Journey to catch them all -Episode (1)

How many Pokémons can you spot, this is drawn by my gorgeous wife: Hana Esmat — Digital Artist in Cairo, Egypt :: Behance

There is an app called Pokémon Home where you can store all your Pokémons and transfer them from one game to the other, it tracks how many have you caught, what you don’t have yet.

As you see, in the national Dex I collected 803 out of possible 1025.

⚒️ In this series, I will post my semi-daily updates to complete this once and for all, to make this challenge more interesting:

• I have to Catch these Pokémon's myself, I am allowed only 10 trades through the series.
• Each entry must come with a story ✨

So today to get the snowball started, let me tell you an overview about the 4 phases of Pokémon games in my life. :)

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Thanks, Spacetoon!

• I was obsessed with the tv show which made me want to search for how I can be Ash myself!! Since video games were (and still are) my favorite medium to consume entertainment, young me naturally found FireRed and fiddled around, I don’t think I got past the first gym, but I knew that Squirtle was my forever starter, nonetheless.
• For the rest of this phase, I watched the movies and the series 😁. I didn’t know what “a Nintendo” is in PlayStation 2 Era.

Those Discs cup in Lays/Chipsy bags, the photo is not mine

• What we did have in Egypt was these Pokémon Discs, we would play at school with them (Teachers hated it), however the last bunch I had were taken by the school principal! I was sitting in the yard, and she came to ask me if I had any, I don’t know why I was honest and gave her all what I had! she took them and threw them Infront of me 😶

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PokeMMO and Dragonite

• I randomly found PokeMMO, which is a fan-made version of FireRed that can be played online. You know how in the movies the protagonist disappears for a while and comes back with much more experience and wit, this was me coming back. After 17 years of my life, I was able to become the Pokémon champion.

I used to upload everything (like everything game’s credits I complete) on Facebook, this is me getting all the badges.

I remember not being able to be the champion, some random guy gave me Dragonite! to be able to win and told me to keep it, i am still friends with him on Facebook to this day!

I remember then searching for more games like it but there was nothing, this signals the end of this phase.. until 2016.

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Pokémon GO!

2nd year in college! I was more comfortable with myself and I think I began to appreciate my Nerdiness a little bit more.

It was summer when the game dropped which means college was off, this didn’t stop me from taking the underground metro to go there because I knew that the university must have a gym in it.

I was right, i remember asking how someone already got it!

Again, Thanks facebook for capturing all these memories

This game took the world by a storm and i was no exception, posting on Facebook groups to meet up with people, walking around my city to catch them all, I even convinced some of my friend to help me.

I wasn’t really an extrovert, I didn’t do many activities outside of the house, however this game for some reason was an exception.

i was featured in an article once Pokémon Go Is Already Taking over Egyptian’s Lives and It’s Very, Very Scary — Scoop Empire

Pokemon Go played a huge role in the next phase too, But let’s not spoil everything now.

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Switch Era

My family gifted me a switch in 2020 (I just graduated college and was too broke to afford one yet), it was my wife’s (back then we were still dating 😁) idea for them to gift it to me.

It wasn’t until 2022 when I tried my first Pokémon game on the switch, On the release day of Pokémon scarlet and violet, My Wife brough us copies for the game.

We had a favorite restaurant (it was cheap, not many went there, and weather was always good), we played there when the game launched, Waiters didn’t understand what we were doing but we didn’t really care.

This purchased changed the course of the next 3 years, More on that later in the series 😁

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Day One — Updates

If you didn’t know, to add Pokémon to the Dex, you can either:

• Catch them in one of the games (Switch or Pokémon GO) and move to Pokémon Home.
• Trade for them

Currently I own these games which should be enough to get us there, my wife has Violet and Sword.

Today's new additions to the Dex are:

1- SeaKing#119: From Pokémon Shield, this guy was hanging out in the Wild Area, it was an easy catch. I don’t know why I always thought that SeaKing was the evolve of Goldeen.

2–Starmie#121: I traded for it on Pokémon Home, this was an accidental addition (Thanks wonder box!) however a trade is a trade, so this is strike one of my trading counts.

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See you soon!