Gen 3

like many kids my age, Gen 3 was my introduction to the Pokémon games. though i never owned R/S/E myself, it was the first Pokémon game i played -- my cousin had a copy of Pokémon Ruby, and let me play it on his red GBA every time we went to visit. he let me catch a Pokémon all of my own, to use whenever i played. she was a Beautifly named Violet, and i still think fondly of being four years old, sitting on my aunt's couch hunched over my cousin's gameboy. perhaps that was where my fascination with Pokémon started? who knows :))

(i don't have a lot of Strong memories of my childhood (it's the cancer trauma #slay) but one of the memories i DO have is visiting my grandparents with my cousin and we took turns sliding his GBA down our grandparents' stair rail lmao. looking back, i'm sure my aunt would NOT have been pleased)

FireRed / LeafGreen

my first mainline Pokémon game, which i got as a christmas present in 2007! i must have asked for it that year, because i remember spending MANY a night in the leadup to christmas excitedly planning out my team. my starter was going to be a female charmander named Charmaine :')

team

unfortunately, this was soooo long ago that i don't remember a whole lot about my OG team. even looking through the Kanto Dex doesn't elicit any strong emotions or pull towards any particular pokemon that makes me go "yes, they were on my team"

what i DO know is that my starter was a female Charizard named Charmaine. every playthrough i did, i caught a Pidgey - later Pidgeot - named Palla. i'm like 90% sure i caught a Rattatta (which i never evolved into a Raticate, because i thought it wasn't cute) called Tickles, in memory of my beloved pet rat who had passed away a few months before i got the game.

Gen 4

Gen 4 !!! everyone give it up for Gen 4 my beloved !!!!! to this day the best generation of Pokémon -- this was the era of spinoffs galore and the beloved Gen 2 remakes. the amount of lore surrounding the Sinnoh region and its legendaries made the world of Pokémon come alive in a way that it never had before (or since).

Pokémon Platinum

Pokémon Platinum is definitely the (mainline) Pokémon game i've put THE most hours into. i've played through it a whole bunch of times, and put over 200 hours into a single playthrough alone. i'd estimate i've put roughly 600 hours into it (at a VERY rough estimate -- this was back in the days when i had an OG DS!)

team(s)

i've played through Platinum a billion times before. i've done playthroughs with all three of the starters; i've done monotype teams; i've done weather-based teams. there's no way in hell that i could recall them all here, so instead i'll just do the main one/s.

• Adrea - Empoleon - Female

  my beloved starter!! i had been replaying Professor Layton and the Curious Village around about the time of this playthrough, and so she's named after one of the side characters in that game :)

  the stalwart of the team, Adrea was there through it all. she was present for every single gym battle, witnessed the arrival of every other team member, and understood them better than anyone else. the solid foundation on which my team was built, she brought unity to the team -- and, as the only member to get along with Enigma, was often the one to ease a situation after he'd been involved.

• Enigma - Hippowdown - Male

  first caught as a Hippopotas. it was late evening when i caught him; i was sitting in the living room, with my grandmother - who was visiting at the time - and my mother, and at a loss for what to name my new teammate, asked, "what do you call a hippo in the desert?" without looking up, my nana replied, "an enigma", and henceforth known my ace was known as Enigma.

  i came to think of Enigma as the grumpy old man of the team; he didn't get along well with the other team members (aside from Adrea), and his Sandstream ability hindered the remainder of the team. boy was he reliable, though -- he hit hard and he could take a hit, and because by this point i had a rough understanding of type coverage, his moveset made him capable of countering 13/17 types. there were incredibly few fights that he couldn't take on single-handedly.

• Jace - Jolteon - Male

  during this playthrough i was experimenting with Pokémon i didn't usually use. Jolteon was my least-favourite Eeveelution, and like so many Sinnoh trainers if i had an electric-type on my team, it was usually a Luxray. so this go round i decided to step out of my comfort zone and evolve my Eevee into a Jolteon!

  Jace was the little firecracker of the team; reckless and headstrong, he hit hard and he hit fast and he fainted often. while he wasn't always the most reliable member of the team, when he fought he FOUGHT.

• Lilia - Gardevoir - Female

  around the time i played Platinum, i was very into sewing my own pokédolls. i spent eight hours painstakingly hand-stitching a Gardevoir toy with a rusty needle, and when i was finished i asked my nana for a pretty-sounding name, and she responded with "Lilia". Lilia became the backbone of my team, and ever since i've had a Gardevoir called Lilia in every game Gardevoir is in :)

• Cayenne - Vespiquen - Female

  Cayenne was definitely ... the weakest member of my team. but we loved her anyway.

• Kondike - Togekiss - Male

  Kondike, like Jace, is another team member resulting from my decision to use Pokémon i didn't usually use. easygoing and reliable, he became a beloved member of the team -- though i cannot for the life of me remember where i got his name from :')

HeartGold / SoulSilver

boy howdy was SoulSilver a letdown. i know this opinion is unpopular as hell but i just did not think it was a good game. it was alternately grindy as hell or completely unchallenging, and maybe i would have been able to put that aside if i liked Johto more. i firmly believe that the bulk of the love for it was a result of nostalgia over the original Gen 2 games. as i'd never played them, i didn't view the remakes with the same rose-tinted glasses that many others seemed to, and it just never quite clicked for me. which is a shame, because i had been SO excited to play it, but to this day my strongest memories of SoulSilver are of being disappointed with it :((( i don't even remember beating the Elite 4!

no team breakdown because i only played this game once 10 years ago and no longer remember what my team even was.

Gen 5

out of all the mainline Pokémon games i've played, i think i have the cosiest memories of Gen 5. by the time BW were announced, i was Chronically Online(TM) and rabidly followed all the updates, rumours, and leaks. whenever my best friend came over, we would borrow my mum's flip phone and painstakingly scroll through Serebii.net to check for the latest updates -- at least, until we racked up a HUGE phone bill and Mum stopped letting me borrow her phone :'')

i received Pokémon Black for my 13th birthday, which was about a month after the games released -- and as a soon-to-be-13-year-old watching all of my friends play the new Pokémon game and excitedly talk about their teams, that was the longest month of my LIFE.

easter fell on my birthday that year, so to celebrate we went on holiday to a water park -- only it rained the entire time, and i got my period the day we arrived :(( so instead of swimming i spent the entire trip lying in front of the heater, eating chocolate and obsessively playing Pokémon Black. i played it pretty much from when i woke up to when i went to bed at night, and by the time we made the drive home five days later i'd already reached the Elite 4 (it would, however, take me an additional three days of getting my ass absolutely HANDED to me by Ghetsis to finally beat the game). though the holiday might not have been the experience my mum had intended, i enjoyed it a whole lot anyway :))

team

• Tay - Samurott - Male
• Tyler - Mienshao - Fighting
• Tante - Excadrill - Male
• Trip - Galvantula - Male
• ??? - Swoobat (i cannot remember its name and i feel TERRIBLE)
• sixth member - undecided. i could never quite find one that synergised well with the rest of the team, so usually this slot was empty, or filled with a rotating member.

Gen 6

to this day i have not played X/Y. i didn't get a 3DS until mid-2014, which i bought with my very first paycheck from my shitty night-shift stocktaking job. i had just enough money leftover for One 3DS game, and i was absolutely torn -- i generally only got new games once or twice a year, at my birthday and/or Christmas, so whichever game i bought, i wanted it to be one that i could get A Lot of playtime out of. there was Pokémon X/Y, obviously; the latest Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game, Gates to Infinity, had come out; and Animal Crossing: New Horizons had recently released. i agonised over the decision for a long time, even putting up polls on my tumblr, before finally settling on Animal Crossing. by the time i had the opportunity to get X/Y, i'd noticed that all my online friends had stopped talking about it FAR faster than they had with previous games (in hindsight, perhaps because they were college students at this point) and decided it wasn't worth it. so i just never got around to playing it, and have never really had the desire to :')

ORAS

my christmas present 2014 :))) by this point my dad, in typical divorced-dad style, had given up on trying to guess what us kids wanted for christmas and instead took us out to the local mall, told us we had a budget of $100, and bought us whatever we wanted, then took us home to wrap our gift/s. (yes, we had to wrap our OWN gifts. that was where my sister and i drew the line, so we exchanged our presents and wrapped each others)

possibly the game i poured the most time into in a single playthrough. the cool part about living in Aotearoa New Zealand is that Christmas falls at the start of our summer holidays, so whenever i got a new game for christmas i had about a month of time that i could pour into it, unbroken.

this was around the time i got very into breeding and EV/IV training. i spent HOURS breeding Feebas eggs to get one that i was satisfied with -- my Milotic, Elise, was definitely the darling of my team!

i also spent many a late night battling my friends over wifi. i loved how wifi battling let me connect with my internet friends and spend time with them despite being half a world away. one particularly tense battle had her down to her final Pokémon with only a single hit point remaining -- and then she proceeded to thoroughly sweep the remainder of my team >:(

wifi battling was also how i spent time with one of my friends from cancer camp. a few years later, he had to get his leg amputated as a consequence of his treatment, and when i visited him in hospital i'd bring my 3DS so we could battle each other :'')

team

• Guinevere - Sceptile - Female
• Swellow - Female
• Elise - Milotic - Female
• Lilia - Gardevoir - Female
• Absol
• Flygon

Gen 8

after taking a break - albeit unintentionally - from the Pokémon series for several years, Gen 8 was what got me back into the games. the last mainline game i'd played was Pokémon Black, and with each of the successive generation's mainline games not appealing to me for a variety of reasons, i was beginning to wonder if i'd grown out of Pokémon. but Gen 8 brought that magic back, at least for a little while :')

Pokémon Sword / Shield

my opinion on Sword and Shield start and end with "it was fun :)" i liked a whole lot of the new Pokémon introduced; i really enjoyed how the Wild Area gave you so many options of Pokémon that it was legitimately difficult to decide which ones to put on my team; overall, it made me feel like i used to when i played Pokémon as a kid :]

i do wish the game had had more to do, though ... the towns were tiny and barren, and it's the only Pokémon game i've put down immediately upon beating the Elite 4.

Brilliant Diamond / Shining Pearl

just as i think others are biased in their love of HG/SS because of Gen 2 nostalgia, i recognise full well how i am biased in my enjoyment of BDSP because of Gen 4 nostalgia. and you know what? i don't care :]

it's cute. it's fun. i get to explore my favourite region all over again, with some of my favourite little guys. having only ever played Platinum as a kid, it was fun getting to use version-exclusive Pokémon that i never got the opportunity to use growing up! also i love the different outfit options for the trainer, i've never felt cuter in a video game!

team

• Aurora - Empoleon - Female
• Pear - Staraptor - Female
• Sorrel - Mismagius - Female
• Sayre - Garchomp - Male
• Aizoth - Toxicroak - Male
• Aspen - Weavile - Female

Pokémon Legends: Arceus

my GOD this was a breath of fresh air the series needed. the complete overhaul of the combat and catching system reinvigorated the gameplay and made it honestly addicting. i had a blast getting to explore ancient Sinnoh, sneaking up on Pokémon and picking out where the modern-day equivalents would eventually lie. i really hope they make a game similar to this again, because it would be a total shame if it was just a one-off :((