Written 2024/1/19
It occurred to me at some point that my save from Easter 2010 was extremely remarkable for having lasted as long as it has.
April 4th was exactly three weeks after the North American release of HeartGold and SoulSilver.
For the sake of completeness, this was about eight months after the Japanese release and just after a week from the Australian and European releases.
The number of saves from this time that are still intact, I imagine, were severely reduced by the copies of the games they were tied to being damaged,
broken, lost, stolen, sold, given away, passed down to a sibling, or just overwritten by the original owner to start a new journey.
Personally, mine survived being lost once and being taken over by my sister.
I don't remember the exacts of how I lost it.
I think I was under the impression that it was misplaced somewhere, then it turned up and got returned to me after an amount of weeks or months.
Surviving the sibling wasn't an insignificant task either.
There was one point where I lost my save in Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story because she had overwritten or erased it.
It's been well over a decade since that happened and I've still never played the game past the day I discovered the save was gone.
I should do that at some point. I remember enjoying it.
There's a chance that she remembered what happened and it influenced her decision to continue my SoulSilver save instead of erasing it.
In a way, losing that Mario and Luigi save may have been an advance for ensuring that my SoulSilver save would make it.
If I was in a position where I had to choose which of the two would see the future, I wouldn't have hesitated to sacrifice the Bowser's Inside Story save.
Weird speculation aside, my save from 2010 managed to stick around.
In March of 2021, I would get my hands on a DSi that I then modded and used to back up that save.
I actually bought it just to have the DSi that was in that excellent shade of blue and to get it connected to Sudomemo, but that was a nice bonus.
After a month short of 11 years, there was finally a backup of my beloved save and all of the Pokemon within it.
At that point, it had been so long since I played it that I remembered exactly three Pokemon.
Yes, the three I copied from that save to transplant into the 2023 save were the ones I chose for exactly this reason.
It hurts a little to know that of these three, I only retained the names of two of them.
Unfortunately, I could not remember what I had named my Togepi/Togetic by 2021.
My still having the save meant I got to load it and find Tops,
who was basically responsible for my favorite Pokemon becoming Togetic several years after I stopped playing the game.
He had been evolved into a Togekiss at some point and there's no chance I could have done it.
I didn't know that Togekiss even existed until many years later and I never would have figured out what stone to use to make the evolution happened.
Looking up how to make Togetic evolve isn't realistic either since I never would have known to look in the first place.
I prefer the design of Togetic to that of Togekiss, but I don't mind that Tops had been evolved.
I can't really think of how else to put it other than just saying "I'm so glad I still have this."
Sure, the only things I really get from it are sentimental value and exactly three Pokemon,
but does anyone really need any better reason for a 512K block of bytes to feel special and worth keeping throughout the years?
Oh, there are also the boxes full of random Pokemon that were caught and have location and catch date information attached to them
that I can use to reconstruct parts of what happened with my original save over a decade after the fact.
I've actually done a good chunk of that as of this writing,
but I can already guarantee that the final product from that effort won't make it into this... journal series(?) unless it's in an abridged form.