like catching in this game much better than in PLA. The promise of battle-free catching is actually delivered upon in PLZA), then 10 Furfrou, and 9 trips to the hairdresser. After that, it was pretty straightforward up until the Goodra line, whose Hisuian forms necessitated a return trip to PLA (they're the ones you see in the Hisui screenshot above). The next mons of note were Pumpkaboo and Gourgeist. The two smaller sizes spawn during the day, and the two larger ones at night, with the smallest and largest being pretty rare during their respective windows. It took a few resets, but I got them all, and, with one more trip to Hisui for Avalugg, blasted all the way through the Legendaries and Mythicals.

As usual, completing the dex during my playthrough meant I had most Legendaries on hand. Once again, though, multiple-form Legendaries were my downfall. Zygarde and, more importantly, Hoopa both have two (Zygarde has like four now, but only two that can exist in Home) forms (if not for Hoopa, I could have just grabbed a Zygarde from XY. But since I needed to do another playthrough for Hoopa as it could only be obtained from ZA, I was as well just grabbing the second Zygarde here too). So, I booted up a new save. It took a lot longer than the PLA grind, but I find Z-A to be more engaging (for the most part). It's a bit of a mixed bag for me gameplay-wise, but at no point in the base game are you blatantly relegated to playtime-padding busywork on the tier of PLA's dex completion.

That took care of Zygarde, and then it was time for the DLC, which unfortunately does relegate you to playtime-padding busywork on the tier of PLA's dex completion. The Annihilape meta had been figured out by the time I was doing this, though, so with strategic selection of my distortions I managed to avoid the worst of it, and after a total of 25 (yes, 25) hours, I had my Zygarde-10% and Hoopa-Unbound. Funnily enough, I made it to the end of the DLC postgame and was confused as to why the Hoopa quest wasn't available, as I thought its only prerequisites were completion of the basegame and DLC stories and postgames. Turns out it was that 15-Infinite-Z-A-Royale once again. It's even less interesting second time around.

So that would be it, but remember how I said we weren't done with Vivillon? Time for me to yap more about the butterfly. I kinda skimmed over this before, but obviously, catching Vivillon in Paldea breaks the met-region rule. At the time of planning, I thought this was a necessary evil. Region setting on the 3DS has three tiers, which I'll call continent, country, and territory. Continent is the broad area of the globe the console is sold in, that goes back to the PAL/NTSC distinction. Basically, the Americas, Europe, and then it gets a bit more specific within Asia. Country is exactly how it sounds, and territory is the sort of first-level subdivision within that country (think US states). So for me, it goes Europe -> United Kingdom -> Scotland.

My understanding had been that you could only change your 3DS region setting at the territory level. So I could lie to my 3DS and tell it I live in England, Wales, or Northern Ireland, but none of that is any good for getting me any Vivillon other than Garden (which, ironically, I don't even need a 3DS to get a Kalos-origin version of, since it's one of the two in Z-A). However, because of how much fun I had with the whole postcard process, I'd been using Vivillon in a draft league (I'd looked at it on the draft board because I had butterfly-on-the-brain from all the Go stuff and it was honestly a steal for 7 points!) and using it there combined with the postcards was quickly making it one of my favourite Pokemon. Because of this newfound love for the funny butterfly, I was looking into shiny hunting an Ocean Vivillon in XY for a totally unrelated project. On the 3DS (some patterns became a little easier to obtain in Go, Ocean being one of them) the Ocean pattern is only available in Hawai'i and Réunion.

But as I was looking this up, I found out something incredible. You can change the country setting of your 3DS's region settings. I can lie to my 3DS and tell it I'm anywhere in Europe. And even better, "Europe" is Nintendo speak for "anywhere other than the Americas and Asia" (I guess due to PAL/NTSC stuff). Even "anywhere but the Americas and Asia" undersells it, because the 3DS it goes strictly by country, not geographical location. A lot of European countries have overseas territories in distant parts of the world that geographically sit within other continents. For example, the 3DS categorises French Guiana, which is very much on South America, as a territory within France, thereby allowing access to the Jungle pattern from Europe. These factors combine to open up all but three Vivillon patterns, and as for those last three, I have an American 3DS from when I lived there and a Japanese 3DS I got because I thought it was cool (it's the limited edition XY one with the cool gold Xerneas pattern and it is indeed cool). The American and Japanese 3DSes make the number I could get from Europe alone somewhat redundant, but I wanted to talk about it anyway because it was so much more than I expected when I thought about what "Europe" intuitively included. For a full list of what territories give what patterns, you can check out this site.

So, I would be able to get every Vivillon pattern, with my OT, with a Kalos met location! The only downside of region changing like this is that it messes things up for connecting to the online, but the online doesn't exist anymore. Literally the only thing it matters for is Bank, so be aware of that I guess, but I have Bank on a different 3DS than the region shenanigan ones (yes, I do possibly have an excessive number of 3DSes).

So, that's it: play through 10 minutes of Y, grab a Route 2 Scatterbug, trade to the main X save (Scatterbug and Spewpa have 20 visually identical forms to store their Vivillon pattern, so their appearance on evolution will match the pattern of the game they were originally caught in even if they're traded), reset and change the region. And then transfer all the Vivillon into Home. Sorted! It's funny I didn't find out about this until after all the Go stuff, but honestly, I don't mind, because the postcards were such a cool experience that I don't regret it at all.

But we're still not quite done with Vivillon. Remember at the start I said there were 20 forms? But the number I keep mentioning is 18? What's going on? Vivillon has 18 regular forms. The other two were event-exclusive. One of them, the Fancy pattern, was randomly made regularly available in SV, as mentioned above. (I actually did end up getting the 2014 event one though, huge thanks to @silvally! I'm undecided yet as to whether Kalos origin trumps my OT + Poke Ball for which one actually goes in the living dex, but it's extremely extremely cool either way). The last one, though, hasn't been available since 2014, and it is my white whale.

Poke Ball Vivillon was available at various real-world Pokemon Center store openings, then received one online distribution, then was never available again. These distributions were nearly 12 years ago. This was the Pokemon that led me to the unfortunate realisation that I had accounted for event-exclusive species, but not forms, as I had started the Vivillon stuff before reaching the end of Galar. And unlike regular Zarude, at time of writing, I have gotten absolutely nowhere on tracking one of these things down. In the very unlikely event you're reading this and you have a Poke Ball Vivillon you'd be willing to part with, comment here, or in the trade thread, or DM me. I would be forever in your debt lmao. Otherwise, I'll keep scouring every online space I can think of, and also keep manifesting a miraculous announcement of a distribution for the 30th anniversary Pokemon Day (It's the anniversary! There's a Kalos game out! It totally makes sense to do it and they've definitely not forgotten about it! No, this isn't copium!). Tbh, getting a full set of Vivillon has just become something I want personally, outwith the living dex, because it's been such a memorable part of the process for me that I just really like this mon now lol. One way or another, I will get that Poke Ball butterfly.

But I'm not going to put the rest of the dex on hold waiting for it. So, that's it for Kalos (for now), and, since I'm putting off DS transfer hell as long as physically possible, I'll be wrapping up the Switch regions next with Kanto.

Region's hardest Pokemon: Vivillon but I love it so I forgive it and I'll say Hoopa instead
Pokemon caught: 544

(Can't get these all in one place yet since Z-A lacks Home support. The Vivillon will obviously go into the Vivillon-sized gap, and the other 3 spots are for the Hisuian Sliggoo, Goodra, and Avalugg you can see in the Hisui pic a few posts above)

 

[There Is No Arceus]

sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but as far as i can tell, there's currently no way to get poke ball pattern Vivillon

 

[falinksedin]

sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but as far as i can tell, there's currently no way to get poke ball pattern Vivillon

See my completely bulletproof plan buried at the bottom of the absolute odyssey of a Vivillon essay in the Kalos post:

In the very unlikely event you're reading this and you have a Poke Ball Vivillon you'd be willing to part with, comment here, or in the trade thread, or DM me. I would be forever in your debt lmao. Otherwise, I'll keep scouring every online space I can think of, and also keep manifesting a miraculous announcement of a distribution for the 30th anniversary Pokemon Day (It's the anniversary! There's a Kalos game out! It totally makes sense to do it and they've definitely not forgotten about it! No, this isn't copium!).

 

[falinksedin]

Region #6: Kanto

Wrapping up the Switch regions, we have what is at the time of making this thread, the last one I've completed ("completed" with a bit of an asterisk) to date. Yes, I did knock out literally everything I could on the Switch before contending with DS transfers.

This is another game where I had (most of) an existing living dex (no memory as to why - my LGE save file is from 2021, which feels like an eon ago at this point. I think I did it just because.), but again, lots of Pokemon would need updating for various reasons. First, some starter replacements. I decided Bulbasaur and Ivysaur were male, but Venusaur was female, which somewhat cut down the time spent in Frame Drop Forest (still runs smoother and looks better than Lag Lake - we didn't know how good we had it). More of the usual early route stuff until Pidgey (I'm jumping around a little chronologically here since I typically leave evolving for last, but I may as well just mention it now).

For a lot of what I'd done so far, whenever something needed evolved, I typically saved it to the end of the work for that region, then batch-transferred everything unevolved to either Violet or Sword, where I have the most XP candy stockpiled. Poor Pidgey was one of the only Pokemon needing evolved that was dexited from both those games, so two of them hung out in the party for a while as I caught other stuff (I know I could have caught a Pidgeotto and Pidgeot later in the game but for whatever reason this is just what I decided to do).

Then we get to the Rattata line. Alolan forms are obtainable in LGPE via in-game trades, but due to the met-region rule, my Alolan forms have to come from Alola itself. Kanto has a ton of regional variants (like, a not-insignificant portion of the dex is going to be caught in non-Kanto games), and I saved them all for the end during my catching, so I'll do the same with this post (this one's gonna jump around a lot).

Almost immediately, yet more weirdness. First, the Pikachu line has an Alolan variant, but as mentioned above, I'll just grab that later. The more complicated part is the Cap Pikachu. Pikachu has a ton of random forms. A lot of them (namely the Cosplay Pikachu from ORAS and LGPE's very own Partner Pikachu) can't go to Home, but the eight versions of Pikachu wearing a cap that were introduced during Gen 7 to promote... something to do with the anime? can, and therefore need to be acquired for the living dex. These forms were distributed once in Gen 7, and once more in Gen 8 (I think one of them was added during Gen 8?), and I did not redeem either of those distributions.

Once again, I'm up against event-exclusive forms. When I had the Poke Ball Vivillon Realisation, I sat down and worked out what forms I was missing. There were 10 total, and these damn Pikachu were 8 of them (the other two being Zarude and Vivillon). So once again, I'm at the mercy of the Pokemon community and their generosity. At time of writing, I have three of these (huge huge thanks to @Battista), but the jury is still out on the other five (Hoenn, Unova, Alola, Partner, and World). If you can help, get in touch!

With that last bit of shameless begging out the way, the next speedbump was Sandshrew (lots of frequent, minor speedbumps with this one). For all the previous games where version exclusives were a factor, I already had a decently-equipped, completed save of the counterpart to my "main" game where I could grab everything pretty quickly. Here, though, despite owning LGP, I'd never actually gotten around to playing it. So, like regional forms, version exclusives would be shelved until the end, where I'd do a mini LGP speedrun to grab everything I was missing.

Aside from those categories, though - regionals and version exclusives - the rest of what I needed from LGE was plain sailing, all the way to the Legendaries. I'll save them for last though, because what I ended up doing was kinda neat. There was one funny moment where I asked a friend to help me evolve a Haunter, and he said PLA would suit him best, he just had to find his cart. Upon transferring the Haunter to PLA, he said he couldn't find his cart, but the talk of trade evolutions in PLA made me remember the Linking Cable item was a thing, and I had a spare one in my save, so I was able to evolve it anyway.

Theres's actually one non-Legendary line after you first hit Legendaries in Kanto's dex, though. It goes birds -> Dragonite line -> Mewtwo and Mew. So I skipped the birds to grab the pseudos. Dragonite was actually no problem - I'd just grabbed one I'd seen as a rare sky spawn and it got in the ball no problem. Dratini, however, as I expertly subtly foreshadowed in the OP, was another story.

Dratini and Dragonair both spawn in the river leading to the Power Plant on Route 10, with odds of 4 and 1% respectively. I wasn't fussed on getting a Dragonair specifically. Either a Dragonair and a Dratini or two Dratini would be fine, as I could just evolve a Dratini in the latter scenario. I just wanted to end up with a male Dratini and a female Dragonair.

Even with a lure on, very few Pokemon spawn in that river - from 2 to 4, but most often just 2, I found. So 4% is pretty infrequent. Eventually, I did get a Dratini, though it was female. No matter - I could just catch it and use it for my Dragonair. Then, the Dratini after that was female. And the next one. And the next one.

I encountered 13 female Dratini before I found a male one. Dratini has a 50/50 gender split. Do you know what the odds of flipping a coin and getting 13 heads in a row are? 1 in 8192. I am as likely to walk into the tall grass in Pokemon Platinum and get a shiny first try as I was to get a run of 13 female Dratini in a row (I know this is not exactly how stats work and gambler's fallacy is a hell of a drug, but 13 in a row is absurd no matter how technical you want to get about it).

I was there for so long, I saw four of the 1% Dragonair, so I just caught a female one of them and released my original female Dratini to save the bother of evolving. And then, finally, after nearly two hours, I got the fabled male Dratini. And it fled.

I got two more females before finally getting a male that stayed in the ball. This gender rule is stupid.

Then came the backtracking for the skipped mons. First, regional forms. Scarlet and Violet gave me the Tauros forms (Paldean regional forms are very odd. There are four total and three of them are Tauros). Galar gave a bunch more - Galarian Rapidash had been on my Sword playthrough team (as a result of some trading way back in my original run) so I was able to just breed it there which was nice for getting everything in one place. Galarian Slowbro was another case of transfer-to-Violet-and-evolve, since Galarica Twigs are so much quicker to farm there. And I already had a set of Galarian birds in Luxury Balls ready to go from my original playthrough. Hisui was as quick as Paldea - just the Voltorb and Arcanine lines there.

Then it was time for Alola, which was to be the first 3DS -> Switch transfer of the entire challenge. But I'm once again going to jump around and come back to it later, as what I actually did after Hisui was the LGP playthrough.

Hilariously, because HMs are implemented in LGPE as "Secret Techniques" and don't require gym badges to use, you can explore the whole map as soon as you beat Misty. I needed to go as far as Fucshia, since getting the LGP exclusive Grimer meant going to either the Pokemon Mansion on Cinnabar Island, or the Power Plant, both of which required Sur- sorry, "Sea Skim". It was straightforward enough - just dodge as many fights as possible with my severely underlevelled, two-gym-badge Pikachu and go to everywhere that has mons I need.

I actually ended up going to both the Power Plant and Cinnabar Island, as I needed a female Kabutops and was getting unlucky with Cerulean Cave item spots on my LGE save, so it ended up making sense to just take the story Dome Fossil on the Pikachu save to the lab and reset for it there. But with that taken care of, all that remained were the Alolan forms and the legendaries.

If you paid attention to the rules above (and I don't blame you if you didn't), you'd know that Legendaries have to be caught in Luxury Balls wherever possible. But the Let's Go games don't have Luxury Balls - they only have Poke, Great, Ultra, Master, and Premier Balls. Getting the legendary birds and Mewtwo in Luxury Balls isn't that hard, though - Snacksworth. Ramanas Park or Dynamax Adventures are all perfectly viable options on the Switch alone.

However, I also need to get them with a Kanto met location. Kanto appears in four other sets of Pokemon games. There's RBY, which can transfer to the Switch if you play on the Virtual Console releases on the 3DS. However, Luxury Balls didn't exist in Gen 1, and even if they did, Gens 1 and 2 don't store ball type as part of a Pokemon's data, so everything is just set to Poke Ball. GSC is ruled out for these same reasons.

The next easiest would be HGSS. On paper, this should work, but it was here I found out about a quirk of Pokemon Home. While the Johto games famously have two regions - literally half the map is Kanto - Home just bases its met region off the game of origin, so any Pokemon originating from HGSS (or Virtual Console GSC) shows as being met in Johto, regardless of whether it was caught in Johto or Kanto.

This has some handy implications for the Johto portion of this run, as it makes life easier for Kanto-exclusive Gen 2 Pokemon like Slugma (there's kind of a bit of a debate about if such Pokemon are actually Kanto Pokemon, which I do think is interesting, but at least for the purposes of this challenge, Gen 2 Pokemon = Johto), but I might introduce some kind of extra rule like I have to breed them and hatch the egg in Johto to compensate for the met location cheese. I'll talk more about it when I get to the Johto portion of the challenge, I guess.

That leaves FRLG. Gen 3: the oldest games that can still transfer to the Switch (so long as you had Bank downloaded before the eShop shutdown, which - though I don't think I mentioned this until now - I did). So, I went all the way back to FireRed, farmed up some Luxury Balls, and caught the four Legendaries I needed. My FireRed save had been a nuzlocke, which was very handy as I'd never actually bothered to catch the Legendaries, so they were just sitting there waiting.

With them caught, the four of them (along with two Weedle who came as far as Unova because the earlier transfer methods require specifically six mons at a time) came into the Pal Park, the Poketransfer Lab (I am NOT looking forward to transferring the entire Johto dex six Pokemon at a time with that awful crossbow game), and then through the Poke Transporter into Bank. I don't think transferring Pokemon all the way up will ever stop being cool for me. Taking the same mon from a game that came out when I was a toddler and bringing it to games released now, on a modern console, is amazing, and something really unique to Pokemon. The Gen 3 voyagers hung around in Bank for a little while, as they had to wait for some friends.

I put off doing Alola until now because I realised it'd be easiest to just do the Bank -> Home transfer in one go, so I booted up Ultra Sun and grabbed everything I needed (Sandslash had been a playthrough team member, so like the G-Rapidash situation, everything was doable in one game). Really the only one of note was Pikachu, who can't be caught directly. Pichu is available on early routes, but isn't ideal since getting it to evolve through friendship would be a pain. Fortunately, that same Pichu encounter can SOS call a Pikachu, letting me just grab the middle stage outright. I skipped some other evolutions - Ice Stones are a pain to get in Alola but I have like 700 in Violet, and friendship for A-Persian was similarly cheeseable with my surplus of EV-reducting berries - but otherwise, everyone was ready to head to the Switch.

Once they got there, I took care of the aforementioned evolutions, and put everything in place in Home. There was just one mon left. I have like 10 Mew because I grabbed a bunch to get the Mightiest Mark on as many as possible back during the 7-Star Mewtwo event raids, but I wanted to keep them together in Violet and get a "fresh" one for the living dex. So I played like 15 minutes of Brilliant Diamond on a new save and that was that.

Kanto sorted (aside from those Pikachu, for now). Finally, I can procrastinate no longer. It's DS time. That's everything I've done so far written up now (I'd meant to write this up somewhere sooner, but just never got around to it so developed kind of a backlog), so it might be a while before the next update. I'm off to Hoenn. Bank -> Home transfers aren't too bad, but that's not what I'm fearing with ORAS...

Region's hardest Pokemon: Dratini
Pokemon caught: 734

 

[falinksedin]

Bit of an update I guess: tracked down two more Cap Pikachu yesterday (Hoenn and Unova). Just missing Alola, Partner, and World now. And of course the Vivillon, as far as the stuff I'm going to need to trade for goes. Not at my Switch for a screenshot but I'll update the pic in the Kanto post or something tomorrow.

Yesterday was also eventful as far as the challenge goes for a much worse reason but I'll save that for the Hoenn post in probably a couple days because it's fun to have a bit of suspense and intrigue.

 

[falinksedin]

Region #7: Hoenn

We’re finally off the Switch, and for the first of the DS regions, I picked Hoenn, largely because I was dreading a particular aspect of it and wanted it over and done with. But we’ll get there when we get there; let’s start at the beginning.

The early stages of progress were business as usual. Breed the starters, catch the early route mons, and so on. I’d been putting off doing the older games because of the hassle of transferring, but breeding the starters immediately made it apparent that there were other reasons the pre-Switch games were more annoying for this challenge. Navigating menus is much slower, and your boxes can’t be accessed from anywhere, both of which are little delays that really add up over the course of knocking out a full region’s dex. It really made me realise how much I’d been taking modern Pokemon’s quality-of-life improvements for granted.

The first interesting Pokemon I hit was Nincada. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but it’s famously the only Pokemon to evolve into two other Pokemon at once, so that’s pretty cool. Not long after came Azurill, who, despite being introduced in Hoenn, can’t be caught anywhere and must be bred from an Azumarill or Marill holding a Sea Incense. Sure.

Then came Nosepass, who’s only available from the lowest floor of Granite Cave (accessible via the Mach Bike), where it constitutes just 14% of Rock Smash encounters. Hoenn has a lot of these randomly rare and involved encounters; I’ll talk more about my thoughts on them later.

Minun was the next notable mon, only available via Horde encounter. Not a huge deal: just spam Sweet Scent until it shows up. Not long after came Spinda. For those unaware, Spinda’s pattern (the placement of its spots) is randomly generated, and as such you could consider each different Spinda pattern to be a different form. There are over 4 billion of these different patterns. It was probably obvious but I’ll explicitly address it here: while it is an all-forms dex, I’m not doing every Spinda form. Not only is that impractical to the point of being functionally impossible, Home literally couldn’t hold them all anyway. So I just grabbed one and moved on.

The fossils were the next remotely interesting encounter - just breed more from the one you get during the story. I wanted a female Lileep, which was somewhat annoying, since fossils have the same 7:1 gender ratio as starters.

Then came Feebas. Feebas is infamous for being difficult to obtain in the older games, only appearing in a small handful of water tiles out of the hundreds in its area (6 in Hoenn, 4 in Sinnoh). While BDSP would later preserve this rarity, ORAS instead makes it a flat 5% encounter everywhere on the route. Furthermore, you can get it 100% of the time at a fixed spot (by the rock near the route’s entrance or under the bridge by the Weather Institute, depending on the time of day).

And to be honest, I think this is kind of lame. I’m by no means the first person to make this critique, but I do think this change takes a lot of the mystery and appeal away from the Feebas line. In case it wasn’t clear from, like, this whole blog (and in particular, the sections I really dwell on), I like Pokemon that are difficult/involved/obscure to acquire. I don’t mean stuff like Nosepass - low encounter rates in random areas feels arbitrary, more than anything else - but stuff like Feebas, Spiritomb, or Runerigus, where getting the Pokemon is kind of a mini side quest in itself, has always been super cool to me. The execution has varied somewhat throughout the series (the biggest thing I’d generally fault them on is that there should be always NPCs hinting at what needs to be done to find the mon, and that isn’t always the case), but I still think the removal of this aspect of the Feebas line in ORAS is a shame. I don’t even have much of a point here, since obviously this kind of encounter has persisted in the games since. I just wanted to talk about it since it felt very relevant to the purpose of this blog.

Anyway, I grabbed my Feebas from under the bridge and evolved it with a Prism Scale from X. Feebas’ evolution method was also changed in generation 5 (which was the first gen its encounter method was also made more normal), having previously involved a bit of a grind with its contest stats. You can still do the Pokeblock stuff in ORAS, but the trade-with-item still works, and for this challenge specifically, efficiency is the name of the game. We’re not even close to the horrors Hoenn has in store for us. I did do the full Feebas grind for the Feebas/Milotic on my first Emerald playthrough team (look, here she is now, in this superfluous image I’ve attached to ever-so-slightly break up the monolithic wall of text), so I beat the fake gamer allegations this time.

The regular dex wraps up, and it’s time for legendaries. First are the Regis, who I never bothered with on my Alpha Sapphire save (fun fact: I have a box in Home literally just named “Regi Box” with 4 sets of the original trio since they’re prerequisite for both the SwSh Regis and most of Ramanas Park in BDSP, so I’ve caught them incidentally so many times). I go to the Sealed Chamber (three times, actually, as I had to re-emerge for both the Dig TM and the mons required for the second puzzle), and then each of their respective caves. This is what I’m talking about; I’m glad these puzzles were preserved.

Next are the Latis, but I’m going to skip over them until later. The box legends come after that, and while I had a playthrough Rayquaza on hand, I actually still needed both a Kyogre and a Groudon, since my story Kyogre was in a Master Ball. Not really an issue though, since, for reasons I’m about to (finally) get to, I’d be doing more playthroughs anyway. Jirachi was next - not an issue, there’d be a BDSP one on hand when I made it to the Switch (like Mew, it’s given to you by an NPC in Floaroma Town for having save data from another game on your account - in this case SwSh).

And last, but certainly not least, came Deoxys. Deoxys has only ever been made available outside of event distributions at the end of ORAS’s postgame Delta Episode. There, it’s treated like any other story Legendary: you get one per playthrough. Deoxys has four forms.

I was going to have to play through ORAS three more times just for Deoxys. Enamorus and Hoopa suddenly look reasonable. I buckled down and got underway, running through Omega Ruby first, to grab the Groudon I needed as well. This playthrough was actually half-done already, as I’d played far enough to get the version exclusives while working on the main dex.

These playthroughs accounted for most of the time spent working on Hoenn, but there isn’t actually much to say about them. Pick Mudkip, kill everything with Swampert, mash A through the ludicrous amounts of dialogue in these games, and eventually reach Zinnia at the Sky Pillar (the Delta Episode in particular really epitomises how much dialogue ORAS has, and how Minecraft-Story-Mode-tier its actual writing is). With a Groudon and 1 of 3 additional Deoxys in hand, it was time for another Alpha Sapphire run, for that replacement Kyogre.

Unlike the Switch, you can’t have multiple saves of a 3DS game, since the data is stored on the cartridge itself. I didn’t want to delete my main Alpha Sapphire save, but fortunately, my 3DS is Homebrewed, so I can make use of the save tool Checkpoint to back up the main save, wipe the cartridge, and then restore the main save later (this will be important shortly). With that taken care of, I blasted through AS much as I did OR.

Once the playthrough was complete, I moved everything into Bank ahead of that save’s deletion, and went to restore the main save onto the cartridge. If you’re not familiar with Checkpoint, there are two options available for any given save you have stored there. “Restore”, which writes the save onto the cartridge, overwriting anything already there, or “Backup”, which overwrites the save you have selected with whatever’s on the cartridge (useful if you’re making regular backups). Obviously, I needed “Restore”. But imagine, if you will, my fat thumb bumped the D-Pad and moved the selection to “Backup”, right as I hit A. Imagine that I didn’t have any other backups of my main save, and the only copy was overwritten with this largely useless extra save.

I don’t need to imagine, because that’s exactly what happened. All of the work I’d done catching the 120+ regular Hoenn Pokemon was erased in an instant. I took stock of the damage. The save file itself (ie. my story team) wasn’t unsalvageable. I’d last used this AS save when I was working on my ribbon masters, and during that process I’d been very careful about making regular backups (a diligence I clearly could have done with for the living dex), so I was able to restore the cartridge to basically just before I began the Hoenn chunk of the dex.

Likewise, the two Deoxys, Kyogre and Groudon were safe, since I hadn’t actually transferred them yet. Everything else though - every single Pokemon from Treecko to Registeel - was gone, and would need to be re-caught.

So that’s what I did. I worked all the way back through. Breeding the starters, the weirdly rare Nosepass, the Wynaut egg (which I didn’t mention before, but I swear the gift one has a longer hatch time than a regular Wynaut egg would), the female Lileep, the hard-but-not-actually Feebas, the Regi puzzles, all of it. I’m skipping through it here for the sake of not repeating myself, but this took a while.

Eventually, though, it was done, and I was back to where I was before. And yes, I did make a backup. One Deoxys playthrough remained (if there’s a silver lining, it’s that going back and redoing everything at least broke up the Zinnia spam), so I got that over and done with on a second OR save, and finally, everything was finished.

Except for the Latis. Remember I said I was leaving them for later? Well, now it’s later. See, Steven Stone is clearly a hater with an objection to this whole challenge, as unlike in the original RSE, he just hands you your game’s Lati when you unlock Surf. He hands you it. Doesn’t take you to catch it - hands you it. That means you can’t choose the ball it’s in. And clearly, Steven didn’t get the memo, because it’s just a regular Poke Ball, not a Luxury Ball.

The only way to get a Luxury Ball Lati in ORAS is via the Eon Ticket event. This event is actually still technically obtainable, as it can spread via Streetpass. Unfortunately, I don’t know anyone who lives near me that got this event back in the day, so I’m out of luck there, and it’s time for another trip to gen 3. Latios on my Emerald save had already been Master Balled for Battle Facility stuff, but I had a Ruby save where I could get him. I’d need to do a Sapphire playthrough for Latias though, so it was time for one more Hoenn run. The general idea is the same: take Mudkip, curse the lack of physical/special split making your water options worse, and rejoice that Zinnia doesn’t exist yet.

The actual catching process is going to be a lot more involved than the birds, because the Latis in RSE are roamers. I’ll put the full explanation in spoilers because this post is already super long. Just know that it took a long time, like everything else Hoenn has put me through.

Spoiler: Lots of yapping about the setup to catch roaming Latis in Luxury Balls

First off, we have to actually acquire the Luxury Balls. This can be done via contest spam in Hoenn itself, but that sounds awful, so instead I’ll be farming them off Selphy like I did for the birds, and trading them over. Trading is slow, but so is everything else about this chunk of the dex. Each Lati has around 50 total PP, so I went with that many balls.

Then, we need to get them ready for catching. First, we have to encounter them once to be able to track them. Put a level ~30 mon in the front of the party, pop a repel (this, combined with the repel, will prevent all regular encounters, but still allow Lati@s, who’s level 40), go to the south end of Cycling Road, hop in the grass on the Acro Bike a bunch of times, then - assuming you get nothing - go into the Cycling Road entry room and come back out to update Lati@s’s route and try again. Eventually, you’ll get the encounter, and can now track Lati@s from their dex page.

Now we need the actual setup to catch them. The common sense course of action would be to just Master Ball them, but I need them in Luxury Balls, so we have to try and turn this into a regular Legendary encounter so ball spam is possible. They’re roamers, so a trapping mon is key. I went with Mean Look Umbreon, because it’s cool, and also because it learns Baton Pass. In gens 3 and 4 only, Mean Look can be Baton Passed. The fact that you’re trapping another Pokemon can be passed to an ally just like having +2 attack or being behind a Substitute can. This is the key to the whole setup. We trap the Lati turn 1 with Mean Look, then Baton Pass out to another mon who can do what Umbreon can’t.

From here, I based my operations out of Mauville, since its 4-way intersection gives a good chance of the Lati being nearby upon a going-inside-then-outside reset (which sets their position to a totally random route), and then you just need to be a bit lucky running into one of the adjoining routes (which just moves their position to an adjacent route). First, I encounter them to whittle down their HP. Umbreon Baton Passes out to Scyther, who spams False Swipe until they’re on 1HP. Then I hard switch to break the trapping effect and allow them to flee, which gives me the opportunity to save. This will be where I reset to if they struggle.

You might be thinking, “why not status them here?”, since that’s the other go-to common sense move with roamers in addition to lowering their HP. But Latios and Latias know Refresh, which clears all statuses. So we could paralyse them here, but it wouldn’t last. Instead, we’re going to continually re-paralyse them during the actual encounter (clicking Thunder Wave after a Refresh does lose out on turns that could be spent throwing balls, but you get those back from full paralyses, so it more or less evens out).

So we need a paralyser. And, they have to be dark type. Latios and Latias only know psychic-type damaging moves, so having a dark type negates the need to worry about the health of the Pokemon sitting in. This was also part of why I gravitated to Umbreon, but the constant paralysis requirement means it can’t do the main job itself. Three dark type mons get Thunder Wave in gen 3 (there might be others with Glare; I didn’t check). First is Tyranitar, who’s obviously no good since its sand will kill Lati@s. Next is Absol. Pressure will halve the length of the encounter, greatly lowering efficiency. That leaves Murkrow, who’ll be our paralyser of choice (or rather, lack of choice).

And that’s it. Run around Mauville until they’re on your route, encounter them, Mean Look then Baton Pass out to Murkrow, spam Luxury Balls, and if they Refresh, click Twave. I did Latios first, and he struggled twice (we’re working with the old gen catch formula here, which is way more brutal than we’re used to now. At 1HP, with paralysis, each ball has around a 1.2% chance to catch. For comparison, the exact same setup would give about a 4.8% chance in new gens). Latias, however, did not make life so easy. A few summers ago, I hunted Latias in Dynamax Adventures. I’d gotten her brother beforehand, and he took a modest 80 or so runs. Latias, on the other hand, took over 500. For most of that summer, the only Pokemon I played was chasing that damn dragon. It made the shiny all the better, but I still remember the grind she put me through.

She did it again here. Latias struggled 7 times before finally getting in the ball (and remember, every time she struggles, I have to go through the hassle of finding her again, since her route position isn’t preserved by saving). Nearly 400 balls were thrown in total. But finally, she was caught, and Hoenn was (almost) finished.

I transferred the Latis up (Umbreon joined them as far as HGSS - we’ll be seeing more of it later), and they took their place in ORAS, before the whole dex made the jump to Home. From there, it was just a case of grabbing Galarian Zigzagoon and Linoone, and the Jirachi from BDSP, along with my original playthrough Deoxys who I’d transferred up years ago and had been waiting in Home this whole time, and finally, the hell Hoenn has put me through is ove-

Deoxys is nicknamed.

I haven’t mentioned this until now, because it’s not been relevant, but I don’t want any of the living dex mons to be nicknamed. It just feels more fitting for a living dex for them just to have their species names. Unfortunately, me three years ago wasn’t thinking about this, and he gave my original playthrough Deoxys the nickname “Voyager”. It is an extremely cool name for a Deoxys, but unfortunately, it can’t be overwritten in any game other than that original AS save, which Deoxys can’t go back to, because it’s already on the Switch.

That means it’s time for one more visit to my biggest opp, Zinnia. You know the drill. Mudkip. Earthquake. Mash A. Hours of my life gone. Eventually, I make it to Sky Pillar, grab the fourth Deoxys, transfer it up, and finally, Hoenn is finished. For real this time.

Well that was something. I knew Deoxys would be bad, but I didn’t anticipate the bonus fourth run, nor the Latis (I had misremembered and thought it was just an early encounter in ORAS, not a gift, so they’d be catchable in Luxury Balls there). And of course, I didn’t think I’d be doing 95% of the dex twice. Apologies for the length of this one (even by this blog’s standards, it’s run long), but it really was a rollercoaster.

Next up, Unova. It’ll be a long one, but after Hoenn, as long as Victini doesn’t have 5 secret once-per-playthrough forms, it’ll be a step up.

Region's hardest Pokemon: Deoxys
Pokemon caught: 874

 

[falinksedin]

Small but very significant update today:
Ladies and gentlemen,

We got him!!!

 

[There Is No Arceus]

awesome

 

[falinksedin]

Still chipping away at Unova (spoiler alert but I decided to start with some legendaries and the genies are so much worse than I realised, which has been a real time sink), but I do have an update:

Got the last 3 Cap Pikachu today, which means I officially have all of the event-exclusive forms I needed to trade for! Now the only thing between me and finishing the dex is my own progress catching stuff (and like, 2 more Unova playthroughs apparently. I thought I was joking when I said gen 5 might not be a step up from the Deoxys runs lmao)

 

[There Is No Arceus]

wait, why are the genies so terrible? aren't they just roamers?

 

[falinksedin]

wait, why are the genies so terrible? aren't they just roamers?

I need two of each - because of Incarnate/Therian forms - in Luxury Balls. In B2W2, they're only in the Dream Radar, where they can only be caught in Dream Balls, and in BW, Thundy and Torn are version exclusives, so it'll take 4 BW playthroughs to get them.

To make matters worse, I didn't know about this and foolishly assumed that all genies could be caught in any Unova game, so I started by doing a White 2 playthrough (all I had to begin with was a completed White 1 save), and then a Black 2 playthrough just because I needed another Zekrom since my W1 one was Master Balled. I'd have needed at least one of these as far as whatever badge you get the gift Zorua, but going all the way with both turned out to be completely redundant in hindsight, knowing how many BW1 runs are needed.

 

[falinksedin]

Region #8: Unova

Unova's dex is unique in that unlike every other region's, it doesn't actually have the grass starter at #001. Instead, Victini is there. For some reason.

I didn't really need to do anything to get Victini, since I had the one I'd claimed during Worlds 2022 sitting waiting in Home, but I decided in the spirit of this weird hiccup in ordering, and for the sake of mixing things up a bit, I'd knock out all of Unova's legendaries as my first task for this chunk of the living dex.

The only Unova playthrough I'd ever done was a fairly rushed White 1 run, because I'd needed a completed gen 5 save to transfer my ribbon masters through. As such, I was less prepared for this leg of the challenge than I had been for most of the prior ones. My playthrough Zekrom was unfortunately Master Balled, so I'd need another one, in addition to a Kyurem and Reshiram to complete the trio. The most logical move seemed to be to just run through both Black 2 and White 2. That'd net me all three cover legends (plus a spare Kyurem), as well as give me completed saves on the games everyone says are better anyway, to actually grind out most of the dex on (my Unova knowledge is more limited than my knowledge of most other regions. I was pretty underwhelmed by it when I first played it and had never felt a huge desire to return to it, so I was going into this with vague memories of second-hand hearsay, as opposed to the at-least-a-couple-playthroughs of experience I have for most other regions).

So that's what I did. I blasted through both of B2W2, and in the end, I had all the cover legendaries, as well as a full set of starters to breed from - my original W1 playthrough had been Samurott, so in B2 and W2 I chose a Serperior and Emboar respectively. I treated W2 as an "actual" playthrough, which I don't normally bother with for runs like these, but since it's a sequel with its own story and I was playing it for the first time, I took it a bit more slowly and wandered around a bit more. Here was my team (I traded a Deino over from W1 as Hydreigon is cool; the whole team was just Unova mons I liked but hadn't used in W1):

Anyway, with that taken care of, I also had the Swords of Justice, because they kinda just throw themselves at you towards the end of White 2's story. All that was left in terms of legendaries was the genies.

And here is where I made the crucial error of assuming that Unova Pokemon would be catchable in the Unova games instead of fact-checking. For some reason, the genies are not catchable in B2W2, and are instead exclusive to Dream Radar, an eShop augmented reality game, from which you can transfer them into your B2W2 save. I actually do have Dream Radar on my 3DS - I downloaded it right before the eShop shutdown because I saw it on a list of "things to get before the eShop shuts down" and it's been sitting untouched since. But in the Dream Radar, all Pokemon are caught in Dream Balls (this was where they originated from, and prior to gen 8 the Dream Radar was the only way to get Dream Ball mons). That's no good, because I need my legendaries in Luxury Balls.

Not a problem, right? I have my W1 save. The thing is, the genies each have two forms: Incarnate and Therian. It's not the first time this has burned me, either - this exact thing was the entire reason I played through PLA a second time. So I catch one set of genies in my W1 save, then do a quick B1 run for a second set, right? Seems straightforward enough.

Except, because apparently in this stupid region they wanted it to be as hard as possible to acquire its native Pokemon, Tornadus and Thundurus are version exclusives. So I'd need two B1 saves and two W1 saves. Cue three more Unova playthroughs.

An unholy amount of mashing A through ferris wheel dates with the king of Team Plasma later, I had all my genies (Lando isn't a problem - you just get him from showing up to the Abundant Shrine, off Route 14, with the other two in your party, so I could've had four of him if I wanted). This is another case of me covering something kinda briefly, relevant to the overall length of the post, but it having accounted for the majority of the time spent on the region. I played through Unova five times in as many days. It was a lot.

I looked into getting the Reveal Glass here, to transform one set into their Therian forms. All you need to do is enter the Abundant Shrine with a Lando-T in your party. The genies you catch in the Dream Radar are in their Therian forms, so it'd just be a case of grabbing Lando from there, then bringing him into W2 to access the ability to change them all at will. I figured trying Dream Radar could be fun, so I booted it up and had a look. I played one round before immediately realising it was time-gated, grindy nonsense with extremely uninteresting gameplay. The genies can stay Incarnate until the Switch.

Anyway, let's breed some starters! Notable points here are that the whole Serperior line had to be female, and Samurott has a second form, but that's not something we can worry about on the DS. Then came the slew of early route mons, up until the monkeys.

The monkeys are only available in shaking grass in the Pinwheel Forest. I wasn't really aware of the shaking grass mechanic, and over the course of this challenge, I would come to absolutely hate it. Waiting on RNG just to access an encounter table for a low chance at the mon you want is silly. I know there are similiarities between stuff like this and Feebas, which I praised previously, and the reality is that the line between "fun and interesting" and "grindy and tedious" is subjective, and wherever it sits for you, Pokemon likely flirts with it somewhere. For me, the key difference is that you can approach Feebas methodically. You can just fish on every tile one-by-one, and you'll get a Feebas sooner or later. You can also keep a very tangible sense of your own progress, because there's a finite, measurable number of tiles on the route, so you know how many are left at any given point. Shaking grass, on the other hand, is just running around until you roll a patch, then entering it to roll again in the hopes of getting the mon you want. Milotic is also extremely cool, while the monkeys are far too lame to justify making so frustratingly rare.

I'll have further run-ins with shaking grass in a bit, so I'll save the rest of my ranting for then. Eventually, I got one of each monkey and then bred a second set. More simple encounters (Gigalith is a trade evo, but I've been working with multiple DSes to move stuff between games this whole time so that was no issue) until Swoobat, who:
A) epitomises my issue with Unova's dex, because mandating 151 slots to design mons for results in the most mind-numbingly boring Kanto reskins, and;
B) is a friendship evo. Welcome to the party, Woobat

By the time I got to Audino, I'd already seen several, because it occupies 55% of the shaking grass encounter table on like, every route. I guess so you can grind for XP because my god everything in this region evolves late.

The Timburr and Tympole lines, Sawk, and Throh are all easy enough. Let's talk about the Sewaddle line. Bug Pokemon famously evolve very early. Almost every game has some early trainer say something along the lines of, "I love bug Pokemon because they're easy to train!" The idea being that you pick up your early route caterpillar and it goes through metamorphosis by the first gym so that new players can learn how evolving Pokemon works. Sewaddle evolves into Swadloon at level 20. I had to check Bulbapedia because by level 15 I though it must be a stone evo or something; it was so unthinkable to me that an early route bug evolves that late. It's very representative of something that plagued this entire challenge: Unova Pokemon evolve so late, and making a living dex of them requires so much grinding.

Once you have your Swadloon, how do you turn it into a Leavanny? Another friendship evolution. I couldn't be bothered doing a second of these, but fortunately, unlike Swoobat, Leavanny is obtainable in the wild. It's a 5% shaking grass encounter, and I need a male. I spent about 2 hours on Route 6, because I could not find Leavanny for the life of me, and the first two I got were female. I hate shaking grass.

Everything after that was fairly straightforward (aside from some regional forms I'm obviously skipping for now) until Zorua. Because I was doing this in White 2, it wasn't a huge deal, but I just want to mention that the Zorua line is event-exclusive in BW, for some reason. The next interesting mon after that was Deerling, who is basically the only thing in the entire game meaningfully affected by the seasons mechanic. It and its evolution Sawsbuck each have four forms - one for each season. The seasons rotate based on the real-world month, so getting all four is just a classic case of messing with the 3DS clock. Deerling is native to Route 6, so I'd actually just gone ahead and done this while I was taking up residence there for Leavanny. Almost immediately after (inbetween is Emolga, who I had already grabbed, because of course it's a Route 6 shaking grass encounter) is the Karrablast line.

Karrablast and Shelmet only evolve (into Escavalier and Accelgor respectively, which look like they'd be the evolutions of the opposite pre-evos) when traded specifically with each other. It's a fun little gimmick. They're more Route 6 natives though, so I had no issue grabbing two of each during the great bug hunt.

Tynamo is at best an 8% encounter in Chargestone Cave's lowest floor, so getting 3 males there took a while. The gender rule really compounds the annoyingness of low encounter rates like these. The ice types - Cubchoo, Beartic, and Cryogonal - can be found more commonly during winter. I guess the idea is that Unova lacks a specific ice type biome, and instead the whole world becomes icy during winter. They couldn't make like 100 ice type mons to actually fill out every area though (y'know, like how when you enter the Ice Path, Shoal Cave, Route 217, etc., the Pokemon you see actually reflect the new environment), so instead encounter tables in like two areas are slightly tweaked and literally nothing else changes. Also, you can just catch Cubchoo and Beartic and Cryogonal in Twist Mountain in any season. In case it's not coming through from my tone, the experience of revisiting it for the living dex hasn't sold me any further on Unova. The games just seem stuffed so full of gimmickry that sounds cool if you don't give it more than a second of thought, but that just bogs down the experience of actually playing Pokemon for me.

Also, everything evolves at like level 50. I didn't even bother with the Audino because I couldn't be arsed with the shaking grass; I just went and fought the league whenever I had a buildup of mons needing evolving. If you use, for example, a Mienfoo on your playthrough team, and keep your level roughly in line with the gym leader level caps, you'll be running a baby Pokemon until the Elite 4. That's not a hypothetical. This is what happened to me the first time I played through Unova. Here's my White 1 team:

There is exactly one Pokemon in that picture who has a level-up evolution that evolves past its base stage before level 50. I know I'm far from the first person to make this complaint, and its impact on a playthrough isn't directly relevant to the living dex, but the late evolution levels really did make this chunk of the dex so much grindier than any of the preceding ones.

Anyway, after Mienshao it was just a few more mons from late-game routes (mercifully, Rufflet and Vullaby are at least caught close to their evolution levels in B2W2), and then Volcarona, who's a once-per-save static encounter in B2W2, fittingly abutting the legendaries in the dex. And since I'd done those legendaries earlier, that was it!

It was time for everyone to go into Bank, and as much as I've talked about dreading transfers, I hadn't actually anticipated this being that terrible, because Transporter is basically just Bank-lite, so shouldn't be too bad for moving mons in bulk. I was wrong. Transporter can only move Box 1 from your Unova save. So you move Box 1 into Bank, and then you need to move the next set of mons into Box 1. But it's not quite that simple. First, you need to move the set you just transferred out of the Transporter Box, which serves as a temporary holding space, and into regular Bank boxes. So you have to boot up Bank first to do that. Except Bank won't open if you don't have a 3DS game in. So you have to take out your Unova game, put in a Gen 6 or 7 game just so Bank will open, move the mons out of the Transporter Box, close Bank, put your Unova game back in, move the next set of mons into Box 1, go back to Transporter, and repeat. Not looking forward to doing this whole process with the added step of playing the crossbow game for every set of 6 mons coming from Johto.

Once they were all in Bank, it was easy enough to send them to Home, where I added in Victini, the Hisuian forms that I'd pre-caught when I finished the PLA Home dex (I was serious about never wanting to touch that game again - I caught all remaining Hisui-exclusive forms ahead of time so I never had reason to open it), grabbed the four Galarian forms I needed, and added my Crown Tundra Keldeo and Indigo Disc Meloetta, who I chose to use over their Mega Dimension counterparts because I think the unlocking methods in those games are way cooler than "pay us $30 for like quests that amount to 'talk to like one NPC and get a free mythical'". My only Genesect is the PLZA one, however, so it'll need to wait until that game gets Home support.

Also, I'd kinda just forgotten that Keldeo has two forms, so I the last thing I had to do was the Swords of Justice questline on a second save. It didn't take too long, and I enjoyed it well enough. Again, this is the kind of rarity I like - it's potentially time-consuming and obscure, but it's consistent and you're not just at the mercy of frustrating RNG. Especially with Mythicals, these weird tasks to unlock them feel like a good way to preserve their feeling of rarity and specialness while making them regularly available outside of time-limited distros. Much cooler than whatever PLZA has going on.

With a second Keldeo acquired, all that was left to do was dump the stupid genies into SV, buy a Reveal Glass at the auction, and turn them into their Therian forms.

And with that, the region I was dreading the most (because of how many mons it has, the amount of transferring involved, and the fact I just plain don't like it very much) is done. Sorry if this one was a bit ranty (like, even more so than the prior posts). The reality is just that these games have cemented themselves as sitting pretty low in the rankings for me, and they're also just not well suited to this kind of thing, so it was a bit of a frustrating experience.

Next up, however, we're moving swiftly onto the oldest games of all (at least in terms of the games used for this challenge): Johto.

(Quick note: I'm going to do a recount here for the "total mons caught" stat, because I realised I hadn't yet factored in the event exclusives I've traded for. So if it jumps up a wee bit, that's why. Also, I don't think I explained this yet, but "total mons caught" refers to mons caught specifically to go into the living dex. I'm obviously catching more mons - Ditto for breeding, False Swipers, trade fodder, etc. - but the stat is just concrete dex progress. And also "caught" includes mons I already had, not actively caught during the challenge. Really it's just "number of mons in the dex so far".)

Region's hardest Pokemon: Tornadus and Thundurus
Pokemon caught: 1,060 (we broke 1,000! Woo!)

 

[falinksedin]

Region #9: Unknown Region

Still chipping away at Johto (hopefully be finished within the next day or two) but in the meantime I remembered this was a thing.

The Home mobile app lists individual Pokedexes of each of the Switch games (which is how you get the shiny gift Mythicals), but the Switch app instead has dexes for each region (because god forbid they have any parity whatsoever, I guess). I didn't even know about this until recently, but it seems as good a basis as any for establishing what mons come from where. For most Pokemon, of course, that's not even really necessary to check, but it's useful for the handful of edge cases (notably, the Kitakami/Indigo mons, for whom my decision to class them as Paldea mons is supported by these dexes).

In Home, Meltan and Melmetal are listed as part of the "Unknown Region" dex - the only two mons in there. It'd feel weird putting them into the Alola dex, even though they're technically gen 7 mons (compared to something like Ogerpon, who's technically not from Paldea but still introduced in the Paldea games, Meltan and Melmetal feel a lot more separate), so sure, those two can have their own box titled "Unknown Region".

I already had these guys just sitting in my Home boxes so it was just a case of making the box for them so it's official. I might swap them out for the ZA ones once that game gets Home support, because the Go symbols are kinda ugly and at least the ZA Meltan is in a Luxury Ball, even if the Melmetal isn't.

Region's hardest Pokemon: Melmetal I guess?
Pokemon caught: 1,062