Pokémon Yellow livingdex: a time travel story

I recently decided to do a livingdex in Pokémon gen 1, a thing that surprisingly I hadn't done yet.

I wanted to have my livingdex on a complete save of Pokémon Yellow and so I landed on a route that I believe not many people would take, that I didn't know was possible before doing it and that made me discover new things about gen 1 as a consequence.

This route is characterized by the fact that is uses only 3 games and none of them need to start multiple save files.

Starting on Yellow means a few things:

• the starter Pikachu can't evolve and we can't catch another so we need another way to get Raichu
• Weedle, Kakuna, Beedrill, Ekans, Arbok, Meowth, Persian, Koffing, Weezing, Jynx, Electabuzz and Magmar are absent from this game
• I need to find a way to get all starter evolution stages, all fossils, all eeveelutions and both hitmons
• Mew is normally inaccessible
• Every other Pokémon is catchable or obtainable more or less easily in Yellow.

So, how did I solve these problems?

The Raichu problem, as well as the starters, eeveelutions and hitmons problems can all be solved with any gen 2 game, by using the time capsule mechanic that allows them to trade back with gen 1 games. By breeding we can easily obtain all Pokémon in an evolution line.

So the big remaining problems are the exclusive Pokémon, the second fossil and Mew.

Let's start with the exclusive Pokémon. Turns out that there is a single game that contains all of them: Crystal!

Pokémon up to Jynx are easily available in Johto, while Electabuzz and Magmar are in Kanto, respectively in Route 10 and Mt. Silver. Since doing all the Kanto gym leaders to unlock Mt. Silver is slow and boring, I instead save scummed to hatch a Magby from the odd egg obtained at the Pokémon daycare and just rushed to Route 10 after beating Lance for the Electabuzz.

Mew I just decided to do the glitch at Nugget Bridge and get it that way, it doesn't feel any less legitimate than cloning an event with PKHex, plus I can't get PKHex to run on Linux.

So that leaves me with a final missing Pokémon: the fossil I didn't choose at Mt. Moon. The game that has me covered this time is Pokémon Stadium: every time the player wins the final battle at the Gym Leader Castle, they obtain a random gift Pokémon between all three starters, the two exclusive fossils, Eevee and the two hitmons, which can then be transferred to a gen 1 game with the Transfer Pak.

Or I could play Red or Blue up to Cinnabar, which in the case of Blue conveniently is the place where Magmar is encounterable.

I wanted to try Stadium so I went for the Gym Leader Castle and it took a while, my team was not great into the final fight especially, but after a few attempts I got the Omanyte I needed to complete my set.

So yeah, that's the route, I think it took overall about 120 hours total to complete the livingdex and a bit more to train my team to level 100 by repeatedly rematching the Elite 4.

Here is the save: pokeyellow-livingdex.sav

And my diploma: