ポケモンＹ
About
a handful of whims coalesced into a spur-of-the-moment decision to try playing pokemon y in japanese. i'm keeping a log of my adventure for both the japanese learning aspect and for revisiting pokemon y, which i haven't played in some years.
i have an amount of experience with japanese that enabled me to hack together fan translations with heavy use of lookups, but i'd really like to attain a better measure of raw reading ability so i can enjoy media in japanese without excessive lookups or mentally translating. i have never been able to stick with study books or websites or pre-made anki decks or what have you; i feel like my best bet is to brute force it by reading something i'm interested in and mine vocabulary from it... and this, too, i have tried many times, with doujinshi and children's novels and so on.
i'm hoping that pokemon y will work out since it's interactive, i already know the gist, and there's built-in goals and measures of progress. and i miss aegislash cuz it's cool as fuck.
History
i got pokemon y and a brand new red 2ds on their simultaneous release day in 2013. i was so excited that i opened the box in the car on the way home and started setting up. the 2ds seemed to get hung on one part, so i took my hands off the console to check one of the booklets for help, at which point the 2ds slid off my lap onto the floor of the car in front of me... screen side down, of course, right onto the handful of automechanic tools my father had left there. i got home and showed off my brand new console to my siblings with a deathly scratch just above the center of the top screen. this scratch just so happens to sit perfectly on top of where the item icon appears when browsing the bag inventory in pokemon y.
my 2ds has been through the wringer since then; knob entirely detached and lost to the tribulations of smash 4 (i played fast characters), stylus so worn it doesn't stay in the slot anymore, lights covered by electrical tape, battery replaced after it stopped holding a charge and started swelling. it looks like a 20 dollar ebay listing some youtuber would pick up for a restoration project.
fast forward 11 years, and i was struck with a bolt of motivation to try playing a game in japanese to get back on my woefully unsuccessful self-study grind. i figured now was the time to finally try installing custom firmware on my now-old consoles so i could get japanese games easily. i'd wanted to hack my beautiful pokeball 2ds xl, but i'd mistakenly ordered a full size sd card, thinking it'd work for both consoles, but the xl only takes micro... i didn't really have any other use for a 128gb full size sd card and i wasn't going to waste the weekend waiting for an order of a micro, so i settled for the old beaten door wedge, taking its more ergonomic shape as a silver lining for my hands, even if my thumb would be paying for the raw stub beneath the missing knob.
after lasting less than 10 minutes in a kanji learning game targeted towards japanese elementary schoolers, i looked into which pokemon games were most suitable for learning japanese (super thorough review video here) and landed on pokemon xy as my personal choice. i still have my original cartridges for y as well as x (my brother's copy, relinquished out of boredom to my living pokedex quest at the time) but i'm super precious about my original saves, so i was glad to have gone through the hacking effort to get a digital copy to keep separately. since i'd played x more recently, i decided to go back to y, and it struck me how i'd come all the way back to 2013, old disfigured 2ds and all.
here's my original save, untouched since 2017:
Materials
sources for everything involved in the making of this page.
