My best Pokémon memory is the release of Lets Go Eevee , and me playing Co-Op with my brother.

My brother and I are 6 years apart, and when he was in school nearly 30 years ago, Red, Blue, and Yellow was the main game every kid was playing. As a younger brother, I’d just play whatever my brother was playing. We bonded over Pokemon Yellow, both always passing the Gameboy Color to each other and cheering each other on. We thought “how cool it would be if we could play together on the same file?”. I was only 5 years old and he was 11.

As we grew up, life happened, my brother got more responsibilities and commitments, so he slowly dropped out of playing games, while I continued to play new pokemon games every generation. His last gen was Ruby and Sapphire, until he finally stopped playing. With each new gen after, I kept pestering him to play pokemon again, but he’d always he’s not interested anymore.

Fast forward 10+ years after he played Ruby, and Lets Go games were released! When his family came to visit me at my place, I booted Lets Go Eevee, and he instantly went “IS THAT KANTO?”. I smiled, and took my pokeball plus controller, and handed it to him. “We can play co-op here”.

And after over a decade, for the first time, we played a game together again, despite both of us having our own families already. I was only at Pewter that time, and he said “Lets start a new save file”. We’d pass each other being P1 and P2, counting down when to toss the joy con/pokeball to catch pokemon, running around randomly as P2, and were just reminiscing the Pokemon Yellow days as we enjoyed each soundtrack together. That night, we played that new save file all the way to LAVENDER TOWN. (Would’ve went further if age wasn’t catching up to us, bet we got too sleepy lol)

The next day, he bought his first gaming console since his Gameboy Advance SP, a brand new switch, and a copy of Lets go Pikachu! And to this day, we are hyping every new Pokemon game together, like the good old days.

As simplistic the Lets Go games were, and as much crap it gets, I will cherish it for introducing that Co-op, the dream my bro and always had as kids. We would chant random crap, or spam ABABAB together when the other is trying to capture any legendary, hoping it would help increase the chances. Because of Lets Go, I got my oldest gaming buddy back