Pokemon fan has an important PSA after sending "20 years of gaming almost down the drain"

gamesradar.com:

Here's an important PSA for long-time Pokemon players: you need to download the Pokemon Bank app on 3DS very soon. One fan's harrowing experience of nearly losing two decades worth of collected creatures is serving as a wake-up call for members of the community.

Through a convoluted process of transfers, trades, and imports, it is possible to bring Pokemon from every generation forward into the modern games. (The original Game Boy cartridges are an exception, though the 3DS Virtual Console versions of those titles can still be part of the transfer chain.) Every Pokemon you've collected through the years can live in the cloud via the Pokemon Home app, and then can be transferred into whichever modern games support those particular creatures.

You can read our Pokemon Home transfer guide for details on how it all works, but there's one important link in this chain that's about to be broken: Pokemon Bank on 3DS. Bank is the only way to complete the arduous process of transferring all your past-gen Pokemon into the current Home app, and with the shutdown of the 3DS eShop looming on March 27, you need to download that app right now before access to it is shut down.

Over on Reddit (opens in new tab), a two decade veteran of the Pokemon series who goes by Crusnik_Asparagus nearly came out on the bad end of this shutdown. After a few years away from the series, they reasonably assumed that all the Pokemon they'd previously uploaded to Pokemon Bank would be available in Home. That was not the case.

"I’ve been playing these games for 18 years," Crusnik_Asparagus writes. "140 hours per game. I’ve bred Pokemon in rare balls with hidden abilities, egg moves and 6 IV’s. Manual labor. Hundreds of hours upon hundreds of hours. Rare event