I ended up switching to a replay of ORAS. I picked a treecko and named her after my boyfriend’s leopard gecko. And I transferred in a meowth and named her after his cat. Together we’re going on a Pokémon adventure in Hoenn!
I kind of want to transfer them to USUM afterwards, so we could have an alolan vacation together. But they wouldn’t obey me, and the whole narrative of the game always treats it like you’re a new trainer, so it would lose a lot of the romance of continuing my travels with Treecko and Meowth.
For the most part I appreciate that each adventure is separate and I’d like to use a different team each time. But I feel like having that one partner Pokémon that you share all your journeys with, like Ash and his Pikachu, is a missing component of the Pokémon fantasy.
Some people make a lot of how you can take a beloved Pokémon from an earlier game and have new adventures with it, but it doesn’t really seem to work that way? Because high level traded Pokémon won’t obey you until you have quite a few badges, the benefit of transferring Pokémon seems mostly limited filling out yet another Pokedex entry and maybe breeding fodder. Not very romantic at all.