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Wait, do you get BOTH a Meltan and a Melmetal in ZA? I thought the mission just evolved Meltan so I haven't complete it as I'm afraid they won't give me another one to put it in home lol.
I'm Making a Living Dex
- Thread starter falinksedin
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falinksedin
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Pretty sure it's both, unless I'm misremembering. You go into a distortion and it just puts a Melmetal into your boxes.
falinksedin
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Region #10: Johto
The penultimate region for this challenge is Johto (I've been saving Alola for last for a reason that's probably pretty obvious if you know anything about completing the dex in Home), and so it was time for HGSS. Heartgold was the first Pokemon game I ever played, and I sank countless hours into it as a kid. As such, those games and the Johto region generally hold a special place for me, and have remained my favourites ever since. I actually hadn't booted HGSS up in a while before revisiting them for this, so it was a lot of fun going back to them again.
The section started, as it usually does, with breeding starters. I'd be getting very used to Route 34 for this one, so I might as well get comfy. All the Meganium line had to be female, so that took a while (also, this has nothing to do with the living dex, but I'm writing this one day after the reveal of Mega Meganium's ability and I just want to interject that I'm very happy team Chikorita finally got a win). I have literally never played through HGSS with anything other than a Chikorita, so I had to start new saves for the others. I didn't actually have an existing completed SS save - I've played through Johto many times since returning to Pokemon, but mainly various types of nuzlockes and challenge runs, which I typically just did on an emulated Heartgold. I've never really had a need for a completed SS save on cart. So, I played 10 minutes into SS to grab a Cyndaquil, traded it out, then reset and did a whole run with Totodile. Feraligatr is fantastic for a story playthrough - the coverage it gets via level up and its matchups into the story fights are Swampert-tier. I'm still team Chikky though.
With the starters taken care of, I cracked on with the regular dex. The first Pokemon of note I came to was Crobat, who's a friendship evolution. Before I could get started with biking back and forth endlessly, though, something very cool happened. Something that's literally never happened to me in my thousands of hours of playing Pokemon. As I was catching the Zubat I got Pokerus (there's a joke in here somewhere about it being apt that I caught a virus from a bat). I went to the Pokecenter to clear the poison it had inflicted on me and the Pokecenter lady gave the dialogue explaining the virus. If you're unaware, Pokerus is a virus your Pokemon can randomly contract (the chance of this occurring is about 1 in 21,845) after a wild battle. While they have it, it can spread to other party members, and it goes away on its own after a few days. After they get better, they're immune and can't catch it again. Both Pokemon currently infected and cured Pokemon have any EV gain doubled, so despite the fact it's a virus sounding ominous, it's actually beneficial.
(Excuse the poor phone photography lol)
I have no idea if it'll ever be useful to me, but it's still a very cool thing to have had happen. I had one of my party members cough on a Shinx I had sitting in my boxes, and then stashed it back there (boxed infected Pokemon won't ever become cured if they're left in there), so I could use it to infect other mons in the future if I wanted.
Anyway, after evolving Crobat, the next Pokemon of note was Pichu, and the run of baby Pokemon that follow it. These can't be caught in the wild, and instead must be bred. A running theme with the Johto dex is that almost every Pokemon has something notable about it, which means there are very few cases of just going to a route and catching a Pokemon (and what that means for this post is that there'll likely be even more yapping than normal). Johto as a region is unique in its design that emphasises short, regular sessions where you chip away at things over time, enaging with all the daily/weekly events, and I think the distribution of Pokemon aligns with that. Catching a lot of these Pokemon is a more involved, deliberate task, and at times only available at certain times of day or on certain days of the week. (These games are also just slow because they run slow - gen 4 is infamous for this - and have the least QoL out of any games used for the challenge. Never mind not being able to access boxes from anywhere; being prompted to reapply repel didn't even exist until B2W2).
The results of this are twofold: for one, you'd immediately have more of an attachment to any party members you had to jump through more hoops to obtain, and for two, it makes your playthrough more unique - my run where I happened to reach the National Park on a Tuesday and grabbed a Scyther will feel very different to your run where you backtracked through Union Cave to explore on a Friday and found the Lapras, or to another where someone went to the effort of getting all the new (as of GSC) baby Pokemon (at least, in a world where we're playing these games semi-"organically" and only looking things up occasionally rather than sitting with 4 Bulbapedia tabs open in front of us and changing our DS clocks at will). There's certainly a degree of bias here with how much I love this design philosophy, because again, I adore these games. But I do think it works better for me than something like "Nosepass is a low percentage encounter via Rock Smash in a specific room in Granite Cave because it just is", because while obtaining a lot of these Pokemon is an involved process, it's rarely random. Almost all of them sit closer to the Feebas end of the spectrum, where you can approach it in a methodical way and keep a tangible sense of your progress, rather than being purely at the mercy of RNG like with shaking grass.
Anyway, with that mini-essay about why Johto is peak out of the way, let's move on to the next such interesting encounter: Bellossom. Bellossom evolves from Gloom when you expose it to a Sun Stone. How do we get a Sun Stone? By playing the greatest minigames ever to grace the Pokemon series.
The Pokeathlon Dome sits just north of Goldenrod City, and there, you can participate in the Pokeathlon: a series of athletics-themed minigames designed to make use of the DS's touch screen. You earn points based on your performance, and those points can be spent at a shop in the Dome to buy various useful evolution items. My story team seemed best suited for the Stamina games (there are 5 sets of three minigames, each corresponding to a different attribute that's ultimately just one of the base stats), so I grinded away at those for a while, and soon enough I had the requisite 3,000 points for a Sun Stone. Fortunately, I was doing this on a Sunday, so I didn't even need to change the clock (the prizes rotate daily, and the Sun Stone is, aptly, available on Sundays). This is what I mean about Johto's design. If I'd undertaken this for a playthrough Bellossom, I'd end up much more attached to it than if I'd just found a Sun Stone on the ground somewhere or bought it in a department store, and the actual "grind" of getting the points doesn't feel like a slog because the games are fun. I didn't even mind doing it for this challenge, where the Bellossom is ultimate just going to sit in a box in Home.
Immediately after Bellossom comes Marill and Azumarill (the first member of the line, Azurill, was added with Hoenn), and for these Pokemon, I wanted females. If you're up on niche Pokemon trivia, me mentioning the Marill line and gender in the same sentence means you probably already know where this is going.
Marill is available by default in the Safari Zone. I can't actually use a Marill caught there for the dex, since it'd be in a Safari Ball, but Poke Ball type passing down with breeding didn't exist until gen 6, so I can breed it and the offspring will be in the required regular Poke Balls. Azurill has a 3:1 ratio of female:male, so I was able to get two females pretty quickly.
This is going to be an oversimplification, but you can think of the way Pokemon gender (along with most other attributes like stats, shininess, etc.) is determined as follows: every Pokemon has a secret number called the PID (Pokemon ID), which is generated randomly as soon as the Pokemon spawns into existence. All of the aforementioned random attributes are determined by that PID, so the PID itself acts as an easy way of storing all of the information. In the case of gender, think of it like this: for a Pokemon with a 50/50 gender ratio, the game just checks to see if the value of the last two digits of the PID is greater than 50. If it is, the Pokemon is male, and if not, it's female (again, this isn't literally how it works, but it's a good enough representation for what I'm about to explain).
The Marill line is the only line in Pokemon history (aside from the likes of Vespiquen, Gallade, etc., where an evolution has a 100% gender ratio because gender is an evo requirement) where different members of the line have different gender ratios. Azurill is 75% female and 25% male, while Marill and Azurill are 50/50. What this means is that for the aforementioned check, the game looks for the number in the PID being over 75 to make an Azurill male, but over 50 to make a Marill male. That means if you have an Azurill whose PID number sits between 50 and 75, it'll be female as an Azurill, but male as a Marill. Azurill is, quite famously, the only Pokemon capable of changing gender upon evolution (this was changed in later gens so now if you have a female Azurill, the gender of its evolutions will always match those of the Azurill).
I bring all of this up because, sure enough, one of my female Azurill became male upon evolution. I knew this was possible, but it was still funny to see it actually happen. I'm very happy for him and he has my full support, but unfortunately it did mean I had to breed another, and Azurill to Marill is a friendship evolution, so it ate up a fair bit of time.
Next was Sudowoodo, which also required breeding because my story one was female. After that, the next notable one was Sunflora, who required another Sun Stone. It was now a Tuesday (and the Pokeathlon prizes can only be redeemed once per day anyway), so rather than return to the Pokeathlon I decided to try my hand at the Bug Catching Contest. Prior to obtaining the National Dex, the Bug Catching Contest will always give a Sun Stone as the first prize, but in the postgame, first prize is instead one of 10 random evolution stones (including the Sun Stone). This meant the odds of getting a Sun Stone weren't great, but I figured I might as well try. I caught a Pinsir and took first place handily (the trick to winning the contest is only statusing your target to catch it, as damaging it lowers your score), but my reward was a measly Dusk Stone. I ended up just trading over a spare Sun Stone from Platinum to move things along, but the Bug Catching Contest was fun anyway. I remember as a kid learning Scyther existed and immediately becoming obsessed with finding one. I think it took me a while to learn that it wasn't available in the National Park ordinarily, and you had to do the Contest to get it, because (while my memories from that long ago are all pretty foggy) I'm fairly certain I spent far longer doing encounters than a 5% chance would have taken.
Immediately after Sunflora is Yanma, who is one of the handful of pure RNG grinds. 1% on route 35 only. Nothing for it but biking around in the grass for ages. Wooper is after that, then the final (and best) Eeveelutions of the whole challenge, Espeon and Umbreon.
After them is Murkrow, who's the first of a few Pokemon with a very interesting status as far as this challenge is concerned. The met-region rule requires me to catch every Pokemon in the region where it was introduced. However, Murkrow, despite being a gen 2 Pokemon and therefore associated with Johto, isn't actually available in Johto - you can only catch it in the Kanto part of the game. As mentioned previously, Home's met region field is actually just based on the game of origin rather than any specific met location, so any Pokemon from HGSS will show up as being met in Johto regardless of the specific met location, but I still thought it would be nice to have the in-game met location show Johto too. Therefore, I decided that for these such Pokemon, I'd go out and catch them, then breed them on Route 34 so that the ones going in the living dex would have Johto met locations even in-game.
(There's also an argument to be made that certain Kanto/Johto Pokemon are actually native to the region associated with the opposite game - ie. Murkrow is straight up a Kanto Pokemon, while Dratini and Lapras are Johto mons, since their only presence in Kanto is as gifts/in the Safari Zone, while they're found in the wild in Johto. I think this is an interesting theory, but the messiness of different games and different encounter tables makes it hard to rule definitively on, and it's generally accepted that "Johto Pokemon" really just means "Gen 2 Pokemon", so at least for the purposes of this challenge, Dratini is Kantonian and Murkrow is Johtonian).
A few more relatively straightforward encounters go by, and then it's time for Unown. Unown has 28 forms (one for each letter of the alphabet, plus exclamation and question marks), and they're found in the Ruins of Alph. This is another childhood memory for me - I remember wanting to catch all the forms and complete the Unown Report, but not really understanding the specifics of unlocking them. I guess either the Prima game guide I was armed with didn't say, or I was just too dumb a child to understand it. Also, just to clarify since I keep bringing it up, the copy I'm playing on is not my childhood copy. That, unfortunately, is long gone, having been traded in to my high street Game (that's the name of the shop, for any non-Brits reading. They literally just called it "Game") for probably like £2.50 when I was a foolish child.
Luckily, I am not as dumb as I was when I was 8 years old, and it turns out accessing all the Unown encounters isn't even that hard. You just complete four puzzles in four different buildings in the ruins, and completing each one adds a subset of letters to the encounter table of the basement (I don't remember for sure, but I suspect what tripped me up as a kid was that two of the buildings are accessed through Union Cave, not through the ruins area itself). The fact it's all one encounter table does mean that by the time all four puzzles are done, getting any one letter is a 1/26 chance, so it's a bit grindy, but it wasn't too bad, and soon enough I had the full alphabet. Then you talk to a researcher, and the final two forms - the punctuation marks - become available in the entrance building (so long as you also completed four secondary puzzles in the ruin buildings, which play similiarly to the Regi puzzles but with "decoding" Unown writing instead of braille. I will admit the "Water" one took me a while, because my brain did not go to a Water Stone. I tried like every water HM and even using a Fresh Water before I thought of the stone).
After that, it was another run of relatively straightforward encounters until Dunsparce, who would be tricky if I didn't already have one. See, a couple of years back, I did a hardcore nuzlocke of HG (on emulator, not on this cart save, but I extracted the important mons onto my cartridge save so they weren't lost whenever I reset for another run), and my plan was to grab a Zubat in Dark Cave to make into a Crobat, who's a very good nuzlocke mon. I'd already gotten a Geodude from Route 46, so the Dark Cave Zubat was virtually guaranteed. Virtually - the first Pokemon I encountered when I walked into that cave was the 1% Dunsparce. I found this hilarious and he became a vital member of the team, even coming to the elite 4. Here's photographic proof:
(Girafarig was a similar story - I'd gotten an Abra early on but lost my Kadabra to sloppy play and forgetting how frail it is, so Giraf stepped up as the obligatory Psychic spammer to sweep all the poison-type Rocket mons. I've had a soft spot for both her and Dunsparce ever since. We were eating good when the Paldea evos dropped).
Anyway, because of all this, I didn't need to contend with the 1% encounter chance and could just breed my existing Dunsparce.
The next interesting mon is Steelix. Steelix isn't that interesting itself - Onix is just a 10% encounter in Cliff Cave on route 47 (among other locations), but while doing encounters for it, I had another very unlikely first:
My luck with random shinies has historically been nonexistent, and while I've done a lot of shiny hunting, it's never been in older games (I just find the Switch far more comfortable to use for prolonged periods). This was therefore my first ever sprite shiny (they do hit different), and my first ever shiny at 1/8192. At level 19, she did know Selfdestruct, which was scary (literally my only ever other random shiny in a game without overworld shinies was another Geodude, on my first day of playing BDSP, who exploded), but fortunately, she got in the second Premier Ball I threw. Her name is Topaz and I evolved her into a Golem, who has my favourite shiny out of that line. I gotta hunt her some friends sooner or later so she's not too lonely in the newly-created shiny box. I figured getting a random shiny at some point during all this (outside of the overworld shiny games) was pretty likely, but it was still cool to see it happen, especially in my favourite game.
Snubbull immediately follows Steelix and is another 1% encounter, but this one came mercifully quickly and I was able to breed more from it to get one to make into a Granbull. Heracross required headbutting a bunch of trees (it works like a lite version of Munchlax - only certain trees have the encounter table containing it, and you have no way to know which ones. Fortunately, headbutt encounters take seconds rather than hours, and Heracross is 30% as opposed to 1).
After that, it was relatively smooth sailing until Porygon2. Porygon is only available from the Celadon Game Corner, for the price of 9,999 coins. That meant it was gambling time! Because of age rating reasons, the Game Corners in HGSS forgo outright slot machines in favour of Voltorb Flip, which is like a slightly more RNG-heavy minesweeper. I am all too familiar with this game, as the boltbeam TMs are locked behind it, so a gambling session as soon as you hit Goldenrod is basically a must for any HGSS nuzlocke. After some grinding, I bought my prize low-poly duck, bred it on Route 34 to get one with a Johto met location, and evolved it.
From there, it was mostly easy stuff - Tyrogue required venturing into Mt. Mortar which I'd never bothered with, and a little tweaking of EVs with vitamins to make sure I evolved it into Hitmontop, then it was more baby mons, before the last Pokemon of the regular dex: Blissey. Chansey is a 1% encounter on a few Kanto routes, but I got super lucky here, catching it within 10 encounters. I also rolled the 50% chance for it to be holding an Oval Stone, which made life easier for evolving the Happiny I bred from it. One final friendship evolution gave me Blissey, and then it was Legendary time (and also the Tyranitar line, but they were simple enough so I'll just mention them here).
Most of the Legendaries on my main save were already caught, and not in Luxury Balls, so this was one of the main reasons for the SS playthrough. Because Johto is goated, you can actually catch both box legendaries in one save, meaning that one additional save was all I needed. First, though, I had to acquire Luxury Balls. In HGSS, you get Luxury Balls via... gambling! The Goldenrod Department Store lottery has three prize tiers - you have a 5% chance of a TM, a 30% chance of a Poke Ball, and a 65% chance of a random berry. The TM and Ball vary by day, and on Sundays, you get Luxury Balls. Entry is $300 and you can play as many times as you like. I hadn't really needed to spend much on this playthrough, since Feraligatr had carried so hard, so I had just shy of $150k saved up. I gambled literally all of it.
With almost 200 Luxury Balls in hand, I set about catching the roamers. I won't go into too much detail here, as it's a pretty similar process to the Latis in RSE. I'd transferred the Umbreon I used for them up to use again here, but this time instead of Baton Passing to an Absol to spam Twave, I Baton Passed to Electrode, since the dogs know Roar, which would end the encounter if not blocked by Soundproof. Then came Suicune, and finally the box legends. I'd just run from Lugia during the story, since I figured it'd be easier to just get all the Luxury Balls at once and do it along with the rest of the Legendaries. I feel like I got pretty lucky with my catches on all of these - not a single one struggled once.
With those 5 taken care of, only one mon remained - Celebi. Celebi can't be obtained in HGSS these days, but it is available in VC Crystal, where you get the event item GS Ball upon beating the league (like the Deoxys and Ho-oh/Lugia items in the newly released FRLG port). I'd started a Crystal playthrough ages back for this reason (along with just wanting to experience the gen 2 version of my favourite region), and so all it took here was finishing it up. I won't go into my full thoughts on Crystal here, since I've definitely already yapped enough, but I had a lot of fun, and while I think HGSS is definitely the definitive Johto experience, I'd say gen 2 is worth trying if you've already played HGSS and are a Johtohead curious about the originals. I played on cart, since that's what I like to do wherever possible, but was able to convert and transfer the save to the VC version with this tool, letting me grab Celebi. I did, however, beat the league before converting, which I guess meant I'd missed the chance to set the relevant flags in the game's code, so the event never triggered at first, and I had to beat the league again actually playing on the VC version to get it to work.
Prior to grabbing Celebi, I'd transferred all of the rest of the mons as far as Bank. I'd really been dreading this, but it wasn't as bad as I'd feared (maybe just because I'd built it up to such a degree in my head that the reailty compared favourably). The crossbow game was tedious but it at least lets you quickly do another set of 6 after finishing one, and mechanically it's fine once you get the hang of it (my many hours of Apex and Valorant clearly paid off for this precision shooter experience). Going from gen 5 to Bank was as annoying as with Unova, but overall the whole process only took an hour or so, which was much quicker than I'd anticipated. Celebi joined the rest of the mons in Bank, and they made the leap to the Switch. From there, I grabbed the six regional variants (the three Hisuian ones were sitting ready, and the other three were all pretty straightforward - the worst was Slowking just requiring a bit of running around grabbing Galarica Twigs).
And with that, the region that, in spite of being the oldest and slowest for this challenge, I love the most, was done. As is probably apparent from this lengthy, effusive yap session, I had a lot of fun revisiting these games, especially given that it was in a somewhat different way to how I've played them previously - it's pretty much always been challenge runs prior to now, with less focus on exploring the world and catching mons. Vivillon was such a good time that I don't know if this is the most fun I've had as part of the challenge, but it comes close. Johto is so peak.
Anyway, love letter to the best region over and done with, only one remains. The home stretch is in sight. Next time: Alola.
Region's hardest Pokemon: Unown, though it was a pretty fun grind relative to the mons that have taken this title previously
Pokemon caught: 1,195
The penultimate region for this challenge is Johto (I've been saving Alola for last for a reason that's probably pretty obvious if you know anything about completing the dex in Home), and so it was time for HGSS. Heartgold was the first Pokemon game I ever played, and I sank countless hours into it as a kid. As such, those games and the Johto region generally hold a special place for me, and have remained my favourites ever since. I actually hadn't booted HGSS up in a while before revisiting them for this, so it was a lot of fun going back to them again.
The section started, as it usually does, with breeding starters. I'd be getting very used to Route 34 for this one, so I might as well get comfy. All the Meganium line had to be female, so that took a while (also, this has nothing to do with the living dex, but I'm writing this one day after the reveal of Mega Meganium's ability and I just want to interject that I'm very happy team Chikorita finally got a win). I have literally never played through HGSS with anything other than a Chikorita, so I had to start new saves for the others. I didn't actually have an existing completed SS save - I've played through Johto many times since returning to Pokemon, but mainly various types of nuzlockes and challenge runs, which I typically just did on an emulated Heartgold. I've never really had a need for a completed SS save on cart. So, I played 10 minutes into SS to grab a Cyndaquil, traded it out, then reset and did a whole run with Totodile. Feraligatr is fantastic for a story playthrough - the coverage it gets via level up and its matchups into the story fights are Swampert-tier. I'm still team Chikky though.
With the starters taken care of, I cracked on with the regular dex. The first Pokemon of note I came to was Crobat, who's a friendship evolution. Before I could get started with biking back and forth endlessly, though, something very cool happened. Something that's literally never happened to me in my thousands of hours of playing Pokemon. As I was catching the Zubat I got Pokerus (there's a joke in here somewhere about it being apt that I caught a virus from a bat). I went to the Pokecenter to clear the poison it had inflicted on me and the Pokecenter lady gave the dialogue explaining the virus. If you're unaware, Pokerus is a virus your Pokemon can randomly contract (the chance of this occurring is about 1 in 21,845) after a wild battle. While they have it, it can spread to other party members, and it goes away on its own after a few days. After they get better, they're immune and can't catch it again. Both Pokemon currently infected and cured Pokemon have any EV gain doubled, so despite the fact it's a virus sounding ominous, it's actually beneficial.
(Excuse the poor phone photography lol)
I have no idea if it'll ever be useful to me, but it's still a very cool thing to have had happen. I had one of my party members cough on a Shinx I had sitting in my boxes, and then stashed it back there (boxed infected Pokemon won't ever become cured if they're left in there), so I could use it to infect other mons in the future if I wanted.
Anyway, after evolving Crobat, the next Pokemon of note was Pichu, and the run of baby Pokemon that follow it. These can't be caught in the wild, and instead must be bred. A running theme with the Johto dex is that almost every Pokemon has something notable about it, which means there are very few cases of just going to a route and catching a Pokemon (and what that means for this post is that there'll likely be even more yapping than normal). Johto as a region is unique in its design that emphasises short, regular sessions where you chip away at things over time, enaging with all the daily/weekly events, and I think the distribution of Pokemon aligns with that. Catching a lot of these Pokemon is a more involved, deliberate task, and at times only available at certain times of day or on certain days of the week. (These games are also just slow because they run slow - gen 4 is infamous for this - and have the least QoL out of any games used for the challenge. Never mind not being able to access boxes from anywhere; being prompted to reapply repel didn't even exist until B2W2).
The results of this are twofold: for one, you'd immediately have more of an attachment to any party members you had to jump through more hoops to obtain, and for two, it makes your playthrough more unique - my run where I happened to reach the National Park on a Tuesday and grabbed a Scyther will feel very different to your run where you backtracked through Union Cave to explore on a Friday and found the Lapras, or to another where someone went to the effort of getting all the new (as of GSC) baby Pokemon (at least, in a world where we're playing these games semi-"organically" and only looking things up occasionally rather than sitting with 4 Bulbapedia tabs open in front of us and changing our DS clocks at will). There's certainly a degree of bias here with how much I love this design philosophy, because again, I adore these games. But I do think it works better for me than something like "Nosepass is a low percentage encounter via Rock Smash in a specific room in Granite Cave because it just is", because while obtaining a lot of these Pokemon is an involved process, it's rarely random. Almost all of them sit closer to the Feebas end of the spectrum, where you can approach it in a methodical way and keep a tangible sense of your progress, rather than being purely at the mercy of RNG like with shaking grass.
Anyway, with that mini-essay about why Johto is peak out of the way, let's move on to the next such interesting encounter: Bellossom. Bellossom evolves from Gloom when you expose it to a Sun Stone. How do we get a Sun Stone? By playing the greatest minigames ever to grace the Pokemon series.
The Pokeathlon Dome sits just north of Goldenrod City, and there, you can participate in the Pokeathlon: a series of athletics-themed minigames designed to make use of the DS's touch screen. You earn points based on your performance, and those points can be spent at a shop in the Dome to buy various useful evolution items. My story team seemed best suited for the Stamina games (there are 5 sets of three minigames, each corresponding to a different attribute that's ultimately just one of the base stats), so I grinded away at those for a while, and soon enough I had the requisite 3,000 points for a Sun Stone. Fortunately, I was doing this on a Sunday, so I didn't even need to change the clock (the prizes rotate daily, and the Sun Stone is, aptly, available on Sundays). This is what I mean about Johto's design. If I'd undertaken this for a playthrough Bellossom, I'd end up much more attached to it than if I'd just found a Sun Stone on the ground somewhere or bought it in a department store, and the actual "grind" of getting the points doesn't feel like a slog because the games are fun. I didn't even mind doing it for this challenge, where the Bellossom is ultimate just going to sit in a box in Home.
Immediately after Bellossom comes Marill and Azumarill (the first member of the line, Azurill, was added with Hoenn), and for these Pokemon, I wanted females. If you're up on niche Pokemon trivia, me mentioning the Marill line and gender in the same sentence means you probably already know where this is going.
Marill is available by default in the Safari Zone. I can't actually use a Marill caught there for the dex, since it'd be in a Safari Ball, but Poke Ball type passing down with breeding didn't exist until gen 6, so I can breed it and the offspring will be in the required regular Poke Balls. Azurill has a 3:1 ratio of female:male, so I was able to get two females pretty quickly.
This is going to be an oversimplification, but you can think of the way Pokemon gender (along with most other attributes like stats, shininess, etc.) is determined as follows: every Pokemon has a secret number called the PID (Pokemon ID), which is generated randomly as soon as the Pokemon spawns into existence. All of the aforementioned random attributes are determined by that PID, so the PID itself acts as an easy way of storing all of the information. In the case of gender, think of it like this: for a Pokemon with a 50/50 gender ratio, the game just checks to see if the value of the last two digits of the PID is greater than 50. If it is, the Pokemon is male, and if not, it's female (again, this isn't literally how it works, but it's a good enough representation for what I'm about to explain).
The Marill line is the only line in Pokemon history (aside from the likes of Vespiquen, Gallade, etc., where an evolution has a 100% gender ratio because gender is an evo requirement) where different members of the line have different gender ratios. Azurill is 75% female and 25% male, while Marill and Azurill are 50/50. What this means is that for the aforementioned check, the game looks for the number in the PID being over 75 to make an Azurill male, but over 50 to make a Marill male. That means if you have an Azurill whose PID number sits between 50 and 75, it'll be female as an Azurill, but male as a Marill. Azurill is, quite famously, the only Pokemon capable of changing gender upon evolution (this was changed in later gens so now if you have a female Azurill, the gender of its evolutions will always match those of the Azurill).
I bring all of this up because, sure enough, one of my female Azurill became male upon evolution. I knew this was possible, but it was still funny to see it actually happen. I'm very happy for him and he has my full support, but unfortunately it did mean I had to breed another, and Azurill to Marill is a friendship evolution, so it ate up a fair bit of time.
Next was Sudowoodo, which also required breeding because my story one was female. After that, the next notable one was Sunflora, who required another Sun Stone. It was now a Tuesday (and the Pokeathlon prizes can only be redeemed once per day anyway), so rather than return to the Pokeathlon I decided to try my hand at the Bug Catching Contest. Prior to obtaining the National Dex, the Bug Catching Contest will always give a Sun Stone as the first prize, but in the postgame, first prize is instead one of 10 random evolution stones (including the Sun Stone). This meant the odds of getting a Sun Stone weren't great, but I figured I might as well try. I caught a Pinsir and took first place handily (the trick to winning the contest is only statusing your target to catch it, as damaging it lowers your score), but my reward was a measly Dusk Stone. I ended up just trading over a spare Sun Stone from Platinum to move things along, but the Bug Catching Contest was fun anyway. I remember as a kid learning Scyther existed and immediately becoming obsessed with finding one. I think it took me a while to learn that it wasn't available in the National Park ordinarily, and you had to do the Contest to get it, because (while my memories from that long ago are all pretty foggy) I'm fairly certain I spent far longer doing encounters than a 5% chance would have taken.
Immediately after Sunflora is Yanma, who is one of the handful of pure RNG grinds. 1% on route 35 only. Nothing for it but biking around in the grass for ages. Wooper is after that, then the final (and best) Eeveelutions of the whole challenge, Espeon and Umbreon.
After them is Murkrow, who's the first of a few Pokemon with a very interesting status as far as this challenge is concerned. The met-region rule requires me to catch every Pokemon in the region where it was introduced. However, Murkrow, despite being a gen 2 Pokemon and therefore associated with Johto, isn't actually available in Johto - you can only catch it in the Kanto part of the game. As mentioned previously, Home's met region field is actually just based on the game of origin rather than any specific met location, so any Pokemon from HGSS will show up as being met in Johto regardless of the specific met location, but I still thought it would be nice to have the in-game met location show Johto too. Therefore, I decided that for these such Pokemon, I'd go out and catch them, then breed them on Route 34 so that the ones going in the living dex would have Johto met locations even in-game.
(There's also an argument to be made that certain Kanto/Johto Pokemon are actually native to the region associated with the opposite game - ie. Murkrow is straight up a Kanto Pokemon, while Dratini and Lapras are Johto mons, since their only presence in Kanto is as gifts/in the Safari Zone, while they're found in the wild in Johto. I think this is an interesting theory, but the messiness of different games and different encounter tables makes it hard to rule definitively on, and it's generally accepted that "Johto Pokemon" really just means "Gen 2 Pokemon", so at least for the purposes of this challenge, Dratini is Kantonian and Murkrow is Johtonian).
A few more relatively straightforward encounters go by, and then it's time for Unown. Unown has 28 forms (one for each letter of the alphabet, plus exclamation and question marks), and they're found in the Ruins of Alph. This is another childhood memory for me - I remember wanting to catch all the forms and complete the Unown Report, but not really understanding the specifics of unlocking them. I guess either the Prima game guide I was armed with didn't say, or I was just too dumb a child to understand it. Also, just to clarify since I keep bringing it up, the copy I'm playing on is not my childhood copy. That, unfortunately, is long gone, having been traded in to my high street Game (that's the name of the shop, for any non-Brits reading. They literally just called it "Game") for probably like £2.50 when I was a foolish child.
Luckily, I am not as dumb as I was when I was 8 years old, and it turns out accessing all the Unown encounters isn't even that hard. You just complete four puzzles in four different buildings in the ruins, and completing each one adds a subset of letters to the encounter table of the basement (I don't remember for sure, but I suspect what tripped me up as a kid was that two of the buildings are accessed through Union Cave, not through the ruins area itself). The fact it's all one encounter table does mean that by the time all four puzzles are done, getting any one letter is a 1/26 chance, so it's a bit grindy, but it wasn't too bad, and soon enough I had the full alphabet. Then you talk to a researcher, and the final two forms - the punctuation marks - become available in the entrance building (so long as you also completed four secondary puzzles in the ruin buildings, which play similiarly to the Regi puzzles but with "decoding" Unown writing instead of braille. I will admit the "Water" one took me a while, because my brain did not go to a Water Stone. I tried like every water HM and even using a Fresh Water before I thought of the stone).
After that, it was another run of relatively straightforward encounters until Dunsparce, who would be tricky if I didn't already have one. See, a couple of years back, I did a hardcore nuzlocke of HG (on emulator, not on this cart save, but I extracted the important mons onto my cartridge save so they weren't lost whenever I reset for another run), and my plan was to grab a Zubat in Dark Cave to make into a Crobat, who's a very good nuzlocke mon. I'd already gotten a Geodude from Route 46, so the Dark Cave Zubat was virtually guaranteed. Virtually - the first Pokemon I encountered when I walked into that cave was the 1% Dunsparce. I found this hilarious and he became a vital member of the team, even coming to the elite 4. Here's photographic proof:
(Girafarig was a similar story - I'd gotten an Abra early on but lost my Kadabra to sloppy play and forgetting how frail it is, so Giraf stepped up as the obligatory Psychic spammer to sweep all the poison-type Rocket mons. I've had a soft spot for both her and Dunsparce ever since. We were eating good when the Paldea evos dropped).
Anyway, because of all this, I didn't need to contend with the 1% encounter chance and could just breed my existing Dunsparce.
The next interesting mon is Steelix. Steelix isn't that interesting itself - Onix is just a 10% encounter in Cliff Cave on route 47 (among other locations), but while doing encounters for it, I had another very unlikely first:
My luck with random shinies has historically been nonexistent, and while I've done a lot of shiny hunting, it's never been in older games (I just find the Switch far more comfortable to use for prolonged periods). This was therefore my first ever sprite shiny (they do hit different), and my first ever shiny at 1/8192. At level 19, she did know Selfdestruct, which was scary (literally my only ever other random shiny in a game without overworld shinies was another Geodude, on my first day of playing BDSP, who exploded), but fortunately, she got in the second Premier Ball I threw. Her name is Topaz and I evolved her into a Golem, who has my favourite shiny out of that line. I gotta hunt her some friends sooner or later so she's not too lonely in the newly-created shiny box. I figured getting a random shiny at some point during all this (outside of the overworld shiny games) was pretty likely, but it was still cool to see it happen, especially in my favourite game.
Snubbull immediately follows Steelix and is another 1% encounter, but this one came mercifully quickly and I was able to breed more from it to get one to make into a Granbull. Heracross required headbutting a bunch of trees (it works like a lite version of Munchlax - only certain trees have the encounter table containing it, and you have no way to know which ones. Fortunately, headbutt encounters take seconds rather than hours, and Heracross is 30% as opposed to 1).
After that, it was relatively smooth sailing until Porygon2. Porygon is only available from the Celadon Game Corner, for the price of 9,999 coins. That meant it was gambling time! Because of age rating reasons, the Game Corners in HGSS forgo outright slot machines in favour of Voltorb Flip, which is like a slightly more RNG-heavy minesweeper. I am all too familiar with this game, as the boltbeam TMs are locked behind it, so a gambling session as soon as you hit Goldenrod is basically a must for any HGSS nuzlocke. After some grinding, I bought my prize low-poly duck, bred it on Route 34 to get one with a Johto met location, and evolved it.
From there, it was mostly easy stuff - Tyrogue required venturing into Mt. Mortar which I'd never bothered with, and a little tweaking of EVs with vitamins to make sure I evolved it into Hitmontop, then it was more baby mons, before the last Pokemon of the regular dex: Blissey. Chansey is a 1% encounter on a few Kanto routes, but I got super lucky here, catching it within 10 encounters. I also rolled the 50% chance for it to be holding an Oval Stone, which made life easier for evolving the Happiny I bred from it. One final friendship evolution gave me Blissey, and then it was Legendary time (and also the Tyranitar line, but they were simple enough so I'll just mention them here).
Most of the Legendaries on my main save were already caught, and not in Luxury Balls, so this was one of the main reasons for the SS playthrough. Because Johto is goated, you can actually catch both box legendaries in one save, meaning that one additional save was all I needed. First, though, I had to acquire Luxury Balls. In HGSS, you get Luxury Balls via... gambling! The Goldenrod Department Store lottery has three prize tiers - you have a 5% chance of a TM, a 30% chance of a Poke Ball, and a 65% chance of a random berry. The TM and Ball vary by day, and on Sundays, you get Luxury Balls. Entry is $300 and you can play as many times as you like. I hadn't really needed to spend much on this playthrough, since Feraligatr had carried so hard, so I had just shy of $150k saved up. I gambled literally all of it.
With almost 200 Luxury Balls in hand, I set about catching the roamers. I won't go into too much detail here, as it's a pretty similar process to the Latis in RSE. I'd transferred the Umbreon I used for them up to use again here, but this time instead of Baton Passing to an Absol to spam Twave, I Baton Passed to Electrode, since the dogs know Roar, which would end the encounter if not blocked by Soundproof. Then came Suicune, and finally the box legends. I'd just run from Lugia during the story, since I figured it'd be easier to just get all the Luxury Balls at once and do it along with the rest of the Legendaries. I feel like I got pretty lucky with my catches on all of these - not a single one struggled once.
With those 5 taken care of, only one mon remained - Celebi. Celebi can't be obtained in HGSS these days, but it is available in VC Crystal, where you get the event item GS Ball upon beating the league (like the Deoxys and Ho-oh/Lugia items in the newly released FRLG port). I'd started a Crystal playthrough ages back for this reason (along with just wanting to experience the gen 2 version of my favourite region), and so all it took here was finishing it up. I won't go into my full thoughts on Crystal here, since I've definitely already yapped enough, but I had a lot of fun, and while I think HGSS is definitely the definitive Johto experience, I'd say gen 2 is worth trying if you've already played HGSS and are a Johtohead curious about the originals. I played on cart, since that's what I like to do wherever possible, but was able to convert and transfer the save to the VC version with this tool, letting me grab Celebi. I did, however, beat the league before converting, which I guess meant I'd missed the chance to set the relevant flags in the game's code, so the event never triggered at first, and I had to beat the league again actually playing on the VC version to get it to work.
Prior to grabbing Celebi, I'd transferred all of the rest of the mons as far as Bank. I'd really been dreading this, but it wasn't as bad as I'd feared (maybe just because I'd built it up to such a degree in my head that the reailty compared favourably). The crossbow game was tedious but it at least lets you quickly do another set of 6 after finishing one, and mechanically it's fine once you get the hang of it (my many hours of Apex and Valorant clearly paid off for this precision shooter experience). Going from gen 5 to Bank was as annoying as with Unova, but overall the whole process only took an hour or so, which was much quicker than I'd anticipated. Celebi joined the rest of the mons in Bank, and they made the leap to the Switch. From there, I grabbed the six regional variants (the three Hisuian ones were sitting ready, and the other three were all pretty straightforward - the worst was Slowking just requiring a bit of running around grabbing Galarica Twigs).
And with that, the region that, in spite of being the oldest and slowest for this challenge, I love the most, was done. As is probably apparent from this lengthy, effusive yap session, I had a lot of fun revisiting these games, especially given that it was in a somewhat different way to how I've played them previously - it's pretty much always been challenge runs prior to now, with less focus on exploring the world and catching mons. Vivillon was such a good time that I don't know if this is the most fun I've had as part of the challenge, but it comes close. Johto is so peak.
Anyway, love letter to the best region over and done with, only one remains. The home stretch is in sight. Next time: Alola.
Region's hardest Pokemon: Unown, though it was a pretty fun grind relative to the mons that have taken this title previously
Pokemon caught: 1,195
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falinksedin
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Region #11: Alola
Here we are: the final region of the challenge. I had completed Ultra Sun and Moon saves, but I'd need a second save of an Ultra game, so I decided to just go ahead with Ultra Moon and ignore the existing Moon save (ever since Deoxys, I've been doing additional playthroughs at the start to get them out the way and prevent interruptions once the catching gets going).
Things begin with breeding starters, for the final time. I wanted females for Brionne and Primarina, but ended up with 3 female Popplio from the first set of 5 eggs, so that was no problem. Every time I reached the final instance of a dex archetype I've been seeing throughout the challenge, it stuck out - next came the final regional bird, early route mammal, and early route bug lines.
After that was Crabominable, then Oricorio. You can change Oricorio's form with Nectar items, but you can also just catch each type of Oricorio on each of Alola's four islands. So I did that. Ribombee came after that, followed by Rockruff. Rockruff has three forms, and I knew one of them would be gimmicky. I was pretty sure the other two would be no big deal, however. After evolving Midday Lycanroc, I changed my 3DS's clock and began grinding to level up Midnight Lycanroc. I was surprised to find that when it reached level 25 and above, no evolution occurred. It turns out, in these games specifically, Midday and Midnight Lycanroc are version exclusive. So I traded over to Ultra Moon, only for the evolution to still not work. I knew the time of day requirement still applied, but it turns out the clock is inverted in Moon and Ultra Moon - it's day in-game during real-life night, and vice versa. One final clock change and I finally got the red wolf.
Dusk Lycanroc, meanwhile, can only evolve from Own Tempo Rockruff, which is a visually indistinct Rockruff form whose only notable trait is having Own Tempo as its ability. During gen 7, Own Tempo Rockruff was event-only. If you had one from back then, you could breed it for more, but without an existing one, or a time machine, I was out of luck. I would just have to grab one from SV (where Own Tempo spawns normally among regular Rockruff).
It was a relatively straightforward run of Pokemon up until Salazzle (shout out to the final Spore user, Shiinotic). Salazzle is like Vespiquen - the pre-evo has a 7:1 ratio of males to females, and only the females can evolve. I got a female on my second encounter, so that was nice. Wimpod was kind of annoying - its spawns are somewhat finnicky overworld encounters you have to chase around. Not long after that was Type:Null. Two playthroughs meant I had two of these on hand no problem, and could evolve one into Silvally.
Then came Minior, who comes in all 7 colours of the rainbow. Crucially, its colour isn't visible until it drops below half health, when its ability Shields Down triggers and its outer shell breaks away. Minior is found in the grass near the observatory on Mount Hokulani, where all Minior colours spawn at equal rates.
I walked into the grass and encountered a Minior straight away. But something funny happened. At the start of the encounter, a bunch of sparkles and stars popped out of the Minior. This sure looked like a shiny encounter, but I was so surprised at the notion I second guessed myself and thought maybe Minior just did that for some reason (it's from space, so maybe it just has a thing with stars). I had a False Swiper up front, since I'd need to be checking colours anyway, so I attacked once, leaving it on about 60% health - the next False Swipe should proc Shields Down and confirm if this was the second full-odds random shiny of the challenge.
That was when I found out Minior learns Selfdestruct.
I looked up a video of gen 7 shiny sparkles after the fact and sure enough, that was what I saw (I mean, I didn't really know what else it would have been; it was just so unexpected I was taken by surprise, especially so soon after the Geodude). So I've now lost 2 of the 3 random full odds shinies I've ever encountered to Selfdestruct. Oh well. Still cool it happened. I did end up getting a Damp Golduck just to make getting the regular colours easier because so many of them were going boom.
It was another run of relatively straightforward mons after that (Togedemaru and Mimikyu are the final Pika clones), up until Bruxish. The table I was reading on Bulbapedia said Bruxish should have been a 25% chance, but I fished up 20+ Pokemon with no Bruxish. I went on like this, baffled, but eventually realised that section of the table is for a bubbling fishing spot. Regular fishing spots, where I was fishing, have Bruxish at 5%. All it took was moving over like 3 metres to the right, to the bubbling spot.
Everything after that was pretty simple up (the Kommo-o line completes the pseudo collection) until the Legendaries. The Tapus weren't too bad - I just travelled to each of the shrines and grabbed them all. Tapu Koko's shrine can't actually be accessed without bumping into fully-grown Nebby, so I actually grabbed Solgaleo first (final box legends!). After the Tapus came Nebby Jr., who you obtain by doing some weird Ultra Wormhole alternate dimension stuff with the box legend in your party. I did this twice - once in each game, having also just grabbed Lunala in Ultra Moon - and evolved one of the Nebby Jrs. into Teenage Nebby. And then it was Ultra Beast time.
In USUM, Ultra Beasts are found by playing the Ultra Warp Ride minigame, which sees you riding your box legend through space looking for wormholes to jump into. The general idea is to get as far as you can - your speed drops over time, and if it gets low enough, you can no longer resist the pull of the wormholes. There are also hazards to avoid which slow you down, and energy balls that boost your speed if you hit them. There are 5 colours of wormhole - red, green, blue, yellow, and white. White wormholes will always contain Ultra Beasts. Lastly, there are 4 tiers of wormhole: basically, the higher the tier, the fancier it looks, and the better the odds of it containing rarer Pokemon (high-tier non-white wormholes is one of this game's shiny hunting methods, and also how you get Legendaries).
Nihilego is typically found in tier 1 wormholes, Buzzswole/Pheromosa in tier 2 (version exclusives), Xurkitree's odds are roughly even between the lower tiers, Kartana/Celesteela in tier 3, and Guzzlord in tier 4. I'm simplifying here - there's a lot of overlap and with the exception of tier 4, which will always be Guzzlord or Kartana/Celesteela, any UB can be found in any tier. The ones I've listed are just the most common. The odds also shift as you make it further in the minigame, as do the appearance rates of the different tiers. Tier 4 wormholes can't even appear until you're several thousand lightyears in, and they peak at just 5%. Also, white wormholes are just 4% of all wormholes (the remaining 96 is an even split between the 4 other colours).
None of these were too bad - wormholes of tier 1, 2, and even 3 aren't too hard to find, even with white's relative rarity. The game is super janky, though, even with the thumbpad controls you can enable by talking to an Aether employee in the Gamefreak office in Heahea City. The space you move through is tube-shaped, but that tube can bend, which makes gauging distance and position very difficult. To be clear, in spite of getting most of what I needed pretty quickly, I do not like this game. It's the absolute pinnacle of RNG hell and the gameplay is not remotely fun enough to mitigate that.
Soon enough, I had everything from Nihilego through Kartana. All that was left was Guzzlord. Guzzlord has a 1% chance of appearing in tier 1 and 2 wormholes (this is low enough that it's plainly not worth doing these), a chance ranging from 5 to just over 20% of appearing in tier 3 wormholes, depending on distance covered, and is always the likeliest to appear in tier 4 wormholes. This doesn't sound too bad, but remember that the odds of a tier 4 white wormhole appearing are, at best, 0.2%. And tier 3 white wormholes are pretty rare themselves.
I spend hours looking for Guzzlord. Like, probably somewhere between 4-6 hours total. In that time I saw two tier 4 white wormholes. The first, I straight up didn't fly into. It looked like I was aligned with it, but I guess I wasn't, and Solgaleo basically phased through it. The second one was a Kartana - something that has a 28% chance of occurring, at the 3,517 light years I'd flown (the other 72% is all Guzzlord). There's no strategy to this beyond trying to play the game well so you see lots of wormholes. Past that, just go into every tier 3 and 4 white wormhole you see.
This is one of those cases of something occupying a reasonable proportion of the text of the post, but having taken up a disproportionate amount of the time. I had a draft match this evening and most of the time I'd allotted for prep got eaten up because finding Guzzlord took so much longer than I'd anticipated (I lost, deservedly - it was a rough matchup against a well-built and -piloted team). I was looking for this stupid ugly dragon for what felt like an age. Eventually, one of the tier 3 wormholes was lucky, and I got the last of the initial batch of Ultra Beasts. I guess it's fitting this challenge tortured me with one last grind. (It would have been possible to get Guzzlord a more reliable way Moon, but having caught all the other UBs this way, and being a very stubborn person, I wanted to see the Ultra Wormhole nonsense through. If I booted up Moon, Guzzlord would have won.)
With that out of the way, I was into the home stretch. I already had my story Necrozma (this encounter is hilarious to me: you just kinda find it sitting there unceremoniously right before the league. I'm not sure why they didn't just have you catch it after the Ultra Necrozma fight), and for once, it was in a Luxury Ball. I guess I'd started doing my Poke Ball rules by the time I played through US. Then came Magearna. I have two of these on the Switch already (three if you count the ZA one), but they're both nicknamed, so I wanted a fresh one. Not an issue - I just grabbed it from Ultra Moon. If you're unaware, Magearna is just about the only Mythical still obtainable from the pre-Switch era, because rather than a time-limited wifi distribution, it's obtained by simply scanning a QR code. You can still find that QR code online, and it still works.
Marshadow came after Magearna - my ZA one is ready and waiting in my boxes - then Poipole, who was the reason a second Ultra playthrough was needed. This guy is once-per-playthrough, and evolves. I turned my Ultra Moon Poipole into a Naganadel, and it went in alongside my original Ultra Sun one. Last of all were Stakataka and Blacephalon, both of whom I already had, because you catch them in a little postgame segment right after the credits (and Zeraora, but again, ZA).
This was the shortest dex of the challenge, and by a decent margin too. Alola is recent enough to not have had many regional forms made of its Pokemon, the actual number of species is towards the smaller end, in keeping with the trend seen across the more recent games, and there's nothing like Vivillon or Alcremie adding a bunch of forms to push the numbers up.
Everyone went up to the Switch, where they were joined by Hisuian Decidueye and Dusk Lycanroc. And that's it! I have officially caught 'em all!
Well. Kind of. Until ZA gets Home support, I can't actually get everyone together in one place (not just the missing Mythicals - also the entire Kalos chunk of the dex). But furthermore, there's just one Pokemon missing - one I haven't yet obtained at all - preventing this from being a complete living forms dex. And it's pretty directly linked to waiting for ZA's Home support so I can get the Mythicals and Kalos mons in.
My Home Pokedex is very close to complete at this point (it's actually been very close to complete for a while - I think even before I started this, it was in the 800s just from moving SwSh, SV, and PLA boxes around between saves lol), but all that's missing are some Kalos Legendaries and Mythicals. Once they go in, it'll hit 1,025/1,025, and I'll receive the gift Original Color Magearna, which will check off the last form required, and formally complete this project.
So, with that in mind, I'll save any sort of big wrap-up post/retrospective for then, and finish this one here. The Champions marketing has pretty heavily implied ZA's Home support will drop alongside that game's release, so hopefully the timing works out nicely, and it'll only be a week or so. Stand by for a final update then, I guess.
Region's hardest Pokemon: Guzzlord
Pokemon caught: 1,293
Here we are: the final region of the challenge. I had completed Ultra Sun and Moon saves, but I'd need a second save of an Ultra game, so I decided to just go ahead with Ultra Moon and ignore the existing Moon save (ever since Deoxys, I've been doing additional playthroughs at the start to get them out the way and prevent interruptions once the catching gets going).
Things begin with breeding starters, for the final time. I wanted females for Brionne and Primarina, but ended up with 3 female Popplio from the first set of 5 eggs, so that was no problem. Every time I reached the final instance of a dex archetype I've been seeing throughout the challenge, it stuck out - next came the final regional bird, early route mammal, and early route bug lines.
After that was Crabominable, then Oricorio. You can change Oricorio's form with Nectar items, but you can also just catch each type of Oricorio on each of Alola's four islands. So I did that. Ribombee came after that, followed by Rockruff. Rockruff has three forms, and I knew one of them would be gimmicky. I was pretty sure the other two would be no big deal, however. After evolving Midday Lycanroc, I changed my 3DS's clock and began grinding to level up Midnight Lycanroc. I was surprised to find that when it reached level 25 and above, no evolution occurred. It turns out, in these games specifically, Midday and Midnight Lycanroc are version exclusive. So I traded over to Ultra Moon, only for the evolution to still not work. I knew the time of day requirement still applied, but it turns out the clock is inverted in Moon and Ultra Moon - it's day in-game during real-life night, and vice versa. One final clock change and I finally got the red wolf.
Dusk Lycanroc, meanwhile, can only evolve from Own Tempo Rockruff, which is a visually indistinct Rockruff form whose only notable trait is having Own Tempo as its ability. During gen 7, Own Tempo Rockruff was event-only. If you had one from back then, you could breed it for more, but without an existing one, or a time machine, I was out of luck. I would just have to grab one from SV (where Own Tempo spawns normally among regular Rockruff).
It was a relatively straightforward run of Pokemon up until Salazzle (shout out to the final Spore user, Shiinotic). Salazzle is like Vespiquen - the pre-evo has a 7:1 ratio of males to females, and only the females can evolve. I got a female on my second encounter, so that was nice. Wimpod was kind of annoying - its spawns are somewhat finnicky overworld encounters you have to chase around. Not long after that was Type:Null. Two playthroughs meant I had two of these on hand no problem, and could evolve one into Silvally.
Then came Minior, who comes in all 7 colours of the rainbow. Crucially, its colour isn't visible until it drops below half health, when its ability Shields Down triggers and its outer shell breaks away. Minior is found in the grass near the observatory on Mount Hokulani, where all Minior colours spawn at equal rates.
I walked into the grass and encountered a Minior straight away. But something funny happened. At the start of the encounter, a bunch of sparkles and stars popped out of the Minior. This sure looked like a shiny encounter, but I was so surprised at the notion I second guessed myself and thought maybe Minior just did that for some reason (it's from space, so maybe it just has a thing with stars). I had a False Swiper up front, since I'd need to be checking colours anyway, so I attacked once, leaving it on about 60% health - the next False Swipe should proc Shields Down and confirm if this was the second full-odds random shiny of the challenge.
That was when I found out Minior learns Selfdestruct.
I looked up a video of gen 7 shiny sparkles after the fact and sure enough, that was what I saw (I mean, I didn't really know what else it would have been; it was just so unexpected I was taken by surprise, especially so soon after the Geodude). So I've now lost 2 of the 3 random full odds shinies I've ever encountered to Selfdestruct. Oh well. Still cool it happened. I did end up getting a Damp Golduck just to make getting the regular colours easier because so many of them were going boom.
It was another run of relatively straightforward mons after that (Togedemaru and Mimikyu are the final Pika clones), up until Bruxish. The table I was reading on Bulbapedia said Bruxish should have been a 25% chance, but I fished up 20+ Pokemon with no Bruxish. I went on like this, baffled, but eventually realised that section of the table is for a bubbling fishing spot. Regular fishing spots, where I was fishing, have Bruxish at 5%. All it took was moving over like 3 metres to the right, to the bubbling spot.
Everything after that was pretty simple up (the Kommo-o line completes the pseudo collection) until the Legendaries. The Tapus weren't too bad - I just travelled to each of the shrines and grabbed them all. Tapu Koko's shrine can't actually be accessed without bumping into fully-grown Nebby, so I actually grabbed Solgaleo first (final box legends!). After the Tapus came Nebby Jr., who you obtain by doing some weird Ultra Wormhole alternate dimension stuff with the box legend in your party. I did this twice - once in each game, having also just grabbed Lunala in Ultra Moon - and evolved one of the Nebby Jrs. into Teenage Nebby. And then it was Ultra Beast time.
In USUM, Ultra Beasts are found by playing the Ultra Warp Ride minigame, which sees you riding your box legend through space looking for wormholes to jump into. The general idea is to get as far as you can - your speed drops over time, and if it gets low enough, you can no longer resist the pull of the wormholes. There are also hazards to avoid which slow you down, and energy balls that boost your speed if you hit them. There are 5 colours of wormhole - red, green, blue, yellow, and white. White wormholes will always contain Ultra Beasts. Lastly, there are 4 tiers of wormhole: basically, the higher the tier, the fancier it looks, and the better the odds of it containing rarer Pokemon (high-tier non-white wormholes is one of this game's shiny hunting methods, and also how you get Legendaries).
Nihilego is typically found in tier 1 wormholes, Buzzswole/Pheromosa in tier 2 (version exclusives), Xurkitree's odds are roughly even between the lower tiers, Kartana/Celesteela in tier 3, and Guzzlord in tier 4. I'm simplifying here - there's a lot of overlap and with the exception of tier 4, which will always be Guzzlord or Kartana/Celesteela, any UB can be found in any tier. The ones I've listed are just the most common. The odds also shift as you make it further in the minigame, as do the appearance rates of the different tiers. Tier 4 wormholes can't even appear until you're several thousand lightyears in, and they peak at just 5%. Also, white wormholes are just 4% of all wormholes (the remaining 96 is an even split between the 4 other colours).
None of these were too bad - wormholes of tier 1, 2, and even 3 aren't too hard to find, even with white's relative rarity. The game is super janky, though, even with the thumbpad controls you can enable by talking to an Aether employee in the Gamefreak office in Heahea City. The space you move through is tube-shaped, but that tube can bend, which makes gauging distance and position very difficult. To be clear, in spite of getting most of what I needed pretty quickly, I do not like this game. It's the absolute pinnacle of RNG hell and the gameplay is not remotely fun enough to mitigate that.
Soon enough, I had everything from Nihilego through Kartana. All that was left was Guzzlord. Guzzlord has a 1% chance of appearing in tier 1 and 2 wormholes (this is low enough that it's plainly not worth doing these), a chance ranging from 5 to just over 20% of appearing in tier 3 wormholes, depending on distance covered, and is always the likeliest to appear in tier 4 wormholes. This doesn't sound too bad, but remember that the odds of a tier 4 white wormhole appearing are, at best, 0.2%. And tier 3 white wormholes are pretty rare themselves.
I spend hours looking for Guzzlord. Like, probably somewhere between 4-6 hours total. In that time I saw two tier 4 white wormholes. The first, I straight up didn't fly into. It looked like I was aligned with it, but I guess I wasn't, and Solgaleo basically phased through it. The second one was a Kartana - something that has a 28% chance of occurring, at the 3,517 light years I'd flown (the other 72% is all Guzzlord). There's no strategy to this beyond trying to play the game well so you see lots of wormholes. Past that, just go into every tier 3 and 4 white wormhole you see.
This is one of those cases of something occupying a reasonable proportion of the text of the post, but having taken up a disproportionate amount of the time. I had a draft match this evening and most of the time I'd allotted for prep got eaten up because finding Guzzlord took so much longer than I'd anticipated (I lost, deservedly - it was a rough matchup against a well-built and -piloted team). I was looking for this stupid ugly dragon for what felt like an age. Eventually, one of the tier 3 wormholes was lucky, and I got the last of the initial batch of Ultra Beasts. I guess it's fitting this challenge tortured me with one last grind. (It would have been possible to get Guzzlord a more reliable way Moon, but having caught all the other UBs this way, and being a very stubborn person, I wanted to see the Ultra Wormhole nonsense through. If I booted up Moon, Guzzlord would have won.)
With that out of the way, I was into the home stretch. I already had my story Necrozma (this encounter is hilarious to me: you just kinda find it sitting there unceremoniously right before the league. I'm not sure why they didn't just have you catch it after the Ultra Necrozma fight), and for once, it was in a Luxury Ball. I guess I'd started doing my Poke Ball rules by the time I played through US. Then came Magearna. I have two of these on the Switch already (three if you count the ZA one), but they're both nicknamed, so I wanted a fresh one. Not an issue - I just grabbed it from Ultra Moon. If you're unaware, Magearna is just about the only Mythical still obtainable from the pre-Switch era, because rather than a time-limited wifi distribution, it's obtained by simply scanning a QR code. You can still find that QR code online, and it still works.
Marshadow came after Magearna - my ZA one is ready and waiting in my boxes - then Poipole, who was the reason a second Ultra playthrough was needed. This guy is once-per-playthrough, and evolves. I turned my Ultra Moon Poipole into a Naganadel, and it went in alongside my original Ultra Sun one. Last of all were Stakataka and Blacephalon, both of whom I already had, because you catch them in a little postgame segment right after the credits (and Zeraora, but again, ZA).
This was the shortest dex of the challenge, and by a decent margin too. Alola is recent enough to not have had many regional forms made of its Pokemon, the actual number of species is towards the smaller end, in keeping with the trend seen across the more recent games, and there's nothing like Vivillon or Alcremie adding a bunch of forms to push the numbers up.
Everyone went up to the Switch, where they were joined by Hisuian Decidueye and Dusk Lycanroc. And that's it! I have officially caught 'em all!
Well. Kind of. Until ZA gets Home support, I can't actually get everyone together in one place (not just the missing Mythicals - also the entire Kalos chunk of the dex). But furthermore, there's just one Pokemon missing - one I haven't yet obtained at all - preventing this from being a complete living forms dex. And it's pretty directly linked to waiting for ZA's Home support so I can get the Mythicals and Kalos mons in.
My Home Pokedex is very close to complete at this point (it's actually been very close to complete for a while - I think even before I started this, it was in the 800s just from moving SwSh, SV, and PLA boxes around between saves lol), but all that's missing are some Kalos Legendaries and Mythicals. Once they go in, it'll hit 1,025/1,025, and I'll receive the gift Original Color Magearna, which will check off the last form required, and formally complete this project.
So, with that in mind, I'll save any sort of big wrap-up post/retrospective for then, and finish this one here. The Champions marketing has pretty heavily implied ZA's Home support will drop alongside that game's release, so hopefully the timing works out nicely, and it'll only be a week or so. Stand by for a final update then, I guess.
Region's hardest Pokemon: Guzzlord
Pokemon caught: 1,293
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good work
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Congratulations! Hope the Shiny Minior comes back eventually, If they only had added Shiny Sound to SV I'm sure it'd appear in less than an hour.
falinksedin
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I'll probably hunt it to reclaim it eventually. You can't SOS chain Minior, which is a bummer. Would definitely go for that if it were an option
falinksedin
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Conclusion
ZA Home compatibility was finally added today, and with it, the ability for me to get everything into one place, tick off the final few entries in my Home Pokedex, and redeem my Original Colour Magearna:
Pokemon caught: 1,294
I won't bother posting all the boxes again but I've stitched together a big image of all the Pokemon which I'll put in a spoiler at the end of the post. Lowkey I haven't double checked my work so honestly I could be missing a mon or form somewhere; I'm just trusting that I was thorough enough as I went lol. I'll probably go back and check through everything at some point, but for now I'm fairly happy to be done with this project.
Would I recommend making a living dex? Yes, definitely. Would I recommend doing it this way? I'm not sure lol. Everything is available on the Switch now, and I'm fairly certain getting everything there would be a hell of a lot faster than getting them all from their regions of origin. That said, I had a lot of fun. It was cool going back and revisiting older games, and I think the living dex I've ended up with is more interesting (at least to me) as a result. So maybe, if you're a glutton for punishment, and like the sound of it, I would recommend it.
I'd definitely recommend specific aspects of it. I think everyone should try getting the Vivillon patterns in SV through Go, getting a full set of Unown in whichever game is handiest, and - and I might be biased here - really digging into Johto and embracing the uniqueness of tracking down each of the Pokemon in its dex.
The Vivillon were probably my favourite part. My least favourite is a toss-up between a few. Guzzlord really sucked, just because I was so close to the end that I really wanted Alola to be quick and easy, and so the hunt for the right wormhole dragging on felt especially bad.
I don't have that much else to say. Thank you for reading, if you stuck with it this far. I hope my yapping was entertaining and/or informative. If (for some reason) you want more of said yapping, I've made another blog that's more general-purpose (since I didn't want to keep making new ones every time I started something new), and whatever I get up to next will be going on there (spoilers: the first thing I plan to do after finishing the living dex is more dex completion lmao. I'll make a post explaining it sooner or later).
I'll put the big picture with all the mons below, but for now (at least until gen 10, when I guess I might have necro this thread for an update lol) I can officially say that I've caught 'em all.
ZA Home compatibility was finally added today, and with it, the ability for me to get everything into one place, tick off the final few entries in my Home Pokedex, and redeem my Original Colour Magearna:
Pokemon caught: 1,294
I won't bother posting all the boxes again but I've stitched together a big image of all the Pokemon which I'll put in a spoiler at the end of the post. Lowkey I haven't double checked my work so honestly I could be missing a mon or form somewhere; I'm just trusting that I was thorough enough as I went lol. I'll probably go back and check through everything at some point, but for now I'm fairly happy to be done with this project.
Would I recommend making a living dex? Yes, definitely. Would I recommend doing it this way? I'm not sure lol. Everything is available on the Switch now, and I'm fairly certain getting everything there would be a hell of a lot faster than getting them all from their regions of origin. That said, I had a lot of fun. It was cool going back and revisiting older games, and I think the living dex I've ended up with is more interesting (at least to me) as a result. So maybe, if you're a glutton for punishment, and like the sound of it, I would recommend it.
I'd definitely recommend specific aspects of it. I think everyone should try getting the Vivillon patterns in SV through Go, getting a full set of Unown in whichever game is handiest, and - and I might be biased here - really digging into Johto and embracing the uniqueness of tracking down each of the Pokemon in its dex.
The Vivillon were probably my favourite part. My least favourite is a toss-up between a few. Guzzlord really sucked, just because I was so close to the end that I really wanted Alola to be quick and easy, and so the hunt for the right wormhole dragging on felt especially bad.
I don't have that much else to say. Thank you for reading, if you stuck with it this far. I hope my yapping was entertaining and/or informative. If (for some reason) you want more of said yapping, I've made another blog that's more general-purpose (since I didn't want to keep making new ones every time I started something new), and whatever I get up to next will be going on there (spoilers: the first thing I plan to do after finishing the living dex is more dex completion lmao. I'll make a post explaining it sooner or later).
I'll put the big picture with all the mons below, but for now (at least until gen 10, when I guess I might have necro this thread for an update lol) I can officially say that I've caught 'em all.
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