#(my Ultra team have too many common weaknesses and Faba hits all of them sadly)

[regallibellbright]

… You know, I kind of DO want to play the 3DS Virtual Console version of Crystal using my original name, the Pokemon I remember of my original team (but more competently than when I was eight by virtue of… not being eight,) and finally be able to transfer *A* version of my original Pokemon up into Bank and from there Home before it shuts down. I’ve never confirmed to myself that the originals are lost on a dead internal battery on the GBC cartridge, but there is realistically no way whatsoever a game cartridge from 2001 still has a working one and I was in no way tech-savvy enough to do the elaborate workarounds to change those batteries when I realized they needed it and I was, like, twelve OR perform the elaborate hack someone figured out a few years back to somehow transfer Gen I/II Pokemon into Bank. I’ve made peace with their loss. I rarely use my past teams once I’m done with their games, but I appreciate knowing I still have my old Pokemon and can put them in Amie or picnic to play with them whenever. Recreating my originals on an emulation of their original game would be nice.

The problem is, this would require some fairly significant savescumming, because one of the Pokemon I had? Was a shiny Smoochum from the Dizzy Punch egg, which significantly raises your odds of shinies but does not have a set species. THAT’S the one I’ve really never gotten over, especially since I have perennially garbage shiny luck everywhere but Go. (My only other wild shiny encounter up until Sun/Moon was a Wooper in Platinum… in the Safari Zone, who fled. Then a Pineco in either Moon or Ultra, and I think a Mankey in Let’s Go Eevee who finally broke the streak of me getting unscripted shinies LITERALLY once a decade.) If I had the patience for shiny grinding via eggs, Smoochum’s my top priority. (And obviously a shiny from another species with the Dizzy Punch egg would make me cackle and maybe sob as I had to decide between resetting a shiny from a species I like out of existence or fully restarting the playthrough, but it would not be what I’m looking for.)

It took me like, at LEAST a year or two to realize she was shiny, is the hilarious part. Smoochum in the anime were pinker than the Crystal sprite and you don’t really encounter other Smoochum in that game so it took me WELL AFTER BEATING THE GAME, GYARADOS AND ALL, I’m pretty sure AFTER Gen III was out, maybe after FRLG even, to go “wait… do I have a shiny?” Yes you do, tiny not-yet-Regalli. Yes you do. And it will be your white whale ever after.