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.

Every Pokémon fan has a favorite game. Mine is Ruby.

As a kid, I only owned handheld gaming systems, never consoles. The video games I played, then, were limited to those that came out for those systems. There are a number of games that came out on the Gameboy Advance I fell in love with, several of which shaped my feelings about video games for years and years to come, but the one that I played more than any other was Pokémon Ruby.

Admittedly, my first playthrough didn’t go all that well. Thrilled as I was to get to play a girl character again, I didn’t like the character sprite for her at all. While the girl sprite for Crystal had been super cute (I loved her hair), I just couldn’t make myself like the girl sprite in the new games. So, around the time I reached Mauville, I traded my Pokémon team to my brother, then got him to trade them to my restarted save, a male trainer named Ichidou.

Among those was my Gyarados.

As a traded Pokémon, Gyarados grew quickly, if somewhat unruly. By now, I understood the basic mechanics of Pokémon somewhat better, and had assembled a well-rounded team; Gyarados was joined by my starter, Blaziken, along with a Manectric, Swellow, and a Breloom. As best I recall, the last slot tended to be something of a rotating position, and while I can no longer go back that far in my Hall of Fame records (it only keeps the last 50 in the PC), I think my first win was with Groudon on the team. I feel somewhat bad for the Elite Four.

There was something about Ruby that had captured my interest that the previous games hadn’t. I’d taken a stab at completing my Pokédex in Crystal, but I’d never gotten further than 225 or so out of the 251 needed. In Ruby’s modified dex, you only had to catch 200 Pokémon. That was doable, I thought.

So I set out to fill my Pokédex. I scoured Hoenn for every Pokémon I needed, painstakingly raising one after another to the levels required to evolve them. I went through the Elite Four dozens upon dozens of times to raise the levels of some Pokémon, and in so doing, my main team — by then, only Blaziken, Manectric, and Gyarados, who could take down the Elite Four more or less on their own — grew more and more.

On my 50th run through the Elite Four, Gyarados hit Level 100.

I’d raised Pokémon to level 100 before, in the previous games. (Truth be told, I’m pretty sure I had Missingno.’s help in Red.) But my Ruby team was something special. I’d put all the hard work to get them there. I’d taken them all that way. And I was proud of it.

More than anything, though, I’d become incredibly attached to those three Pokémon. Even now, I can’t bring myself to choose any other starter when I play any of the Hoenn games. I always find myself catching an Electrike whenever I can. And even though this wasn’t the first time I’d raised a Gyarados, this game ensured that it would be one of my favorite Pokémon for many, many years to come.

I still have Gyarados, of course. He’s still sitting on my Ruby cartridge, along with the rest of my team. One day, I’ll probably transfer him up to the newer games for safekeeping, but for now, I like being able to turn on my game, see my old team, and relive the memories.

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.

Of course, there was more to Ruby than battling and catching Pokémon. For the first time, you could do something new: contests. These contests judge Pokémon moves in something akin to a beauty pageant, completely changing the meaning and importance of each move.

I don’t remember taking Gyarados through the contest circuit, but he’s got the ribbons to prove it. Actually, Gyarados has more ribbons than any other Pokémon in my Ruby save, between Contest ribbons, the Hall of Fame ribbon, and other ribbons he earned in his time. I’ve never been much of a ribbon collector, but I wasn’t surprised when I turned the game back on and found him so decorated. It did surprise me that out of everything, he had ribbons for the Beauty contest, given that Gyarados’s moveset (and appearance) lends itself much more towards Cool, but hey. Maybe I just have a particularly gorgeous Gyarados.

The other place I used Gyarados a great deal was the Battle Tower, and that’s where his weaknesses became apparent.

In Ruby and Sapphire, the Battle Tower allows you to take a team of three against seven AI trainers in a row. Your team is healed after each match, but you cannot exit until you’ve beaten every trainer. If you lose, you’re out, and your streak ends.

While Blaziken, Manectric, and Gyarados were a perfectly fine team against the Elite Four, they couldn’t stand up to the might of the trainers in the Battle Tower. The fact was, no matter how much I liked these three, they were a very unbalanced team, and their weaknesses outshone their strengths. This was most evident in Gyarados.

The third generation introduced a lot of features into Pokémon that have since become standard — natures, abilities, and so forth. However, one key aspect wasn’t changed until the fourth generation: the physical/special split. In the first three generations, Pokémon types are classified as either physical or special. This meant that Normal-type attacks used a Pokémon’s physical Attack stat to determine damage output no matter what, while a Water-type attack used a Pokémon’s Special Attack stat.

As a Water/Flying type, Gyarados had been cursed with a type classed as special (Water), without the Special Attack stat it needed to make use of it. Gyarados’s base Special Attack is 60. Its base physical Attack is 125. You see the problem: if Gyarados wanted to take advantage of the bonus granted by using attacks of its own type (Water), it was stuck using its lousy Special Attack, instead of its incredible physical Attack.

And despite being part Flying-type (a physical type), Gyarados couldn’t learn a single Flying-type move.

I love you, Gyarados. I raised you to level 100. But you really sucked in this generation. I’m sorry. It’s not me, it’s you.

Emerald: It is an extremely vicious and violent Pokémon. When humans begin to fight, it will appear and burn everything to the ground with intensely hot flames.

Of course, this didn’t stop me from raising a Magikarp to level 20 when I got Emerald.

I wonder if I had resigned myself to this fate even that long ago. It’s not like I didn’t know what it took to get a Gyarados. You got a fishing rod, you found some water, you let your Magikarp get beat up by every Pokémon in sight, and eventually you’d have a Gyarados. Rinse, repeat. I did it here, and I’d do it again before long.

The fact that it knows Rock Smash is more telling than anything else, truly. I raised a Magikarp just to evolve it and teach it Rock Smash. (Magikarp can’t learn any TMs or HMs.) There’s something painfully funny about that.

I actually ended up spending a lot of time playing Emerald — never as much as Ruby, but enough to be significant. I’d loved the Battle Tower in the previous game, so it stood to reason that I’d fall in love with the Battle Frontier. To this day, the bonus areas in post-game play have never been as fun as the Battle Frontier. Each area had a completely unique way to battle Pokémon, from letting them to decide the moves to having to play with randomly generated Pokémon to a giant dungeon. It was a blast, and I loved every minute I spent there.

I never used Gyarados, though, because he just wasn’t up to snuff. Instead, my team was Latias, Milotic, and Dragonite, the latter an addition from FireRed and LeafGreen. (You might've guessed from the trainer card above.) While it wasn’t a team without issues (two dragons were not the best idea), the three of them had a wide movepool and enough healing options to take on all comers.

In many ways, Milotic was the replacement for Gyarados on my team. There are a number of similarities and contrasts between the two Pokémon — they’re both Water-types, they both evolve through significant effort from a lousy fish, one rare, one common. They’re both serpents. One is beautiful and calming, desired by all; the other destructive and violent, feared by all.

That’s not to say that Gyarados is without value, of course, either as a battler or as a character. It’s simply that you have to work much harder for it.

FireRed: It has an extremely aggressive nature. The Hyper Beam it shoots from its mouth totally incinerates all targets.

Despite my love of Ruby, my infatuation with Pokémon had faded somewhat in the year since its release. I had other things going on in my life, new interests, and while Pokémon had been great in my childhood, it wasn’t something that I kept up with all that much. It wasn’t until I happened to see FireRed and LeafGreen on display in a store that I even knew they existed.

FireRed was a truly magical game to me, and it brought the memories of playing Red right back to the forefront. I happily dove right back into the series, and this time I did it with the help of the internet. Around this time I got deeply invested in the online Pokémon community, soaking up any information I could.

Unfortunately, this is where I screwed up: I bought an Action Replay.

If you’re not familiar with it, an Action Replay was another brand of a GameShark — a cheating device. I really just wanted it to access a couple of things that were tricky to get to, like event-only legendaries, and for easier access to TMs, so I didn’t have to replay an entire game to get one. (TMs didn't become multi-use until a later generation.) Where I went wrong was using it for other things.

I’m not actually sure that this Gyarados is from my FireRed, since I reset it some time ago, but based on the level and the fact it has a Hall of Fame ribbon, it’s a good guess. There’s no way I actually raised it to level 71 — especially not in Kanto, where it’s a huge pain to level up Pokémon. What I actually did in FireRed was level up my Pokémon with Rare Candies, breeze through the game, and completely ruin any fun I was having. What had begun as a fun journey into nostalgia was entirely ruined by no one other than myself.

Around 2005, I bought LeafGreen, planned out a party, and played through the whole thing normally. And, of course, I had fun. It was a blast to pick out Pokémon I’d never really used before and find out the best ways to use them. In 2015 I restarted my FireRed to do a Nuzlocke, which breathed new life into the game for me.

I doubt I’ll ever raise a Gyarados in Kanto again; I’ve done it enough times. But it hasn’t stopped me in other regions.

Travel to Sinnoh

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