>>56204459I started out watching the anime as a little kid, didn't get a pokemon game until Sapphire when I was 7. By that point I was totally hooked and engrossed into it, collecting and trading cards, keeping up with the anime and movies, there was always mystery, wonder and excitement behind new pokemon stuff.
I eventually stole my friends little brothers copy of Ruby the night before they moved away, got Leaf Green when it came out, then Emerald and eventually a used copy of Fire Red which had an epic save file with an event Deoxys. (I didn't get to attend an event til 4th gen) Also played Blue Rescue Team and loved it as well.
Diamond and Pearl were my first totally new gen. I was beyond excited for them. While I did notice how slow they were compared to Gen 3, and certainly felt the poor distribution of mons, I loved them regardless. I played Diamond like 6 times before Platinum ever came out. I think this was about the time I was really knowing and remembering everything about the deeper mechanics; I got into breeding, masuda method, pokeradar hunting, and started WiFi battling, using guidebooks and forum posts to build teams. Platinum came out, still got my preorder Giratina figure, also played Explorers of Darkness, pure kino even better than the first one. By this point I had backtracked and emulated Yellow and Crystal, so when HGSS got announced I obsessively checked Serebii every day, corocoro scans, that old TV Japanese TV show I'm forgetting the name of. This was my first real hype season. Soul Silver was a joy, at the time I felt it was the best Pokémon game yet, maybe tied with Emerald. I also played it exhaustively. This was the first and only gen that I completed the dex! All 493. I got every event this gen and caught the rest, between migrating and trading between versions. It felt amazing.
