the story of chingle the chingling
at long last. i am finally going to explain the origin of this chingling i've been obsessed with for the past 3 months. strap in i'm going to be long because he deserves it
this is Chingle my beloved chingling son. the one in the video game came first and then i became so obsessed with him that my mom and my friend both independently bought me a chingling plush for christmas/birthday this past december. the point is, chingling is one of my favorite pokemon at this point because of this little guy, everyone in my personal life knows it, and i need you all to know why.
it started back in november. i live in the US and i was flying out of state to go to a friend's wedding, actually the same friend who bought me one of my chingling plushies lol thank you Venty. it was my first time ever attending a wedding and it was a really wonderful time! but i was also excited because another friend of mine, Cloud, lives in the same state and close enough to the wedding venue that i could visit him IRL for the first time while i was there. little did i know what fated encounter awaited me at his house...
we were bored and decided to dust off his old wii and browse the games available on it to see if we felt like playing anything. for some god forsaken reason, pokemon ranch caught our eye. you know, the gen 4 pokemon storage app that doesn't actually let you move pokemon between games but has a glorified virtual aquarium/screensaver attached to it. it's only kind-of-not-really a video game. and yes i promise this is related to my son chingle.
we were expecting to just boot this up for the novelty for a total of five minutes tops and then turn the game off, but when we loaded it up, we discovered that there were over 700 of cloud's childhood pokemon stored in this thing from 2007-2009 or so. frankly i was enthralled by the mass of pokemon stored because i never even got close to the 999 pokemon stored requirement for hayley's mew as a kid (if you aren't aware, the NPC character Hayley will trade you a Mew once you store 999 pokemon into pokemon ranch, which is one of the very few repeatable ways to get the mythical in the older games). the count was definitely bolstered by cloud's dad of all people, who apparently had a brief stint with gen 4 back in the day and had stored hundreds of pokemon himself.
i was also enthralled because apparently ranch hadn't been booted up in 13 years, according to hayley:
both me and cloud thought this was the funniest shit in the world. poor hayley trapped in this purgatory for 13 years. the way that she says it with a smile on her face like this is a normal amount of time to pass in her lonesome. it felt like something out of a creepypasta LMAO. and it only got funnier as time passed and we sunk deeper and deeper into this mini fixation on pokemon ranch we had together while i was at his house.
and we really seriously did get fixated. we left the wii on for hours at a time and had ranch constantly playing in the background while we did other things, but sometimes we weren't doing other things and we were genuinely dedicating large swaths of time to actively watching ranch like some sort of fucked up baby sensory video for adult pokemon autists. and a couple of really cool things happened along the way that i want to briefly share just to emphasize how much of a cool bonding experience this was for me and cloud, which will tie back to chingle in time:
first, we noticed a peculiar sparkling (but not shiny) octillery walking around the ranch wearing what appeared to be a focus band on its head.
wow pokemon ranch screenshots are like 2 pixels tall. i could eat those artifacts with my mouth. anyway here's a photo of the octillery from cloud's actual wii. i was absolutely mystified by this thing. i tried every search for "pokemon ranch focus band octillery" you could think of and absolutely nothing was coming up. i consider myself to know a lot about the gen 4 games but this was a gap in knowledge that drove me absolutely nuts and i desperately needed to figure it out.
since google wasn't working and cloud wasn't having any luck in the searching department either, i ended up reaching out to an acquaintance of mine who is the only person i know with an almost encyclopedic level of knowledge about pokemon ranch, the youtuber SirToastyToes who runs a 24/7 ranch livestream lol (not an advertisement or anything i just genuinely think he's awesome for that)
this got me incredibly excited because i thought maybe we had stumbled on something completely undocumented, but it turns out this just so happened to be a gap in both of ours' knowledge because golgo's octillery and its ranch model is documented online, it just wasn't coming up in searches very easily and doesn't appear to be common knowledge. for that reason, here's a link to a really great article i found after this conversation about the backstory of this focus band wielding japanese exclusive octillery event with photos of the thing in ranch and everything on pokemonhistorian (which also has a lot of other cool articles about obscure mystery gift pokemon. i ended up binge reading like everything on this site lol. again not an advertisement i just think documentation of this stuff is cool)
regardless, pictures of the unique 3D model in ranch were not available on bulbapedia so cloud and i asked if toasty could do the honors of uploading our screencap of the octillery (that took forever to get BTW because of lack of camera control) to bulbapedia since he had the bulbawiki permissions for that and he happily obliged, so now as a result of this whole trip the event pokemon section on the page for hayley's trades looks like this:
do i have any earthly idea of why golgo's octillery was on my friend's childhood pokemon ranch? absolutely no idea. cloud's best guess was that his dad had an illegitimately cloned one on his file for some reason, but it sticks out like a sore thumb because like... out of all event pokemon to have clones of, golgo's octillery? the other pokemon sunday event pokemon were not in the ranch and nor were any other event pokemon so it's a bit absurd. i am thankful for it though, because cloud and i had a blast figuring out what on earth this thing was, and getting to upload this photo to bulbapedia was really exciting even if we were definitely not the first people to discover it.
the other really cool thing was that even though i hadn't brought all my pokemon games on this trip, i had my laptop with all my save backups on it so i was able to load one onto cloud's DS and upload copies of 200+ of my own pokemon to cloud's ranch. the effects were twofold:
for one, cloud gets to boot up his childhood wii with remnants of my first ever visit to his house there for him to enjoy forever. a lot of my really important pokemon were uploaded including pretty much all of my shinies, ribbon masters, and particularly Hope the buizel who as many people who know me know, is one of my most important pokemon. we definitely followed her around the ranch for a long time and watched her interact with all of the pokemon lol.
and two, my uploading my pokemon pushed cloud's ranch over the 999 requirement for hayley's mew. i had actually never seen the animation for the mew trade, even via uploads on youtube or whatever, so that was really cool! and cloud let me keep the mew as a keepsake of the trip because he is so nice to me and knows i collect event pokemon. (side note that it's really cool that it comes in a cherish ball because the easiest ways to get mew in gens 3 and 4 these days have it in either a pokeball or, in the case of faraway island in emerald, a player-chosen ball that can't be a cherish ball lol)
cloud didn't just trade me the mew, though. he also traded me a very special boy. That's Right we're finally getting back to chingle in the chingle lore post!
as you may have guessed at this point, chingle is one of the aforementioned childhood pokemon that was littering cloud's ranch save file. alongside doing all of the above, we also watched an in-game parade of every pokemon belonging to his childhood pearl save. there were lots of fun pokemon with nostalgic memories attached but a chingling named Chingle scrolled across the screen and i don't know if i was just tired or what but i lost my mind. i thought that name was the funniest shit in the entire world.
i do not have pictures of our initial chingle sighting because at the time, we didn't know it would be important to us. it was just a funny nickname and that was it. but after we had such a fun time with pokemon ranch and after cloud was able to dig out his childhood pearl of which he could successfully withdraw his ranch pokemon to, i knew i wanted a pokemon of his as a keepsake for our meeting-for-the-first-time trip and i knew it had to be that silly little guy with the funny name.
this is chingle at the time of being traded. pokemon ranch doesn't actually display a whole lot of info about the pokemon stored in it, plus i had only really seen chingle's summary in passing during that parade where i wasn't paying as much attention, so i was delighted to find out upon receiving him that he has an adamant nature (+attack, -special attack), has his highest IV in attack (as indicated by "likes to fight") and was caught on halloween in 2008. actually the most violent baby chingling i have ever seen. it just endeared me to him more and this is why in the first image of this whole post you can see that chingle has zen headbutt and return for attacking moves. even with the adamant nature, chingling has a base attack stat of 30 so his special attack still manages to be higher, but i have those moves for flavor and vibes.
we also exchanged mail because i collect it whenever i trade with people in the old gens with mail, so i have this lovely mail from cloud in my platinum PC now. it's iconic i think
since chingle was only level 13 and i was so attached to him at this point, i actually dedicated myself to using him in a playthrough of platinum. during the trip to cloud's place, i had actually started an all-johto playthrough of platinum in which i bred all three johto starters to use in another game and traded them over as eggs so i could have them all as my starters in platinum instead. i was planning to use three other johto pokemon as well, but because of chingle's unexpected appearance in my life, i changed plans and went for a "sinjoh" playthrough; i still used the three johto starters but my other three pokemon were sinnoh pokemon: chingling, togekiss, and glaceon. i brought chingle through the game entirely unevolved and i plan to keep him that way!
here he is hiding behind my togekiss a little bit in the hall of fame when i beat the game after i got home (and next to the buizel plush cloud gave me as an early christmas gift that's meant to be Hope) but this isn't the only thing chingle has done. you may have noticed that the trainer ID of this file is conveniently 02006, AKA 2006, AKA the year that diamond and pearl came out in japan and debuted sinnoh to the world. that's not hacked nor did i reset for it; i actually played through platinum again because for a completely separate project i won't get into here, i needed a fresh sinnoh save file to do some RNG manipulation on (think a speedrunner-like trick to get pokemon with certain stats or shininess or whatever) and i figured i might as well have some fun along the way. therefore the TID is RNG manipulated and uh... well i have photos of chingle in front of shiny giratina because i used him to paralyze it for the capture:
i also grinded finding all the unown letters in chingle's name to give him the perfect battle intro animation (yes that is cynthia's garchomp):
and of course he attended my friend's wedding!
oh yeah and since i obtained chingle he's kind of become a mini legend in my personal friend groups and we're always joking about him and saying his name in increasingly silly ways. this is important because the aforementioned SirToastyToes hosts an event called Ranch Week in which you can submit shinies you obtain in gen 3/4 during that week to be uploaded to his giant community pokemon ranch, and i shiny hunted a chingling with the pokeradar in platinum fittingly named Shingle (Shiny Chingle), who then appeared in the ranch week summary video for december so that's a fun bit of chingle's footprint online
there's also Pringle, another shiny chingling from this pokeradar hunt that i gave to my friend Regi in return for him distributing the shiny johto legendary beasts to his game via an actual legitimate distribution cart that he owns and trading them to me (unfortunately no pictures of pringle, i forgot, but i do have photos of the legendary beasts...)
chingle is so prevalent in my life that my relatives know about him and my 60+ year old mother now knows the pokemon Chingling by name. he's truly iconic
but yeah. that's chingle! just a (violent) little guy my friend caught as a kid all the way back in 2008 that i somehow stumbled into receiving after i met him in person for the first time in november 2025 in tandem with unexpectedly bonding over pokemon ranch. i love him dearly and like every pokemon i get attached to i am planning on ribbon mastering him when i have time (getting every ribbon possible on him from gen 4 and up) so i'll be posting about that in the future. he will be unevolved forever until maybe z-a where i think evolving chingle into chimecho for mega chimecho might be cool but idk i haven't decided yet. regardless, i will always keep a copy of him in gen 4 as a chingling baby... forever
i leave you with a photo of chingle and hope at my 26th birthday dinner at a hibachi restaurant. goes hard as hell
