Today’s game is Pokemon Emerald. It is done. My living dex has been completed (at least to the extent Emerald can cover) and i moved them all over to box on the 3DS (along with backing them up on my PC).
Completing a Living dex has been hard. Like, really hard. I think the only way this could be more difficult is if i was doing a shiny dex. You know how many Shinies i found while filling out the Living Hoenn dex? 1. And it was a shiny Nincada. The game estimates i spent 150 hours in total, so doing some napkin math that’s nearly ~30000 hours too fill it out. No way i can do that.
The regi-trio weren’t too bad. I just spammed ultraballs and put them to sleep until i caught the. The only bad part were the puzzles, which even then weren’t too bad.
You know what was bad though? Milotic. Only 6 spots on that entire route is bullshit. I was just sailing up and down with the old rod hoping for it too bite. It took ages. To be honest it’s making me rethink doing the rest of the achievements purely because of how burnt out i was. Thank god for ditto so i could just breed another.
After i pulled my Ditto out of that daycare though for one last time, i breathed a sigh of relief, but also felt immensely proud. I may have to do it multiple other times but this was a good challenge i think and a really good stepping stone.
A shiny dex sounds like it’s own layer of hell. In my mudkip-only game, I decided I may as well get a shiny mudkip if I’m stuck with it for the entire game, and that took me way, way too long even with fast forward. Admittedly a shiny starter is quite a bit different than a random shiny, but still!
I have trouble keeping patient enough to get a female starter to breed and trade to friends who pick other ones. Getting a shiny one I don’t think I could do
Mine's actually a shiny female!
For Emerald specifically, I learned shiny starter hunting is actually especially difficult. For other pokemon games, your seed is randomly generated when reloading the game, so you have a random 1/8192 chance to get a shiny starter every time you select it. But for whatever reason in Emerald, your seed stays the same from the moment you start a new game. So the RNG is completely fixed. What this means is you can’t really soft-reset for the shiny right in front of the bag as easily as you can in other games, because if you pick the pokemon at, say, the 100th frame, then you’ll always see that exact version of the pokemon at the 100th frame. So in between each soft-reset you need to wait longer and longer each time so you don’t risk grabbing it on the same frame as before.
Eventually you’ll be waiting 20+ seconds between each reset, and rather than continue to soft-reset, it will be faster to just start a new save entirely, which properly resets the seed. Which you’ll then need to do again and again until you eventually get the shiny. Now I was perfectly ready for a regular shiny starter hunt, but this? No, this was some crap I wasn’t willing to put up with. So I instead went down a whole rabbit hole of learning how to RNG manipulate using a hex reader. Still took me multiple days on and off, but it was an interesting learning experience. I could technically use this to guarantee any pokemon is shiny by waiting for the correct frame (the one upside to static RNG) since I now know my secret ID (the hard part), but that wont do me much good in a mudkip-only run lol.