Ooh a chance to revisit Pokemon!
Let’s Go Pikachu was the first game I played in Japanese, and my favorite Pokemon game is Gold/Silver/Crystal and the remakes are really good too
I also got the Pokemon Adventures manga which are a nice complement
AND JP Stadium 1 and 2 as well! It’s gonna be fun using the transfer pak. I don’t got a link cable, but I think I can transfer my gen 1 pokemon to Stadium 2, and then Stadium 2 to GSC? I don’t remember
If I really wanted to, I could even play the games inside the Stadium games using the transfer pak! But I don’t think I will because I remember it crashing a lot of the time
I’ll add that there’s a helpful site called Pokejisho, where you can type the names of Pokemon, items, moves, etc. in either English or Japanese, and it’ll display both of them side by side as well as a link to their articles
Also, maybe I’ll do trivia on Pokemon name origins as we go along, I love that stuff
And as for changing the battery, hmu if you got any questions! I’ve never had to do it for gen 1 but I’ve done it twice for gen 2 (but same process iirc) since those games are always keeping track of real time for the day and night system. You need 2 things, the first is that it’s manufactured with a CR2025 coin cell battery that you can find at a dollar store or wherever (and you can replace it with a much more common CR2032 that’ll fit and last longer) and the 2nd thing is a 3.8mm socket for removing the security bit and opening the cartridge. I recommend getting the tool because if you have it, you can also use it to make your N64 region free, it’s super simple and it’s the only tool you need, Nintendrew has a good video on it and then you can play Japanese N64 games
By the time we start, no. But I actually happen to be playing my first Pokémon game right now! Well, I played a little Pokémon here and there as a kid, but I didn’t have any Nintendo stuff, so it was mostly just watching my friends play. I have a GBA of my own now so I’ve been playing FireRed during my lunch break (unfortunately a bootleg that GameStop claimed was legit, but luckily it’s good quality).
Funny enough I’m using my English FireRed run for Irish practice. My Squirtle is named TURTAR (‘turtle’), Eevee is EABHLOID (éabhlóid ‘evolution’), etc.
Since I’m playing the Gen 3 remake in English, I think I’ll play Gen 1 in Japanese!
Shiritori run: evolving ゼニガメ to カメール means you have to drop メノクラゲ for ルージュラ
Jokes aside, this would be definitely be way too restrictive for a gen 1 game, but I wonder how it would go with newer games?
lol and look at what I found while trying to see if a shiritori pokemon challenge existed:
If I can find my copy of Let’s Go Eevee I’ll use that, otherwise I’ll acquire a version of LeafGreen. I played FireRed when I was a wee ankle biter, still have the cartride somewhere even.
my memory is bad so if the timeline is off here, sorry. i’ve spent years frying my brain with videogames and forgotten about how time works.
in the uk i am pretty sure the tv series came out long before the games were released. maybe a year or so? so me and all my friends were all a bunch of nerd kids really into the tv show without knowing that there was a game at all. you know we were nerds because we all had the same ash ketchum hat and thought it was the coolest thing.
technically the first game i played was a web game where i was searching for pokemon stuff on the internet and found that someone had basically remade pokemon red into a web game by taking screenshots of the game and using links to create a choose your own adventure style text adventure game. i think they only did it up to about the battle with brock, so 10 year old me had to keep restarting and doing viridian forest over and over and over.
when the actual games were released i got pokemon blue the day it came out and picked squirtle (the objectively best and coolest og starter). but nobody i knew had a link cable so we could never trade or battle. thats the one thing digimon had that made it king of the playground. you just slap those chunky boxes together and mash the buttons. no cable required.
pretty soon after that was the first time i went to japan and they had so much pokemon stuff that didn’t exist in the uk. i bought the pokemon tcg game for the gbc and it was unplayable because obviously it was all in japanese. and then i bought a pokemon tcg card catalogue even though i never collected the cards, just so i could look at the pictures and redraw them.
I was surprised to learn that this is true! The TV show aired in March 1999, the games didn’t come out until October. 
Wonder what that decision process looked like!
I was a bit too young to consciously remember the introduction of Pokemon, so for me that’s just something that “always existed” - with the added benefit that 7 year old me was able to get all those second hand pokemon cards from my slightly older neighbours after they grew out of it 
