Catching ‘Em All, and How to Do It

If you breathe, you know what Pokémon is. You’ve at least run into a Pikachu or perhaps even a Bulbasaur at some point in your life, and you might have a vague inkling that it’s a game about collecting creatures, with the goal being to, as both the song and the box says, Catch Them All.

The thing is, this is actually a lot fucking harder than you might think–so I set out to do it myself. In a copy of Pokémon Blue for the 3DS, after two-and-a-half years of on-and-off play, I now have a save with a full 151 possible Pokémon caught. I have screenshots of the journey.

What possesses a man to go to such obsessive lengths? What keeps people from doing the thing listed on the box? Why does Lt. Surge have such a fine ass? Join me, friends, and I will answer all your questions.

An overview of Pokémon mastery

Memery aside (that I will nevertheless give into and overexplain the games, in case you’re somehow both aware of this blog and have no idea about them), given it’s possibly the single most successful gaming tagline since “It’s in the Game”, why is it so hard to actually catch all the Pokémon in any given Pokémon game?

Anyone who’s played the games knows part of the answer. Each generation of Pokémon comes in two flavors, plus a third reissue flavor for extra content and bugfixes. For the first generation, that was Red and Green, and then an updated Blue in Japan later. We got Red and Blue in the rest of the world. Yellow soon followed, more closely modeled on the then-hugely successful Pokémon anime. All of these games are roughly the same, same region, same characters–the only difference is in which Pokémon you can encounter in the wild.

You see, Game Freak had this really funny idea to have version exclusive Pokémon. Because the Game Boy Link Cable was such an integral idea to Pokémon from the beginning, they would require its usage for game completion with each game having Pokémon you couldn’t get in the other one. You’d have to trade for them, either with a friend with a copy of the opposite game, or two Game Boys and a copy of each for us lonely lads. Traded Pokémon have some additional benefits and drawbacks, and it’d encourage some socialization and add a multiplayer component to Pokémon–trade with your mates and also battle their probably cheated teams with your probably cheated team.

Thing is, if it was only exclusives, catching them all would be a lot more doable. A few Pokémon evolve only when traded, which is similarly annoying, but again doable. The real nasty idea is actually one of the reasons Pokémon became big–the event-only Pokémon.

If you’re playing legitimately, you can get, at maximum in the first generation, 150 Pokémon. #151 is Mew, a very cute and powerful alien cat creature fully programmed into the game, but completely unobtainable through normal means. You’d have to go to a promotional event, plug your Game Boy into a kiosk that would effectively act like another Game Boy, and download a Mew into your save. The speculation around Mew and ways to get it would help propel the Pokémon games into a sort of legendary (no pun intended) status–a game full of secrets that would only reveal themselves had you not missed the boat.

As you can imagine, all of these events are now 25-30 years past. Save editors, glitches, or community efforts to simulate these events in some form or another are your only hope of getting event Pokémon. In all fairness to the game, it will still tell you your Pokédex is complete at 150, but 150 isn’t 151. It’s not complete, Oak, and we both know this.

Thing is, so far, we’ve only talked about the first generation. The second generation, Gold, Silver, and Crystal, not only have their own Pokémon, version exclusives, and event Pokémon, but they’re missing plenty of the Gen 1 Pokémon, requiring now four games to play through instead of simply two. By the time the three third generation games came around, you couldn’t even trade with Crystal and prior, necessitating the FireRed and LeafGreen remakes of the first generation to obtain their Pokémon. You’re still missing tons of second generation Pokémon in those five, however, and again–event-only Pokémon from every generation.

Are you seeing the issue? These are time-sensitive games cut into bizarre shapes that require multiple playthroughs if you want to catch everything you physically can, and even then, you’re still missing Pokémon. While completing the Pokédex isn’t required to beat any of the games, it’s what’s literally encouraged on the box, and yet they make it a total assfucking to do so.

What were they thinking?

My objective becomes clear

Thing is, I’m nuts. I wasn’t all that into Pokémon until I had a chance encounter with my childhood copy of FireRed, bored at home after being expelled from school at 14, and afterwards I got fixated. I petered out pretty hard after getting through SoulSilver on the DS, but six years later, in 2023, the closure of the 3DS eShop and curiosity about Red and Blue on the Virtual Console (a series of older emulated games you could buy and digitally install on your 3DS for a quick hit of Zelda II or whatever) got me interested in diving back in.

If I was ever going to complete a Pokédex, it’d be on Red and Blue. They have the least amount of Pokémon available and only require each other to pull it off. Better yet, my 3DS is hacked, so I could back up and export my saves as needed, important for trading between the two games and two 3DSes. (I only have one 3DS, but Caby has a hacked 3DS as well, so I can move my Red save to hers and trade with my Blue save as needed. That’s why my attempts always coincide with trips to Wales.) I could also take screenshots with the hacked 3DS firmware–equally important for documenting my progress.

If you’re curious if there’s any differences in the Virtual Console versions of Red and Blue versus the original Game Boy issues, there’s only some minor animation differences, no bugfixes. This isn’t just an anticlimactic bit of trivia, it’s kind of a necessity for making this happen.

Welcome to the world of Pokémon, dear reader.

Phase one: beating and completing Blue

On May 13, 2023, with four days to go until I flew off to Wales for the very first time, I hit the ground running. My home game would be Pokémon Blue, because Squirtle is always my starter and I take pride in representation. Back in 2018 for minerteaux, I had done a brief fake Let’s Play of Blue that told of the tale of Big Chunky the trainer, his rival Kyle Drake, and his unfortunately-named Squirtle Gregory. I reprised the two for this run.

For most of the game, it’s pretty standard goings. You walk into an area, either a town with a gym you’ll need to conquer or a route or cave you simply have to survive across, battling and capturing wild Pokémon as needed and then winning various trainer battles. Trainers can be amateurs or Gym Leaders, each of whom specialize in a specific type of Pokémon. Trainers are defeated when all of their team is knocked out. Play your moves right, have a variety of types, and keep your team healthy, and you win. Walk into traffic and you’ll be rushed to a Pokémon Center, now poorer and with a bruised ego, to bring your team back to life.

Something I always look forward to in a new run is using Pokémon I’m unfamiliar with and gaining a new appreciation for them. For my Blue run, I picked up a Clefairy outside Mt. Moon who I named Prince (as in my pink cat lad, not the singer) and evolved into Clefable, and I gave the pair of early game nuisances Rattata and Caterpie a serious go each. Rattata evolves into Raticate, a speedy hitter who becomes dangerous when paired with Dig, and Caterpie becomes Butterfree, a flighty bug whose Confusion and status-afflicting moves nevertheless made it a right headache for the computer–a nuisance on my side instead now. Love ’em, they’re great.

Kanto especially always gets me wistful towards its middle end. It’s not all that big in reality, but the speed at which you explore it and the places I never saw as a kid, the far-off reaches of Fuchsia City and surfing south on my loyal and ever-tanky Gregory towards Cinnabar Island, fills me with this sense of grandeur even as I write this. Whimsy, if you will. It’s a fun game to explore! Once you get past the early-game tedium of Mt. Moon, Diglett’s Cave, and Rock Tunnel especially and can fly to every town you want to visit instead of walking there, you really do start to appreciate the wacky scale of everything.

There’s several points in the game where, even though Pokémon aren’t technically version exclusives, you still can’t get them all in the same save. You pick from one of three starters, which necessitates three different runs to get all three lines. You also have your choice of how you evolve the hidden Eevee in Celadon City, again requiring three runs to each get Flareon, Jolteon, and Vaporeon. There’s three Pokémon that have to be revived from fossils, and two have to be chosen between per save. A fighting dojo in Saffron City gives you the choice of Hitmonlee or Hitmonchan for beating its trainers, but not both. Four Pokémon also can only be obtained via evolving on trade.

So alongside beating the eight gyms, plus the Elite Four (a set of four very difficult trainers you have to beat in succession without breaks, plus your rival as a surprise final boss), you’re looking in every route, cave, forest, and ocean path to catch ’em all. Each Pokémon has to be weakened, but not knocked out, in order to have the best chance of catching them. This is why the nice handful of extremely difficult and missable Pokémon that only have one or two in each save are so frustrating. There’s a trio of elemental birds, Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, which you get one shot each to catch. Knock them out, you’re fucked. Reset if you saved beforehand or trade them in. Mewtwo can be found in Cerulean Cave at the very end of the game, again, a whole one available. Snorlax, you get two chances.

Adding insult to injury is that these Pokémon all have abysmally low catch rates, which is an internal number value that determines, effectively, even at the best of times, how likely you are to capture the Pokémon post-Poké Ball throw. There’s ways to increase your chances by weakening the Pokémon, putting it to sleep, freezing it, that sorta thing, but you still have no guarantee of it working.

Kinda.

Let me introduce how broken Generation 1 is.

The absolutely fascinating world of Generation 1 glitches

Red and Blue are probably better known for their glitches than their gameplay. What’s hard to appreciate these days is just how difficult programming a full RPG for the Game Boy is. Red and Green spent about five years in development, each of the 151 Pokémon completely unique in what moves they can learn, their stats, how quick they are to grow, where they’re found, and obviously what they look like. This is just the battling system. You have the rest of the dialogue, character design, world design, key items, difficulty and progression, and also just the sheer technical size of Kanto from tip to tail. It’s a miracle it works at all.

Nevertheless, Generation 1 had plenty of oversights that aren’t all that difficult for a casual player to exploit. These range from minor glitches that would be easy for a programmer to miss (say, Great Balls being better for catching Pokémon than Ultra Balls in certain circumstances) to Gigantamax fuckups that let you skip parts of the game, duplicate items, and encounter Pokémon that don’t exist and maybe shouldn’t exist. A savvy player can use these to their advantage, and to make my life a lot easier, I did.

As your reward for saving Silph Co. in Saffron City from the hostile takeover of Team Rocket, the president of the company will give you their prototype Master Ball, a Poké Ball which never fails to catch its target. With only one per save, you might be wondering which Pokémon it’d be best to use it on–and the answer is all of them, because there’s actually infinity of them per save. Through a surprisingly easy and fun setup, you can encounter the reality-distorting Missingno, a placeholder Pokémon who will duplicate the sixth item in your bag to the tune of 128 of them every time you encounter it. Sort the Master Ball to the sixth item slot and you never have to worry about weakening, knocking out, or fighting with any wild Pokémon ever again.

Is this cheating? I don’t personally view glitches as cheating, no. Cheating to me is external help, not undefined behavior. Spawning things in is cheating because you’re going outside the bounds of the game to give yourself an advantage for zero effort–editing memory for infinite lives or invulnerability–but taking advantage of a glitch still requires knowledge of the glitch, setup, and then performing it. For me, anything I can do with my hands alone while the game is on is legit. I still had to get the first Master Ball and hunt down the Pokémon to catch. The only difference is I didn’t spend the time irritating myself after I found them.

So having used Missingno to get a lot of Master Balls (and Nuggets, and Rare Candy, and a few others), it was as simple as going down the list, finding where that Pokémon could be found, hunting it down, chucking a ball at it, and then sorting it in my PC (where you can’t name boxes, or see Pokémon in each box without having an empty slot in your party, so it kinda sucks). Doing this gets you 124/151, when all’s said and done. A fantastic chunk of Pokémon, and where I’d be ecstatic to leave it for any other game and gen, but not 151.

A detour: how the trade system on Virtual Console works

One feature I always find really cool is that Nintendo extended their 3DS Game Boy/Color Virtual Console emulator to properly emulate the Link Cable. This works on local wireless. Two 3DSes near each other, using the same technology that StreetPass uses, can trade and battle Pokémon. Again, this is one of the (many) perks of having visited Caby when I did–I could use her 3DS to trade between my two saves.

Hacking your 3DS to run homebrew gives you access to a save dumper and restore app called Checkpoint. Checkpoint will make a copy of your save on your SD card, letting you move it to another 3DS using a computer or restore it to the game copy at a later date, should you bork yours or experiment unsuccessfully. (You can also restore any random valid save you find online to your VC games, which would come in very handy later.) I’d dump my Red save using Checkpoint, move it to Caby’s also-hacked 3DS, boot them both, grab a lovely handful of junk Pidgeys, Spearows, Rattatas, anything that was nearby in Blue, and trade over the Red exclusive that I wanted to my Blue game still running on my own 3DS.

This led to a very funny situation last weekend where I had both 3DSes on their chargers on Caby’s bed like some sort of science experiment, drunk as a skunk on a voice call with Somnolescent, completely unable to focus on the multi-step trading process because I was too busy hunting down a CD of Welsh novelty children’s rap from a man who looks like Spoony. (Both pursuits were successful in the end.)

Phase two: my first Red playthrough

So far, it’s been a pretty normal and standard playthrough, but stick with me here. This is where things start getting silly, and you get to appreciate some of Kanto’s wonderful glitches in action.

Given I was playing as Big Chunky in Blue, it was decided I’d be playing as his Welsh cousin Wmungus (as in “umungous”) in this run. I also needed a rival name and had a laugh.

Wmungus would pick Bulbasaur this time and again name him the dorkiest thing he could think of.

One good thing about Gen 1 is that you don’t need to beat the game to get all the version exclusives out of it. You only need to get as far as Cinnabar Island to get the Red-exclusive Growlithe and revive your fossil Pokémon (in my case, Kabuto, since I revived Omanyte in my Blue game), and you actually only need to beat four gyms, Pewter, Cerulean, Vermilion, and Fuchsia, to get there. (Using a glitch, you can knock Pewter off that list entirely.) Beating gyms has two important benefits for completing the game:

• They increase the level at which traded Pokémon obey you
• They allow the use of certain utility moves for navigation outside of battle

You see, to prevent you from simply trading in a level 100 Articuno and flattening the game with it, traded Pokémon will disobey you until you’ve gotten the badge that proves to them they should listen to you. This sorta works, but not really, and we’ll get into why later. Utility moves like Cut (for cutting down trees blocking your path), Fly, or Surf are also locked off to prevent you from skipping ahead until you’ve beaten the gym where Game Freak feels you should have access to those moves. All other gyms are unnecessary for a second playthrough.

Off Wmungus and Preston went. I traded in an unused Lapras from my Blue save early on because Water Pokémon just make me feel safer. For team, I went with another Raticate with Dig for reliability, a Pidgey as my glass cannon frequent flyer Pokémon of choice, and Jigglypuff as my early game experiment of choice. I wound up not keeping up with her because her base stats meant, even at the same level, she was getting her ass nuked. Lapras, Raticate, and eventually Pidgeot were all I really needed to get through the bits of the game that I did.

I started investigating skip glitches for this run. Keep in mind, Pokémon games are slow as fuck to get through, and if I can avoid playing one twice in rapid succession in full, I’d like that. One of the most useful glitches involves the battle-escaping Poké Doll item. Normally, when you get to Lavender Town, you have to battle through the Pokémon Tower, a gigantic grave site to dead Pokémon, and put the ghost of a Marowak at ease. You can only battle ghosts after identifying them with a Silph Scope, which you can only get by completing a secret Team Rocket dungeon underneath the casino (or Game Corner, officially) in Celadon.

Snoresville! Buy a Poké Doll at Celadon and chuck it at the stupid fucking ghost’s head. Skip it, win at life, no Rocket Hideout playthrough needed. You get the Poké Flute for completing Pokémon Tower, which wakes up all sleeping Pokémon when used and allows you to battle Snorlax, who I’d knocked out in my Blue run. You do actually need this even if you haven’t got a need for a Snorlax, because two block two of the roads you need to progress.

Another thing you can skip, and actually you can skip it guilt-free regardless, is the bike. Walking is slow as shit, so in Vermilion, you can get a voucher for a free bike to speed up traveling around. That said, don’t want it? Well, the game makes you think you need it by blocking your entrance to Cycling Road, the route that connects Celadon to Fuchsia City, with a guard that turns you away without having gotten the bike. Just keep holding left. You will move past him between his text boxes and the game will give you a bike for as long as you’re on Cycling Road, no voucher or trip to get the bike required. What a well-programmed game.

Another playthrough of Silph Co. to get Master Balls and a Surf off to Cinnabar to duplicate them and revive Kabuto, and I was ready to catch the three or so Red exclusives I’d yet to. (Protip: surf backwards from Pallet Town, not forwards from Fuchsia, so you can skip the Seafoam Islands.) I also needed enough casino tokens to buy Scyther from the Game Corner. You sure can just buy tokens if Evil Eddie’s got it rigged for you, at a rate of $1000 for 50 tokens every time you ask the guy at the counter. Scyther costs 5,500 tokens. If I were smarter, I would’ve gotten one from the Safari Zone, but smart people don’t complete Pokédexes, and money is no object when you can sell off infinity items anyway.

With the Red exclusives in hand, Hitmonlee, Kabuto, and a Vaporeon from Celadon, I was sitting pretty at 146/151. Close, but no cigar. I was going to need to go through a third time to get the last starter and the last Eeveelution.

Phase three: my much speedier second Red playthrough

This time, I only needed to make it to Celadon. You get your starter at the start of the game, so that’s three Pokédex slots right there, and Eevee can be had immediately on arrival in Celadon if you go into the condominiums through the back door. Otherwise, I had a vested interest in going fast, skipping everything, and not giving a single fuck. This meant handing it over to not Big Chunky, but Big Chunky’s Portuguese cousin.

Remember how I said I traded in Lapras and used it throughout my first Red playthrough? I traded him over for this Red playthrough as well. Also remember how I said Pokémon disobey if you don’t have the right badges for their level? That honestly doesn’t much matter in most gens! Disobedient Pokémon can fall asleep, refuse to attack, use the move you want them to, or use any other move at random. As long my level 40 Lapras does any attack at all, it will one shot destroy any Pokémon I put in front of it, and the time spent waiting for it to stop fucking around is negated by its high health and the weak attacks of its opponents relative to level.

In short, yes, still trade in a level 100 Articuno. The benefits massively outweigh the downsides outside of it obviously taking all the challenge out of the game.

I did still work on leveling up my Charmander (and Charmander levels up very quickly for a starter, so as soon as it was time to trade over, he was already level 26, I think), but you have to make sure not to evolve the starter–otherwise, you’ll need to start again to get the one or two earlier evolutions you missed. Still, leveling up and just interrupting the evolution every level means that you’ll be able to evolve it the very next level up in Blue, so I spent the run using Charmander for a lot of basic fighting and then Lapras for anything that would’ve made Charmander sweat, say, hiker trainers with Rock-type Pokémon, or Brock’s Rock types.

Not that the Brock fight in Pewter is altogether long or challenging with my big dick Lapras in tow, but it’s pretty trivial to skip the kid who drags you to the gym should you try to leave town. The setup requires saving the moment he starts to talk to you, restarting the game, and then letting him drag you to the gym. When you return to the edge of town, he won’t be there and you can walk through no problem. Despite Cerulean Gym and Lapras being Water-based and Water types resisting Water moves, the sheer level difference meant I walked in and Lapras flattened the dicks of Misty’s two Pokémon in one hit each.

You do need to make the trip through the SS Anne to get the Cut HM to progress to Rock Tunnel because of a single tree in the way, but if that tree wasn’t there, you could get to Celadon in these few steps:

1. Get your starter, get through Viridian Forest.
2. Skip Brock.
3. Get through Mt. Moon.
4. Beat Misty.
5. Progress onto Rock Tunnel. (This is the most annoying of the lot, due to it being pitch black. No time to light it up with Flash. Use a good map and be the most socially avoidant person that cave has ever seen.)
6. Walk from Lavender to Celadon.

Even having to detour through the Nugget bridge to Bill’s Cottage for the SS Anne ticket and then the boat itself to get Cut, I had my Jolteon in about two-and-a-half hours. 150/151. Oak was already telling me I was the authority on Pokémon, all of Kanto spoke of me as a folk hero, my Hall of Fame data was completely and utterly shredded from many Missingno encounters, but there was still one thing left, one bridge (not the Nugget one) left to cross. I’d been saving it for years for just the perfect occasion.

Phase four: the Mew reward

I’ve had a save I got online of various event Mews on my external hard drive literally since I started this quest in 2023. What I didn’t notice was that this save was actually for Pokémon Yellow, necessitating a quick trip to hShop to get it going on Caby’s 3DS.

What I also didn’t notice is that, while I’m pretty sure these Mews are legit, Mew was never distributed at level 100 for obvious reasons, and there were two of them on this save. Without doing any real digging, my guess is that this is a legit Mew, because it has an OT of Luige which matches this Mew from the Pokémon 2000 Stadium Tour, just one someone grinded the shit out of. If it isn’t real, I will eat my Rapsgaliwn CD.

A wrap-up, and a quiz for you all

So yes! I have Caught ‘Em All. It’s neat! Like I said, I’ve been at this for two years on-and-off, so it’s nice to have the playthrough wrapped up and the save exported for safekeeping. You don’t get anything special for completing the Pokédex other than bragging rights, but it’s a special sort of above and beyond challenge akin to a good RetroAchievements set that makes me happy to have accomplished it once in my life. Completing things makes me happy. Can be leftovers in the fridge, can be games, can be projects. I can say for certain I know Red and Blue inside and out.

I thought about ending this post off with my usual overlong navelgazing and shit about how I’m playing every Pokémon game casually from now on, but I had a more fun idea. Here’s a little quiz about Kanto I made up, a journal meme if you’re of a certain age. If you’ve played a Gen 1 game recently or ever, if you’ve played any of the remakes (there’s two now), feel free to copy and paste the template into the comments and let me know how it went for you. I’ll go after the template.

Kanto Region journal meme template

Which game(s) you played:
Your starter and why:
Your preferred type for your run:
Favorite part of Kanto:
Least favorite part of Kanto:
The bit you had the most trouble with:
Any exploits, glitches, or outright cheating you used:
A Pokémon you grew to like or love from using it:
A Pokémon who disappointed you or you stopped using and why:
Which Eeveelution you picked:
Dome or Helix Fossil and why:
Hitmonlee or Hitmonchan and why:
Your favorite of the legendary bird trio (Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres) and why:
Where Kanto falls on your ranking of the regions:

Cammy’s answers

Which game(s) you played: Red and Blue, of course. I also played through FireRed in high school, but I’ll be focusing on my run from this Letters post.
Your starter and why: Obviously, all of these answers, I picked both, but for my initial run, Squirtle. Blastoise is my favorite end-stage Gen 1 starter, and I find it easier to find a good Grass-type heavy hitter than a Water-type heavy hitter outside of the starters. Surf and Hydro Pump are two of my favorite moves in the whole game.
Your preferred type for your run: Water and Ice. Blastoise, Articuno (who I didn’t use during my Elite Four run because I was missing a Fire type, but I used it throughout the rest of the end game), and Lapras have all been staples of my Kanto teams since FireRed.
Favorite part of Kanto: I always enjoy arriving in Celadon. Something about its size, the minigame slots at the Game Corner, and especially the Department Store where you have all the exclusive goodies for sale turns it into an exciting trip into the city for a forest lad like myself.
Least favorite part of Kanto: Rock Tunnel. All the irritation of going through a cave and hitting every fucking Zubat on the way, but you can’t see! At least other dungeons in the game have something worth seeing in them, like Zapdos in the Power Plant or Mewtwo in Cerulean Cave, but Rock Tunnel exists entirely to waste your time. Motherfuck Rock Tunnel.
The bit you had the most trouble with: The Elite Four took me some trial and error, especially Lance and his Dragonite. I think I beat it a half dozen times in the end though, because I’m just that pro of a gamer.
Any exploits, glitches, or outright cheating you used: A handful of skip glitches throughout the Red runs, and Missingno and ‘M to duplicate items as needed. Honestly, fairly mild as far as a swiss cheese game like Gen 1 goes.
A Pokémon you grew to like or love from using it: Butterfree, Raticate, and Clefable, especially Clefable. It’s decently tanky, but it being only weak to Poison moves and having a nice variety of TM moves it can learn makes it a nice all-arounder for mid-late game. Raticate’s Dig is supremely easy to cheese in battle, making you invincible for half of all turns in battle and being super powerful when it does hit. As said earlier, while Butterfree isn’t too strong, its status-afflicting moves made it a fun bit of foreplay in the heat of a battle, if you get my drift.
A Pokémon who disappointed you or you stopped using and why: On my second runthrough of Red, I basically had to drop my Jigglypuff like I said. Even at the right level, it was just getting its shit pushed in endlessly, and that was disappointing. Luckily, I never had to use that team to beat the Elite Four, so the much better Pokémon I had on me by that point were more than enough for the handful of battles I had left.
Which Eeveelution you picked: Flareon. Obvs.
Dome or Helix Fossil and why: Definitely the Helix Fossil. You don’t think I’m some heathen against Lord Helix, do you? Plus Kabuto/Kabutops are weird chitinous bug people, and I don’t trust like that.
Hitmonlee or Hitmonchan and why: Honestly not big on Fighting types, but I chose Hitmonchan. Seems less weird to punch people than to kick them.
Your favorite of the legendary bird trio (Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres) and why: Articuno has always been my favorite. One of the biggies back when I played through FireRed, partially because Fly has a lot of the same advantages of Dig, plus you can fast travel with it, but also because Ice-type moves have a chance of freezing any Pokémon you use them on. It’s like cheese on top of cheese.
Where Kanto falls on your ranking of the regions: Definitely up there. I think I still gotta give it to Johto for comfiness, but that’s just because I’m a naturey vintagey sap. Probably #2 between Johto and Unova.

Cammy’s Hall of Famers

And finally, since the repeated Missingno encounters turned my Hall of Fame data into shredded mozzarella, I’d like to present my initial team that beat the Elite Four for all the world to see. I still don’t know how to name Pokémon. Thanks for reading!