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Even the cheese is a pocket!
YOU GUYS…Cheeseburger Backpack is real!!! Reblog if you would rock this. 🍔Pre-order now on the Cartoon Network Shop! http://bit.ly/1RfZPZB
Even the cheese is a pocket!

As a bonus, after he helped me out with being able to extract a Mew from the obsolete Pokémon Ranch ‘game’, my multi-talented friend @cakeinmilk also took the time to draw this rendition of the Pokémon Ranch proprietor, Hayley, with said Mew. Although I think he captured the game’s weird, bobble-headed art-style very well, I also feel that his artwork might be a little too good for this game as it almost looks adorable here!

My final Generation 4 commission is for my Soul Silver team and was created by the very talented joe_sketches on Instagram. He took payment for this in the form of a donation via this link, providing money to organisations fighting for racial justice. Please check it out and support it if you can. A great piece of art, and a great cause. #blm

This beautiful piece really captures my colourful HeartGold boys in all their glory. It is by Siplick on Deviant Art who was amazingly fast and pleasant to deal with! Check out their art and commissions here.

Next we have my Platinum team (complete with jet-packs!), soaring high above the Sinnoh region! This has been expertly depicted by Gustavo Zanin (gustavo_old_trainer) from Instagram. Check them out for commissions or support their Ko-fi page here.

This is a first; my first commission received as a physical piece of art, drawn by the wonderful Natalia (charmink.tattoo) on Instagram. Check out her page for excellent tattoo designs - if I ever decide to get one myself, I know where I will be heading!

First up is this amazing rendition of my Diamond team by MacIntyre Rath (macintyrerath) on Instagram. I really love the style of this piece and you should check him out for commission (he also does stickers!) and/or support him on Patreon here.
Another pokémon generation, another great set of pokémon to choose from for my top ten. I really don’t think that there are any pokémon that I think are awful - they all range from average to fantastic. Additionally, in Sinnoh, I loved the big expansion on the new evolutions to old pokémon concept - and I think this Top 10 reflects that. As is always the case, I have included both the original Gen4 sprite as well as the shiny sprite, with all sprites taken from Platinum for the sake of consistency. Gen4 also marked my first first shiny since Gen2, and although Bibarel didn’t sneak into my list, I really just wanted to mention it again!
Wow, I can’t believe that I am finally at the end of Generation 4. As always I will be posting all the lovely art that I had commissioned of my Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, HeartGold, and SoulSilver teams before I move onto Gen5. I know these upcoming games are often considered rather devicive within the pokémon fanbase, but I also think this view has softened over time so it might actually be more of a case of fans of the franchise not enjoying new things. Eiter way, I’m excited to see how I fare with Pokémon Black and White!
Now for one of my favourite bits of documenting this journey: Graphs! As ever, we will first take a look at the two graphs that provide a breakout the pokémon type distrbutions in my final teams across the generations; a distribution by type (using a stacked bar graph to indicate each generations) and a 100% stacked bar graph showing the percentage use of each type in each generation.
No great changes at the top here. The Water-type is still way out in front as the most common, with Flying maintaining it’s second-place spot although it actually closed the gap everso slighty. However, both of these types are definitely skewed in their usage, due to the fact that Water-types are typically the only ones who can learn HMs such as Surf, and Flying-types are the only ones wo can learn the HM Fly. Since these HMs are absolutey required to get around, a Water-type and a Flying-type are pretty much guaranteed to be on every team. Looking below the top two, Ground and Psychic retain third and fourth position respectively, but the real mover is Grass, surging ahead of Electric, Normal, Fighting, and Posion to take fifth place in the overall standings.
Since there are a variable number of games in each generations, the second graph helps to give a bit more insight. This shows that Flying was actually my most used type, with over 12% of the pokémon that I used in Gen4 having the Flying-typing. Water and Grass come next with just over 10% usage of each, while there are a few percentage point increaes for Normal, Dark, and Psychic as well. Rock continues to be my least popular type overall, tied with Bug and Dragon for the lowest usage in Gen4, however Dragon can be expained away as being a naturally rarer typing. Despite this, thanks to Garchomp (Dragon), Tyranitar (Rock), and Yanmega (Bug), I did still manage to use at least one pokémon of every type. I don’t actually plan it this way, it just happened naturally, the same as it did in Hoenn. Now let’s move on to the real world graphs, starting with Time:
I’ve smashed straight through the 1000 hours of elapsed game time milestone with Gen4, as I begin to approach 50 total days spent on this project! Still, I did spend less time on Gen4 than Gen3 in total with ~375 hous to Gen3’s mammoth ~411 hours. This is mainly because, although the individual Gen4 games were longer overall (Platinum comes in a close second place to Emerald for the most time spent on a single game so far), there were fewer of them to play in total. Next up, Cost:
Another reduction from Gen3, but this is hardly surprising as I had to buy a lot of kit and way more games then. This time around there were no hardware costs since I already had two Nintendo DS systems, so my only real outlay was the games. In fact, if I hadn’t had to spent £77 on a sealed copy of Pokémon Ranger (to ensure that the Manaphy Egg quest was going to be available), Gen4 would have been nearly as cheap as Gen2! I did however, add a new category to the graph for the various bits of kit that I had to buy for the Gen 1 & 2 rescue mission. This isn’t really a Gen4 cost, so I didn’t think it was fair to include it there just because this is when I started doing it. It comes to just over £150, but I don’t think it will grow further than this - altough I guess we won’t know for sure for a while!
As ever, these stat breakdowns are fun to produce and I really enjoy seeing the variation in pokémon types that I end up using each generation. The cost and time elements are also good to keep track of - especially when I see a reduction in both for Gen4. It gives me hope that I might make it to the end of the project one day!
All I have left to do is consolidate all of my pokémon into Pokémon Platinum for a fully complete Pokédex. Easy, right? Well kinda, but this still took far longer than I was hoping for.
Transferring my teams from Diamond, Pearl, HeartGold, and SoulSilver is simple enough, but there are a lot of pokémon that I need still to transfer up from Emerald via Pal Park and I have discovered a limit; Pal Park only lets you transfer a batch of six pokémon once per day. Not once in a calendar day, once per 24 hour period, which makes it extra annoying if you don’t remember to do it consistently at the same time each day. There is no way around this - messing with the date and time settings don’t seem to help - so I really just have to suck it up do it piecemeal. There are also other tasks to complete to finalise the ‘Dex, such as breeding earlier forms of a pokémon in Platinum since I only have the final form to send from the other games.

This breeding, hatching, and levelling process actually keeps me pretty busy as there really are a lot of gaps to fill, not least petty much every starter needs to be bred and levelled up to it’s second stage since these are so rare outside of the ones the various professors gift to you. I assembled a good team for this; Blimpy the Drifloon and Ziggy the Empoleon from my Platinum team, and Humph the Camerupt from my Emerald US team take up three of the team slots and Me Too, my Ditto from Emerald, is placed in the day care. I then prioritise transferring pokémon that need prior stages to be obtained out via Pal Park. One is placed in the day-care with Me Too until we get an egg. The Day-Care Checker app on the Pokétch came in very useful at this point as I could nip back every time an egg appeared and switch another pokémon into the Day-Care. The egg would would then hatch quicker with Humph in the party due to the Flame Body ability that reduces the number of steps required to for hatching to occur. With the use of an Exp. Share item given to the lower level, Blimpy, Ziggy, Humph would then battle strong enemies resulting in the fast levelling the newly hatched ‘mons until all the evolution stages had been registered in the Pokédex. Finally, Blimpy was able to use Fly to move quickly between the day-care, Pal Park, and a route containing stronger enemies, and Ziggy was able to use Surf to make sure that I could access all the biome types in Pal Park. Whew, this was a lot of effort.
As I slowly made progress in this, I also started storing each individual stage of every pokémon in the PC boxes to create what is known as a Living Pokédex. This will be very useful for future games as I won’t have to redo all of this breeding and hatching and levelling. Instead I should just be able to transfer everything across and focus solely on the new pokémon of that region.
Finally I got there, and my last actions in Gen4 were to do a quick run through of the Elite Four and Champion with each of my Gen3 teams since it was nice to see them all again! But most importantly of all, my Sinnoh Regional Pokédex reads 210 seen/210 caught and my National Pokédex reads 493 seen/493 caught. This extra consolidation work took my Platinum game time up to a whopping 90 hours and 58 minutes, but it is more than worth it to be able to say Generation Four: Completed!
Oh, and I stopped by to visit the Game Freak lead developer, who this time is staying in the Hotel Grand Lake at the Valor Lake Front, in order to get my certificate of completion of the ‘Dex. It’s still shit.
