Pokemon Memory Challenge

Background

While I've never owned or relly played a pokemon game, I got kind of interested in the franchise around 2013ish when watching people speedrun Pokemon Red. Over time, I started to watch nuzlocke and other types of challenges of various gens and romhacks.

The other day, I realized that I know a lot of pokemon, and I said as much in a group of friends. One of them challenged me though, and asked me to name one pokemon for every letter of the alphabet. I couldn't because I could really only think of the names of like 40 pokemon!

The Plan

I knew that I could name WAY MORE than 40 pokemon. I was pretty sure it was in the 200-300ish range, so I decided to go ahead and test it out by using the PKMN Quiz which includes all 1025 pokemon, including their sprites.

The first time I played, I had a really bad issue where I just couldn't spell the names of most of the pokemon I knew the names of, so I turned on spelling assist.

The plan was composed of 3 phases:

• Phase 1: Just name as many pokemon as you can, without googling anything or looking it up, in 30 minutes. This goes until the subjective feeling of "Idk if I know any more pokemon than this".
• Phase 2: In 35 minutes, name as many pokemon as you can, but afterwards, just glance over the names of the pokemon you missed and focus on the ones you recognize. Continue until you score roughly the same 3 times in a row.
• Phase 3: Memorize 25ish pokemon per day until you can get a perfect score. If you zero out the timer, add 5 more minutes for the next day.

Notes

08.11 - I started to use Anki today, with a pre-built pokemon deck. So far I think I've been learning a lot.

08.12 - After testing myself today, I did an anki cram for all the pokemon I should have known, then my normal cards. It's getting a lot harder, because many of these pokemon I've never actually heard of before.

08.13 - I'm crushing the cards, however the cards I'm using and the shadows from the quiz are different, so I can't always translate one to the other.

08.14 - I was trying to "test myself" without shadows for the first 10 minutes today and that wasted a lot of time, so I actually hit the wall as far as time before I was really one. Today I had moved up to 50 minutes. I think 50 min will be a good time tomorrow if I don't waste the beginning section LMAO.

08.16 - Today was the first day I got fewer right (4 less than last time). I think it's because I got interrupted in the middle + was eating a pork chop, but I think 50 min is probably just not enough time, because I ran out. So 55 min tomorrow! I looked at the ones I missed and I do know many of them, I just didn't get there yet. -- I was annoyed by this so I redid it.

08.20 - Had family visiting so I didn't practice or study in the last few day, which makes it cool that I did score higher. Looking over my wrong answers, I know that I already know a lot more of these pokemon, I just can't associate their names with the silhouettes. So there are more easy wins to be had still.

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