So. Hear me out. I had intended on continuing to document my play through of Generation 1 games, but this blog fell to the wayside. The good news is that I completed my Generation 1 Pokédex! It was several months ago, but I will do my best to recall the journey. The ending had a twist (because of course it did) that I was not expecting. So once I beat the elite four in Pokémon Blue, I decided to start a fresh play through on Pokémon Yellow. My goal with this game was to just power through and get access to the three starters and catch the Pokémon that weren’t available in Blue. Now I know that this is not a conventional choice since Yellow can be a bit frustrating at times. Yellow had several changes compared to Red and Blue: updated sprites, changes to characters in the game so they matched characters from the anime, Pikachu was your starter and your rival had Eevee, and there was a surfing Pikachu mini game. Now to the more frustrating aspects– mainly the unavailability of certain Pokémon. First, besides your starter Pokémon Pikachu, no other Pikachu or Raichu appear in the game and you can’t evolve your starter Pikachu. Additionally, Weedle is not available as well as Jessie and James’s Pokémon (Koffing/Weezing, Meowth, and Ekans/Arbok). Catch rates have also been adjusted (many decreased).

I didn’t have much trouble breezing through the game until I got to the Safari Zone to catch Scyther. I spent 3 hours doing this, but was eventually successful. I know that I could have purchased Scyther at the Celadon Game Corner, but didn’t feel like grinding the Elite Four for money to convert to coins. I spent a total of 44 hours and 19 minutes on Pokémon Yellow with most of that time taken to grind out levels on the three starters. After getting Scyther, I went to a Pokémon Center to heal and transfer my exclusives to Pokémon Blue cartridge. Up next was a hopefully short adventure in Pokémon Red to get the three exclusives that were not in Blue or Yellow: Ekans, Arbok, and Electabuzz. After getting these three Pokémon, I traded them into Blue and had one final task: grinding the Elite Four for money so I could buy coins to purchase Porygon from Celadon City Game Corner. In order to do this you need to spend 130,000 Pokédollars to buy 6500 game coins. Since beating the Elite Four and my rival got me approximately 11,000 Pokédollars each time, I had to run through the process 13 times to have enough money. Once Porygon was secure, I was now ready to re-create the Toys R’ Us Mew distribution event to secure Mew, my 151st Pokémon.

I made a blog post on how I created my own Generation 1 Toys R’ Us distribution cartridge using an original ROM from an authentic cartridge. With this cartridge I traded a Toys R’ Us Mew to my Pokémon Blue cartridge and was now ready to celebrate my success! I did it! All 151 Pokémon caught! The next step was getting them from the original cartridge all the way to Pokémon Home on my Switch. This process is less convoluted than transferring Generation 3 and 4 Pokémon, but still a process nonetheless. If you want see a general flow chart on the transfer steps, click here. My main console (besides my Analogue Pockets) is a Pikachu Version of the 3DSXL that has custom firmware installed on it. It’s literally a Pokémon machine with every Pokémon game installed. In order to get the Pokémon from my Blue cartridge to HOME, I’d need to inject my save file in the Virtual Console Version of Blue (or Red) to then get them into Pokémon Bank. That’s where the Epilogue Gameboy Operator comes in. The GB Operator allows you to back up save states from your cartridges– something that y’all should be doing especially if you own the Analogue Pocket as they have been known to wipe saves. Anyhow, I backed up the Blue save and then transferred the save to my 3DSXL. It’s a several step process and maybe one day I will make a separate post for it, but I used this guide to do so.

Now that my Virtual Console Blue version has a completed Pokédex save file, it was time to get it into Pokémon Transporter and then Pokémon Bank to then finally get them into HOME on the Switch. At this point, I was super nervous because my cumulative 70-plus hours of work was on the line. I began the transfer process first making sure that the Pokémon were in the correct order. Everything was going smoothly until it came time to transfer Mew. It wouldn’t allow me to. I was confused. It was from a legit source and not hacked. I was upset– my goal was to have each Pokémon in HOME to have the logo of the original system it came from (and for it to come from the region in which it first appeared). No other Mew would suffice. After doing some research, I discovered the earliest version of a legal Generation 1 Mew was from an event in the UK called “Pokémon Festival UK” and was held on November 22, 2016 at the Old Truman Brewery in London, England between the hours of 5 and 10pm. Tickets to this even were super limited and only 100 tickets were given out. The event was to promote Pokémon Sun and Moon for the 3DS. Long story short, I got a copy of the Virtual Console Mew and I was set. All 151 Pokémon were transferred into HOME and I was done with my quest.

As I reflect on my journey so far, some might ask why I didn’t just play the games on the Virtual Console to begin with to remove the extra step of transferring saves and such. I have two reasons why I chose not to. First, playing the VC games on the 3DSXL does not do the games justice as the screen is stretched to accommodate the 3DSXL’s screen size. You can have it in the original dimensions, but then it looks super small. Second, I own all the original games and want to play them. After getting a hold of an Analogue Pocket (or 3) I rather play GB/GBC/GBA games on that handheld. They are beautifully rendered and give me the original feel of playing the games on original hardware. I plan on continuing this process until I get to Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum. Anyhow, stay tuned for my Generation 2 adventure!