Column: Pokemon20: The MoshFish Story

Part III: Eggs and Cheats

By the time 2003 came around, I was well and truly ready for a new adventure, and that soon came in the form of Pokemon Sapphire for the Game Boy Advance. My brother got Ruby, to help me finish off the ones I couldn’t get, but he never really played it, leaving me to pull double duty if I wanted that delicious 100% completion, which unfortunately never came about. After hearing how amazing the new featured in Crystal were compared to Gold, I also decided to buy Emerald, which was the first time I had bought two games from the same generation — and it is lucky I did, because Emerald would very quickly become far and away my favourite.

Pokemon Emerald is still my most played game of any console or handheld I have ever owned, due in no small part to the ease of breeding the new region of Hoenn offered – a single straight line, left to right, was able to be traversed quickly and easily, which rapidly cut down the amount of steps hatching each egg would take. It was this ease of breeding new Pokemon that made me think I must, surely, hatch a Shiny Ponyta, solely due to the huge volume of eggs I was hatching. Thankfully the ‘released’ Pokemon didn’t completely flood the Hoenn world of my Emerald version. I must have bred hundreds, if not literally thousands of Ponyta in the hopes of getting one with blue flames, but it never happened. Not here, at least (dun dun dun!).

Emerald also became my favourite for another, slightly less honourable reason: I learned how to clone Pokemon and items. By utilizing a save/load/reset pattern, it was possible to clone any Pokemon currently in your party, and I used this method to have entire boxes ful of what should have been one-time-only monsters. This included the special Pokemon from the GameCube games Pokemon Colosseum and XD: Gales of Darkness, which I transferred using the GameCube-to-GBA link cable I managed to track down on eBay (and let me tell you, it wasn’t cheap – but it sure was worth it).

Outside of Hoenn, I bought the Generation I updated remake of FireRed, and my sister got LeafGreen. I thoroughly enjoyed these remakes, especially the new areas included. This new area allowed me to transfer my FireRed team over to Emerald, where I could clone them and give them any number of powerful items. The FireRed version also included the ability to re-battle some trainers, which I recall appreciating substantially.

Generation 3 didn’t introduce any new Pokemon into my favourites list, and off the top of my head I can only think of Rayquaza (the Emerald mascot, no less) as worth mentioning. I’m sure I am just forgetting something awesome, though.

Part IV: Gone But Not Forgotten

By 2007 the Nintendo DS was soaring and I was getting (a little bit) tired of constantly attempting to get that Shiny Pontya, so I was very grateful for a new game to sink my time into. I opted for Pokemon Diamond, and a friend of mine chose to get Pearl, and together we played near simultaneously through the story. I came very close to finishing the Pokedex in Diamond, but the one-off Legendary Pokemon were never available for me. I lost my save file for Diamond a few years ago, when I read online about some glitches to try to get those special event monsters, but I must have done something wrong because BELPHEGOR, BEHEMOTH, MAIDEN, GORO, ARKH and SABBATH were all deleted as my save file corrupted. Gone but never forgotten – I restarted just recently, actually, but I can’t quite find the energy to keep going without my old team.

This was also roughly the time when HeartGold was released, an update of the Generation II games not unlike FireRed was for Generation I. HeartGold was a fantastic trip down memory lane for me, and the available non-Johto Pokemon were a pleasure to track down and capture. I used the real-life pedometer, shaped like a Pokeball and useful for a handful of mini-games, until it’s batteries died out, and I never bothered getting them replaced.

Generation IV, in Diamond in particular, introduced another of my favourite Pokemon in Croagunk, a small kung-fu frog (which I’m pretty sure is the best description of anything ever). Croagunk, and sometimes it’s evolution Toxicroak, have become cornerstones of my teams. Some of my other favourites were Abomnasnow and Drifblim, which also often feature in my teams, when they are available. After the relatively disappointing lineup in Generation III, these new Pokemon were a very welcome change.

But we’re still only two-third of the way through! Generations V and VI await, on page 3!