Ahead of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet’s release, I actually decided to “catch ’em all” – and now I hate myself

When I was eight years old, I introduced Pokemon to the playground. I had just watched the first episodes of the anime on SM:TV Live and forced my friends to participate in imaginary Pokémon battles. I had forgotten a lot of the Pokemon names, so the fights were mismatches like Onix vs. Rockadock (who I later found out is called Geodude).

By December, the playground was filled with trading cards, toys, and game fights. On Christmas morning, I unwrapped a copy of Pokémon Blue and commandeered my brother’s Game Boy to stare into a green abyss for days, only stopping to change the batteries.

Looking back, it was an incredible moment when Pokémon appeared almost out of nowhere and took the country by storm. Then, as soon as it arrived, the madness died down. I remember I was still at it in 2001 when Silver and Gold was released. But for generation 3 I couldn’t care less.

But when COVID hit in 2020, me, with the immune system of a sad potato, suddenly had free time. By isolating myself, I caught up with a franchise I had only dipped a toe into since the early 2000s. A year later, I finally completed the Pokédex in Pokemon Blue. It only took 21 years to catch 151 Pokémon, never mind that there were barely 900 of the little blighters out there by then.

Well, Covid really hit me a few weeks ago and turned me into a coughing, hacking mess. I tried to find something that my confused mind could play, and only the monotony of Pokémon Shield broke my viral obliteration. The search to find a way to throw Hop into a well was consuming enough to drive away the Covid-induced haze.

When my Pokédex organically filled up and news of Scarlet and Violet started pouring in, I had an idea. “What if,” I asked in a feverish delirium, “I really did catch them all?”

After all, modern games in the series have access to so many Pokemon, and between Shield, an abandoned save in Legends: Arceus, and 151 Pokemon in Blue, you probably already had most of them.

Right? Right?

Before you suggest that I was making poor decisions in my life, remember that I was curled up in bed, feverish and coughing like I’d been on 40 cigarettes a day for life. What better position is there to get rigid clarity and plan important projects? Let it be known, however, I have a history of making… questionable decisions.

Regardless, fueled by COVID-induced hubris, I threw myself into the project. He may have only had significant familiarity with the games when the Pokémon were animals rather than *checks notes* sensitive cups of tea, but I had the willpower and tenacity to succeed. Also, she was very, very sick. So you can’t judge me.

If I was going to catch them all, I needed a way to track my progress. So, I checked into Pokémon Home and reserved some boxes for my live Pokédex. That means he had to catch all the Pokémon. All of them. There are no excuses.

Did I mention that I have terrible judgment?

With a big raid on Shield, having captured 200 Buizel in Legends: Arceus (none of which were considered heavy enough), and those 151 from Blue, my home was immediately filled with over 700 hired pets.

Call me sad, and please do, I deserve it right now, but as I watched those crates fill up, I began to want to carefully move my Pokémon in some semblance of order.

But that was a task for later, when he could pore over the boxes like a crazed, caffeine-addled Professor Oak with bags under his eyes and stimulants stashed in the pocket of his lab coat. For now, I’m back on Shield and with my trusty level 90 Urshifu (I still only use animals, it’s a bit much Beauty and the Beast to fight with a living candle or a garbage bag) and slashed a bloody swath through Galar’s Pokémon.

Some might have been more difficult than others. For example, the collection of starters usually requires multiple restarts. But now people give them away in Trade Surprises or rigged Dynamax matches. The sword and shield are badly broken. Veterans can guess the website responsible for surprise trading me over 20 shiny Snorlax.

A major obstacle to baby Geoffrey’s attempts to collect Pokémon was trade evolutions; previously a nuisance of wires and swaps back and forth just so his coiled-up blue man-thing could grow extra arms. Now, with the internet allowing us to trade with minimal glitches (well, minimal glitches for Nintendo, anyway), Game Freak has new ways to torment us.

“Please, sir,” the studio says in its best Oliver Twist voice. “Walk under an arch while a Pokemon has taken more than 49 damage.”

Doubts were beginning to creep in.

When COVID finally got bored of asking my pathetic immune system why it was beating itself up, I finally moved to Pokemon Home. I built my roster, starting at Gen 1, leaving slots for all the Pokemon I was missing.

It was boring, but I’ve done my own taxes before, so it’s a monotony I’m used to. It’s also an apt comparison, given the basic mistakes I made (according to my accountant). That’s foreshadowing, folks.

There’s no way Nintendo is going to make organizing Home unintuitive and a nightmare. It’s not like having to collect each Pokémon and move them through your boxes. If you’re lucky, you can chain some together and migrate them en masse, but it’s mostly a matter of pressing X, Y, down, “sort by national Dex number” and manually contesting each Pokémon. Like a farmhand, or a battery farmer.

It was boring, but when I got the hang of it, it became almost therapeutic. A relaxing routine of animals moving around a computer against his will.

Until I didn’t leave room for Hisuian Arcanine.

You could say that it was silly to include regional forms, and you would be correct. Maybe if Nintendo/Game Freak allowed us to insert spaces in our boxes, it wouldn’t matter. But the developers didn’t do that, right?

It only took until Pokemon #59 for a catastrophic bug to manifest.

I was committed Honest. Devout, even. He wanted to have a proper Pokédex. But there are a limited number of times you can make weird turns while forcing a piece of fruit into a dollop of sentient cream before you start questioning what to do with your life. Only a limited number of times can you flip a squid upside down for minutes before seeing yourself on the Switch screen and frowning. There are only so many ways to Google “How does this Pokemon evolve?” before replies like “Rub it in mud under a silly moon” make you cry.

That space, so early in the Pokédex, haunted me.

A small mistake destroyed my ambition to be a Pokémon master in a second. Maybe, if I hadn’t made it, this Pokédex might have taught me some valuable lessons, maybe it would have changed my life.

But I made this mistake, and the only thing it taught me was that I hate myself.

No, that’s not true; I learned that my sense of commitment is tenuous at best. I learned that I can’t reliably count above…three. I learned that there are too many Pokémon.

Pokemon everywhere. In Shield, my phone was a Pokémon, the computer was a Pokémon, that apple was a dragon Pokémon was a problem. It was like that weird collective moment we had when we didn’t know what was cake and what wasn’t.

A mistake turned Pokémon from a fun children’s game to an existential crisis in which Pokémon is a song away from being Don’t hug me I’m scared.

So my account stays at 712 out of 904, that’s where it will stay.

But not everything is bad. This ill-conceived project made me replay and re-evaluate Pokémon Shield, made me return to Legends: Arceus, and made me admit that Let’s Go’s controls are the devil.

It may have been a disappointing ending, but I had fun playing it. Can I say that I had fun as a player? Or does that make me an accomplice of Nintendo, or something?

Despite the marketing line and little refrain we’ve all had in our heads since the ’90s, in the end, I wonder if we’re supposed to catch them all. Maybe back in 1999, when we were all fresh and bored, it was possible, even fun! But now that goal just feels out of reach.

Perhaps the true journey of Pokémon is, and always will be, the hordes of sentient animals that we enslave along the way?