The Legacy Wall: Pokemon Teams of Years Gone By By RowanTS Watch

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With Pokemon Sun and Moon around the corner, I thought I'd make this - "Sun's" Wall in his new house that he's set up for the old transferred Pokemon so they can see where they came from. Click Download and zoom in for all the details (big but worth it) - see how many references you can count. Details and reasonings below.



Disclaimer: This is a photoshopping dealy, none of the original images are mine (except the letters), but heavily image edited (except for the XD sketches, those are basically neat). I'm not making any profit off it, it was purely to have a look back on a life of pokemon and celebrate that those Pokemon are still with me. Thank you to any and all people's art, or screenshots, or stock images I used.





WHOLE LIFE STORY TIME:



I started playing Pokemon when Silver came out in the UK. I'd watched the anime since the beginning and loved it, collecting every cheap McDonald's piece of merchandise I could lay my little hands on. At the time a GameBoy was way out of our price range, but after Silver came out, my mother bought me a turquoise GBC, Silver, and a Prima Game guide (all of which I still own). It was a dark winter evening and I begged for the light on in the car to see the screen. I hadn't had any exposure to video games - I need my real life mother's help to get out of Mom's House in the game. I poured so many hours into that game (much to my mother's cost in batteries until she got me a power pack!) and I loved it. I especially loved one Pokemon - an Umbreon. I saw it's amazing sprite in a magazine and it was a DARK type - how cool, they weren't even in the anime yet! So when I got my game I had to get one. I could take you to the tile where it evolved, surfing between Cianwood and Olivine next to the Whirl Islands. It was during the day, so I slammed off my game, and ended up having to replay about two HOURS of game because I hadn't saved, but as if by fate, it again evolved on the same tile, but this time at night. It and Meganium were everything, and even though I got stuck on the elite 4, I eventually got through the whole game, occasionally grinding up Umbreon in the grass outside of Mt Silver. Some time later, after receiving Yellow, and also playing the new Crystal a while, (but Silver still my main game), I was playing with a sort-of-friend (who previously ruined my enjoyment of my Meganium by cloning it six times and not tracking the original) who was messing around trading missingno-mons and sharked mons through the time capsule. Turned out he was using my Silver game. I don't know what happened to this day - he said he boxed my Umbreon to begin with and wouldn't have touched it, but either way I found out a few days later... my Umbreon wasn't there. I checked every box, the day cares, my party a hundred times (which it never usually left), but it had completely vanished. And I was distraught. Mum tried to help by getting me the new Ruby and an on-sale Gameboy Advance SP, and I threw myself into that, essentially mono-running with Blaziken. I never played Silver again except for checking if Umbreon was somehow magically there, and when I moved house I couldn't find the cartridge at the other end - I don't know if I binned it in a fit of rage and blanked it out or what, I never lost or broke anything expensive so it was very weird for me. That you can't transfer Pokemon from those old games and their batteries tend to fail... Maybe ultimately it was all for the best.



But then, fate appeared. A Pokemon magazine told me about a new game called Pokemon Colosseum, its starters? An Umbreon and an Espeon. Luckily my Mum thought it was fate too, and even though it was really too expensive, for my birthday she picked me up a Gamecube and the game. When I tried to play it straight away it turned out the memory card they sold with it wasn't large enough for some reason and it couldn't save to it, but she told me to keep playing, keep the console running overnight and she'd pick up a bigger one tomorrow. Good as her word she did, and it worked and I could save. She had a lot of problems, but her understanding of how I felt towards Pokemon wasn't one of them.





IMAGE DETAILS:



That Colosseum Umbreon felt like my vanished Silver one had somehow travelled across the digital world to find me - yeah, corny, but true. So here came the headcanon that the Colosseum character had found the two of them after their being stolen by Team Snagem, and felt like keeping them. I wanted to reconcile the idea of transferring Pokemon from one game to another while still having that 'love' for the pokemon, so I created the P.R.I.M.E. Initiative in my head - a program that Colosseum character set up so he could let his pokemon see the world, and let other trainers join in too. I massively bonded with the Shadow Tyranitar you get at the end (Masterballed it as I knew it was the last one) because the trainers beforehand were tougher than any Elite 4 I'd faced (you don't have to catch the E4's Shadow Pokemon). I did the grind through Mt. Battle more times than I could count, getting all of them, Blaziken, my Ruby Rayquaza to level 100. They had brief jaunts to Emerald, with surprising success in the Battle Palace (but never any medals), starting the tradition of them visiting every single "main" game I got. LeafGreen brought Venusaur and Mewtwo into the fold. Pokemon XD saw Electrozap the Jolteon and Dustpaw the Houndoom (and the idiocy of not teaching purified Lugia Psycho Boost because I thought it was a stat boosting move and those were for wimps). Diamond - Torterra, and Platinum - Empoleon, Gallade (whose Ralts came from Ruby, to Diamond, then to Platinum so he could be in the playthrough), and Lucario (from the GTS, level 100 for a Rayquaza - I had many from restarting Emerald so many times). SoulSilver was back to Johto with Meganium again, but no raising an Eevee this time. White had Snipe the Serperior, Rowena the Liepard, Bayard the Stoutland and Zekrom - starting the tradition of "whole" teams. White 2 I actually bred and trained a mono-normal (at the time) team for, trading them over to play the game with and becoming Movie Stars - Pip the Cincinno, Vaxine the Zangoose, Na5p3o10 the Porygon2 (said Nass-pee-oh-loh - Sodium triphosphate otherwise known as Polygon), Aruna the Togekiss, Koko the Slaking, and Darwin the Snorlax. X meant Skjaldborg the Chesnaught, Bruce the Pangoro, Premax the Tyrantrum, Robin the Talonflame, Mab the Florges and Chia the Raichu. Last but not least was OmegaRuby (the "main" game) - Heracles the Blaziken, Jet the Salamence, Styx the Absol, Sintian the Aggron, Morse the Walrein and Positronium the Plusle, mirrored with one I used on my first playthrough of AlphaSapphire (my "restarting" game): Atlas the Swampert, Maraca B. the Ludicolo, Qi Xing the Scizor, Ana the Politoed, Magna the Ampharos and Electrum the Minun. Again both sets bred for but traded while still in eggs to have the oR OT. The mass of other Pokemon in that frame are all the competitive pokemon I amassed by training and breeding and soft resetting during Gen 6.



All of these Pokemon are with me today. They have been through every Elite 4 and Champion in every region after their own. Showing my original Ruby Blaziken to the "Developer" in OmegaRuby to receive the special diploma was amazing, and I hope they'll all be able to stick with me for many years to come.

IMAGE DETAILS Image size 5616x3510px 16.97 MB Show More

Published : Oct 26, 2016