Arbitrary's Infernape: Getting Back into Pokemon in 2026 and Ruining Myself in the Process (PART ONE???)

Hello it’s me, I’m back to writing things on the internet, a skill that has become even more irrelevant in the face of the content mill listicles and AI slop flooding all search engines forever. Writing is fucked, video games are extra fucked, and writing about video games has become a sustainable job for exactly five people, all of whom are 42-year-old white men. But that’s fine! In the face of the real-time collapse of the AAA video game industry and the death of literacy, I’ve returned like Gandalf during the Battle of Helm’s Deep, just when you needed me most. Sure, if you cared you could’ve listened to that podcast I’m sometimes on, or watched my stupid internet streams, but the time has finally come for me to write a thing for the six people who will read this. You're welcome and I love you.

There are a lot of things I could write about, between all the weird obscure RPGs I’ve played, the current state of indie survival horror games, my brief spate as a “40K guy”,  and the continuing series of ill-advised choices I’ve made in regards to retro game collecting. See that picture up there? That was my haul from just a week of trawling the local gamestops and buying some PS2 stuff from my friend before he moved to Sweden. Did you know that Gamestop of all places has shockingly competitive retro game prices? I'm getting off topic. Maybe I will, one of these days, maybe even in video form. But for now I’ve decided to tell you about my current hyperfixation, something that has been passively and actively grinding away at my soul for about the last four months. 

As a younger millennial, I was the correct age to be fully obsessed with Pokemon right from the get go. Even before Red and Blue came out in the United States, I was a kid living on base in Okinawa and thus vaguely aware that pokemon existed. I didn’t know what their names were, I didn’t know there was a gameboy game, but I knew that the Pocket Monsters existed and were therefore exciting. I’ve been hot and cold on the series ever since, but the fact remains that I’ve owned at least one game from each generation and completed most of them. I might even be inclined to say some of them are “good video games” even if they’re all made for babies and children. Like any good hipster, I’ll still point to Gold and Silver plus their 4th gen remakes as the height of the series, but I also had a pretty serious kick with X version circa 2013. 

After being decidedly underwhelmed by Shield and dissuaded from Scarlet and Violet over their rocky launch, I thought my time with the video game side of things might’ve been over were it not for the misfortune of purchasing a Switch 2. In the truest reflection of any early console adopter, I bought Pokemon Legends: Z-A mostly on a whim. it was a thing that came out that ran on my new thing and didn’t seem like total garbage. I liked it well enough but never quite got around to finishing it, barely being edged out of my (unfinished and unposted) Game of the Year 2025 top 10 list by Command and Conquer revival-esque Tempest Rising. We

Moving the game’s combat to real-time was refreshing, and after around 15 hours I was still pretty positive on the whole affair. If nothing else I played more of it than I played of Donkey Kong Bananza, a game I think is probably actually quite good but for whatever reason didn’t grab me.

Unfortunately, If Z-A was the only thing I had engaged with, this blog would not exist and I would not be over here trying to justify the things I’ve done in order to “catch em all.” The true cause can instead be blamed on three things:

1. The upcoming release of Pokemon Champions finally giving a platform to engage in the competitive side of things with significantly less nightmare overhead than before. 

2. Finding out after the fact that the Switch 2 upgrades for Pokemon Scarlet and Violet made that game actually run at an acceptable level of performance. Also? Most of the things I liked about Z-A actually were first introduced in Scarlet and Violet.

3. Being stuck at work with nothing to do and falling down a competitive pokemon Youtube hole thanks to Wolfe Glick

Pokemon Violet is genuinely one of my favorite games I played this year

I love doing drive-bys on my robot lizard motorcycle. Just cruising around legally distinct Iberia, throwing balls at monsters, capturing them to add to my ever expanding menagerie. The shift to an open world with a non-linear progression was not a painless one, and it feels like Game Freak couldn’t quite figure out what to actually put in all of the open space they made. There are three main questlines to tackle in whatever order you want (followed by a “true ending” of sorts when you’ve done all three) but not a whole lot outside of those. Nonetheless, Pokemon Violet became my chill out switch 2 game for a while, a way to just not think very hard and roll around collecting and battling different pocket monsters, probably while stuck at work with nothing else to do. Is it the height of JRPG Supremacy? Probably not. But it’s a good “podcast” game and can be easily put down and resumed without much interruption. 

I think I lost one battle in my entire time with the game, but that’s almost expected. I wish there was a hard mode, or some sort of trainer scaling, or really any reason to engage in the mechanics, but also this is a game for children. If I wanted a “difficult” pokemon experience, I could do a Nuzlocke run, or play one of those over-tuned ROM hacks. Terastilization has the misfortune of being the most interesting generational gimmick from a competitive standpoint but is the least interesting on a casual level. While the offensive and defensive implications of being able to change your type are myriad, tera lacks the flash and immediate appeal of something like Mega Evolution or Z-Moves 

It’s also to the game’s credit that the two DLC areas feel big and fleshed out enough to excuse the $30 “will never go on sale ever” cost of the season pass. You can actually start The Teal Mask immediately after the introduction of the game, and it was actually the first area of the game I really tried to tackle. The story of that on its own is a good 10-15 hours, and Kitakami has enough new stuff to give it a very different feel from Paldea. You even get Ogerpon, who is not only one of the best modern marketable plushie designs I’ve seen, but also straight up one of the lodestones on my team for the rest of the game. You don’t get full access to The Indigo Plate until after finishing both the main game and The Teal Mask, and it offers something of a real post-game, complete with trainers who actually use items and obligatory double battles. Between those two areas, it’s basically another game’s worth of game and one can almost excuse the part where some of the new pokemon introduced in these DLCs are absurdly powerful (we’ll get back to that)

I Completed the Paldea Pokedex and all I got was a slightly different colored Pikachu

Yes,. I took a screenshot off my TV like a goddamn savage. I'm not sorry.

I think Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are genuine steps forward for the series in a lot of ways and I’m unironically excited to see what Gen 10 will end up doing. But you’re not here for me to tell you “Actually the writing in modern pokemon games is weirdly sharp” you’re here to hear of my depravity. So let’s talk about finishing the Pokedex. There are 400 Pokemon in the Paldea pokedex. Just by rolling around and throwing balls at everything I made a good chunk of progress without even trying. It’s when I started to actually try that things got hard. The reward for filling out the pokedex is the Shiny Charm, which increases the appearance rate of differently colored pokemon by a significant margin, from 1/4096 to 1/1365. Shiny Pokemon are something of a status symbol, a way of showing your luck or weird dedication, truly making them the NFTs of digital monster collecting. That was the goal. That was the mistake. 

Weird esoteric evolution requirements are nothing new, going all the way back to maxing out a Feebas’ beauty stat in order for it to evolve into Milotic, but Gen 9 has multiple that feel like they exist to fuck with you. To evolve Finizen into Palafin, you need to level up Finizen while in a Union Circle with another player (Union Circle is essentially the “play the game with your friends” thing and it seems neat.) To evolve Bisharp into its new evolution Kingambit, you need to run around with your own bisharp and make a bunch of other wild bisharp faint, but only ones that are holding a specific item. The realest fucker of them all is Gholdengo, a dope-ass golden surfboarding ghost, who requires you to collect 999 gimmeghoul coins. This is deeply tedious and fucking sucks, made even worse for the competitively minded because Gholdengo is very, very good. It took the help of a friend willing to spot trade their Gholdengo for me to finally get that Shiny Charm, but at long last I had finished the pokedex.

Shiny Hunting is one of those things that has mostly just become easier as the pokemon generations have gone by. No longer do you need to chain hatch eggs using the Matsuda method, or use the pokeradar to chain encounters, now you just need to farm mass outbreaks that are conveniently located on the map. Making at least 60 pokemon in a mass outbreak faint increases your chance of a shiny spawning to 1/819, which you can further game down to 1/512 with the proper picnic foods. Now, once you have fainted 60 pokemon and made your sandwich, all you need to do is respawn the group you want to farm over and over again until a shiny shows up. You can do this either by going a short distance away and throwing a picnic, or by going to a fast travel point. Sure, this may take hours of my life, but I have adult ADHD and sometimes I don't want to actually think about playing video games while I'm yelling at ZombiePie during his streams.

The Depths

So with the main Paldea pokedex complete and a small but growing army of slightly different colored pokeymans, I was done, right? Well. There are two other pokedexes in the game.

Even if you weren’t aiming for completion, catching some of the best pokemon in the Scarlet and Violet DLCs requires you to go most of the way towards 100%. In order to catch the Bloodmoon Ursaluna, a giant bear who shoots lasers out of its forehead and is apparently a monster competitively, you need to catch 150 of the 200 pokemon in Kitakami. This is doable, if a bit arduous. Once you do that, you need to catch 200 out of the 240 pokemon in the Blueberry Terrarium in order to catch two version-exclusive paradox pokemon (in the case of Violet, it’s robot future versions of Cobalion and Terrakion). This is where the post-game grind hell really kicks in. You need to do a bunch of short, repetitive quests in order to gain “blueberry points” to upgrade the different biomes of the terrarium, giving you access to the starter pokemon from previous generations. Trying to get to 200 without at least some of those starters requires a friend for trade evolutions and version exclusives and at that point you might as well just have them spot trade you the stuff you don’t want to bother with.

There’s a way around a lot of this, and it’s Pokemon Home, the current outside storage for all of the Pokemon games released on the Switch. Game Freak tends to add Pokemon Home support for new games a few months after launch, as a way of keeping the initial experience fresh for players, but I didn’t have to worry about that, coming as late as I did. Bringing my pokemon over from the 3DS games into Home was more painless than I was expecting, but did require me to immediately pay for the $15/year subscription to use more than one box of storage. Trading using the GTS requires the mobile version of home, but transferring pokemon to and from games requires the switch version. I don’t know why this is the way it is outside of some weird misguided attempt to get Pokemon Go players more firmly in the multi-game ecosystem that Home is supposed to encompass. 

It’s relatively painless to swap version exclusives or trade evos, but the true currencies of the GTS are shinies and legendaries. The most frustrating pokemon to complete my pokedex were not the ones I had to spend like 10 hours grinding for, they were the ones from the other version that other people had to spend 10 hours grinding for. I’m a selfish little baby, and didn’t want to give up my hard-won Iron Crown or Iron Boulder to get the much cooler Gouging Fire and Raging Bolt (prehistoric dinosaur Entei and Raikou,) so instead I spent like 10 hours grinding out shinies to flip on the GTS. Shiny hunting is probably the easiest it’s ever been, but you’re still spending hours at a time rerolling mass encounters until a different colored pocket monster spawns, sometimes even with other random shinies spawning besides the ones you actually want to use. 

I at least have integrity, unlike the illicit hacked shiny trade (not a joke), but also I fully believe that some of the paradox pokemon I traded for were hacked, specifically Walking Wake (prehistoric dinosaur Suicune) and Iron Leaves (future robot Virizion). Those two aren’t counted for pokedex completion, and that’s because they’ve only been available a handful of times over the last few years in specific event raids. The last time they were legally available for catching was at the end of last year. While Iron Leaves is apparently “not very good”, Walking Wake is the rare water type useful in both rain and sun teams, making it a very powerful pick. Somehow, those two are legal for competitive play, while this generation’s mythical, Pecharunt is banned despite being obtainable as long as you download the associated mystery gift. That makes sense. Listen we’re at a point where you can get most of the mythical pokemon in the game without needing a time-limited event. Let the people use Arceus in VGC, I dare you. See what happens. 

Wow I sure am talking a lot about competitive pokemon. It sure would be a shame if this hole led me down a path of horrible toxicity. What's that? there's another two parts to this? Oh. Oh no.