That guy's a Maniac...

It's been... how shall we say? A hot minute since I last gave an update on my mission to empty out all of the legendary pokémon, special pokémon available from in game trades from NPCs and events and get all these guys with as many ribbons as possible from the Pokémon games going all the way back to 2002's Pokémon Sapphire all the way through to Pokémon Violet. The rules of the challenge are here  and progress to date from Pokémon Fire Red , Pokémon Colosseum , Pokémon XD Gale of Darkness , Third generation spinoffs and lastly Pokémon Sapphire can be found in the respective hyperlinks. Or for convenience you can find the whole series here . Corners have been cut. Sanity has been tested. I've spent the last eight months sort of and sort of not trying to evacuate the hell out of my copy of Pokémon Diamond , the first mainline pokémon game on the Nintendo DS. Why has it taken so long? What's the hold up? What state did I leave the game in first time around? Listen on to

Welcome to the first game in our self-appointed mission to save them all in Operation Last Bus Home (OLBH), the briefing for which you can read here .  2004's Game Boy Advance games  Pokémon Fire Red and Pokémon Leaf Green are an interesting pair of games in the series. Although in the series chronology they came out after Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Sapphire, or to use the community taxonomy, the first mainline third generation pokémon games, I've decided to start OLBH here because there's much less to do in Fire Red, so I thought I'd give myself a bit of an easy start. Mark those words.  Looking back at the series, I can understand complaints that those first three Pokémon generations were a little bit derivative. Pokemon Green, Red, Blue and Yellow were all slightly different versions of the same game set in the Kanto region which brought us the first 151 pocket monsters. Pokémon Gold , Silver and Crystal introduced 100 more pokemon to the world and the first half o