Recovering Lost Pokemon
What’s going on Internet? I figure games fit under my media theme for #WeblogPoMo2024 so here we go.
I recently picked up a Miyoo Mini+ after seeing Joel post about them non-stop. I started playing Pokemon Fire Red and remembered all the Pokemon I had sitting on the old 3DS Poke Bank. I hadn’t owned a DS device since 2018 and my Nintendo ID wasn’t currently attached to anything. Where were my Pokemon?
I go looking and find out that the 3DS eShop was announced end of life in 2022 and was made unavailable in 2023 (there abouts?). The Poke Bank is discontinued and Pokemon HOME is now the place to store Pokemon. Was I out of luck?
Searching the web found many contradictory posts and information about what was possible, however I wanted to recover my Pokemon.
Without determining whether this was actually possible to do I purchased an expensive second hand 2DS console and picked it up the next day. I spent a couple of hours banging my head against the wall trying to clear the default profile and having issues factory resetting the device due to errors connecting to the Nintendo servers.
I went down the path of home brewing the console and was able to reset the device after a couple tries. Once reset I seemed to have lost the home brew and was back to a stock 2DS install. I was able to create a new profile but I was unable to figure out how to link my Nintendo ID!
After logging into my Nintendo Online account I could see that I had a Nintendo ID linked to the account, great. I ran into issues going through the linking process on the 2DS console as I had entered incorrect details, it wasn’t clear what.
I raised a support request with Nintendo Support, provided all the info they asked for and waited over the weekend only to discover that because i’m not in the States I’d have to contact the local Aus/NZ Nintendo Support team. I went ahead and did that.
After a couple back and forth emails, they were able to unlink my Nintendo ID with my old console (I’m happy I kept a record of that serial number). I was still unable to link my Nintendo ID with the new console. I hit them back with another email and was sent an unhelpful link to recovering a Nintendo Online account… I sent back an annoyed reply mentioning I’m trying to figure out what details I was missing for my Nintendo ID.
Back to web searching again I came across [this page for ressetting a Nintendo ID password]. I entered the details that I remembered and was met with success and was provided a temp password that allowed me to successfully link my Nintendo ID to the new console 🙌
Because I’m responsible I changed the password and saved it to my password vault for safe keeping. I was then able to login to the eShop and was worried when I saw everything being “unavailable”. No worries I found the Poke Bank app and clicked through and “hell yeah” was given the option to redownload as I had used it in the past.
Once that was done, I was presented with a single option to transport the Pokemon out of the bank and into Pokemon Home. The transfer only took a few minutes and I was able to see my collection on the app on my phone, amazing.
I was suprised I only had 168 Pokemon in the collection, but now look at it as a great opportunity to continue filling in the gaps as I slowly play through the games again on the Miyoo Mini+.
Surely there’s a way to transport Pokemon from emulated games to Pokemon Home, right? Gotta catch em all!
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