PaigeFTW: A Tourney Lost
My boyfriend hasn’t played a Pokemon game since Generation IV because he somehow lost his Nintendo DS on the bus while in high school, so in an effort to remedy his glaring deficiencies, I loaned him an old DS system and Pokemon Black last weekend.
“You can just delete my file,” I said.
“What? Are you sure? You don’t want to trade them to another game and save them?” he asked.
After all these years — really, 20 years of Pokemon — I have only really been attached to two teams. My Pokemon Silver crew was the only team I ever got to level 100. It took 200 hours, so I was understandably aggrieved when the cartridge battery died and erased my data.
The other team is from Pokemon Pearl, though they now live in my Pokemon White 2 game. Resting comfortably at level 60, they are the only team I’ve ever attempted to play competitively with — in any game, ever.
Eight years ago, I was still in high school and Play N Trade — a would-be GameStop competitor — still had a small presence in Mililani. One of my friends worked there and invited me to compete in their Pokemon tournament.
My team was a good, solid team — Infernape, Staraptor and Luxray. I thought, hey, I can’t do that badly, can I?
My first opponent was a middle-school kid who sadly had no chance against me, even if we basically had the exact same team.
My second opponent was one of my classmates — a kid who, you know, ended up going to Harvard and majoring in astrophysics. What I’m saying is that this guy was good at math and serious about everything, and he did EV training. I did not.
It was a harsh but valuable lesson that the world of competitive gaming was a far cry from being able to trash all your friends. It was a defeat that truly stung; a revelation that being good at something isn’t always a fun process.
But that team that got me there — what can I say, we learned that lesson together. I shall not abandon them. And so when my boyfriend eventually gets battle-ready, we shall face him, together.
