December 26th: When Worlds Collide

- Gemini was magically transported into the box to temporarily free up a party slot
> Magic: TOPS [M] (Lv. 56 Togekiss)
- Beat Lance, got inducted into the Hall of Fame. Credit sequence played and the game reset.
- When going to load the save up again, a message popped up saying it was corrupted and that the previous one had to be loaded. Loading puts me back with Karen. Weird.

- YouTube Screen Recordings -

For how short the log part of this is, there's a lot to say here. Starting with the magic part, when I was talking about "old friends", I really meant it. I never finished SoulSilver, but my sister picked up my save from where I left off and finished it. That save survived long enough for me to eventually make a backup of it. With the save editor, I was able to open my original 2010 save, export all of the information about any particular Pokemon, then use those to add exact duplicates to my new 2023 save. I exercised restraint in my wielding of unlimited power and only used it to move Gemini to the box, clone one of my original 'mons into the party, and clone two more into a different box.

For the Lance fight, I elected to hack in Tops, which hatched from an egg to become my first Togepi. I evolved it to a Togetic, but didn't know that Togekiss existed. That happened after I put the save down. Given his level, moveset, and the fact that he's from the same species line as Gemini, I figured switching him in and temporarily benching Gemini would be the best way to keep the fight challenging but make it actually possible to beat. I'll save talking about the other two for a different time, likely if and when I bring them out to be used in a fight.

Booting up the game for the first time after applying the change actually got me excited. Not only did my tomfuckery not kill the save (or so I thought), but I got to see one of my old favorites in this new save. I honestly wasn't expecting to feel that strongly about it. I guess it had something to do with looking at the summary for Tops and seeing the original nickname, trainer name, and date from a save that is older now than I was when I started it being magically copied to this new save with very little effort. It feels like a small but not entirely insignificant miracle.

Getting into the fight, it was still particularly hairy. Especially when the Aerodactyl made the executive decision to land two critical Rock Slides back-to-back, taking out Tops with the first one and Ramelia with the second one after I basically sacrificed her to heal up Peep. Also, Lance has three Dragonites and a Charizard. I don't know why I thought it was four Dragonites. Probably something I misheard from somewhere else.

After getting to the part where the team and I got the Hall of Fame entry, I didn't really know how to feel. This was the first time I had seen this, which after all this time was surprising because I didn't know what to expect. I actually really like how they showcase the team with the little cinematics for each of the Pokemon in the party. It even shows the original trainer and how the Pokemon was obtained. Yes game, Tops was absolutely obtained in a link trade. Actually, he's probably what I'm most conflicted about. I feel bad for benching Gemini and denying him the spot just because I didn't know how prepared to be for the Elite Four. It's made worse by the fact that I keep doing it to him. I feel the same way about Gorb. Worse actually, because I keep using him to gimmick fights with Curse. On the other hand, having one member of the party be one of my favorites from my original playthrough with further opportunities to bring him and two other favorites along to finally finish this game after all this time is great.

I watched the whole credit sequence without even thinking about skipping it. I was just taking it in and wrapping my head around how to feel about what just happened. It was a nice credit sequence. I got up to do something after I saw that the game had just reset and was going through the title sequence. I came back to an unexpected and unwelcome message. "The save file is corrupted. The previous save file will be loaded." Loading the game brought me back to after I had beaten Karen.

I dug into the save with PKHeX again to see if I could figure out what had gone wrong. I started with an option to verify checksums and almost immediately got a "large block checksum is invalid" message. A quick search led me to a GitHub issue about HG/SS doing pretty much exactly what happened to me. Modifying PC box content, loading up, saving once later, trying to load it after that, then having the data be flagged as corrupt. Apparently, this just happens when doing this with PKHeX on SoulSilver and the workaround seems to be loading the game up after modifying it and repeatedly saving. From what I read, it sounds like twice should be good enough, but maybe doing it at least six times will be good for completely ensuring that the changes actually stick. At least it's not beyond saving, and even if it was, I still have the backup.

I guess the next steps are to load the game up again, save a bunch, scrape by the Lance fight again, then do whatever might happen to come next. Lance was cheating by having too many Pokemon with much higher levels than mine, so I cheated by switching out one of my party Pokemon with a different one using a save editor. I'll take this unexpected setback as Lance's way of cheating to counteract my cheating against his cheating, even though he wasn't really cheating. That, or maybe the first successful boss fight against him was an illusion devised by Satan and I need to beat him a second time for the true ending.