>>36298564It was cool seeing sprites of things that were in the game but were inaccessible without cheating/trading, I even felt that way in Silver when seeing Pokémon like Scizor, Porygon2, Politoed, Kanto Legendaries, Celebi, etc. But in RS, you had to wait an entire year for Colosseum to come out to see beyond 201 (Jirachi included as 2002's summer event), and a couple months after that for FRLG. And then there was Altering Cave, which was supposed to make certain Pokémon available in FRLG that weren't normally available, but it never got used. And most players without access to events couldn't get Ho-Oh, Lugia, or Deoxys either, so for the latter two, they'd have to buy Colosseum and XD, games in which the number of Pokémon is fairly low and you can't even breed them or encounter them normally. When Emerald came out, it gave access to those Altering Cave Pokémon in the Safari Zone while still retaining Altering Cave for whatever reason, and it also had an event for Mew which was never given out anywhere but Japan. Jirachi was given out in Pokémon Channel's bonus disc in Australia for some unexplainable region instead of Colosseum while it was the only way to obtain Celebi in Japan. And the other Lati could only be obtained through the e-Reader. Speaking of the e-Reader, it was used for a bunch of facilities across Gen III and even in the Orre games to get extra Pokémon. So if you wanted to catch them all, it would require a GameCube, two GBAs, Ruby, Sapphire, FireRed, LeafGreen, Emerald, an e-Reader (e-Reader+ in Japan for certain cards), the appropriate cards, a link cable, a GC-GBA cable, Colosseum and its bonus disc, XD, ALL in Japanese, and that doesn't even count the events. It was a huge mess, and Wi-Fi trading wasn't a thing. You needed people IN PERSON with the right stuff to get everything.
