Saying Hello and Other Introductory Stuff

Hello there! Welcome to the world of Pokémon! My name is Gator. People call me the Pokémon Professor. But that's enough quoting the opening of Red and Blue. I'm just a nerdy college student who happens to like Pokémon. I decided to make this blog to share my random thoughts on the series and see what other people think. I might make posts about other games from time to time, but it'll mostly be Pokémon related.

That all being said, I should probably start out with how I got into Pokémon. When I was about 7 years old, Pokémon was still relatively popular after its initial boom, but I didn't really pay much attention to it. It wasn't until I read The Official Pokémon Handbook that I started getting into it.

(image provided by Bulbapedia)

For some reason, I found the Pokédex entries that the book gave really interesting and entertaining. After that, I mostly watched the anime, since I didn't have a Game Boy at the time. As a result, I skipped the Generation I games entirely but was intimately familiar with Ash Ketchum's adventures in Kanto. In retrospect, it's a bit of a weird perspective.

(image provided by Bulbapedia)

It wasn't until my 9th birthday that I played the games for the first time. My big present that year was a Game Boy advance and Pokémon Crystal. From what I remember, I was attached to Squirtle at the time, so I picked Totodile because it was a fellow Water-type. Totodile has since become one of my favorite starters, but that's another story. I also played the game a bit clumsily because I wasn't sure what I was doing at first. To give you an idea, I thought that "super effective" and "not very effective" hits were random things like critical hits. But somehow, I was lucky enough to make it through the game and beat Red at the end of Mt. Silver.

Since then, I've played Sapphire, Ruby, FireRed, Diamond, HeartGold, and White. Out of those, I've only finished Sapphire, Diamond, and White - I tend to get distracted from finishing my games a lot. I've also played a few of the spinoff games, and out of those, the Ranger series is my favorite. I also want to try out Pokémon Puzzle League and Pokémon Snap sometime.

Well, I suppose that's enough for now. Next time, maybe I'll talk about what I think of the starters. I hope you enjoyed this blog, and remember: Gotta catch 'em all!