One of the oddest parts of being an ex-Pokémon Go player is that I still have the app installed on my phone. Despite not having actively played it in years and frequently running into space issues on my phone, I have not yet removed the app. As it turns out, moving Pokémon from Pokémon Go to Pokémon Home is an incredibly slow, arduous process given that I’d collected over a thousand Pokémon by the time I stopped playing, many of them shiny, legendary, or incredibly powerful. In order to transfer Pokémon between the two apps, I have to use a limited resource in Pokémon Go, which burns up extra quickly if the Pokémon being moved are legendary, incredibly rare, or shiny. You can, of course, buy more energy to transfer Pokémon if that’s something you really want, but you could also just wait a week for your energy bar to be refilled again. Or just transfer a few every day. Whatever you prefer. After all, they wouldn’t just prevent you from using a long-advertised feature of the app, would they? They’d just put any means of it being made convenient behind a money wall.

It is frustrating that, despite my distaste for games that make me feel like I must play them every single day in order to make any progress, I am once again stuck doing mandatory chores just to leave one with everything I was supposed to be able to collect and take away from it. That was the whole point of one of the advertising pushes fairly early on: you’d be able to catch all kinds of Pokémon and, using the Pokémon Home service, transfer them between games and build a complete Pokédex without needing to resort to paying real money for Pokémon or using hacks to get the rare ones. That might not have been the sole reason I played back in the early days, but it was the reason I kept up with it for as long as I did. And now, here I am, over a year later, still transferring Pokémon out since I had so many rare little sprites that I only now just finished sending the legendaries and shiny Pokémon over (I could only move about six of these per week and about half the Pokémon I’d held onto were shiny). Now, finally, I can start sending more than five to ten of them at a time. I’ll be able to send mass quantities of normal Pokémon now, rather than using them to fill in the gaps left by the rare ones. Finally, I might start making some real progress.

I genuinely have no idea how much longer it will take. I’ve only missed a handful of weeks in all of this time, so I’m concerned it’s going to take another seventeen months to finish. The next entry in the main Pokémon franchise might be out by the time I finish this. There might be a new Pokémon Legends game (I dreamed about it so vividly that I was convinced one had been announced already until the moment I went to go look up its full title just now) by then, or maybe the next rerelease of an older game. Or maybe even the Johto version of the Pokémon Let’s Go branch of the main franchise. Who knows! Anything is possible, given how long this might take me. It’s not even like my collection was incredibly huge or anything. I only had about fifteen hundred Pokémon when I stopped playing! It’s just so much effort, since a lot of them were favorited to prevent me from accidentally sending away particuarlly good/sentimental/interesting versions of the Pokémon I’d caught and there’s no way to mass un-favorite Pokémon. Which really feels like a quality-of-life problem they should have addressed at some point. Though, I suppose they did since they made it a bit more difficult to transfer Pokémon unintentionally. I just wished they’d fixed the symptoms of the true problem as well as the true problem.

Now I just have to make my peace with this seemingly unending labor. One last dig into my free time with the added cost of piling on to my frustration. One final dedication to pointless labor just so I can get something I want. One culminating set of mandatory chores and then, after who knows how many months or years, I’ll be able to remove the app from my phone. I’ll be able to get away from this constant reminder of that golden period right after the game’s release when it seemed like anything was possible and that everyone was united under the call to catch Pokémon on a fun little app on your phone. I miss those days. I miss that general friendliness and collective gathering. I sure walk a lot more now, but it is less magical than it felt back then, when I was leaving my house to catch Pokémon like a long-desired dream had finally come true. Now, I’m just doing bitter work as I reflect on those golden moments and hope that someday we’ll find our way back to that time of unity.