You remember how back in the day, completing the Pokédex was some sort of big accomplishment. To be honest, I don’t remember because I never once did it. The first time I ever did it was in the game Pokémon Legend Arceus. The reason was simple. It was the first game I played that allowed me to actually get every Pokémon just by encountering them in the wild. What I am trying to say is that I never really had anyone to trade with and online trading wasn’t very convenient so I never ended up completing a Pokédex until that game. However, I decided to give it another shot this time and have been trying to collect all 400 Pokémon in Pokémon Violet. Here are a few of the problems I ran into while going for this.
First off is getting the starters is a bit of a pain. Truth be told I didn’t have this as bad as some other people because I had by sheer coincidence picked the least popular starter Quaxly. That meant it was a lot easier finding trades for the other two since he was in such high demand. Although funnily enough the first starter I ever got from trading was another Quaxly through a Wonder Trade. This would later be a symbol of my luck to come.
Next up is the Pokémon who have very specific evolution conditions that you will not know unless you look them up. Some of them are very useful Pokémon to have, but they can have such annoying evolution conditions. Thankfully I got lucky and managed to find some of them through Tera Raid battles.
Now the good news was that after I managed to track down the starters, by then I had found a way to find people who were trading for version exclusives. I just needed to input certain link codes I found online to locate people who were hopefully looking for the other exclusive Pokémon. Now the key word there is hopefully. It seems a lot of other people were also enjoying Pokémon Violet because Pokémon Scarlet players were either offline or trading with everyone else. There is a feature they added that I picked up on eventually where your Pokémon would glow if the other party doesn’t have it. I thought it was a nice touch. More importantly, it let me know that I would very often get matched up with a player who had the same version. Everything about it was pretty much a gamble so I just had to keep trying my luck until I had all of the exclusives. Did it take some time? Absolutely. Did some take longer than others? Oh, you know it. Did I succeed? Fortunately I did. I managed to finally find all of the version exclusives. However I am still not done and that is because of one big problem. Lack of friends.
I realize how depressing and misleading that last bit sounded so let me clarify. There are a total of four Pokémon in the game that are difficult to get without having easy access to a friend who plays one of the Generation IX games. These four are Gengar, Scizor, Slowking, and Palafin. The first three require trading with someone or finding them in Tera Raids and the last one has a special evolution condition involving playing with friends or finding it in a Tera Raid. Thankfully, Gengar can be gotten easier than the others if you trade an NPC a Pincurchin for a Haunter in Levincia City. So, the main problem is the last three because I have to gamble by hunting in different Tera Raids until I find one, and then I have to actually beat the Tera Raid as well. So, far I have only managed to get Scizor, but here’s hoping with luck I get the other two soon. It would be nice to get that Shiny Charm. But more importantly, it will mean I haven’t spend all my time doing this for nothing. Wish me luck!
I understand that this is not the most efficient way to do things, but when you are playing alone sometimes there are certain gambles you need to take. That’s how I will justify this at least. Anyway, that is all for today. I have to go back on the hunt in a few minutes once the raids refresh. See you next week! I realize this might have been a bit shorter than usual, but I hope it was at least somewhat informative for once. Besides, if you forgive me, I can get you a Quaxly.
That Casual Gamer Guy 