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ever since i played the game as a kid, i thought colosseum (and xd) had some incredible pokemon graphics. these games also featured shadow pokemon - pokemon who were put through terrible treatment and made into a 'soulless fighting machines.' naturally, your goal as the protagonist is to help these pokemon... and, once you help them, they're granted a ribbon for overcoming such an awful experience. this ribbon is called the national ribbon. in later generations, this ribbon grants the title 'the triumphant' to the pokemon who has it.

after taking reides (whom i hatched in emerald version) through orre to pick up the earth ribbon for his ribbon master journey, i got really interested in purifying a shadow pokemon from orre and making it into a ribbon master. this wasn't only because of the fairly exclusive national ribbon, but also because it just felt right. i wanted take my time in orre a bit further, you know?

the next step was choosing the shadow pokemon that i'd make into ribbon master. i decided on raikou very quickly, but, with the future closure of pokemon bank casting a shadow over me, i wanted to add another pokemon to the journey... another pokemon with sentimental value. this pokemon would be another one associated with johto: stormspike the croconaw himself.

while your 'starter' pokemon are the iconic espeon and umbreon duo, in pokemon colosseum, you can actually get the 2nd evolution forms of the johto starters. this is HUGE news, because totodile is my starter of choice; i love the totodile family dearly. anyway, you save one of the johto starter evolutions in the early game, and the other two are available in the post-game. you can even snag the pokemon in a ball that isn't a pokeball!!! i ended up waiting to catch stormspike in the post-game so that i could catch him in a master ball! :D and something else that's really cool about the gamecube pokemon games is that many of the pokemon have unique designs compared to their sprite-based gba gen 3 game counterparts. in croconaw's case, you can see that illustrated here:

seeing the unique design had me sort of fixated on getting one, haha! i wasn't a stranger to rng manipulation, and i figured that i could probably mess around with that in order to get my shiny croconaw. manipulating colosseum's rng ended up being a huge task that required a lot of research on my part, but i managed to pull it off with surprising ease and caught my very own shiny croconaw from orre. stormspike had finally arrived! i decided to keep him as a croconaw in order to really highlight how he was the croconaw frome orre. i also think that a lot of the middle evolutions for the starter pokemon have a tendency to get overlooked, and i wanted to give croconaw the love it deserves!!!

stormspike accompanied syklemos the raikou during their shared ribbon mastery journey, and the duo from orre soon met laverath the manaphy in sinnoh. they achieved ribbon mastery together!

stormspike's title is the triumphant.