go back

i will never, never forget the first time that i saw raikou. as a little kid playing silver version, i watched as the legendary beast ran off with its friends in the burned tower within ecruteak city, and i wondered when i'd run into it again. would it find a home in a dark cave? or would it take a page out of zapdos' book and find a power plant to settle down in? i thought it was awesome and couldn't wait to see it again, even though i had no idea how that'd happen. nothing prepared me for running into raikou randomly on the route right outside of azalea city.

raikou made a massive, massive impression on me as a kid. it was the first roamer legendary i ever ran into - and, even now, i get starry-eyed whenever a legendary randomly pops up in some tall grass while i was training up other pokemon or doing something else entirely. the encounters are always so... magical. everything about that childhood experience - from the way i encountered it to the absolute fervor to catch it that gripped me, lol - cemented raikou as my favourite legendary dog of the generation, as well as my favourite legendary overall. it was the first time a legendary pokemon really shook me to my core.

while i couldn't (legitimately) transfer up the raikou that i caught in silver version, i played through pokemon colosseum during reides' ribbon master journey. it was during that game's plot that i caught a raikou, whom i named syklemos. upon deciding that i'd go for another round of ribbon masters when the eventual shutdown of pokemon bank was announced, i knew that syklemos would make for a perfect candidate. accompanied by stormspike, my shiny colosseum croconaw, and, later on, laverath the shiny ranger egg manaphy, syklemos was a super welcome addition to my ranks of my ribbon masters.

syklemos' title is the triumphant.