a few days ago, i managed to hatch a shiny horsea in my copy of emerald version!!!!!! this shiny is one that means a WHOLE LOT to me for so many reasons and i am absolutely gonna start up what will hopefully be a saga of posts related to him.

the gist of it is that this little one is, first and foremost, a nod to my beloved dnd oc, reides. secondly, he is gonna be my first earnest attempt at the ribbon master challenge!

the ribbon master challenge is a really fun - yet really difficult! - challenge which consists of trying to get as many marks/ribbons on one pokemon as possible (basically, from their origin generation to the current one). there are many resources related to this challenge, my favorite one being athis' ribbon handbook. you can see a lot of people talking about this challenge on the pokemon ribbons subreddit as well as in random places online (like this post right here LMAO). there are also quite a few videos about ribbon master challenge attempts on youtube, too; again, my personal favorite one is the story of toast the scizor.

anyway, i talked about potentially attempting the challenge on my tumblr blog back when i successfully manipulated gen4's rng for a shiny of my fav mythical pokemon, manaphy - which i also named reides, as i associate manaphy with him. i eventually strayed from that idea, however, because i really, really want my first ribbon master to have the gen3 ribbons; most importantly, the hoenn contest ones. (this is 100% just a personal thing - ribbon masters that are from gen4 onwards are obviously still incredibly awesome and i still wanna try the challenge out on my beloved manaphy at some point. i just have a lot of nostalgia associated with gen3's ribbons so i want my first attempt at the challenge to include the grind for them.) that being said, i didn't want to stray from the initial concept of putting it on a pokemon that i associate with reides, so…

that's where this horsea comes into the picture!

i've associated reides with the whole horsea line for a loooong time - longer than i've associated him with manaphy, tbh! my tumblr blog even has a post mentioning that i hatched eggs for a shiny one - also named reides - in ultra sun. i struggled a lot with if i wanted to evolve that horsea fully or not, ultimately deciding to keep him as a baby. but i always wanted to catch another one which i'd evolve fully. i mean... look at this thang.

shiny kingdra absolutely rules, and the royal theme that it has going on is, again, very much up reides' alley. it seemed like my procrastination re: actually hunting for that second shiny horsea actually paid off, in this case, because i realized it'd be sick if my ribbon master was a shiny kingdra. that way, my other shiny horsea can remain as a unique hunt, too.

beyond my shiny requirement, i wanted the horsea to be male, like reides, and for him to have a nature that suited reides' personality. since i already have a brave manaphy, i was torn between quirky or bold for him, but i ultimately decided on bold. so... a shiny, bold, male horsea was the goal. this isn't an impossible shiny hunt by any means, but... well... let's just say i wasn't in the mood to phase on tons and tons of different shiny horseas that didn't meet my somewhat-specific criteria. frankly speaking, it would sour the entire experience for me. add emerald's wacky rng to the picture and it just... wasn't fun to even think about. so i figured that i'd take yet another page from my manaphy's book and that i'd rng manipulate for my ideal horsea. furthermore, i decided that i'd try to hatch my horsea in a cool spot - hence the 'seafloor cavern' met data. (sadly, since i'm transferring him up through the generations, this data will eventually get replaced with a blanket 'hoenn region' line - but i still wanted to do it!!!)

once i had a general Plan of Action, it was time to execute it. a few weeks ago, i made a post on my tumblr blog about learning how to rng manip in gen3. in that post, i showed everyone my shiny treecko, ivy, and vaguely mentioned in the tags that having the means of shiny hunting in emerald opened up a lot of ribbon master challenges... but i didn't mention my true goal of learning the inner workings of gen3; namely, reides. LMAO. by shiny hunting for that treecko, i was able to deduce my tid and sid combo, which would aid me in my future rng-based shiny hunts in that particular game file.

i then had to play through the entirety of emerald's plot. at first, i dreaded this, since i wanted to grab my horsea asap and get right into the challenge - but it was a TON of fun! i kept practicing different rng hunts and ended up getting four more rng-based shinies in addition to my shiny starter and reides. plus it was just plain nice to re-visit gen3's storyline after all these years. once i got the super rod in mossdeep city (since horsea is a super rod-specific encounter) and my seventh badge (since i needed to be able to use dive so that i could get to the seafloor cavern), i caught a male horsea and a female horsea, popped 'em in the daycare, and - through MUCH trial and error which could, in itself, end up as a huge post - managed to hatch this perfect little horsea.

given all of the setup that went into getting reides, i knew that i wanted him to be on my very first team that beat the hall of fame. it was only fair, considering that the team pretty much existed because of him! and, while this post is focused on reides, trust & believe that i still developed a TON of fondness for the rest of my lovely storyline team! i couldn't have possibly gotten reides his first ribbon without the help of ivy the sceptile, popsicle the cradily, metal the aggron, chimney the camerupt, and miku the flygon!

reides and his friends who helped him get his very first ribbon!

next on the emerald agenda is ev training reides. i am going to be training him alongside a latios named albatross, a beldum named origin, and a bagon whose name is currently pending as i try to think of something! i've never ev trained in a gen3 game before, so... fingers crossed that it goes well and that i can keep count of the encounters without fuckin up! ;LDFSGKD;FKG i'm ev training so that i can get the effort ribbon on reides but ALSO so that we are at full power for taking on emerald's battle tower afterwards. i'm SUPER nervous about doing this, as i have never attempted the battle tower before, but i'm hoping that it'll go okay!

in addition to aaaaall of this chaos going on in emerald version, i dusted off my good ol' wii and started a replay of an INCREDIBLEEEE game called pokemon colosseum, since i'll need to send reides over there eventually to get a ribbon for clearing 100 battles in a row over on mt battle. (luckily, i still have the necessary hardware from my childhood for doing that.) mt battle is going to be seeing a lot of me, as i'll also need to grind for pokecoupons there so that i can buy special berries which will help him in becoming a contest pro back over in hoenn. colosseum's plot also gave me the chance to soft-reset for a bold-natured suicune that will probably get ev trained too, and who will likely join reides in all of his future battle tower endeavors. i named that suicune after reides' in-universe god, 'persana.'

so... yeah! the setup for this challenge alone has been A Lot but i can honestly say that i've been having so much fun with it. i feel like i'm interacting with like... every single aspect of gen3 at the moment. it's totally revitalized my love for pokemon as a whole and i'm really hoping that i can stick to it and complete the challenge in its entirety! >:) so, again, here's to hoping that i can also keep this blog updated on my progress as i pass certain milestones! if any of you have ever taken on the ribbon master challenge, feel free to let me know about your experience in seafare's guestbook!

mood: productive
music: iron moon - chelsea wolfe