Pyroclastica

This whole thing started as just idly killing time… Telling myself I’d do a run through LeafGreen, pick Bulbasaur as a starter just like I did playing Pokemon Blue when I was 9, have some good nostalgic memories, not think too hard about it…
…And somehow, in the middle of the run, I decided I was going to make a living Pokedex. I figured that’s a reasonable definition of “completing” the game?
This Pokedex was made entirely legitimately. No glitches, cheat codes, save states etc. were used. Using 2 Analogue Pockets, and another FireRed file (which I didn’t even complete), I traded over everything I needed, just like you would have had to do in 2003.
Nothing about this is really hard, it’s just tedious. I did have the extreme fortune of finding a Lucky Egg on the first Chansey I caught, which helped the level grinding a LOT
Not sure what I thought would happen, but trading over another EXP.SHARE from the other game also caused no problems. Half of Exp goes to the monster who did the fighting, and the other half is divided between however many are holding the EXP.SHAREs. This made it pretty easy to grind the elite 4 to level up living-pokedex monsters.
When I was playing through LeafGreen, I did my best to give myself over to the game and get in the mindset of what it felt to play it (meaning Blue) for the first time ever. I haven’t played a single Pokemon game past gen 3, however, I remain convinced that the 1st gen has the best setting and aesthetics.
The pokemon lab, the burned out mansion, the references to strange science projects, team Rocket skulking around, it all works together like none of these games ever did before or since. No one ever really thinks of the Pokemon games having a “plot” but there really is a lot here if you pay attention.
Overall, good experience, but this little project landed me in a gaming hole where it was the only thing I did for the past few months. Hopefully I can pull myself out of the rut and get back to playing smaller games to post more frequent reviews.

Pokemon LeafGreen