Transferring the Hoenn living Pokédex in Pokémon HOME

Note: The generations are completed out of order.

Completing the living Pokédex for Generation III: Hoenn

The Hoenn region introduced 135 new Pokémon, and the regional Dex contains 201 Pokémon, which was a mix of Pokémon from Generation I, II, and III. Obviously, as the first two generations take care of Kanto and Johto Pokémon, the focus for Generation 3 is going to be 135 Hoenn Pokémon.

I had a few choices for this. There are 5 games that take place in the Hoenn region. Released in 2002 (2003 in the US), Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire introduced the Hoenn region, and started the third generation of Pokémon.

Following Ruby and Sapphire, Pokémon Emerald was released in 2004 (2005 in the US), which brought improvements to the engine, and revamped the story to incorporate the entire weather trio and both Team Magma and Aqua.

Finally, the last games in the Hoenn region are Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, released in 2014 on the 3DS. Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire (ORAS) are remakes of the original Ruby and Sapphire, and feature multiple changes from the original games.

Once again, due to my masochistic tendencies, I decided on Pokémon Ruby, and well, Pokémon Sapphire due version differences. Yes, this meant that I would have to catch, evolve, and trade all the Pokémon on the Gameboy Advance, then transfer them up to Generation IV, then up to Generation V, then into Bank, where I can finally migrate them over to Pokémon HOME, but I guess it's not so bad 'cause I get blasted with nostalgia, so I guess that's a positive? Anyways, I pulled out my Pokémon RS cartridges, put on the new Joji album, and started my journeys.

There were a few ways I could have accomplished completing the living Dex. Method 1 is catching Pokémon as the story progresses, and grind evolutions during/after the story. Method 2 is speedrunning the whole story, and catching all the Pokémon after clearing the Hall of Fame. I chose Method 1 for no particular reason; it just seemed like a smarter way to work.

I'm going to spare most of the details, but I ended up clearing the Hall of Fame on Pokémon Ruby with an in-game clock of 45 hours and 49 minutes. 

These older games are not as fast as I remember them to be, but I think that is also partially due to playing on emulators for so long. Throughout the story, I caught every single Pokémon I could find, and caught multiples of the same species to evolve later. What I noticed is that I would be running out of Pokéballs. Without being able to pray for critical captures, I just had to hope I got lucky.

It took about 3 days to complete, I started around 10:30 PM on Thursday, September 24th, and finished Sunday, September 27th. Regarding version exclusives, I didn't actually play through both games twice, but rather I played through Ruby, and transferred any exclusives from my already completed save file from Sapphire. In my opinion, the hardest part wasn't even over yet. I spent an additional day trying to figure out how to get my Gameboy Advance hooked up to my Wii to get a Jirachi from the Colosseum Bonus Disk. Spoiler alert: neither my Wii nor Gameboy Advance wanted to play nice with me, so I had to resort to a dirtier method. Now, in all ways, this is technically legal, but it does involve the usage of Emulators. All the screenshots of Pokémon Ruby so far have been taken on a DS with a capture built in, but honestly, I think going forward (in the future), I'm going to be using an emulator, as these units are NOT cheap, and I am not trying to break this almost impossible to find hardware.

Anyways, to obtain Jirachi, I had to gather a few things. I had to obtain a rom for Pokémon Ruby, my save file, and a rom for the Pokémon Colosseum Bonus Disk. As mentioned before, I had tried to do this on my Wii, meaning I do own these games legally. Owning the roms for these games are legal, as long as I am not distributing these roms on the internet. On that note, I obtained the Bonus Disk rom, and dumped my own rom and save file for Pokémon Ruby. I used the GBA Backup Tool for DS flashcarts to do so.

Once all that was done, I used VBA-M and Dolphin to initiate a link between Pokémon Ruby and the Colosseum Bonus Disk. 

It took a little trial and error, but following this guide helped me legally obtain a Generation III Jirachi. This is legal in Pokémon Bank and Pokémon HOME.

I also attempted to use this rom to obtain a Deoxys, but I was not able to obtain a legal Generation III Deoxys as neither the Aurora Ticket Distribution rom nor the Doel Deoxys Distribution rom would work with any of my GBA games, so I gave up and decided I'll get a Generation III Deoxys when I get access to a GBA flashcart.

Update: I got access to a GBA flashcart, and I will be showing a demonstration of the various leaked distribution roms on real hardwire.

Now, the worst part about this entire process: migrating up the Generational ladder. Starting with Generation IV, I made the first of many mistakes, I used Pokémon Pearl to transfer up without realizing the 24 hour wait time between migrations. 

After the first migration, I realized I had to switch over the Pokémon SoulSilver, but whatever, the migration to Generation IV took about 9 hours or so. The second mistake I made was choosing Pokémon Black over the sequels, but I'll get back to that in a bit. The next step in the process was moving up to Generation V with the abysmal Poké Transfer Lab minigame. Pal Park was a strange concept to begin with, but the Transfer minigame was genuinely making me question my sanity at this point. 

The transfer from Generation IV to Generation V took me a whopping 19 hours with obviously needed mental breaks in between, as by this point, I was losing my grasp on reality.

Here's why choosing the original games was a poor choice. I'm pretty sure I chose these games because my copies of Black 2 and White 2 don't currently have save files in them, but I wish I hadn't made the choice to use Pokémon Black. Box management in Pokémon Black is genuinely awful. The ability to select multiple Pokémon at once was a feature that was brought back in the sequels, but was missing in the first games, meaning that moving Pokémon from one box to the Transport box proved to be quite the tedious task. 

Having to individually move each Pokémon 1 by 1 for 134 Pokémon made my thumb cramp, and I had the biggest sigh of relief once I realized that I finally moved these insignificant bytes of information one generation higher.

The hard part was finally over, the Hoenn living Dex was just a few steps away from "HOME" but I am dreading my entire existence at the time of writing this as I am going to have to do a portion of this process for the Sinnoh regional dex, but i'll be sure to use Black 2 for Sinnoh though; I do NOT want to feel pain like that again.

The final step was obtaining the Pokémon HOME transfer code, and completing the final migration from Pokémon Bank, and I'm done. My entire Hoenn living dex is in Pokémon HOME.