X: In ancient literature, there is a record of a Gyarados that razed a village when violence flared.

If there was one thing that was going to bring me back to Pokémon, it was 3D.

I actually tried to explain to people who had never played Pokémon how cool X and Y were. “No, see,” I said, “the original games were nothing more than sprites. Drawings on a computer screen. After a couple years they were animated, and they got better over time, but it was nothing like this.”

Nothing, nothing like this.

They didn’t really get it, of course. I don’t think you truly can understand how incredible X and Y were unless you played the earlier games in the series. By the time Black 2 and White 2 rolled around, the spritework was really impressive, but — Pokémon was always cooler in 3D. It had been that way since Pokémon Stadium, in 1998. Pokémon Snap was in practice nothing more than a simple rail shooter disguised as a camera game, but it had Pokémon in 3D and it was the coolest thing ever.

Needless to say, I got Pokémon X the day it came out. (In lieu of color preference, I went with “which legendary looked cooler,” as all good Pokémon choices should go.) And, of course, I had to raise one of my favorite Pokémon.

Because X didn’t just have 3D. It had Mega Evolution.

In the weeks and months leading up to the release of X and Y, there was much discussion of this new feature. Surely it was just a rip-off of Digimon. Pokémon was out of ideas. You name it, someone was saying it. And yet for all the criticism, one thing was certain: more and more Pokémon were getting new Mega Evolution designs, completely transforming how they looked and handled during battle. Most of them were super cool. (Or... super questionable.)

Gyarados, of course, was one of the Pokémon chosen to receive a Mega Evolution. It fell... well, it fell somewhere in the middle. The first time I saw Mega Gyarados, I honestly wasn’t sure what I was looking at. So Gyarados was still a fish, except with giant fins? And thicker? Gyarados, buddy, I’m not sure how this works out as a positive for you.

More importantly, why in the world was Mega Gyarados a Dark-type, and not a Dragon?

Gyarados’s affinity with the Dragon-type hadn’t decreased at all over the years — to the contrary, it had been able to learn more and more Dragon-type moves. By the sixth generation it learned three Dragon-type moves by level-up (Dragon Rage, Twister, and Dragon Dance) and could learn more via move tutors and TMs. And, of course, it still looked like a dragon. It was still inspired by a dragon. Given the prime opportunity to make it one — to finally leap over the dragon’s gate — well, why didn’t it?

Now, full disclosure, I do think it was a huge misstep by the developers to not make Gyarados a Dragon-type. That being said, I can make a few guesses as to why it ended up a Dark-type, to the point that I’m perfectly fine with it.

Y: Rarely seen in the wild. Huge and vicious, it is capable of destroying entire cities in a rage.

The first guess is that Gyarados has been associated with negative behavior since its very first Pokédex entry. The dex entry used in Y (above) is the same as the original entry in Red and Blue. Gyarados is an incredibly powerful, violent Pokémon. It is not a kind, cuddly Pokémon. It is feared by humans. It is dangerous. These are all traits typically associated with Dark-type Pokémon, and Gyarados’s association with these traits has been reinforced from the very beginning.

The second is that Water/Dragon is a type-combination weak only to Fairy and Dragon. Put that on top of Mega Gyarados’s incredible stats and you have a beast of a Pokémon. One of the most important parts of Pokémon is balance. The Fairy-type was introduced largely because Dragon-types needed a good counter. Gyarados is a powerful Pokémon that’s strongly hampered by its 4x weakness to Electric-type moves; the addition of the Dark-type gives it various weaknesses to offset that power instead of a strong weakness to one thing.

Using that reasoning, I can make my peace with Mega Gyarados being a Dark-type. It helps, too, that Mega Gyarados can finally take advantage of the Dark-type moves Gyarados has learned for many generations previous and wreck shop with them.

With all of this in mind, it should come as no surprise that I raised a Gyarados of my own in X. (That, and the fact that I clearly have a Gyarados problem.)

You can see that I never got around to replacing Surf with anything else on Taihen, either. Such is the fate of most Gyaradoses I raise, it seems. Gyarados also doesn’t get Crunch until OR/AS, so Bite was the best Dark-type option. Ice Fang is also a really, really great move for Gyarados; it’s a relief after so many years of using Ice Beam and getting subpar results thanks to Gyarados’s poor Special Attack.

I really feel like the sixth generation is where Gyarados finally came into its own. It’s not that Gyarados wasn’t a good Pokémon before this generation; it’s been a great Pokémon for a long time. But between the options given by Mega Evolution and its revised moveset, Gyarados was finally able to truly take advantage of its excellent physical Attack and largely disregard its Special Attack except with high-damage moves like Hydro Pump and Hyper Beam. Even then, there are far better options to take.

What’s more, Taihen was a fun Gyarados to raise because for the first time, I could actually interact with him. Out of all the new features in X and Y (and there are a ton), my favorite is Pokémon Amie, which lets you play with, pet, and feed your Pokémon. There’s honestly nothing like trying to pet your blank-eyed Magikarp, evolving it, and finding yourself faced with a Gyarados that’s simply so huge it barely fits on the screen. (A tip: Gyarados is fine with belly rubs, but if you try to feed it, it’ll move its head down to the touch screen. Just don’t touch the spikes on the head.) And then you get to throw balls of yarn at it and feed it berries. It doesn’t get any better than that.

X and Y reignited my waning interest in Pokémon and made me love a game series that had started to fade into my childhood. If it hadn’t been for all its new features, I may never have gotten back into the series. For that, I’m very thankful, and I’m all the more reassured that Pokémon is here to stay in my life.

And then, of course, the Hoenn games got remade.

Omega Ruby: When Magikarp evolves into Gyarados, its brain cells undergo a structural transformation. It is said that this transformation is to blame for this Pokémon's wildly violent nature.

Remakes of the Hoenn games were rumored for years, considered that the first two generations had already been remade, and I myself considered it an inevitability, especially with all the hints in X and Y. But even knowing all that didn’t prepare me for the flood of emotion that overcame me when I finally had Omega Ruby in my hands.

Playing Omega Ruby was like talking a long, extended stroll down memory lane. I did my best to recapture the original experience — I chose the boy character, I used the same name, and I set off with a Torchic I knew I would raise into a Blaziken. And it wasn’t long before I had the rest of my original team assembled: Manectric, Swellow, Breloom, and, of course, Gyarados.

I didn’t try to recreate my original Gyarados. That wasn't the point. What did matter was the experience. I wanted to have the same team of Pokémon, but I knew I would never have the exact same playthrough again. My original playthrough of Ruby was special to me, and my Omega Ruby playthrough was special, but they were never going to be the same. They were different games, played at different times in my life. I wanted different things out of Pokémon. When I was a kid, I didn’t care about the nuances of Pokémon battling. I just wanted to have fun and run around. As an adult, I wanted to teach all my Pokémon the best moves, and get the most out of it.

You can see above that I haven’t trained this Gyarados to level 100 the way I did the original. I would like to, of course, and I likely will spend the time to do so, sooner or later, as I travel around to fill my Hoenn Pokédex. It’ll be a lot easier in Omega Ruby than it ever was in Ruby. But that won’t change that it’s fun.

Alpha Sapphire: Once Gyarados goes on a rampage, its ferociously violent blood doesn't calm until it has burned everything down. There are records of this Pokémon's rampages lasting a whole month.

When I completed the main story of Omega Ruby, I felt as if I’d come full circle in my experience as a Pokémon trainer. I had been a kid trainer heading out into the world to catch my first Pokémon, and I had come back years later to look at the world with the experienced eyes of an adult. I thought to myself, “If I never play another Pokémon game, that’s all right. That was all I needed.” It was perhaps the most satisfied I had ever been upon finishing a game.

But the Pokémon series is continuing on. Sun and Moon are due to release in 2016, and I know I’m going to buy them. To me, it feels as though Omega Ruby was the end of one journey, but that many more adventures are yet to come.

You might wonder: after all the times I’ve raised a Gyarados, after all the times I’ve had it as a part of my team and taken it through the gym circuit and battled against the Elite Four — will I do it again, in future generations? Aren’t I tired of raising Magikarp to Level 20?

To which I answer: you really think I’m going to stop now?

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