it brings me no joy to announce that i am in my annual Pokémon phase. kind of wanted to try to wait it out because i knew there'd be a precipitous drop in interest soon enough, and i may not even end up finishing this game. also because, there are certain Big Games i've wanted to hold off on playing on here until stuff was a little more developed, and i had certain things figured out. for example how i would handle eventually wanting to play multiple Pokémon games alongside each other, trading between them. luckily i probably won't stay interested until that point so it's not worth worrying about

out of all the phases i go through, around this time last year was the first time i really started caring at all about the more intricate mechanics. when i learned about natures it pretty much ruined my life. i bought a japanese copy of LeafGreen and very quickly decided that resetting whenever i got a bad nature and IVs made the game not fun. also the fact that i was overconfident with my ability to read this game that's entirely in kana and so wouldn't even help me in learning the language that much

i would also get kind of obsessive about emulation vs real cartridges. normally i'd just emulate it who cares, but the interconnectivity between these games, especially those of different generations, made all the hacky solutions to making that stuff work with emulated copies feel. i don't know a little less legitimate? that's a nostalgia thing i think; there was something magical about linking up these games as a kid and simply loading up another emulator instance sort of loses that. maybe if real copies of Pokémon games weren't like $80 nowadays i would continue to care about this

oh jeez. a long while ago when i naively thought my interest in Pokémon would last me long enough to play through every game i wrote out a list of variations of my name to use for each game, to signify what game a pokémon was from. for Emerald it was either Zemera or Emphie. actually here are some more of them

doomed to play with the dumbest names ever up until X/Y when i could just be Xephie/Zephy

as well as that i carefully planned out nicknames for all my pokémon back when i was playing LeafGreen, because in the japanese version the names are limited to only five characters. also because they clearly came up with a lot of the names for those guys when they didn't think Pokémon would go on nearly as long as it has, so a good amount of them are just the name of the animal they're based on

i had names for every gen 1 and 2 pokémon so good thing i'm starting with gen 3. it's fine though most of them i wasn't concerned with them not sounding stupid in english so i'd be coming up with new names here anyway

having flashbacks to a really funny and cool romhack i made of the beginning of this game as a kid, where characters said Swears, and Rude things

all my life i've picked grass starters. i think for a long time Treecko was my favorite guy. maybe i had a period in my early teens or something where i made an effort to expand my horizons when it came to starters, but now more than ever i am decidedly on the green train. this is where i admit that despite all existing zephiepix my hair is actually green

this might be a longer journey than anticipated. spent about 20 minutes trying to come up with a name for this one guy! my problem is i try to think ahead to when i've potentially Caught 'Em All, so i don't wanna name him something basic like Kyle or whatever that i could use with another more fitting pokémon. then there's the question of if i wanna say screw it and go with joke names. anyway i named him Rokaryme

i'm literally going to kill this kid

at the first bigtown. wanted to fill up my party asap and very foolishly did not catch a Seedot upon finding one thinking i could easily get another, unaware that it's a 1% chance, and then spent too long trying to find another. well here's the gang so far. the OGs. my ride-or-dies. they are all getting replaced the minute i start running into birds

hey everyone it's Wally this is my journal now, Zephie suddenly forgot how catching pokémon works after doing it thousands of times throughout their life so i had to show them. anyway i'm a dumb big snotbaby and my Ralts looks stupid

game froze last night so that had me worried knowing that could happen. tried setting it up to play on my phone instead but i'd rather touch lava and spikes than touch controls, and i figured it'd be more likely to freeze up on a seven-year-old phone, which it immediately did. saving more often now; heeding the advice of a random little girl i talked to in Oldale Town. the time-bending power she wields must be destroyed

learning even more about pokémon this time around than i did last year

me looking at cartridge prices on ebay

i know it's an old observation that everyone in Pokémon games really does talk about nothing aside from pokémon. but to be fair if pokémon were real i would only be talking about them too. even without all the wacky superpowers, if real animals were nearly as Around as pokémon are, like if i could walk near a bush and just find dogs and rabbits hanging out, then maybe they'd measure up

this man wants me to come up with a funny word to make his daughter laugh in exchange for a PC wallpaper. i looked online thinking there'd be a simple answer and just saw a bunch of complicated algorithms. apparently the codes are all things like kLQBCLpnJPcBBCS depending on individual trainer values which i guess would make me laugh if i was a dumb toddler and someone made that noise at me. but where the hell are you supposed to learn these

i can't believe i've already had a troublesome battle. as a kid for the first few hours of a game i always employed the tried-and-true method of Use My Starter For Everything while everyone else is just along for the ride, and now in trying to level all my guys fairly evenly i have made a fool of myself. Wourm here was my strongest remaining guy and he managed to pull through by hardening incessantly and waiting for his prey to succumb to poison. used an X-stat item for possibly the first time in my life in this battle

first badge get! party check-in. i wasn't aware the Cascoon/Silcoon evolution was essentially random and not based on sex so i lucked out there slightly. also stuffed in a computer is Muzzle (Whismur), Brella (Shroomish), Yenifer (Poochyena), Ludo (Lotad), Lizzi (Zigzagoon), and Halia (Nincada). boy that's a cumbersome way to give dex updates never mind. got the PokéNav afterwards and went back talking to every single battle NPC to ask for their digits

this is the scariest part of the game. a rare moment when even as a dumb kid playing this - when i would just accept everything in the game as normal - i felt like i was going insane listening to these aliens attempting to mimic human behavior. but maybe that's just because i haven't opened my eyes to "AMUSING TRENDY" which i hear is all the rage these days. Any trainer could tell you that "AMUSING TRENDY" is essential to training your POKéMON stronger!

second badge get. cranking them out a little faster than i expected, which i suppose i could attribute to the actual sense of direction i've developed since i was a child. sometimes i'll play a game i remember getting super stuck in as a small and wonder how i even figured out how to turn on the console. this world used to feel so big to me. now i could destroy it with the press of a button. nice internal battery kid would be a shame if someone were to let it run dry