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Unofficial Starter Pokemon

Battista

Battista

Fun Old Man
Scorbunny Fan Quaxly Fan
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It's funny how life works. In the early days of Pokemon, my starter of choice would often be the only one I'd consistently train, resulting in an unbalanced team. Now there are many playthroughs of a game where I find myself boxing my starter and using another Pokemon in its place. I call them my "unofficial starters".

The first time I remember doing this was in Pokemon Sun, when I picked Rowlet but decided to box it pretty quickly. I'm pretty sure I ended up using a Magnemite from the Trainers' School as my starter instead, though I don't recall having a particularly strong connection to it.

The idea of using a different "starter" than the prescribed three and really bonding with it came with my first Sword playthrough. I wasn't a big fan of any of the Galar starters, particularly their final evolutions, so I ended up conferring the title on an early route Rookidee. A later playthrough I did the same with a Yamper. Violet continued the trend, where I twice boxed my Quaxly in favor of a Paldean Wooper my first playthrough, and an Azurill my second.

Do you have any "unofficial starters" that replaced the ones the game set you up with?
 
I usually get too attached to my starter to trade it out, but I'm planning on using a manaphy from pokemon ranger as an unofficial starter in my next platinum playthrough.

I also did a pokewalker playthrough of soul silver where my starter was in the pokewalker the whole time and I only used pokewalker-caught pokemon. So my unofficial starter for that playthrough was kangaskhan, certainly a unique start to a pokemon journey!
 
lumineonite said:
I usually get too attached to my starter to trade it out, but I'm planning on using a manaphy from pokemon ranger as an unofficial starter in my next platinum playthrough.

I also did a pokewalker playthrough of soul silver where my starter was in the pokewalker the whole time and I only used pokewalker-caught pokemon. So my unofficial starter for that playthrough was kangaskhan, certainly a unique start to a pokemon journey!
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Do you still have that kangaskhan? It’s even more special now that it can mega evolve! :D
 
In Yellow, since you can't evolve the starter Pikachu, I considered the Nidoran-M to be my "true" starter Pokemon and eventually left Pikachu in the Box. I also did a solo run of Crystal with only Growlithe/Arcanine, so my starter Totodile ended up as just a Surfer.
 
ohhh i do this because i have replayed most pokemon games so many times that i need to use something other than the three actual starters for variety. some standouts that come to mind are Panini the Luxray in platinum who frankly was not very good but i adore her anyway, my butterfree named Lovebug from leafgreen that had a surprising amount of use even up to and through the E4, but the coolest one of all is Knife my unevolved shiny skiddo from X... i was not shiny hunting, just looking for a normal skiddo, and after i caught my normal skiddo, the very next encounter i was shocked by a shiny skiddo instead. i only had one premier ball left (my favorite ball that i was catching the whole X team in) but thankfully she stayed and i kept her unevolved the entire game lol. she has an eviolite and the ability to set up and heal herself so she actually didn't do half bad
knife.png

there's probably more fun examples of this i'm just forgetting right now. i do this a lot. but i never do it on the first playthrough of a new pokemon game so there's that at least
 
i have never done this because i always get too attached to the starters T_T with the one exception of the time i kept erasing my blue saves trying to do glitches and eventually got so fed up that i borrowed speedrun strats and soloed the game with nidoking instead. LOL
despite that i do have plans to do something like this when i get around to playing frlg - i was looking at a fansite and saw that someone beat firered with just two pokemon which is making me want to try it, especially since ive seen kanto itself many times before
 
virtualpet2001 said:
despite that i do have plans to do something like this when i get around to playing frlg - i was looking at a fansite and saw that someone beat firered with just two pokemon which is making me want to try it, especially since ive seen kanto itself many times before
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wow this totally reminds me that i traded over two eevee eggs to pokemon ruby and beat the whole game with them!! their names were cereal and muffin… they weren’t even overleveled or anything; i got lucky and the espeon hatched with hidden power bug so i got to use that against the swarms of poochyena and stuff that otherwise couldn’t be touched by psychic, and against steven’s steel types i ended up using some ridiculous curse + dig strats with umbreon… it was especially fun because eevee can’t even usually be obtained in RSE. it’s too bad that FRLG and emerald have such harsh trading restrictions before the game is beaten though :(
anyway all this is to say if RS is possible to beat casually with two pokemon, FRLG would be too for sure. just have some sort of water or grass move for all the rock/ground types in the region if you don’t feel like suffering :swirlix: (though fighting works too as you can see in the link you provided. i love that website, i was surprised to see it mentioned here)
 
In both my Nuzlockes my starter died early, but both times I found great replacements who carried the team, were good in both offense and defense and became quickly the stars of the team.

In Shield it was Galarian Slowbro. Quick Draw was a godsend, Shell Side Arm is great, and has the always amazing Surf so it doesn't forget its ancestors' Water type, has great coverage.

In Violet it was Garganacl. Wonderful defense that can tank almost anything, recovery options, and the usual Rock coverage which includes Ground and Steel moves.
 
I don't often box my starter right away, because they are useful (especially in older games,) but they often aren't on my hall of Fame team. I tend to keep my starter until my team Is otherwise filled out, and I need room for a different pokemon.
 
I don’t usually box my starter, but I have made trades at the start of each Pokémon game in order to use a Totodile from the beginning. For instance, I used the Gameshark device in order to find a wild Totodile, and I caught it to use throughout my journey.

For newer games, I would just trade with someone to get a Totodile. It’s very important to me that I have one as part of my team.

You could say he’s my unofficial teammate.
 
I'm currently doing a SoulSilver playthrough where I didn't feel like using the traditional starters, so I traded a Larvitar to use as my unofficial starter, training it from level 1. So far, it's definitely been interesting to use Larvitar in the early game.
 
Unless I am specifically doing a challenge where I use only Pokemon I raised from eggs traded in from another game? I rarely, if ever, abandon my starter for a different Pokemon, and thus, don't really have any unofficial starter Pokémon to speak of. Except for when I used Mankey over Pikachu in Pokemon Yellow in most battles when playing.
 
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