A quick disclaimer before I write this post: no, you're not seeing things. I went and changed this thread title after four and a half years for the sole purpose of not wanting the word "weirdest" to be written in caps lock. Such a monumental and revolutionary change, I know.
Looking back, 2019 me was a lot different than the me of today. At the time I still had a different style of posting on the forums reminiscent of the rest of my teenage years. I don't quite know how to explain this off the top of my head, but something about my posts from that first year or two on the Forums feels a bit... off. I mention this because I found one of my own posts and wanted to look back at what's happened and changed since then:
(My notifications weren't working right so I missed half of these until now, sorry)
Well I might as well share mine now. This is an example of that weird sequence of events I can't really explain. These, in my eyes, are much more interesting that weird individual moments. Let me take you the world of spinoff games. Trust me, you'll understand once I tell you what's going on here. This is kinda freaky.
So my first spinoff I had ever played growing up was the third game in the Pokémon Ranger series, being Guardian Signs. Not many people talk about it because they mostly prefer the first two games. Anyway, as crazy as this sounds, I've been able to trace multiple things in that game back to...myself? In other words, I'm convinced that somehow, I'm related to this game somehow.
"But bdt2002, how the heck does that make any sense? It's a freaking DS game." Questions like those are excellent questions. But just read this list of strange coincidences. At this point, there's so many it's honestly kinda creepy.
1. The male protagonist has the same name as me (I'm a guy)
2. The female protagonist just happens to have the same name as the season I was born within
3. In the anime special for the game he uses a Feraligatr as his go-to partner with the Ranger sign (Feraligatr is my all time favorite Pokémon)
4. The region the game takes place in (Oblivia) uses a resort style theme, a theme many friends of mine know I'm always a fan of
5. For some reason, a Pokémon I always hated growing up (Kingdra) is placed in very specific locations throughout the game
6. I probably missed something-
The main thing that's changed since then has been the onset of the Switch era of the core series lineup, excluding Let's Go's 2018 release of course. This on its own doesn't mean anything, but like many other fans, I found myself appreciating the older games more at this time as a result of the Nintendo Switch's shortcomings in spite of its massive financial success. For the sake of this post, it wasn't until the core series' perceived decline on the Switch that I really started getting nostalgic for a special list games that started it all for me from 2010 to 2014, the Pokémon Ranger trilogy chief among them. In my original post I said Guardian Signs was my first spin-off game, and while that's technically still true, it was also my first Pokémon game outright, and with the game's 10th anniversary landing in 2020, I decided I would dedicate that year to honoring how it brought me into the franchise and possibly the greater fanbase as a whole.
Fast forward one year to 2021, and things
immediately take a suspicious turn. I honestly didn't hate 2020 as much as most people I know, but 2021 was significantly worse on almost all fronts. I'd like to think I've been very fortunate to have a great life, and to my family's credit, my worst year was still better than some people's best. Something else worth noting too was that, thanks to Guardian Signs' international release happening seven months after its initial release in Japan (I live in North America), my 10th anniversary celebrations carried over into the new year as a result of this. During 2021 I was also playing through Alpha Sapphire at the time as a replacement for what was originally supposed to be a Pokémon Emerald nuzlocke attempt. The re-adjusted playthrough helped me get through an otherwise miserable year, but I wouldn't be making this post if something didn't come up during it. ORAS fans may remember the BuzzNav, more specifically that dude on the news who talks about things you've done in the game up to that point.
At one point, a news headlines mentioned "Summer, age 12" (if anyone's curious, I chose to play as the female protagonist in this run, naming her as such because of the Guardian Signs celebrations), something that caught my attention with the understanding knowing that ORAS Hoenn doesn't seem to take place at the same time (in year, that is) as the original games. If you somehow haven't figured this out yet between my username and my post details, some basic math can tell you that, assuming ORAS Hoenn takes place in 2014 instead of 1996- remember, Gen 3 and Gen 1 are contemporaneous- the ORAS version of Brendan and May were born in 2002 just like me. Okay, cool, but that doesn't mean anything... until you remember the Soaring feature being a direct reference... and you remember Brendan having a Latios and May having a Latias... and you remember that ORAS were still the newest games at the time of the Wii U Ranger ports- Sun & Moon wouldn't release for another five months, but oh? What's that? Sun & Moon just happens to also be in an island-based region with Legendaries guarding each island, has an emphasis on riding on Pokémon instead of HMs,
and it has a regional PokéDex size of exactly 301? What's next, you're going to put Pichu on the first Route of the first island?
Hey look, they did that too.
I'll end of my post here since this is getting extremely long (I don't blame you if you didn't want to read this whole thing), but I couldn't believe I missed all of these little details. The fact that both ORAS and SM were directed by the same person and the fact that there's already another spin-off reference in Alola, that being Gladion's battle theme, only increases the assumption probability that Shigeru Ohmori knew
exactly what he was doing, and by the grace of whatever you might believe in, the stars aligned perfectly in what was otherwise the hardest year of my life so far to help me learn to appreciate these 3DS games after they were on their way out. All of this because someone in the heavens above with a crazy sense of humor decided to make me the target of a bunch of coincidental references back-to-back-to-back.
) recently defeated Byron (
) in Pokémon Diamond Version. I had Kricketune use Sing in the hopes Bastiodon would hesitate to knock out Kricketune with Ancient Power. It worked better than I intended. Sing hit, so Bastiodon consumed its Chesto Berry, but it then used Rest twice, even though it had taken no damage yet. After Bastiodon was knocked out, I switched in Skorupi, which used Pin Missile to nullify Steelix's Sturdy Ability. Infernape then easily defeated it with Close Combat.
