back in 2020, right on the day of pokemon's anniversary (february 27th) my pokemon platinum cartridge that i had ordered off of ebay came in the mail. i had bought one to replace the one i had as a child since it's been lost for years. i was immediately emotionally struck by the following events that transpired while checking out the save file left on it by the previous owner. you can tell from how dramatically i wrote these tweets lmao

in the end, i decided to keep neverhappy in gen 4 despite by promise, due to it feeling like... her home? if that makes sense. at the time, a huge reason i had bought pokemon platinum was to finish up my other ribbon masters, and i figured that i would bring her along, but it feels wrong to remove her from the place she's spent years of her life in and knows so intimately... so i decided she would stay in gen 4.

after this, as we all know, 2020 went to hell and i ended up drifting away from my ribbon master challenge to work on other various things in gens 3/4, and i actually didn't play through platinum and finish it until january 2021. it occured to me after i beat the game that the first anniversary of rescuing neverhappy, and the 25th anniversary of the franchise, was coming up in a month... and i figured what better way to celebrate that anniversary than to ribbon master her, essentially clear every challenge she possibly could in her home generation? so, that's what i set out to do.