I had a Gameboy Advance when I was a kid, but I did not actually play Pokemon on it (I was a much bigger fan of animal related games such as Sims Pets or Pocket Dogs, also Mario games)! Instead my first memories of the Pokemon games came from watching older kids play Pokemon Stadium on GameCube while my mom exercized at the gym, or watching my classmates play multiplayer with their Game Link Cables! It wasn't until I was in middle school that I was able to save up enough money to buy a new DSi and my own copy of Pokemon Black that I was finally able to play the games myself!

I totally fell in love with it. I loved collecting and categorizing all of my pokemon - I named almost every single one, usually after my favorite book characters at the time. I'm not sure I ever actually defeated the Elite Four; I just spent hours creeping all over the region, battling and catching random pokemon. I liked the story a lot too; something about the character N - who was isolated and resonated more with Pokemon than other people - really struck close to home for me. I remember being younger and particularly struck by the sight of his room, the bright childish colors and toys, it felt lonely in a very familiar way.

Eventually I was able to upgrade to a 2DS and got myself copies of Pokemon X and Pokemon Moon - both of which I did actually finish!

Every once in a while I consider going out to get the rest of the pairs - White, Y, Sun, etc. but so far I have not! I do not have a lot of money LOL, and I'm content enough to just keep retreading the same ground in the games I already have. The only game I would maybe go out of my way to get would be Pokemon Black 2; but from my meager searches it seems surprisingly difficult to get your hands on? Or maybe I'm just bad at shopping for anything besides secondhand books and stuffed animals lol. As for the newer games though, not only do I not have the money to buy a Switch, but I'm also kind of sick of the unrelenting pace of new games that feature kind of shoddy content :/ so I will probably not invest in most of it lol, but I did have some good fun playing Pokemon GO for a while when I was in college :)

IDK!! I'm not very good at strategizing; I've always been a particularly brute force player in video games because I tend to forget about things like TMs and items because they aren't right in front of my face :P But I don't mind; I just like being able to go around and collect goofy little dudes, it's fun! I think the only thing that keeps me from playing more is that the sudden cuts that accompany random encounters tends to upset me when I'm feeling overstimulated lol; but a recent goal of mine has been to go through and do my best to get absolute completion in all 3 Pokedexes :D I'm not very far into this journey, but it's been fun anyway - think it might also be neat to update progress on that here, so keep an eye out for that if you want!