Pokémon Emerald player spends £1500 just to complete the Pokédex

Avid Pokémon fan and Twitch streamer Johnstone recently embarked on a journey to find out how much effort it takes to complete Pokémon Emerald's Pokédex with the legit method. The cost of completing the Pokédex ended up soaring to a staggering $1500+ amount.

After streaming the iconic Game Boy Advance game on Twitch, the content creator released a step-by-step tutorial on how to capture each and every Pokémon available in the Pokémon Emerald Pokedex, which totals out to 386 unique Pokémon. This venture took him a total of 14 days, and to replicate it you'd need around $1500 on hand if you're in the United States.

If you want a rough idea of how the cost added up to so much it's because a lot of Pokémon in PokémonEmerald are either unavailable in the base game or have ridiculously low spawn rates. In these cases, Johnstone chose to play other Pokémon titles and transfer those captures back to Emerald.

Some of these titles and their consoles are basically retro media at this point and go for really high prices online. Here's a breakdown of everything he bought and how much it cost:

• Pokémon Emerald $180
• Gameboy Advance $60
• Cables + Batteries and Soldering $70
• Pokémon/Nintendo Wii $75
• Pokémon Colosseum $125
• Pokémon Colosseum Bonus Disc $200
• Pokémon Ruby $70
• Pokémon Colosseum Bonus Disc JP $140
• Pokémon Fire Red $110
• Pokémon Box Ruby and Sapphire $1500/$100 for the PAL version
• Pokemon Colosseum XD Gale of Darkness $150

For an idea of the dedication required, he 100% completed Pokémon Colosseum, Pokémon Colosseum XD Gale of Darkness, and Pokémon Fire Red. Furthermore, in the final days battled the same pair of journalists 300+ times for an XP grind method.

You can watch the highlights of his 2-week marathon on his YouTube channel, where he gives a breakdown of the cost, methods, and progress made every single day. There's a lot of details to go into and some of these methods are pretty crazy.

Unfortunately, it's actually no longer possible to completely 100% the Pokémon through only legitimate means. Despite the crazy spending, the limited-event Pokémon Mew and Deoxys remain out of reach, and Johstone had to resort to some small hacks to reach those events.

Regardless, it's truly an impressive achievement and really goes on to show the dedication required to Catch Them All. At the end of his journey, he was rewarded with a much-deserved certificate of achievement(in-game).

Hopefully, the journey ended up being worth it for him. For the rest of us looking to take on this challenge, he gave the advice "Don't".