Collecting Pokémon in 2025 is both easier and harder than expected

In early 2020, the Pokémon Company launched the Pokémon Home app, allowing gamers to store all their monsters in one place. It seemed like the dream for collectors; however, since I didn’t really have any monsters in Pokémon Bank, and it didn’t launch with Pokémon Go support, I never used the service. But that all changed a few weeks ago.

This modern Pokémon journey actually started in April 2024. With the launch of Delta and other emulators on iOS in 2024, I started playing the old-school Pokémon games again for the first time in a decade. This was a blast and ultimately led to a summer of getting really deep into — and spending way too much money on — Pokémon Trading Cards.

Moving past my poor financial habits and my sick Chien-Pao deck, for the first time in a while, Pokémon was back in my fingertips, and I’m not going to lie, the nostalgia felt great.

After I finished up the DS titles, I started Alpha Sapphire on the 3DS, and finally, this year with the Switch 2, I’m playing Scarlet. During all this, I’ve gathered a decent collection of legendary Pokémon that I want to keep through the games. This led me to look back into the Pokémon Home app, and I’ve learned that now, it’s pretty much perfect. There are still a few issues, but overall, it just works.

The real turning point for me is that Home now allows you to transport monsters from Pokémon Go into the standard games. Since I played Go for years when I first moved to the city, I’ve caught around 95 per cent of the first three Pokédexes. This means that overall, in the games I’ve played in the last few years, I’ve got 583 Pokémon, which is 53 per cent of the total national Dex.

And while you could play just the mainline games, you still need to play Go a little bit to get Melmetal and Gimmighoul in the Switch titles. Plus, the mobile game makes it significantly easier to get a legal Celebi. The only other way is to play the version of Pokémon Crystal from the 3DS eShop (find out how to do this below).

All of that said, consolidating everything was not as easy as I wanted it to be.

The Pokémon Go hurdles

At the launch of Home in early 2020, it only worked with Pokémon Bank and the Switch Pokémon games that were available then. However, by November 2020, the company finally added Pokémon Go support. Unfortunately, at this time, it was locked to level 40 players and up. Even as die-hard as I was, I only ever made it up to level 34. After a few months, it slowly rolled out to all users, but by that point, I wasn’t playing much anymore.

Five years later, I’m back and trying to catch ’em all again. While Pokémon Go is great for casually catching monsters from all generations, it doesn’t make moving them to the Home app super convenient or cheap.

To start, if you want to store more than 30 Pokémon in Pokémon Home, you need to pay $4 per month or $21 a year. This also unlocks the ability to move your pals over from the 3DS. However, getting them off that old console in 2025 is another story entirely.

The next hurdle, and the one that pissed me off the most, is the limit of how many monsters you can transfer from Go to Home per week. You can do 25 regular monsters per move, and if you’re moving low-level creatures, you can get around 50-60 moved per week. However, if you need to move one shiny legendary or mythical monster, that limit drops to 1-3 monsters.

There is a way around this, but it will hurt your wallet a little more. For 1,000 in-game coins, which cost $14 in the real world, you can refill your fuel and transfer another group. For me to do all my Pokémon, it would probably cost me over $70.

You can make coins without paying, but in the best-case scenario, you only make 50 coins a day, so it will take 20 days of perfect Gym defence to accumulate the amount needed. Having said that, I expect that most players will take more than a month. Pokémon Go has always been pretty predatory with its in-game currency, but having it appear here for a service I need to pay for already feels a little steep.

You also need to be aware of some of the limitations of trying to use Go Pokémon in a regular game. It can be done, but some special Pokémon, legendaries and mythicals can only be moved from Home to Scarlet if you’ve already caught one in the game. For instance, I could move an Exeggcute over without issues, but my level 11 Shiny Ho-Oh needed a workaround before I could use it.

I also own a regular level 57 Ho-oh that I caught in HeartGold on my phone, so I needed to transfer that one over to Scarlet first, which verified it in the Pokédex. Then, I could move my lower-level Shiny version to use in-game.

It’s also worth noting that moving Pokémon from Bank and Go to Home is a one-way street. Once they get into Home, you can only move them into Switch games. So if you have a strong battle team in Go, think twice about moving them to your console.

How to physically move monsters from Go to Home

If you haven’t already, the first thing you need to do is download both Go and Home on your phone. Then, open Settings in the Go app. The menu for the Pokémon Go Transporter is a little buried, but choose ‘Connected Devices and Services,’ then open ‘Pokémon HOME.’

Once you send over your selected creatures, you must open Pokémon Home and receive them. Once you do this, they should be safe in the Home app. If you open Home on your Switch, you can now move monsters into your games, pending any of the limitations I mentioned above.

Is it easier or cheaper to move from an emulator to Home?

The answer here is also a resounding “no,” unless you already own most of the needed gear. This includes:

• A 3DS system
• MicroSD card
• USB card reader
• The Pokémon Bank app
• The Pokémon Transporter app
• Legal versions of the games you want to play

While Nintendo and the Pokémon Company laid out a pretty easy path to move from Bank on 3DS to Home on Switch, the main hurdle nowadays is actually getting the Pokémon Bank and Transporter apps.

Unless you downloaded them back in the day, you’re out of luck since Nintendo took down the 3DS eShop. So, unless you feel comfortable hacking your 3DS, you’re probably out of luck. But don’t be too worried; the process of cracking a 3DS is actually more straightforward than you’d expect, but it’s probably a nerds-only type of project.

If you decide to hack your 3DS or buy a used one that’s already hacked, you need to download an app called the hShop. This app has preserved a ton of 3DS content, including Pokémon Bank and Transporter. If you want to get Celebi by playing a mainline game instead of in Go, you can also download the eShop’s version of Pokémon Crystal here. It has the Japanese special event patched to the end, making it one of the only two legal ways to obtain that monster.

The next step is moving your saves from the emulators on your phone to the 3DS. To do this, you must have the same version of the game you’re playing on your phone and your cracked 3DS. Then, open the same game on the 3DS and start it just enough to create a save file. After that, take your save file from your phone, rename it to match the one on your 3DS, and replace the file on the 3DS’ SD card.

Once you get your saves onto the 3DS, you can move Pokémon through the generations normally. This involves using the Pokémon Transporter app we downloaded earlier for DS games.

Once you get everything into the Bank, it’s free (as long as you have a Home subscription) and easy to move into Home, but once again, like Go, it’s a one-way street.

Happy hunting!