Bits & Glory

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to complete all of the generation’s Pokedex’s. I realize that this is a tall task considering that there are 8 generations of Pokemon. Couple that with the fact of having a full-time job, a family, and trending towards that everlasting adult-life 8 PM tired feeling… yeah, you get the picture. Perhaps my expectations needed to be tempered and I did just that. So STARTING in 2020, my goal is complete all of the Pokedex entries of every Pokemon generation. So far, so good!

Naturally, it was time to start this journey with “Gen Wun”. I went with Pokemon Yellow as my game of choice. Going into this I realized that I would need access to both Pokemon Red & Blue in order to complete the 151 Pokedex… but I preferred the overall polish and upgrade of Yellow as my main playthrough.

There weren’t too many challenges along the way. The most difficult catches of Yellow were the ancient bird trio of Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres. I got extremely lucky with some RNG on Articuno where my second Ultra Ball was able to capture the ice bird on its first non-missed attempt. The Safari Zone crew was surprisingly easier than I had expected, catching all of the exclusives and harder to catch Pokemon in roughly less than 3 hours. Naturally, I saved my Master Ball for Mewtwo in the Unknown Dungeon and the Mew encounter glitch was successful after only 5 Pokeballs.

The Pokemon that took the longest to acquire was Porygon. Porygon was a Pokemon that I never had acquired legitimately as a child. Porygon requires a whopping 9,999 coins from the Celadon City Game Center. Yeah, I spent some time playing the slots but to be honest I felt the best overall method was to continue grinding for money by beating the Elite Four and spending $1,000 for 50 coins on repeat. It took a while, but it was probably the fastest method!

Fact: My 151st Pokemon? Persian.

Props to the final Elite Four grind sesh!

• 

• 

• 

The true hard part of this Pokedex completion journey was having to spend an extra 10-ish hours with both Pokemon Red & Blue while using my girlfriend’s 3DS as a middle-man trade mule with her copy of Pokemon Yellow.

Besides the Red & Blue exclusive Pokemon that are not present in Yellow (including the annoying slogs to Koga to surf for Electabuzz & Magmar), the subsequent playthroughs are necessary for Pokemon such as Omanyte/Kabuto, Hitmonchan/Hitmonlee and the three Eeveelutions – as you are only able to obtain one per playthrough.

Legitimately completing the Generation One Pokedex is a great feeling. In fact, it was a childhood dream come true. I can rest my head at night now knowing that I did not need Gameshark, or having someone gift trade me Pokemon left and right. Now… onto Generation Two!