User:Kidburla

From Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia.
Jump to navigationJump to search

Hi, I'm Adam. I joined Bulbapedia in 2007.

I'm 33 at time of writing, I live in London and I work in the financial services industry. My favourite Pokémon is Piplup. My favourite region is Hoenn (controversial?) My favourite episode so far is The Song of Jigglypuff. My least favourite is Pikachu's Goodbye. My rival character name (in games which support it) is Bryn (whose real-life namesake hates Pokémon, but that's as good a reason as any to name my rival after him).

Pokémon status

(last updated 27/10/2018)

This covers all the main games I have played, except for Blue (because I don't know where the cartridge is and may have even been sold at some point) and FireRed (because my progress through the game was so little that it's not even worth putting here).

Pokémon LeafGreen Version (emulated) (2008)

  • Hours played: 75 approx
  • Completion: Pretty much everything
  • Previously trained (no longer in party): Omastar, Dratini



Pokémon Emerald Version (emulated) (2008-2009)



Pokémon Platinum Version (2009-2011)

This was my first physical cartridge; after this, all my games were physical cartridges.

  • Hours played: 190 approx
  • Completion: Pretty much everything except Battle Frontier
  • Previously trained (no longer in party): Infernape (evolved starter), Graveler, Staraptor



Starting from this version, I started training all my Pokémon from eggs where possible. My above team were all trained from eggs (level 1) except for Vaporeon, who was obtained at L20 from Bebe.

Pokémon SoulSilver Version (2011-2016)



All the Pokémon in the above team were trained from eggs (i.e. from level 1 right up to 83).

Pokémon White Version (2016-2018)



All the Pokémon in the above team were trained from eggs (i.e. from level 1 right up to 86), apart from Braviary, due to the inability to catch Ditto before the postgame in this game, and the fact that all Braviary/Rufflet are male. Braviary was trained from a Rufflet caught at level 34 on Unova Route 10.

Pokémon Yellow Version (Virtual Console) (2018-)

  • Hours played: Less than 1
  • Completion: Almost nothing yet
  • Previously trained (no longer in party): None



Anime

  • Episodes watched (in order from the beginning): 145 approx, plus specials/movies in between

My history with Pokémon: falling in and out of love

Phase 1: 2000-2001

I first got into Pokémon in early 2000, in between the release of Red/Blue and Yellow in Europe. At the time I owned a Game Boy and bought a copy of Blue as all my friends had Red. Since that time, I've been always much more drawn to the "second version" (Silver, Sapphire, LeafGreen, Pearl and SoulSilver) though obviously I'll go for the third version when possible. Anyway at the time I was in my early teens and I bought some books about Pokémon which I still own now. I never really "got" Pokémon Yellow and didn't realise until years later that it was supposed to be based on the anime. No one I knew actually bought Yellow Version. I think the main thing I remember about Kanto (although we didn't call it that then, it was just "the world") was exploring. There was one guy in my school class who knew absolutely everything and where all the underground tunnels came out. I still to this day get mixed up in Kanto between Diglett's Cave and Rock Tunnel.

Phase 2: 2003 approx

By the time Gold/Silver had come out, I had kind of given up on Pokémon. I'd got to the Elite Four on my copy of Blue but never had managed to beat them. I remember loading up a downloaded ROM of Silver, getting the Pokégear and thinking just how complicated they had made it. I found it pretty confusing and no one had ever properly explained it to me so I kind of left it once more.

Phase 3: 2004-2005

Around the time FireRed/LeafGreen were released, I became interested in the franchise again as they were remaking the games I had loved so much as a teenager. This was in mid-2004 and there was a lot of hype around the games. This was the first time that I even heard about Crystal, Ruby or Sapphire as I had been out of touch with the franchise for so long. I was most excited by the wireless capability, the VS Seeker, the help feature and the Sevii Islands. After LeafGreen came out, I bought a Game Boy Advance and a copy of the game. However this was a fairly short fad, and within 6 months I had sold my Game Boy Advance as I was short on cash. I had only reached Cinnabar Island on LeafGreen at the time, and so had not even got close to the heights of before.

Phase 4: 2008-2009

Finally I got back into Pokémon in early 2008. I was doing a very boring job to fill in time before I had a big contract piece starting up later in the year. In my lunch breaks I was often bored. However I discovered that my mobile phone (the Nokia N95) had the facility to run a Game Boy Advance emulator. I proceeded to buy one (namely vBagX) and I started to play LeafGreen again in my lunchbreaks, starting from scratch obviously. This time, I did get to the Sevii islands and really enjoyed it. It was only here that I discovered some features of these games such as abilities and held items that I hadn't really cottoned onto in 2004. Afterwards I played FireRed, with the aim to have at least seen all 151 creatures in the dex, but got bored and quit this game around the Pokémon Mansion point.

Itching for a challenge, and not wanting to return to Generation II graphics, I decided that my next game would be Emerald Version. If you've been following the above then you'll know that all 4 of the instances I'd played before were set in Kanto, so I knew Kanto pretty well, but looked forward to the whole new region of Hoenn to explore. Emerald was a big part of my life until well into 2009. I learnt a lot about the franchise in this time, including generation mechanics, stats and all sorts. In playing Emerald I planned my strategy a lot more carefully than in the earlier games I'd played, in terms of evolution levels and so on. In June 2009 I bought a Nintendo DS and a copy of Pokémon Platinum Version. However only a couple of weeks afterwards, my attention drifted to other things.

Phase 5: 2009-2011

In October 2009 I got back into the franchise for the 5th time, playing Platinum Version as my main game. I started off trying to write a blog covering my experiences in Sinnoh, but soon gave that up. You can find the blog here. Soon afterwards, I became interested in the anime. I'd never watched the anime before because I couldn't get past how childish it was, but I think I've got over that now and enjoy seeing it and the references to the games. I'm currently still playing Platinum. I bought SoulSilver on the day it came out (March 26th in the UK) but didn't properly started playing it yet for a long time...but was really looking forward to that as I'd never properly played a game set in Johto, and hardly knew anything about that region. I did, however, create my character during the Mew event, just so I could download Mew (grr at Nintendo for not making it available to players of Platinum). I continued playing through 2010, and in particular I kept up with all the hype around Generation V. I don't quite know when this phase ended, although I do know that I attended an event in London in February 2011, where I obtained the Winter 2011 Celebi. I imagine it was around that time that I lost interest again.

Phase 6: 2011-2012

I don't know whether it was towards the end of the previous phase or towards the start of this one that I switched to SoulSilver Version as my main game. Having done almost everything possible in Platinum (except for obtaining all those Battle Frontier Prints, which I never felt motivated to do), I moved to finally start my adventure in Johto. I don't really keep records but I did keep records of all my Elite Four matches and I can see that there were no matches between 13/06/2012 and 21/10/2012 so I imagine I took a bit of a break then.

Phase 7: 2012

Well I know I started playing the Elite Four again on 21/10/2012 as noted above, and finally beat them on 30/10/2012. Beyond that, I don't have many other details about this phase of my journey.

Phase 8: 2013

Second half of 2013 - I had a scheme with three friends to all start FRLG from the beginning and battle each other as we went along. This time, I was playing FireRed version, but on a real cartridge this time of course! I forgot how annoying it was to not have Dark type Pokémon (before the Elite Four anyway). There is no type super-effective against Ghost types except Ghost itself. Of course, some non-Ghost Pokémon can learn Ghost moves, but this still did not make it all better for me. Sorry to all you Gen1ers out there! Of which I was also one once, but this just annoyed me. This project was also somewhat ruined by the fact that three of the four of us had full-time jobs whereas the fourth member of our group was a teacher on his school holidays, and was able to make progress a lot faster than the rest of us. This kind of ruined the race, and the whole project petered out after only a few months. This phase of my journey was largely independent, and I don't remember learning that much about X&Y versions or spending any more time on SoulSilver Version during this time.

Phase 9: 2016-2017

I don't know how my love of Pokémon just suddenly awakens without warning, but it did again fairly recently, around the middle of February 2016 - I even have the approximate date as 15th or 16th! In the second half of 2015, I spent a lot of time playing and finally 100% completing a game of Banjo-Kazooie, one of my favourite platforming games. After that, I felt a bit lost as to what to play next, trying a few different games but not finding anything which really captured my attention. It wasn't until mid-February that I realised that Pokémon was the perfect solution to my problem and I suddenly felt a desire to engage with the franchise again!

My first goal was to get SoulSilver Version out again and figure out where I was up to. This took some doing - even though I had a lot of old notes scribbled down, I couldn't make sense of a lot of them! After that, I started playing White Version, from the beginning (trading my event exclusive Pokémon from that save to Black 2 which I had also already purchased).

This phase was also characterized by following some Pokétubers. I never really saw YouTube as a means to engage with the Pokémon community in earlier phases, but I started to watch a lot of theory, speculation, Let's Play and other videos. Around this time I was getting excited by Pokémon GO and Sun/Moon, so the hype around those will kept me hooked until at least the time they came out! Of course I had a lot of catching up to do in terms of knowledge as well. Things like Mega-Evolution, I had never even heard of!! And I didn't know many of the Gen5 or any of the Gen6 Pokémon, let alone Gen7.

This phase ended in late 2017 when I became busy with some other things and decided to take a break from Pokémon to give myself more time. At the time it was supposed to only be for a few weeks, but ended up lasting months.

Phase 10: 2018-Present

I resumed playing Pokémon around September or October 2018. This was not so much because I was less busy, but just because some other circumstances limited my ability to do certain tasks, so I had more time available to play Pokémon. When I resumed White version, I was very close to the end of the game, so just needed to complete the last things like completing my exploration of the east side of the map, catching the remaining sages, defeating Cynthia, and finally getting to battle and defeat Alder! In particular for the sage mission, I was very "purist", not looking up their locations on Bulbapedia or other websites, but literally going back to Nuvema Town and re-exploring the map from scratch until I found all of them. I even went into every building, as I thought some of them may be in buildings (they weren't). My favourite one was Rood, living on the island that is confusingly called "Route 18" in Unova (I wish they had given this island a proper name!)

After completing White version on 26th October 2018, I immediately started playing the Virtual Console version of Yellow. Even though this was after Let's Go had been announced (but before release), this is just a coincidence and I had planned for a long time to play Yellow in between BW and B2W2.

Miscellaneous