>>33197305Ahahahaha god that was a nightmare.
You needed a Game Boy Advance, a Gamecube, the GBA to Gamecube adapter, and at absolute minimum Fire Red, Leaf Green, Emerald, Colosseum, and Gale of Darkness (Gale of Darkness actually covered all the Hoenn mons that Emerald didn't have access to, otherwise you'd have to include Ruby and Sapphire as well).
Now pick US or Japan. US means you get easy Jirachi access from the Colosseum preorder disc, Japan means that Jirachi was event distribution only (this being Gen 3) but the Colosseum preorder disc in Japan let you get Celebi (with much more effort involved); this was the one Celebi that wasn't complete hell to get until Gen 6.
Gen 4 made things drastically easier, in between events being made less horrible to get your hands on, the GTS existing (at the time it was relevant, RIP), and not needing a home console to finish everything up. Doing it solo requires all the stuff for Gen 3 + Diamond and Pearl (at absolute minimum you have to port forward the Regis to Gen 4 to get Regigigas).
But yeah, Gen 6 made it as easy as it's ever going to get relatively speaking. Having all four of X, Y, OR, and AS means that's every single non-event Pokemon accounted for right there, and then you had WiFi distributions of every single event Pokemon in the game to date to make even that painless
and then you realize they never released Eternal Floette to date and so you still can't get everything. Don't even need another console as long as you have Pokemon Bank.
>>33198908Monthly distributions during 2016 made even that as easy as it will ever get. The only hellish thing was getting the Japan-only things like Shiny Jirachi, as per usual.
Anyone who got Shiny Arceus legit is a lucky sob 
