After a month delay, Poke Bank has finally gone live in North America and I’m ~so~ happy that it’s finally live. I came home from work to find out that Nintendo had finally put Poke Bank into the NA store; that was definitely something very nice to come home from work to. (・∀・)
Pokemon Bank is free until March 14, 2014 so you’d better download it quickly to get all 30 days in! Well… For North Americans, we’ve only got 29 days because the trial started yesterday and we didn’t have it yesterday. That’s beside the point. Anyway, it’s free until March 14 and you get a free Celebi so it’s worth the download. (｡･ω･｡)
Look at my baby!
That is Espee, my little baby. I’ve had that little guy since Pokemon Platinum. He’s been through multiple regions with me and he’s gotten me out of a lot of tight situations. As you can tell from his stats, Espee is not IV trained. I got him before I became a (sort of) competitive battler, so he was never IV trained. I’m considering using a Reset Bag on him to re-do his IVs but I haven’t decided yet.
Honestly, I suppose to someone from the outside looking in, there’s nothing special about Espee. He’s not shiny, he doesn’t have a good nature, and he’s not IV trained. But he’s special to me for sentiment value. He was one of the first Pokemon I ever did train to level 100. I’ve put a lot of effort and care into raising him. I will be honest that I teared up a bit when I first saw Espee in Poke Amie. I'm just so happy to have my baby back finally.
I’m ridiculously attached to my pixels, okay?
I’m so happy to have Espee back. I’ve checked back on Pokemon Bank every day since it was delayed just so I could transfer Espee and others over to Pokemon X. So far, I’ve transferred Espee and a plethora of Legendaries. You can only do one box at a time so… It takes a while, you know. Because of my crappy Internet, it took me nearly 20 minutes to successfully transfer 1 single box. So this’ll take me a while.
Before I do my mini review though, let’s discuss that Celebi.
As you can see, the Celebi you receive is only level 10 so it’s a trainable Celebi. Not like it matters too much though since Celebi isn’t really allowed to be used anywhere because it’s seen as ‘uber’ but if you want to train one, the one that comes from Bank is an excellent one to train. My Celebi is Sassy, I’m not sure if the natures are random or all of them will be Sassy. What’s yours?
In order to get Celebi you must start up Bank. Bridgitte (or however you spell it) will give you either 100 Pokemiles or 10 BP for your first time. Go into the Bank and insert a Pokemon into the cloud storage. Save your storage and Bank will quit your session. Now go to your X/Y game and click Pokemon Link on the main menu. Do not start up your game until you get your miles/BP. Once you get it, start up your game and save. Quit your game and go back to Bank. This time, Bridgitte will give you Celebi. Go into Bank, save, go to your game click Pokemon Link, and tada! Celebi will now be placed in your first available box (for me it was Box 1).
Now for my mini review!
Pokemon Bank is a pretty interesting experiment from Ninendo, I will give them that. It’s really nice to have a cloud storage to store 3,000 Pokemon. Although I am still debating on whether or not I’ll buy a subscription when the 30 day trial is over, but that’s beside the point. Bank is fairly easy to use once you get through the initial activation. The activation can be a bit iffy, it isn’t explained too well so it can be a tad bit confusing. It’s still fairly easy to get through.
However, I must say that it is a bit of a tedious process. For starters, Poke Transporter can only transfer one box at a time and it will always be your first PC box. So before you load up Transporter, make sure you first box is filled with the Pokemon you want to transfer. I had to shut down Transporter, rearrange my boxes, and then go back to Transporter. It’s a bit of a pain that Transporter can only transfer one box at a time and you can’t even switch the boxes.
You also must switch your game cards. Transporter will not work unless you’ve got Black/White/Black 2/White 2 in the game slot. However, Bank will not work unless you’ve got X/Y in the game slot (or you’ve got a digital copy). So you’ll need to switch cards when you switch applications if you’re a cartridge user like me.
Bank has got its tediousness as well. With Bank, you must transfer your Pokemon one by one. You can’t, for whatever reason, transfer your entire Transfer Box. I’m not sure why Nintendo didn’t add that in but okay. It’s just a bit tedious to do it one by one. If you’re like me and your Internet connection doesn’t save Bank the first time, then you need to do it all over again… One by one for 30 Pokemon. Oi. Thankfully it saved the second time.
Now, despite my criticism, I love Bank. It’s an awesome little app and I think that as a breeder, it may just become my best friend. I look forward to trying out Bank here and there to get to know it. It might be very good for when I launch into a breeding project.
Now, as another note, Bank will know if your Pokemon is illegit. Believe me, I tried. They fixed the legality checker BIG TIME. I tried to move over a Keldeo I had a friend Pokegen and Transporter blocked it, it wouldn’t let me take it. So I can confirm that, at least for me, the legality check is up and running. It will stop illegit Pokemon so don't bother trying to get illegits over.
Whether or not my friend did something wrong with Pokegenning Keldeo or not, I don’t know. I’m going to try transferring some of the Pokemon I genn’d myself to see if I can get them through.
So my little Pokefans~ Go download Pokemon Bank (it’ll be the first thing you see in the eShop) and Poke Transporter (Bank will give you the download link to it, don’t go searching for it). Tell me, how do you like Bank and Transporter? ( ﾉ^ω^)ﾉﾟ