Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know by now that Pokémon Scarlet and Violet will be out this Friday. With new games come new Ribbons and a chance to get those Ribbons on your favorite Pokémon.
Or not.
Dexit is still A Thing That Exists, so a good number of Pokémon aren’t in the base games right now and that includes Golurk. So I’m probably forced to wait until DLC to transfer him over. Worse? When I do, his moveset will be altered and I’ll have to hope that I can re-tutor or re-teach him some of those moves.
But it gets worse because GameFreak fucking hates us or something: Ribbons are limited and one is an absolute gamble. Directly from Reddit:
“No, the other new ribbon is much more sinister. It’s called the Once-in-a-Lifetime Ribbon, and the description implies that whenever you send out a Pokemon on Surprise Trade, it has an “extremely infrequent” chance of spontaneously picking up this ribbon on the way to the recipient. There’s no hint at just how infrequent this is (possibly 5%? 1%? 1/256? 1/4096?), but the implication here is that in order to keep up with the concept of “full completion”, you’ll have to trade away your RM, over the Surprise Trade system in particular so you don’t get to arrange who you get matched up with (surprise trade is online-only, so you can’t simply play in offline mode when there’s only one other local player around), then once you find out who did end up being your trade partner, get in touch with them somehow and see if they’ll give you your Pokemon back. AND hope that the magically low odds paid off this time. If they didn’t, keep repeating the process all over again, like it’s a Battle Tower with nothing but Sheer Cold and Horn Drill spammers and no Sturdy protection available for you to use. And of course, if you experience just a single one of what could be hundreds of these trade cycles where it turns out you can’t contact the other trade partner, or if they don’t know you well enough to want to give it back, then you’ve lost the Pokemon forever.”
There is no way in hell I am doing that.
I’ve had my Riser for eleven years: I caught him in the Dragonspiral Tower, one of 90 Golett that I caught that night. It was April, it was night, the weather was terrible and Prime and I were waiting everything out in the den. I caught Riser in a Great Ball; his Nature was Brave and he had great stats so he was on my team immediately. Unova had no Ribbons but he got plenty in Kalos, Alola, Hoenn, and Galar. He’s not exactly a Ribbon Master but he’s damn close.
I will not trade him away for the chance of a new Ribbon. That’s ridiculous. What the hell is GameFreak fucking thinking?!
These games are going to make bank. I know that. But this is getting out of hand. Dexit was bad enough but this is insane.
Oh, and most of the towns are empty; you can’t go into the buildings unless it’s a Gym, a Center, or your house. That’s it.
I don’t know what to think anymore.
Iacon East 