Solving the Mysteries of My Ancient Pokémon

I thought my oldest Pokemon were dead I started playing Pokemon with Ruby version obtained alongside a Game Boy Advance SP on my ninth birthday in 2003. over the course of the next few years I would also get leaf green and emerald when they came out along with fire red and Sapphire at some point within that span I still have all the original cartridges as evidenced by Michael Groth written on the back of them with varying degrees of fadedness done by my mother to keep my brother and I from arguing over which cartridge belonged to whom but while the cartridges are still here the original save files are not Ruby has a save file I started a couple years ago when I bought a Game Boy Advance SP to replace my original one that I foolishly sold as a young teenager whatever was on that Ruby file wasn't significant so I just wiped it to start a new one sapphire has a completed file from a character named Brendan but I don't know when I completed it both fire red and leaf green have files with only three badges with characters named Ash and Andre neither of which I remember playing myself finally Emerald had a save file with eight badges right before the Victory Road and I don't remember when I played it but I would assume when I was older because I had a Salamence something I doubt I would do as a little kid in short the save files of my first playthroughs of these games are long gone the only Pokemon preserved from these games was my first ever shiny a pharaoh I aptly named shiny that safely resides in Pokemon home all of my other original gen 3 Pokemon were lost or so I thought greetings Boogie fans Michael here and this is the story of how I discovered a treasure Trove of some of my oldest Pokemon and the resulting quest to discover their Origins this all started because recently I set up my GameCube and Wii U on a spare TV in my house I wanted to play some Mario Kart Double Dash to see if my skills in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe would transfer to the first Mario Kart I ever had they don't Double Dash is hard but then one day as I was poking around my backlog of games one in particular caught my eye Pokemon box Ruby and Sapphire you all are likely already familiar with Pokemon home the modern Pokemon storage game which is really more of a utility software it can hold on to Pokemon from every generation except the Gen 1 and 2 cartridges and can be used to move Pokemon from previous systems onto the switch then from one switch game to another its predecessor was Pokemon Bank a 3DS software that served the same purpose it is still used to move Pokemon from the 3DS to Pokemon home but you had to have downloaded it before the 3dse shop shut down earlier this year if you didn't do that well you still can but you'll have to drink up miharti's Yoho if you catch my drift Omen Bank are probably the most well-known Pokemon storage softwares now but there were some that came before prior to bank was my Pokemon Ranch for the Wii a goofier one that involved putting your Pokemon into chibi model form and letting them run around a ranch with a me caretaker I actually had this one but it had issues the biggest one is that Pokemon can only be withdrawn from the ranch by using the same save file as the one that put them on there originally so since I don't have my original Diamond save file anymore I assumed those Pokemon were all lost I now know I could have gotten them off by using less than authorized methods but prior to learning that I thought they were gone forever so I donated the Wii to an old folks home so it's a bummer I'll never get those Pokemon back but at least the seniors get to do more bowling but before even my Pokemon Ranch was Pokemon box Ruby and Sapphire it has an adventure mode where you can play your Ruby or Sapphire game on the TV screen using the GameCube controller but its main purpose is storage despite its name and can interact with and store Pokemon from all 5 gen 3 handheld games and it has a capacity for 1500 Pokemon which might I say is comically absurd that's 1500 Pokemon the Ruby Sapphire hoe index is only a little over 200 and the game itself can hold 420 Pokemon nice plus the six in your party 1500 plus 426 is 1926 Pokemon that's like catching every Pokemon in the hoe index 10 times why it becomes more reasonable when you know that it can store Pokemon from the other gen 3 games too but it came out before those games did anyways I wanted to see if I had any Pokemon left on box because I hadn't opened it in a really long time I had no idea what was on there and the idea of finding some really old Pokemon of mine excited me I plugged in my Ruby Sapphire style GameCube memory card that came with Pokemon box then booted it up I was greeted with boxes remix of the Ruby Sapphire title theme which slaps then click go to Pokemon box I'm then prompted to connect a Game Boy Advance with a Pokemon cartridge to the GameCube using the GBA GameCube Link cable I think a big reason why I didn't look at box and gosh I would estimate a decade and a half is that I didn't have the hardware as I mentioned I sold my Game Boy Advance SP when I was an early teenager and I didn't buy a new one until 2019. then I didn't buy the connecting cable until early 2020 to make my the longest journey a Pokemon can take video and I didn't look at box during that process and where I live now is my first time setting up my GameCube since I made that video three years ago so I do is it instructs and turn on my Game Boy Advance and after a bit of connecting it tells me I have to save at a Pokemon Center I'm guessing it's to prevent you from removing any Pokemon in your party that have HMS and then end up trapping you in the field if you're in a Pokemon Center you can just get a different Pokemon from the box so once I fix that and try it again the Box screen appears on the GBA and it tells me that I can turn it off older games have their technical quarks but it is wild to me that I could operate Pokemon box with the Game Boy Advance just off I'm greeted by Bridget the older sister of Lanette the PC developer in hohen this is actually the same Bridget from Pokemon Bank just earlier in time and this was the game that she was introduced in my only options besides saving and exiting are of course arranged boxes but then also showcase a goofy mode where you can make little stages of Pokemon it's pretty lame to be honest but of course what I really care about are what Pokemon are in the boxes and it was a lot more than I expected but before I reveal that to you I have some new merch we got a new desk mat which I'm very excited about it's super high quality it looks gorgeous and it's got two new Mighty forms on it the jungle form and the K form and they'll have plushies later this year so look forward to that there's also the team Sky jogger and Hoodie combo these are the joggers got the team sky emblem right there and I'm wearing the hoodie the team Sky emblems on the sleeve right here and then this says chain team sky and it's embossed like elevated yeah it's kind of cool it's subtle you can see like the the T right here these very exciting products are available at mnjtvmerch.com right now but only for a limited time so if you want them you gotta pick them up before they're gone but now that I finished that what was in the boxes boxes one through three were mostly full but then box four had just some Pokemon so I'd say around three boxes or 180 total the first thing I noticed was that several Pokemon not available in Ruby and Sapphire were present meaning that Pokemon from fire red leaf green and maybe Emerald were all on here I didn't see any mythical event Pokemon yet but that wasn't really surprising events back in gen 3 required in-person attendance which is something I didn't do I was 10. only two legendary Pokemon were present and Articuno and a suicune and I found only two starters a Venusaur and a Charizard barely over their evolution levels indicating that they were extra starters evolved for the Pokedex I then began to scroll through the Pokemon paying close attention to their OTS original trainer and ID numbers some were caught by Justin the name of my younger brother others were caught by Lance what I assume is an in-game name either Justin or I used in a not first playthrough of Ruby I know it has to be Ruby since I found both zangoose and soul Rock and those are Ruby exclusives the OT of Alex also appeared and it seemed to be the same thing one of us played another playthrough as a girl but in Sapphire version since some of Alex's Pokemon were Lunatone and Seviper there were a few standout Pokemon though Pokemon where they had different OTS and those OTS only appeared once buy me in the Mr mime from Rayleigh Mr Neato the Nidoran from Sage zincs the Jinx from Dante and shading the far-fetch'd from Alyssa I was confused at first but then realized these are all fire red leaf green in-game trade Pokemon with Mr Neato being leaf green specific and that's when it hit me it's not that just some of the Pokemon here were not from Ruby and Sapphire most of them were not from Ruby Sapphire and a bunch of them all had the same original trainer name like that intrigued me because I always name myself after myself in my first playthrough of a new game it's varied between Michael Mike and Mikey over the years but in my first playthrough of the game it's always my own name another thing I noticed is that almost all of these mic Pokemon had nicknames I've gone through different phases with nicknaming over the course of My Pokemon career and my current phase is I nicknamed Pokemon that I use but not Pokemon I just catch for the decks but when I started Pokemon back in gen 3 I nicknamed basically every Pokemon I caught and eventually stopped doing that because it got tedious but in the earliest days everything was nicknamed so the OT of Mike and the fact that they all had nicknames made me realize that much of the Pokemon in this box could be from my first ever playthrough of leaf green when the game came out almost 20 years ago the possibility of this was super exciting and I needed a way to confirm it I wasn't sure at first but then I remembered shiny the Pharaoh I still have a Pokemon from that original playthrough so I opened up Chinese info in Pokemon home and saw it had the OT of Mike and the ID number of 14619 the Pokemon in this box file matched that exactly I had found dozens of Pokemon from my first ever playthrough of Kanto I couldn't believe it I thought all those Pokemon except for shiny the Pharaoh were gone this was insanely cool to discover but there was one Pokemon that made me a bit more emotional than the rest several unknown were in the box all with Goofy names that included their letter in some way such as unknown a with the A and Michael capitalized but one of them unknown D was named Daddo my dad passed away in 2006 when I was 11 years old and data was what I called him from birth up until not that long before he passed away which means that I caught this unknown and named it after him while he was still alive and I think it's really special that I stumbled upon this Pokemon that honors his memory probably would have honored his memory a bit more if I had named like an Arcanine or a Dragonite after him but I'm sure he'd still be flattered some other notable Pokemon from my original leaf green are a level 64 Parasect named Killer a level 5 Beldum not obtainable in Fire and leaf green meaning I somehow got an egg over to it and a level 5 swablu named cotton ball which knows false swipe this is not normally possible but Box gives you gift eggs at certain deposited Pokemon milestones and the first one is a swablue with false swipe a move that it normally cannot learn this one in particular must have been given at the start and seems to have been hatched in my leaf green additionally I took a closer look at the Justin Pokemon all of which had matching ID numbers and there were six of them in total Quagsire Electabuzz Cloister Arbok Kangaskhan and Psyduck it occurred to me that every single one of these except Kangaskhan is a fire red exclusive as you might imagine when two brothers are playing Pokemon at the same time I played one while he played the other so I played leaf green he played fire red that leads me to believe that these Pokemon were caught in his fire red version then traded to me so I could complete the Pokedex there were some other mic Pokemon that confused me though because their ID numbers didn't match the others this was the case for an Ampharos named thunderow a miltank caught in a master ball named dirang whatever that means and the suicune I mentioned earlier named Hydro 2. the only place in the five Mainline Pokemon games where you can get Mareep and miltank is the emerald Safari Zone extension while the Ampharos maybe could have been bred the miltank could not have been caught in a master ball as for suicune it can be caught in fire red leaf green but only if you start with Charmander I played leaf green using Blastoise so while it's technically possible that I did another Fire Red Leaf Green playthrough with the trainer named Mike I have no memory of doing so in short these three Pokemon don't make sense coming from Mainline Pokemon games and that's because they didn't they came from Coliseum Pokemon Coliseum is a spin-off Pokemon game where you steal Shadow Pokemon from other people in order to purify them I have a video where I do a deep dive into the game but I also talk about it in my longest journey a Pokemon can take video I know these three Pokemon are from Coliseum not only because obtaining them in the main games is wildly less likely but also because their data all makes sense all three have a ribbon and Shadow Pokemon get a ribbon upon being purified Ampharos is above the level you snag the shadow flaffy at while suicune and miltank are exactly the level you snag them at and it explains the master ball on miltank it was being a jerk and I wanted it out of the way see I'd hated miltank ever since I was a little child but side note if you ever play Coliseum use your master ball in the Metagross that has the lowest catch rate while I can't confirm it like I can for the leaf green Pokemon the trainer name being Mike for these former Shadow Pokemon implies that these could be from my first ever playthrough of Coliseum although I don't know why I would name the suicune Hydro 2 so maybe not then one final Pokemon of note in this box file foreshadowing was a Magneton it was level 32 and named polzo and this Magneton has an ID number not found anywhere else in the Box file and an OT of Michael all caps as evidenced by the character names for the leaf green Pokemon and Coliseum Pokemon I tended not to follow the Gen 3 naming Convention of having names all caps except the first time I think I can't be a hundred percent certain but I think there's a high likelihood that I named my character in my first ever playthrough of Ruby Michael all caps which is what this magneton's OT name is Magneton is found in New mauville in Ruby version which means that this Magneton polzo could be the last surviving Pokemon from my first ever Pokemon playthrough but I can't say for sure yet it's also found in fire red and leaf green and Sapphire and emerald so I need to do more digging speaking of emerald I also found this ladybug named Mr buggy which is an objectively amazing name this ladybug is one found in the post game Safari Zone area of Pokemon Emerald based on its Pokeball and the original trainer is Crash I'm less certain about this but I do have a faint memory of naming one of my characters crash and since this ladybug was caught in emerald and its OT is crash this ladybug could be from my first Emerald playthrough where I may be named myself crash in short I definitely found Pokemon from my first leaf green playthrough and maybe from my first Ruby and emerald playthrough I needed to do more digging to solve those Mysteries but before I could do that I still had more discoveries to make you see all I've discussed so far is the Box file that was on the memory card that came with the game but I have two other GameCube memory cards this white one is one that I bought within the last few years but this black one is the first one that we ever had you can imagine my surprise when I booted up the gamecube's menu to see that the only thing on it was another file of Pokemon box there was more treasure to be found I swapped in the card booted up the game the same way and found about two more boxes total of Pokemon immediately I noticed several eggs which I would definitely be hatching and as I flipped through box one every single Pokemon had the original trainer of Sarah remember how I mentioned sometimes my brother and I would replay these games but call ourselves a different character and occasionally play as a girl well Sarah was one of those playthroughs specifically of sapphire because there was a Lunatone that Sarah caught now I don't know whether this was me or my brother oh there's a Rayquaza only being used for HMS well uh uh that's pretty lame I hope it wasn't me but it probably was since I started with Ruby I don't know if we'll ever know the first box was all Sarah Pokemon until I got to this jump Pluff this mysterious jump plot the OT is all caps Michael but the ID number doesn't match the Magneton from the other file it has a ribbon which could indicate that it's from Coliseum since skiploom is a Shadow Pokemon but it doesn't match the name or ID of the suicune Ampharos and miltank additionally you can find wild hoppip and fire red leaf green and XD Pokemon Colosseum sequel like Magneton I'll need to remove it from box in order to solve its mystery I scrolled through the rest of box one all of which were Sarah's Pokemon including a why not just named uh this prompted me to message my brother and uh well we uh we think it was him box two was still mostly Sarah's Pokemon but it had way more that were not a Justin armaldo which does not match the ID number of his fire red Pokemon so could be from his first Sapphire playthrough another box gift false swipe swab blue hatched in the Sarah game a Magikarp from my leaf green a different ID Justin swablu and Arya dose which are former Shadow Pokemon from one of his Colosseum playthroughs based on their levels and ribbons a duking metacham which is an in-game trade Pokemon as a meta tight from Pokemon XD a trap inch belonging to crash another potential Pokemon from my first Emerald playthrough a Daryl delcati named skitit terrible name which is an in-game trade from Ruby and Sapphire and to my shock a Mew I'll talk more about the Mew in a minute but real quick let me cover the Pokemon in box three there were only nine one was an egg six were Sarah Pokemon one was a Politoed from my leaf green and one was a Roselia out with the OT mic but not matching the ID number for leaf green or Coliseum and Roselia is not catchable in Coliseum anyways so with all the Pokemon discovered I have four Mysteries to solve the origin of polto the Michael Magneton the origin of the different Michael jumpluff the origin of the Mike Roselia and what is this freaking Mew let's dive into the Mew first its OT is NYC and its ID number is zero one two three four clearly not randomly generated so it must be an event Pokemon but I don't remember going to any events in gen 3 so could I have gotten it in a trade the first thing I did was check serebi and bulbapedia's event databases but no Mew like this appeared so I took to Google searching zero one two three four NYC Mew and oddly enough I got results across game faq's Smogon poke Beach and Twitter other people were asking about this exact same Mew some got answers saying it was hacked since it's not in the event databases but if it's not legitimate why do random people across the internet have the same one then I thought about it for a bit and I remembered a game shark back in the old days if we wanted to hack a game we used an action replay or a game shark things you could just buy at the store and inputted codes that hacked the game walkthrough walls stealing Pokemon whatever many people lost Pokemon to corrupted save files but one thing they could successfully do was generate Pokemon so I did a bit more digging and I found this video in November of 2009 quake's Gamespot made a video demonstrating how to use a cheat code in a ROM to generate a Mew with the OT NYC and the ID of zero one two three four the codes used in emulators today are almost always the same as codes used in physical action replayer game Sharks back in the day so that means either me or my brother along with several others on the internet put probably the same code into one of these devices and generated this Mew so unfortunately the Mew is not legitimate but now for the other three polzo the Magneton the jump fluff and the Roselia the first thing I did was open Pokemon home on my phone and the OT filter a convenient feature where it will list all the OTS for Pokemon in your home and include the ID number simply clicking one brings up all the Pokemon from that OT I looked for any that matched polzo the magnaton or the jump Pluff and didn't find any but to my shock I did find one for Roselia it was just one Pokemon a Kingdra named Roy oddly it says it was met on July 21st 2014 which didn't make sense but then I realized that was the date it was moved into Pokemon Bank my shiny Pharaoh has the same date this told me something but not enough to learn more I needed to remove these Pokemon from box I connected my Sapphire grabbed polzo the Magneton and I can't withdraw it it turns out that box has certain requirements for withdrawing a Pokemon that a specific save file did not deposit the requirements vary from game to game but all of them require you to have registered 100 Pokemon in your Pokedex which I had not done for any of my games now I could have just caught about 25 more Pokemon on my Sapphire but I opted to meet those requirements with Emerald I was right before the league anyways and since it was the last gen 3 Mainline game I figured it could give me the most information about caught locations and so forth so I began that process in Emerald getting through the Victory Road fighting the league mainly using belly drum hariyama entering the Hall of Fame and got up to 100 Pokemon owned this took a while but the Johto expansion of the Safari Zone helped me speed up the process after a few hours that was complete and I tried again to withdraw polzo the Magneton and success I could bring it into my Emerald file so I brought in magnaton plus several other Pokemon and then swapped box files and brought in jumpluff Roselia a few other Pokemon and all of the eggs I then opened up emerald and checked polzo summary excited to see that its obtained location was in a trade well that's a bummer I thought it would give me more detailed location info but then I scroll to the next Pokemon datto the unknown and it did give me location info extremely specific info it said the specific lip 2 chamber why didn't polzo have that info I kept scrolling and saw that the Roselia was met at Route 117 where Rosalia is normally found which unfortunately didn't tell me much about which game it came from jumpluff was met at level 5 on Route 104 a route where it is not found in the wild meaning it was hatched from an egg whatever that Michael save file was it seems I somehow ended up with a hoppip egg and then hatched it and evolved it all the way to jump love probably going through the Pokemon League to do so because it had a Hoenn Champion ribbon but I was still confused about polzo why did it not have location info but then I looked at some of the other Pokemon I brought into emerald and I figured out why I had also brought in the former Shadow Pokemon I found and like Magneton they all said obtained in a trade I checked polzo's ribbons and lo and behold it had a purified Shadow Pokemon ribbon to my shock Paul Ruby or fire red or leaf XD there is a shadow Magneton available in XD that has the same moves and around the same level as poso the Magneton the name was all caps Michael because that's the default name for the XD protagonist so I just clicked that instead of clicking new name because I thought it was cool that my name was the default so polzo the Magneton is not from my first Ruby playthrough but it seems to be from my first XD playthrough which is still pretty darn cool as for the eggs almost every single one was a Trico which made sense considering the several level 5 tricos already in the Box file but the final egg one described as obtained at the nice place was a Zigzagoon that knows extreme speed this is actually the second box gift egg Pokemon obtained when depositing at least 100 Pokemon into the box but as for jumpluff and Roselia I still couldn't be completely sure where they came from I eventually remembered that Roselia was not catchable in Emerald so it along with Roy the Kingdra had to be from Ruby or Sapphire jumpluff was harder to tell though but I thought Emerald was more likely Ruby and Sapphire did not have the National Pokedex so I didn't really see why it would evolve a hoppip all the way up into a jump plot in a game where I wouldn't get any Dex entries for it it became clear that while I knew these two Pokemon were created in gen 3 Hoenn games I couldn't know which game specifically using official methods so their mystery would remain unsolved or would it you see by using less than sanctioned methods I can figure out which precise game these Pokemon were created in I just have to get them onto my switch so I grabbed jump Bluff and Roselia plus datto the unknown polls of the Magneton Thunder of the Ampharos and freezing the Articuno and migrated them to palpark in Platinum after catching them there I used the transporter lab in my Black 2 to move them to gen 5. then using Pokey transporter on the 3DS I got them into Pokemon bank then moved them from bank to home once on home I moved them to my brilliant Diamond I know gross but it's the only switch game that both of them can go into and traded them to a different switch that is well different and just one that allowed me to look more deeply into the save data so I went through that process and looked at the info on Roselia and it was from Ruby and then jumpluff was also from Ruby oh huh gotta say didn't predict they would both be from Ruby uh thought I would have only played through Ruby using a Michael variation name one time um apparently not but what this does mean is that while both of them are not from my first Ruby playthrough one of them probably is I don't know which one and I now have no way to tell because I do not remember how exactly I formatted my name in my first playthrough of Ruby so in the end while I can't say with certainty that I have this specific Pokemon from my first ever Pokemon playthrough I probably have one or two and I definitely have a bunch of Pokemon from my second so in the end I'm pretty happy with how this all turned out don't forget to pick up some team Sky gear or the cool new Mighty desk mat at mnjtvmerch.com and thank you so much for watching with an extra special thanks to my patrons over on patreon who are helping support my channel independent of fluctuating YouTube ad rates if you want to help support me the same way links in the description below but that is all I have for now until next time thanks gotta catch them all

Channel: MandJTV

Views: 391,625

Keywords: New Pokemon games, New Pokemon, Top Pokemon, Pokemon Talk, MandJTV, MandJTV Pokevids, gaming, video games, nintendo switch, nintendo, pokemon, new games, family friendly, top 10, top 5, charizard, greninja, pikachu, best pokemon, all pokemon, original pokemon, retro games, retro pokemon games, nintendo pokemon, pokemon legends arceus, pokemon scarlet and violet, gen 9, nostalgia, pokemon home

Id: mIDY-2muZRM

Length: 28min 12sec (1692 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2023