In an amazing feat of persistence a Pokémon player has managed to transfer their Lugia from Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness all the way to Pokémon Sword & Shield, games that are fifteen years apart. A longstanding feature of most Pokémon mainline games has been the ability to carry your team of Pokémon over from a previous game. Over the years as Pokémon games grew in size and complexity, this became an important way for certain Pokémon to maintain certain moves and abilities over generations.
Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness is famous for the introduction of Shadow Lugia, gracing the cover of the game when it was released in 2005 for the Nintendo Gamecube. The Lugia from this game is corrupted by Cipher, the game's evil team, and can eventually be purified to its normal form in-game. Lugia can’t exist in its shadow form in Sword & Shield or any other Pokémon game, so it must be purified to be transferred. But Shadow Lugia’s legacy has lived on elsewhere, with Pokémon GO introducing the legendary bird Pokémon in an event earlier this year, even if fans didn't think that event quite lived up to the original.
In a post on Reddit, lunderamia shared their incredible fifteen-year achievement of bringing their purified Lugia all the way up to Sword & Shield. A screenshot shows the Lugia sporting the National Ribbon, a special ribbon only awarded to Pokémon that has been purified from the shadow affliction present in the Gamecube games, Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness and Pokémon Colosseum. The comments were full of impressed Pokémon fans, and some that shared their own story of keeping their long-time Pokémon partners with them over the years.
My ~15 year old purified Lugia from Pokémon XD. Transferred through 5 games to Sword. Worth it. from PokemonSwordAndShield
In the comments, lunderamia was happy to show off that the Lugia knew the powerful Psychic-type move, Psycho Boost, a move that Lugia can only learn from XD: Gale of Darkness. The Pokémon franchise can be known for its unique, or even outright challenging forms of Pokémon evolution. But keeping track of abilities and moves that change over generations can be even more of a trying task. Unfortunately, Sword & Shield introduced some heavy-handed changes, meaning that even though this Lugia has Psycho Boost on its moveset, it won’t be able to use it in battle.
The introduction of Pokémon Home has made this transfer process much easier in modern Pokémon games, though it usually takes some time for new games to become connected to the Pokémon cloud storage service. For example, the most recent games, Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl have yet to connect to Pokémon Home, and there are even more questions about if Home will connect to the soon-to-be-released Pokémon Legends: Arceus. However, don’t let the improvements of Pokémon Home diminish the impressiveness of this player’s task. Getting a Pokémon from the Gamecube to the Nintendo Switch takes a lot of various hardware, different games, and persistence.
Source: lunderamia/Reddit