u/occultureshock

I always found the painting for the smart contest kinda creepy. It reminds me of those creepy chain emails you'd get back in the 2000s. Maybe Gamefreak is mad at me for naming Vulpix after the legally distinct Foxparks.

It's crazy how much faster Gen 3 is when you've done all of the prep already. I still had my winning streaks in the Battle Tower from when I did Feraligatr last year, so those took all of like half an hour (Ruby and Sapphire battle tower NPCs really are braindead) and I had the poffin recipes from last time too so the contests weren't really an issue either, even with a lot of jamming my visual stats were high enough to beat everyone else most of the time. Foxparks managed to get four out of the five paintings, only missing out on the cuteness painting.

Mt. Battle was a slog, but an easy slog. The double Kyogre team I used last time was getting annoying with all of the rain animations, so I used Foxparks with Heat Wave and a Soul Dew Latios with Surf (and by that I mean Latios did all of the work and Foxparks missed every single Heat Wave). This way I was able to get the World Ribbon with all of my other RM candidates too, but they still have work to do in Gen 3.

Gen 4 time! Yayyyyyy! 💀

Dundee proves that he never lost his inner diva and wipes the contest floor with his competition.

Gen 6 was a breeze compared to Gen 4. I do appreciate all of the quality of life improvements to the battle facility and contests this go around. Thank god I didn't need to do all of the ranks in the contests again, and I really do like that once I've unlocked the master rank with one Pokémon, they're unlocked for all Pokémon going forward. Maxed out contest stats makes them much easier, and I won most contests just from the visual portion alone.

The Battle Maison was also significantly easier than in Gen 4. The Mat Block Protean Greninja/Substitute Mega Salamence/Swords Dance Lando-T team made triple battles a complete joke, only having one or two close calls in the later fights. For the Chatelaine I switched back to the team with Terrakion and Beat Up, since +6 Rock Slide destroys her team. It made getting the ribbons on my other Pokémon much easier since I could get them on three at a time. I do also appreciate that I can just pick one format for the ribbons and not have to do literally everything.

I had to get the paid ribbons for my Gen 5 Pokémon since now is the only time I can get them, but getting BP through Bank and using them to buy vitamins to sell made getting money trivial.

Reimu was the only Pokémon I have that qualified for the Time Travel Award, since Dundee and Robot Stop are from Orre. It was nice getting it one of my Pokémon at least.

Super Training still sucks.

Alola is up next, I'm a little concerned about the Battle Tree since I haven't tested my battling team at all, and the only time I've played Battle Royal was when I was forced to during one of the endless cutscenes of Gen 7. At least I can finally Hyper Train some of my Pokémon, Reimu has been stuck with 0 IVs since Gen 3.

Dundee takes a quick break from ribbon collecting by soloing the Elite Four and becoming a world-renouned film star. You can see him in the new Neil Breen movie, Croc & Awe. It makes The Room look like Citizen Kane.

While he takes a break, I'm able to introduce some new members of the Ribbon Squad, who I've already collected a few ribbons with. It might be a bit ambitious of me to introduce so many new members but I'm not super worried about Gen 6 and 7. Zoroark is my favourite Pokémon and I wanted to breed a shiny one to RM for a while (even if it was approaching double odds...). I wanted to RM a Gen 6 Dream Ball Pokémon and I chose Petilil because of its regional form in Arceus. Reshiram is one of my favourite legendaries and it also has a great shiny (both Petilil and Reshiram made up for my bad luck with Zoroark, Petilil took only 49 eggs and Reshiram took only 185 resets!)

Most importantly IMO, I went looking through Pokémon Bank and found much more than I bargained for: my first ever successful full odds shiny Pokémon, a Whimsicott from Black 2 in 2016 (the first full odds one I encountered was a red Basculin, which used Final Gambit turn 1). To my surprise it could still travel to Gen 6, so I thought I might as well add it to the team.

>!Also taking screenshots was getting way too annoying, I have to take the screenshots with my 3ds by pressing L + down + select and then I'd have to transfer them to my laptop and then scale them up individually so they don't look like shit when posted!<

My last update about Dundee's progress was around May of last year I think? He was still a Croconaw since Z-A hadn't released yet and I kept him unevolved in case a regional form was announced. I probably could've done this in a much shorter period of time, but a lot of IRL things popped up and my focus and interests were elsewhere for a long time, so I ended up spending months at a time not making much progress.

For some reason I mentioned in my last post that Gen 4 was my favourite for getting ribbons, I have no idea what I was talking about then because Gen 4 was brutal (I'm still haunted by the Multi Ribbon). When I heard about the Bank shutdown I was thankfully mostly done with Gen 4 already, only missing the Great Ability Ribbon, but even if Bank was staying open I doubt I'd go through the gauntlet of going all the way from Gen 3 again, not for a long while at least. HeartGold was fun though.

Joining the Ribbon Squad are Frank the Transmasc Azumarill, who I showed off in a different post (by the time I made that post I already had a lot of the ribbons on him, he was only missing some of the contest and tower ribbons), as well as Valentine the Absol, caught in HeartGold in a Love Ball, and Peachone the Chatot, also caught in HeartGold in a Lure Ball. The reason I chose Chatot in particular is because Peachone was the Pokémon that I used for RNG manipulation in Gen 4. All three of Frank, Valentine, and Peachone were caught using RNG manipulation. The game shows them in regular balls since they're currently in Diamond.

For full clarify, since I don't have access to an old hotspot or network, I did not get the World Ability Ribbon (thankfully it's optional and also please god let me leave gen 4 it's been over a year). Dundee, Reimu, and Robot Stop have every ribbon except the Day of the Week Ribbons, which I plan to get in ORAS. Frank, Valentine, and Peachone have all ribbons available in Gen 4 excluding the Effort and Day of the Week Ribbons.

Now that the hardest part is over, I plan to include a fair amount of other members to the squad, most of which are Gen 5 but there is one Gen 4 member I'm currently working on who's almost done with Gen 4 (thankfully it's a legendary so I don't have to torture myself with the Battle Tower again). My next post will probably show them off, and I may as well cover a few optional bits in Gen 5 too.

(Notes on the nicknames of some of my RMs for anyone who cares: Reimu is the name of the main character of Touhou, Robot Stop is a King Gizzard song, Frank is the name of the rabbit in Donnie Darko, and Peachone is a weapon in Vampire Survivors)

So I was made aware of the Bank shutdown in February so I'm back from buying cigarettes and working on my ribbon masters again (Shadow Feraligatr has been the main one). With the shutdown I wanted to include some other RM ideas I've had, and this was one I've always wanted to do. In case you didn't know, in Gens 3-5, a female Azurill has a 1/3 chance of becoming male upon evolving into Marill due to the two having different gender ratios. Behold: shiny transmasc Marill. This was done a while ago between Battle Tower stuff and real life stuff and I'm still thinking of a nickname.

As far as the actual challenge has been going with Dundee and co., I've been making slow but steady progress whenever I had time. I took care of the Legend Ribbon first and I'm about halfway done with the Battle Tower ribbons. It's not looking likely that I'll be able to get the wifi ribbon but I guess we'll see.

I've had some other ideas for RMs to add to my journey, seeing how realistically it's now or never. I have some shinies I wanna do, most notibly my shiny Chatot that I use for RNG. I'll try share some more updates soon!

reuploading this because reddit had an existential crisis and make the picture quality nonexistent, soz