Transferring my 20+ Years Worth of Pokemon into the Modern Age — Part 1

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AniTAY-Official

11 min readFeb 11, 2024

Hello again everyone, after missing my self imposed deadline multiple times, I’m back to regale you with my suffering that is this project. Playing through the old Pokemon games and struggling with the arcane transfer systems took a lot longer than I thought. Plus my Pokemon Unite addiction kicked in recently, which ate a ton of my time. Blarg.

In the article, I’m going to use a bit of shorthand because typing out the initials for each Pokemon game in a gen takes up too much space. From now on, I’m going to refer to Pokemon Diamond, Pearl, Platinum and Soulsilver as “Gen 4.” “Gen 5” is Pokemon Black, Black 2, White, and White 2. You get the picture.

The Grind Begins

I gotta start somewhere and figure I should start with the most annoying part of this project; transferring Pokemon from gen 4 to gen 5 using Poke Transfer.

I have to bust out my 3ds and dive into the mess of my drawers to find my decade old ds to start transferring Pokemon. Finding my ds took little effort, but the A button on it doesn’t work. Oh forget my life.

This would delay the transfer project… if I didn’t realize that I only need the touch screen to use Poke Transfer… you get to live a little longer you silly DS.

Playing the poke transfer mini game is pretty straight forward. It’s a simple mini game where I shoot poke balls at the 6 Pokemon I’m transferring from gen 4 to 5. It takes me about 2 minutes to complete the game and confirm the transfer.

Looking at how many boxes of Pokemon I need to transfer over, it should take me 372 minutes or roughly 6 hours and 15 minutes to complete this leg of the project. Oh jeez I better get a podcast or video to get through this…

Life, the Universe, and Questioning My Life Decisions

My eyes start to glaze over and I fall into a trance. The stream in the background slowly melts into white noise. I can feel my wrist burning. After 2 hours, I can’t take any more and I take a break. Poke Transfer is just as bad as I was anticipating.

My mind keeps wandering while playing the minigame. It got so bad that I kept accidentally canceling the transfer after completing the minigame. The white noise of the podcast/youtube videos plus my electric blanket make the monotony better, but it can’t stop me from thinking “Is it really worth it to transfer every pokemon I have to the Switch pokemon games.”

Of the over 1000 pokemon I have in my old games, some of them are duplicates from one of the many breeding projects I undertook back in the day. Like, I have one Ralts for every pokemon nature in the game because I wanted to be able to easily catch a legendary pokemon with a certain nature.

Is it really necessary for me to have 50+ Ralts or any other pokemon in my collection? No, I don’t need that many of the same pokemon.This got me thinking “Are there any other pokemon I don’t need to transfer over?”

A good chunk of the pokemon I transfer over can be caught in the modern games fairly easily. Heck, there’s multiple remakes of old pokemon games. The only pokemon gen that is moderately hard to get on the switch are pokemon from gen 5.

Now that I think about it, a lot of pokemon that used to be rare in older games are very easy to get in modern games now. Take Lucario. In gen 4, you could only get one Riolu (the pre-evolution of Lucario) in game via an egg given to you by a NPC, excluding breeding and trading. In the other DS and 3DS games, Riolu has a spawn rate of about 5% in specific areas. However in Pokemon Legends Arceus, there are multiple areas that Riolu will spawn consistently. Legends Arceus might be an outlier with how easy it is to get certain pokemon, but it still stands that it’s so much easier to get rare pokemon. Excluding legendary and mythical pokemon. That’s a whole different can of worms.

In the interest of time and my sanity, I’ll hold off on transferring pokemon I have a ton of copies of in the switch games. I’ll have to check what pokemon I have in my switch games before I can determine which ones I don’t need to transfer over from my old games. Oh boy, more things to add to my to do list.

Closing Off Loose Ends

I figure I might as well finish playing through my sister’s copy of Pokemon Black. She already collected the first 3 badges and her team isn’t… terrible, but dang it needs a ton of work. The team currently consisted of: Dewott, Sigilyph, Simisear, Throh, Blitzle and Roggenrola. Even with this mediocre team, I should be able to blow through this game with my 20+ years of experience with this series. Anyways, HERE WE GOOOOO!

Booting up the game, I find that my sister left in Nimbasa City. I’m so glad I forgot pretty much everything about this part of the game because it is some of the best story and music I’ve experienced while playing a pokemon game. Going through the ferris wheel ride with N and seeing Bianca’s father confront her about her pokemon journey put a huge smile on my face. The emotional heft of these scenes and sublime music to complement them makes me realize that gen 5 is one of the best pokemon entries in the series.

The presentation in Pokemon Black is just so good. Every single town you visit feels so vibrant and interesting. You get to see each gym leader do something outside of their gym. Whether it be dealing with the machinations of team plasma to interacting with your player character and their rivals. Every town in the game feels just so alive and I just love seeing all new plot developments; even though some story elements do repeat.

Oh and don’t get me started on the music. The composers for the game really knocked it out of the park. Every single track in the game is so memorable. So memorable in fact that one of the songs turned into a viral meme. IE the Driftveil City theme. Though, I personally prefer the more emotional songs in the game. In particular, I love the theme called “Unwavering Emotion.” Link below.

Pokemon Black is just such a good game. I love playing it… even though it’s pretty much a standard pokemon game. The RPG mechanics are pretty much the same as the first game in the series with a few changes. It’s dry to say the least, but the phenomenal music, graphics and writing make it easy to wash down the dated gameplay.

Progress wise, I have to deal with Nimbasa City’s gym, which is an electric type gym. It’s now one of my most hated pokemon gyms now. My sister’s team is super to everything in the gym and I don’t have any pokemon with good special defense except for sigyliph who’s weak to electric type attacks. What’s worse is that every single flipping Emolga in the gym knows double team too! I can barely hit the freaking rodents! GRAAAAH! Luckily, my sister’s throh is overleveled and I manage to barely beat Elesa with it.

After developing an intense hatred for Emolga, I scoot over to and then through Driftveil City. The Samurott, formerly the Dewoot, blew through Clay’s ground type gym like it was nothing. It was so nice to have such an easy gym after the hell I had to deal with in Elesa’s gym. Otherwise, there’s not much to say about Driftveil besides it’s theme is so freaking good and team plasma was causing some trouble in the city before I dunked them into the ground.

There’s not too much else I can say about this play session. Like, I plowed my way through Mistralton and Icirrus City without too much issue. This is because I picked up a Karrablast and a Drilbur along the way from Driftveil to Mistralton.

Karrablast turns into Escavalier, who is a strong bug steel pokemon. Drilbur turns into one of the best pokemon in Unova, Excadrill. Escavalier is just great at tanking a lot of hits and Excadrill has such a stupidly good stat spread and moveset that I can pretty much sweep every remaining gyms, the elite 4 and the champion with this thing.

Other notable things from Mistralton and Opelucid City is the encounter rate in this game is so absurdly high. I swear, whenever I walk through grass, through a cave, or surf on water, I run into a wild pokemon every 3 god dang steps. It got so bad that I bought a ton of repels so I can travel to new places without losing my mind.

I finally ended my play session after completing the relic castle story mission in Opelucid City. Next up, I need to take down the dragon type gym in the city and then I assume I finally get to go to the pokemon league. I can practically taste the end of the game at this point. With my current team: Samurott, Zerbastrika, Excadrill, Escavalier, Cofagrigus, and Duckett (my HM slave) the end game should be a cake walk.

In the next article, I should be done with Pokemon Black as well as most of the transfering from gen 4 to gen 5. Hopefully, it won’t take me more than a month to get the next article out. Especially since I have only until April 8th, 2024 to get all my transferring done. Link about this deadline is in the link below.

Announcement of Discontinuation of Online Services for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U software

Thank you very much for supporting our products. At 4pm PDT on April 8, 2024, online play and other functionality that…

en-americas-support.nintendo.com

P.S. When evolving my Karrablast, I figured out that the face buttons on my DS were working. I just needed to hold the buttons a little longer than I normally press them. Yay.

Transferring Methods Used This Session

Poke Transporter

This is the process to transfer pokemon from the gen 5 games to gens 6 and 7
This software moves pokemon in box #1, which holds a total of 36 pokemon at a time, of the inserted gen 5 game. The pokemon are then moved to Pokemon Bank, a cloud based storage system for the 3ds line of pokemon games.
Once a box is moved, you must log into Pokemon Bank to move the transferred pokemon out of the transfer box in Pokemon Bank.
Once the transfer box is empty, the transfer process can continue.

Poke Transfer

This is the transportation method from gen 4 to gen 5.
You need two DSes to use this process.
After connecting the two games, you have to play a short touch mini game to transfer the pokemon from gen 4 to gen 5.
You can only transfer 6 pokemon per minigame.
Takes about 2 minutes to complete a minigame.

To Do List for Games

Gameboy Advance Games

Pokemon Emerald/Ruby

I booted this bad boy up and I was right, the internal battery ran out. However, it seems like I can still play the game. The only difference is that clock based events won’t occur anymore, which isn’t an issue for this project.

Unfortunately, I found out the buttons on the DS I’m using for this project don’t work anymore. I can only laugh. It’s like I fell into a pitfall and came out unscathed. Then tripped on my shoe laces and broke my neck.

P.S: I’ll have to go back to looking at this game because my DS face buttons are not in fact broken lmao.