Pokémon has always been about trading with your friends, but what about trading with yourself? Nintendo updated its cloud-based Pokémon Bank software for compatibility with Pokémon Sun and Moon recently, so I figured I'd give transferring some of my older and more heavily-trained monsters a try. They deserve to see the Alola region as much as any, right?
The first order of business was updating the Bank software through the eShop, and after doing so I was ready to send over some monsters (and save myself literally hundreds of training hours in doing so). My source cartridge was a copy of Pokémon Omega Ruby, the much-lauded remake of Poké-generation III’s beloved Hoenn region. Some may recall the hashtag #HoennConfirmed. But that is a history lesson in memes for another day.
The beauty of the Bank system is the ability to easily preserve hard-trained Pokémon across each generation that is released, without having to worry about each particular game’s proprietary method of doing so. It’s unified, it’s in the cloud, and the experience has remained the same since Bank released in 2013. As such, the recent update for Sun and Moon was a welcome one. Nintendo's diagram below outlines the general gist of how it's supposed to work.
The standout of my collection is a Snorlax that I have had, I kid you not, since 2009’s Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, released now nearly a decade ago. This 'Lax is getting long in the tooth. But, as a monster that single-handedly defeated Johto’s entire Elite Four all by its lonesome (Curse and Amnesia are comically unstoppable together if you can bide enough time), it more than any deserves to be preserved and moved over.
Whether or not this particular Snorlax is EV and IV trained I couldn’t tell you (I think it is, but it’s so old now I can’t recall), but it doesn’t matter – this was a nostalgia play. The transfer is a simple matter of dragging Pokémon from "boxes" into "banks" – the process went smoothly, as can be seen below.
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Pokémon retain their pixel-art sprite forms in Bank, but rest assured you get to see them in all their glory once the transfer process is complete. Nintendo has developed the tool in such a way so as to make saving mandatory, so don’t expect to pull off any cheap cloning tricks Game Boy link cable style (though if experimenting with that is your thing, more power to you).
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The end result..
Aha! So it was EV trained. Wonderful.With the transfer complete, my beauteous overpowered monsters arrived safe and sound to their new home in Box 32, much to the surprise of my unsuspecting Alolan trainer whose current best is a level 37 Litten. I expect he'll enjoy breaking out the level 91 Snorlax that refuses to obey and accidently Body-Slams itself after first destroying the party of every Kahuna in the vicinity with relative ease. I’ll be sure to keep everyone reading posted on how that goes over.
