It was the evening of Wednesday 12th February 2025. An ordinary, middle-of-the-week, spaghetti-bolognese-for-dinner kind of evening. And I decided it’d be a good idea to start a Pokémon living dex
If you’re unfamiliar, a Pokémon living dex is a collect 'em all challenge where you catch one of every Pokémon across the various video games, and store them in Pokémon Home (it’s iCloud but for Pokémon). As of right now, there are 1025 Pokémon in the Pokédex, and there are variations of the living dex to make this challenge more manageable or more difficult. I’m going for a living form dex which means storing one of every Pokémon, including
- Regional variants - Original & Alolan Geodude
- Pre-evolutions - Bulbasaur & Ivysaur & Venusaur
- Form variants - all 28 Unown variants (A-Z and ! and ?)
- Gender variants - male & female Gyarados (male has blue whiskers, female has white) This means that instead of collecting 1025 Pokémon, I’ve got to collect 1394
I am aware that some of these Pokémon are very difficult to collect, and some are virtually impossible. My theory is though that there’s so many Pokémon to catch, that this is going to take me a while. And in that time, more new games will be released with increasingly broader lists of Pokémon available to catch. Therefore, as time goes on, it’ll get easier to collect the currently difficult-to-collect Pokémon.
I don’t have a plan of attack, nor do I have a deadline, but I do have a spreadsheet. I’m using this spreadsheet from Austin John Plays and Pokéjungle. You can view my copy of the spreadsheet here, if you want to see how my progress is going. Head to the 'LivingForm' sheet. Column J is what you want to look at; 1 means I haven’t stored it, 0 means I have, x means I’ve got a pre-evolution, just need to evolve it
I’m also keeping track of my progress in my Arcade
Am I underestimating how difficult this challenge is going to be? Probably. Am I going to get distracted by something else in a few weeks time and then forget all about this? Almost definitely. Am I going to have a good time along the way anyway? I bloody well hope so