When Pokemon first entered the scene the game challenged us to “catch ‘em all,” a truly arduous task that some of us actually managed to accomplish back in Generation 1. Now were on Generation six and there’s about 700 of the little buggers clogging up my storage boxes. Sadly they were unable to allow people to transfer Pokemon from the first two generations so starting with Generation Three (Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald) catching ‘em all required the purchase of the two Gamecube games as well as waiting for FireRed and LeafGreen. What I’m trying to say is it was a big pain in the butt to become a Pokemon master and I’m not too keen on doing it again! So when Pokemon Bank was announced I was thrilled that I could bring in my old Pokemon crew to X and Y and see them in glorious 3D, and so I can breed them with pandas. For some reason I once again allowed myself to be blinded with optimism and forgot that the true meaning of Pokemon isn’t “Pocket Monsters,” its “tedium.”

Pokemon Bank allows you to store about 3000 Pokemon in an app for your 3DS. It can draw them instantly from both this generation and the previous (Black, White, Black 2, White 2, HeartGold, SoulSilver). The first month is free then they charge 5 dollars (or Pounds for those of you across the pond) PER YEAR. That’s pretty much the gist of it, all in all it’s a pretty damn handy service if you are a long time player of the series and or like to breed a boatload of Pokemon for whatever purpose. And five bucks a year isn’t an outrageous amount of money.

 

So here’s a run down of the problems. Pokemon has long been notorious for adding slow, clunky, and tedious system of doing things. Let me run you through the transportation process I’ve done since I’m drawing Pokemon from as far back as I possibly can:

 

• Gen 3 to Gen 4

The original DS could hold both a GBA game and a DS game at the same time. With this you could take out 6 Pokemon at a time and send them to a special “Safari-Zone-esque” park where you had to first track down the Pokemon then catch them all over again albeit without a fight. It was time consuming and got old real fast.

 

• Gen 4 to Gen 5

Armed with 2 DS’s you once again sent Pokemon over in waves of 6 to the new generation where you have to catch them again but this time in a target practice mini-game using the stylus. Personally I hate motion controls/touch screen crap partially because the puny stylus irritates my big, meaty hands and doing this minigame too long makes my hand feel goofy. Especially when I have 17 full boxes to move 6 Pokemon at a time. You can fail the minigame too but you’d have to be pretty crappy. What is good about it, thought, is that it at least has the decency to ask you if you want to send more instead of kicking you out and making you go back again. I was able to move about 10 boxes in 3 hours with several breaks.

 

• Gen 5 to Pokemon Bank

Pokemon Bank actually comes in 2 parts, one is the bank and the other is a separate app called Pokemon Transfer. Transfer takes the entire contents of your first box of storage in your Gen 5 game and moves it to the Bank. In order to move another box you have to go into the bank app, move the transferred box into the bank, and then go back to your Gen 5 game and move Pokemon ONE AT A TIME to box 1 to move them next. While this is doable and arguably faster than doing it 6 at a time with a minigame, this is still pretty annoying. I can’t for the life of me figure out why they do this. Maybe its to maintain the more relaxed pace and image that the Pokemon games present? Or maybe its done to extend the game play through lack of Intuitiveness. OR some third reason that I can’t figure out.

Bottom line: Pokemon Bank is worth it if you got a ton of Pokemon to move through the generations or just that you can’t stop catching them in X and Y. I have a feeling that you already know for yourself if this is a service you’ll use. I give it my recommendation but for the love of all that is holy, Nintendo, would you PLEASE learn to streamline things!

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