I did it, I finally did it. I hunted down and leveled up all 154 Pokémon of the Unova region, so now I can finally check the task off my list and put Pokémon White Version behind me. Right in the nick of time too, because Pokémon White 2 (and Black 2, I guess) is released tomorrowday, and there’s no scenario in which I don’t pick up the new Pokémon title on day one.
Of course, one could say that my task is not yet truly complete. There are actually 156 Pokémon unique to the fifth generation of games, but two are still (legitimately) inaccessible to North American players. Nintendo has announced that Genesect will be given away via wi-fi starting tomorrow to commemorate the release of Black/White2, but Meloetta remains entirely uncatchable. While it’s been part of the franchise since the start, including Pokémon that cannot be obtained until Nintendo says it’s okay is totally stupid. The worst part, of course, being that if you want to play the game from the beginning again and you don’t have two DS systems and another Pokémon game of the same or a greater generation, there’s no way to back up these incredibly rare monsters. So if you reset your game, or your save file corrupts, you’re 100% boned.
I’m still waiting for the day where Game Freak decides they want to cram each and every critter onto a single cartridge. That will be nice.
Of course, if I were certifiably insane (or 14 years younger) I could try to fill up the National Pokédex. But really, there are 649 total species of Pokémon, and I’d have to trade from at least three other game cartridges to get them all. And that’s not including those stupid ones that Nintendo only hands out once in a lifetime. I don’t have any cheat devices for the last several generation of Nintendo handhelds, so I can’t even hack my way to completion. The only solution would be to cheat on a ROM and then trade from that to my legit game, but currently my DS emulator refuses to let its wi-fi support actually work.
tl;dr, I caught them all, I’m not going to catch them all.