Hello welcome to my Pokemon Thread, specifically for Pokemon. I might actually make this a discord server because I think it’d be easier to find people to trade with and battle that way.
For people who haven’t played Pokemon, here’s my recommendation:
Playing the most recent games gives you the maximum amount of people to play and trade with. Given that Pokemon packs in the multiplayer features, this is actually quite useful.
If you want to get into PVP, the new games have a Rental Team feature where you can rent teams made by the top players in the world. This will make it easier to get your feet wet with competitive.
If you just want to play by yourself, any Pokemon game is good to start with, depending on your stance with emulation. Platinum is my favorite but others have opinions as well. It’s the most affordable to play Sword and Shield, and I think the original RBY are still on the 3DS eshop. Keep in mind that these games are made so that children can beat them, so they’re not hard unless you are a child playing your first game.
Also, as a competitive player and nuzlocker, there’s no wrong way to play Pokemon. When I say I like those formats, don’t take it as me bashing other players-- I think just playing casually and using Pokemon that you think are cute is just as valid as me nuzlocking the games. And don’t listen to anyone who says there’s a right/wrong way to play either, they’re silly.
Some questions to get us started:
What’s your favorite Pokemon overall? Favorite by type? Legendary?
If you do competitive battles, what’s your favorite format?
Link some cool Pokemon videos that are informative or otherwise interesting
Post your FC and anything you’re trading for.
I’ll start with one of my favorite Pokemon videos by World Champion Wolfe Glick:
I’m a lame loser nerd but I really like Charizard, probably nostalgia from when I was like 4 going “ Wow dragon!” Even though it’s not a dragon type
Weirdly Ho-oh! First legendary I ever caught.
As for the other questions… I gotta admit I don’t really play anymore. I play some other dumb game called World of Chorecraft or something. I did get Sword and Shield but I just couldn’t stay committed to it in a dumb way. I think I got up to gym 7? I need to give it a go again one of these days!
Catch me being the weirdo with the most random teams possible.
I actually still have my Blue, Red, Yellow, Gold, and Ruby cartridges so I’ve been doing nuzlockes with the Grass starters on those since grass is my favorite. -If- I could ever figure out emulation, I would try a grass only nuzlocke run in each gen for fun.
As for competitive, I do the battles occasionally in Pokemon Go and that’s about my limit. I haven’t owned a game since Ruby so its hard to keep up outside of that.
I don’t really play Pokemon but I did watch the heck out of it as a kid. My favorite pokemon are dragons. All the dragons. Or dragon like. Charizard, Aerodactyl, Dragonair, Dragonite, just keep em coming. Oh and Mew cause it’s a QT
I suck and have only played Blue. When it came out a friend gave it to me so that he would actually have someone to battle and trade with. It was fun, I just haven’t done a whole lot with mobile consoles since high school when it came out. Still watch the shows with my daughter though, and she does have one for her DS, but I’m unsure which one it is.
Anyways, I typically dig fire types, fire is my jam, but my favorite is, and always has been, Psyduck, as I am a giant meme. I’m not super familiar with all the various legendaries so I’m gonna have to go with Moltres.
(BTW this is Kenixx, just decided to switch to a character without a guild tag, and one that I was actually playing before I quit.)
To the surprise of no one I love ghost types, Pumpkaboo is my favorite. I don’t have a Switch so I can’t play Sword and Shield, but back in the XY and Sun/Moon days I loved doing ranked single battles and going buck wild with off the wall strategies. FEAR Pumpkaboo was interesting, same with my FEAR Mimikyu, I’m a big fan of trick room and destiny bond. Oh. And my level one Honedge named Frostmourne, his strategy only works in double battles, but he can KO a max level too with some trickery.
I also make a point of always beating the elite four with a team of Magikarp.
So I still have my orginal Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold and Silver cartidges along with my old Nintendo 64 and both Pokemon Stadiums. I didn’t get back into playing Pokemon until the Y and X versions for my 3ds and that when I was introduced to the mind-blowing meta of online PvP.
Here I am just grinding to 100 and stacking my whole squad with big DPS skills and I’m learning about “walls” and “switching” and all sort of combo lingo that made me feel I’m learning the meta of an MMO for the first time. I enjoyed reading about it but it wasn’t for me and this is coming from someone who loves PvP games.
Raichu is still my all time favorite and I recently pulled a “Logan Paul” by getting a “Dark Raichu” card framed with a lanyard(platinum chain was out my budget )
I actually couldn’t afford a Gameboy when the games came to the states so I couldn’t play Pokemon until Ruby and Sapphire, where I saved money for a whole year so I could get my own Gameboy Advance. I have played the original Kanto and Johto games, though.
I’ve bought every mainline generation since RSE and Platnium continues to be the best if you just wanna play solo because the Battle Frontier is just that cool. I know some people feel the series has gone downhill, and in some ways it has, but there’s still something of value for me in every entry. Sword and Shield might offer a poor single player experience, but it offers really fun multiplayer options and some of the most accessible competitive changes ever made to the series with the introduction of mints, ability capsules and patches, Ditto Raids, and the breeding changes. Plus Dynamax is healthier for the metagame than Z moves and Megas, and it’s been banned in Series 11 so we’re finally in a metagame for the first time in almost 10 years without a generational gimmick. Heck it’s been banned longer if you’ve been playing Smogon singles but I do Not because the game is not balanced for singles.
My favorite Pokemon are Crobat and Celesteela. I also love the Eeveelutions and Eevee. Favorite types are poison and flying. My favorite formats are monotype singles and VGC doubles. When I play Smogon singles, I like the lower tiers.
I think I still have XY sitting around somewhere, though I restarted my game to nuzlocke it so I can’t really trade.
I can include resources for this if people are interested. I can also include some interesting hacks of the games.
Lucario and Gardevoir are permanent members of any team I build. They just compliment one another’s strengths perfectly and have enough tools to always go into a fight with a type advantage of some kind.
Favorite type, I’m not so certain. It used to be psychic, way back in Gen 1. I do like Fairy and Steel as well. I wish I could like Dark as much but it feels more like a liability to have on a team.
My favorite legendary… I’m not sure to be honest. Too many these days to keep track of.
Honestly its so hard to just pick one. I love so many pokemon across all the generations and my favorites tend to change from time to time. Right now I am really liking Tyrantrum and Crobat. My favorite starter is Typhlosion.
Favorite type? I would have to say electric although I just like them all.
My favorite Legendary is Lugia.
Personally I mostly play for fun and with friends. On Pokemon Sword and Shield I completed my first pokedex which has inspired me to try to complete them across all my games.
I used to have my original red, yellow, gold, silver, and Crystal until about two or three years ago. This guy from my High School was asking for old pokemon games for a young cousin of his and I went ahead and gave him mine for free. Now I just have the digital ones.
Great news is I just bred, EV trained, and evolved a pair of Eevee into Espeon and Umbreon! Wanted the pair after remembering my days playing Pokemon Colosseum. I also finished a Scyther just this morning to replace a Scizor I last a few years ago after I accidently erased one of my games. Thank goodness Sword and Shield helped me get back to where I was for breeding.
OK so Emulation is actually pretty easy to get into. It’s not as easy as it used to be because copyright is cracking down, but I found some pretty easy solutions to get your hands on a variety of ROMs and abandonware. Note that I typically only emulate games that are no longer in circulation, where copies of the game are far too expensive for used games of that variety.
To get an emulator, you can just google the name of the emulator or what system you want to emulate. I recommend No$GBA or Visual Boy Advance-M 64 Bit (make sure any visual boy advance emulators you download are this version for 64bit OS or it will crash) for modern Windows 10 GBA emulation, and my SNES emulator is snes9x. I use Dolphin for Gamecube and Wii titles. Desmume is great for DS titles. If your computer can run Citra, that can also emulate 3DS titles, but it is a harder system to emulate because it is kinda glitchy. My computer is definitely more powerful than a 3DS but the translation bogs down my emulation a lot.
Once you have your emulator, just follow the instructions to install. I usually make a handy little folder in my documents called “Roms” and store all my emulation files there.
Then you need Roms. Reddit has actually become my favorite resource for roms. Check the pinned post on r/roms, it will always have a masterlist. Vimm’s Lair is also a safe place to download. I do not recommend googling because you cannot guarantee that what you download is malware, but r/roms and Vimm’s Lair are always pretty safe. Just find the rom you want to play and download away!
If you want to play hacks, you will need a patching program. Lunar IPS is a pretty good one, and most fanhacks will have instructions on how to patch their games and what roms are compatible.
Some good Pokemon Hacks are:
Blaze Black and Volt White/Blaze Black and Volt White 2; These are hacks of Pokemon Black and White (and 2) that convert the game to have higher difficulty, buffed Pokemon, and every Pokemon that existed in Gen 5 available.
Pokemon Renegade Platinum; rebalance of Pokemon Platinum by the above guy that removes most required HMs and is just also pretty good.
Honestly just play anything by Drayano.
Pokemon Crystal Clear; this is a really interesting Pokemon Crystal hack that removes the restrictions on routes and lets you start in Kanto. You can do the gyms in any order.
Pokemon Radical Red; this Fire Red hack adds all Pokemon from gens 1-8, cranks up the difficulty, and makes the game a lot more… interesting. It has mega evolutions, Dynamax raids, and god knows what else. Radical Red is a pretty fun game and provides challenge even when playing casually. It also has an EXP limit so you can’t overlevel.
Pokemon Reborn; I don’t actually like this one but some people do so it’s here. It reminds me too much of “pokemon but darker and edgier” so I’m not a big fan. One thing it does right though is that it fixes all the horrendous shiny palettes so that’s cool at least.
There are a bunch of other Pokemon fan games but I haven’t played them and I tend to prefer balance patches to new stories since I’ve yet to play a Pokemon fangame that was better than XY in terms of Atmosphere and story, and I’ll go on record saying XY is the worst of the mainline Pokemon games in terms of that. You also have to be careful with fan hacks because some people seem to think that sonic boom at level 10 is an ok gimmick for a gym leader.
For anyone interested in Gold or Silver digital version ( And I think I saw Crystal was too) the old cloning hack still works on them. On my current Silver playthrough I was able to all three starters at the beginning of the game. Be careful with the saves though and good luck!
I don’t mind paying for old games provided they’re like. reasonably priced and available on modern systems. I could have emulated half the games I own on steam, for instance, but because the devs actually make them available I try to pay for them.
I feel less guilt with Nintendo because they’re very adamant about not doing that. Plus everything I want out of single-player pokemon, they haven’t attempted to do since BW2 after implementing it in the worst possible way.
Poliwhirl. This is also my answer for the question of “what would your partner Pokemon be” if I were a character in whatever series.
Water closely followed by Ground and Steel.
ah yes like my way where i’m currently trying to level cap everything before going to the battle tower and also getting them all their natures, abilities, and hyper trained just because i want to even if i’m not a competitive player
Wow dragon!” Even though it’s not a dragon type 
I did get Sword and Shield but I just couldn’t stay committed to it in a dumb way. I think I got up to gym 7? I need to give it a go again one of these days!
it’s a QT 
)