Hello, guys!
There is so much negativity as of late. How about we just relax and share some warm Pokémon-related stories we had in our lives?

I'll start.

First, a little background. I am from a country where Nintendo wasn't a thing until 2012 (it still isn't really well-known), and I specifically lived in a town in the middle of nowhere (it isn't even on a country map) so we didn't know about and didn't have access to most of the modern world entertainment. Only major cities had some access to it as well as people with Internet which wasn't so wide-spread. Despite all of this, Pokemon craze managed to hit us in 2000 and lasted for a year. As a result almost everyone knows about Pokémon but as time passed people who loved it started to hate the franchise for no real reason, myself included. It was considered stupid and childish.

It happened about 11 years ago. A classmate of German origin came to school with a strange gaming device (Nintendo DS) and played something that resembled Pokémon (German edition of Pearl). All of a sudden he was the center of attention, everybody wanted to try that game. I didn't find it appealing though but still tried to curiously peep into his screen. But several months later he suddenly asked me if I wanted to try playing Pokémon and offered me one of his Gameboys with the first two generations of Pokémon games. We weren't even friends but I agreed as that could be a fresh experience. The games were all in German which I don't know but oh boy, what an experience! Not only the games were super interesting, I also managed to make the best of friends! He showed me the fun of trading, link battling, we always had something to discuss. And when I got the access to the Internet, I learned so much about this fascinating franchise, learned about its surprisingly huge fanbase, emulated 3rd and 4th gen games, and so on...