First up, off the bat, yes Im still gonna finish Financial Stability. That run got paused cuz I got veeery busy with personal stuff last year. But I should hopefully get back on that run as well soon.
With that disclaimer out of the way, lets talk solved games. Tic Tac Toe. Connect Four. Chopsticks. And now, finally, Pokemon.
Well, kinda.
Now, just from reading "every pokemon has four abilities active at once", you might be thinking: "Theres no way that is possibly balanced." And youre right. Youre absolutely right. Its not. Its not balanced, not even a little bit. I terrorized the early game with Ledian in my latest nuzlocke. Ledian. But even with how unbalanced the game can be, the fights are genuinely fun and interesting to play through. And, while on the discord for Elite Redux trying to route my nuzlocke encounters, I stumbled across a challenge run that promised to make the game even more fun for me: the no repeat challenge. Full credit for the idea for this challenge goes to 1paper1clip on the ER discord. I tried to reach out to them but they never responded.
In essence, you go through the game and every time you use a mon in a fight, you box it afterwards, like you would a fainted pokemon in a nuzlocke. Specific rules can be found below:
(note: while the original challenge was on an earlier version of the game, I am playing on the v2.5 beta. This changes the game greatly, increasing the number of mandatory fights and changing them up greatly. I will not be able to use most of the strategies from the original run in this challenge, and will not be going out of my way to use the ones I can.)
Now, these arent rules, but just some observations about the nature of the challenge:
Title screen, turning off EVs.
Yadda yadda
Elite Difficulty. Im keeping Level Caps on Easy, again, just to make my life easier. The original challenge was done in regular difficulty, so I dont even know if this is possible to do in Elite with hard level caps, so lets keep it a little bit simple for now.
Lets gooo
Our first choice in the game, being the starter. I go for Sinnoh because an offensive powerhouse like the Infernape line will be good to have early incase of an emergency. Or so I thought. Monferno was completely useless this update, spoiler alert.
I am not counting the zigzagoon fight as part of this challenge, btw. Come on. Be so fr. Be so so so fr.
And NOW the game can really begin.
These are all the pokemon that can be found on Route 101. I just DexNav'd the "Get New" to get them all in bulk, which is what Ill be doing for every location.
Oldale Town Encounters.
And, our final encounter pool before the first fight of the game, Route 103.
With that, lets get into the first fight.
Brendan has two pokemon: Mudkip and Goomy. The real threat here was the Goomy. The stupid blob is too bulky for most of the pokemon we have access to at this point. There are some pokemon that might be able to help, namely Mightyena and Linoone, but those pokemon are far too valuable to throw away so early in the game. After about twenty minutes of looking through my options and doing calcs, I find what I am looking for:
There is no luck to worry about in this fight, since every move is 100% accurate and Water Pulse is never gonna be clicked vs Bellsprout, so confusion is not an issue. The mudkip, in all my testing, never clicks Rock Throw until it has enough Bulk Ups for it to be a OHKO, but even if it did, we only need two turns of setup, one for sunny day and one for growth, and Rock Throw unboosted is a 3HKO. Looking at the fight now, instead of Life Orb, I should have put Sitrus instead, since two max roll Rock Throws would leave me with too little HP to take two turns of LO recoil.
In the fight I recorded, it was simple: Mudkip just Bulked Up Twice as I Sunny Day into Growth. Solar Beam takes care of Mudkip and then Goomy dies to Hidden Power Ice.
With the rival fight done, we have a new encounter pool to add to our box.
Theres a lot of stinkers here (if I ever find a use for the Brambleghast line I will be extremely surprised), but sprinkled in are some phenomenal mons: Lotad and Seedot can both evolve into their final evos right away, and Rookidee and ralts are obviously gonna be great lategame. But standing between us and the lategame is the very first trainer on the route, the monstrous Youngster Calvin.
Note: Cut is a 60BP Steel move that always crits here.
Now, youngster Calvin is a monster in this game, being for my money the hardest fight pre-roxanne for a nuzlocke. Most of that comes down to how fuckin obnoxious Seel is with Fur Coat. Most of the good options you have at this point in the game are physical, and you really want priority because Poochyena is fast as hell for this point in the game and can demolish you with Crunch while being deceptively bulky with Eviolite. Focus Sashing isnt realistic either, as Shedinja all but guarantees a Final Gambit, which can be hilariously dangerous if you planned some fancy setup with focus sash to live a key hit. However, this time, the answer doesnt take me too long, and its a mon we've just picked up, too...
Behold, the face of death. The setup here is surprisingly intuitive: you set up curses until youre at max attack, then aqua jet everything. Rollout in this game is an physical rock type Echoed Voice clone, and it is there for Seel. I originally had Rock Slide, but Rollout was obviously better once I saw we had access to it. The major points of hax in this battle are Play Rough attack drops from Tinkatink and Iron Head Flinches from Tinkatink, alongside frostbite from Seel Ice Beam potentially. For the Iron Head Flinches, it doesnt matter at all, genuinely, because after a single Curse (which you are guaranteed to get off since Tink is hard coded to get rocks up first turn if it doesnt see a kill), each Iron Head is doing 1hp cumulative damage lmao. Play Rough Attack drops are rough, since you have to spend an extra turn Cursing for each one you get, and I mean theoretically theres nothing stopping tink from just running you out of curses by attack dropping you turn after turn after turn, but at 10% a turn and 16 Curse PP, I think thats probably beyond the realm of possibility. Ice Beam frostbite is a little scarier, but since we dont have special moves its not too much of an issue, and by the time Seel comes out our HP is kinda meaningless, so it doesnt really matter if frostbite cancels out leftovers. All in all, Im not 100% happy with this, since there is some like extreme bs hax that can happen to make you lose the fight, so lets call this a soft solve.
Vibrava and Kricketune both have typing changes, take note of that. This fight is honestly just annoying, to be completely honest. Theres not too much hax to be found here, but the one bit of hax there is, which is Yanma outspeeding and flinching with Air Slash, is just depressingly realistic. Wacan Berry on Yanma is some cosmic joke, because I was indeed toying with using Spark Pawmo (Spark in this game is a 40BP Electric type Quick Attack) to try to get rid of it, but ofc its holding the electric resist berry. I tried all the fire types I had access to. I was even ready to throw away my Monferno. But no. Nothing was working. In frustration, I just kinda went "fuck it", and brought out the big guns.
Linoone is just a great, great mon for the early game. In a nuzlocke of this game, id say its easily the second best early game encounter you can get after Ledian. And it proves that reliability here, cuz I knew I could spend an hour trying to crack the puzzle with the shit pokemon you get this early on, or I could skip it entirely with the beast that is Agility Linoone. There is 0 hax in this battle. Confusion in this game is changed to just add 1/4 recoil to every move you use, so water pulse confusion doesnt even fuck w the gameplan much. Yanma is guaranteed not to Detect twice in a row if it has atleast a 2HKO. Vibrava is guaranteed to SR turn 1 unless it sees a kill. So the setup of Agility Turn 1 into return > return + QA > Return is the simplest thing in the world to pull off. It sucks to have to say goodbye to Linoone this early, but atleast we make it past the *checks notes* second trainer of this run. Oh lord, this is gonna be a long one, isnt it?
Note: Bravado is a special facade clone, and take flight is a 60BP Flying type U-Turn.
This fight is a little breather between tough battles. The most dangerous thing here is the Tailow, with Bravado hitting like a truck after a determination boost, and base 85 speed being a lil too high to beat without committing seriously good pokemon at this stage. Luckily, theres no Wacan Berry this time, so we can abuse Spark.
One Inch Punch is a 90BP Punch move that cant miss btw. We need Electric Gem because without it, Spark is annoyingly a 98% OHKO on Tailow, even with Expert Belt. I could have gone Life Orb, but at this point I was really committed to not taking a single hitpoint of damage this fight, so I went with Electric Gem for the style points. The flow of the battle is simple: Fake Out + Mach Punch always kills Ziggy, and a single One Inch Punch kills Meowth, who we outspeed, so we can save our electric gem to Spark the Tailow. If all goes according to plan, Allen wont be able to get off a single move, barring Fake Out from Meowth. Even if Meowth Fake Outs, and even if Fake Out crits, it will never put Pawmo under 50% HP, meaningly Meowth will never trigger Opportunist. This fight is just straight up solved, theres 0 luck involved here.
For Calvin, we do get an unlucky Play Rough attack drop, but thankfully its a one off, as my next curse brings me back up to full. After that, the fight goes as expected.
For Rick, Yanma comes out before Kricketune, so theres 0 way to lose, even if Krick goes for Water Pulse and gets the confusion, he will be on 1HP due to sash after you Return him, so theres no chance of any hax stealing your win here.
I thankfully remember to turn off Auto-Run so I can sneak around the optional Lass, then head into Allen, who, as mentioned before, is a 100% solved fight.
With our first three fights done, we are free to go onto to Petalburg city for a brief respite.
These are our Petalburg encounters. Most of this stuff is good, but not good for a while yet. Importantly, we get Ninetales straight away, as Vulpix can evolve as soon as you get it.
The Marts in this game have been replaced by Adoption Centres, where you can buy special Redux Regional forms of regular pokemon. You get 5BP per trainer win, and since we will be kinda ignoring most trainers we can for this game, we will probably not be able to use all of these, but Ill touch on the important ones. I buy a Fighting type Pansage and a Dark type Pansear for later, but looking back, I probably should have saved my BP here.
There is also this. This Pokeball gives you a random starter from any generation.
We roll Sprigatito, which Im fine with.
With all that out of the way, we can move on to Route 104.
This is a beautiful pool of encounters. You have some trash here in Wooloo, but otherwise, really solid route. Azurill is kinda disappointing because Huge Power is gated behind level 24, which means you dont have it pre-roxxanne, but itll be great once we pass that. Tailow and Furrett are solid mons, and even shit like Applin has a power spike lategame. The real gem here is Ledian, however. Ledian is able to solo so, so many fights before the third gym, so really, its a get out of jail free card for us if we absolutely cannot figure out a fight. But we will get to that later.
I had more planned for this update, but I hit the maximum amount of attachments (i didnt even know that was a thing), so this will have to be split into two parts. Part two coming in like, half an hour lol once Im done writing it up.
With that disclaimer out of the way, lets talk solved games. Tic Tac Toe. Connect Four. Chopsticks. And now, finally, Pokemon.
Well, kinda.
Pokemon Elite Redux is a hack of Pokemon Emerald that is, for my money, one of the top three hacks of all time, at least in my opinion. The main draw of the game is its multi ability feature, where every pokemon has four abilities active at once, (three unchangable "innates", and one variable ability thats chosen out of a pool of upto three, like regular games). In addition to that, the game has a TON of custom abilities, moves, megas, regional forms, and even just a couple fakemon thrown in for good measure.
The game also has a TON of QOL changes that make it one of my favorites to replay, including:
-The game gives the player unlimited customization of their pokemon, with you being able to change the natures, abilities, and movesets of any pokemon you have at any point in the game.
-The players party is healed automatically after every fight
-You are given every single battle item at the start of the game, from the lowly oran berry all the way to the mighty choice band.
-Insanely good DexNav
-Stripped back story that skips most of the boring parts of the Hoenn region.
-Every trainer has a competitive team that is interesting to face.
-Every Pokemon evolves by Level, and you are given all TMs and HMs at the start of the game.
The game also has a TON of QOL changes that make it one of my favorites to replay, including:
-The game gives the player unlimited customization of their pokemon, with you being able to change the natures, abilities, and movesets of any pokemon you have at any point in the game.
-The players party is healed automatically after every fight
-You are given every single battle item at the start of the game, from the lowly oran berry all the way to the mighty choice band.
-Insanely good DexNav
-Stripped back story that skips most of the boring parts of the Hoenn region.
-Every trainer has a competitive team that is interesting to face.
-Every Pokemon evolves by Level, and you are given all TMs and HMs at the start of the game.
Now, just from reading "every pokemon has four abilities active at once", you might be thinking: "Theres no way that is possibly balanced." And youre right. Youre absolutely right. Its not. Its not balanced, not even a little bit. I terrorized the early game with Ledian in my latest nuzlocke. Ledian. But even with how unbalanced the game can be, the fights are genuinely fun and interesting to play through. And, while on the discord for Elite Redux trying to route my nuzlocke encounters, I stumbled across a challenge run that promised to make the game even more fun for me: the no repeat challenge. Full credit for the idea for this challenge goes to 1paper1clip on the ER discord. I tried to reach out to them but they never responded.
In essence, you go through the game and every time you use a mon in a fight, you box it afterwards, like you would a fainted pokemon in a nuzlocke. Specific rules can be found below:
(note: while the original challenge was on an earlier version of the game, I am playing on the v2.5 beta. This changes the game greatly, increasing the number of mandatory fights and changing them up greatly. I will not be able to use most of the strategies from the original run in this challenge, and will not be going out of my way to use the ones I can.)
- Must box every mon I use after a fight.
- I must not rely on luck. I must take every possible hax into account. I will be going through my thought process on how to avoid the luck that Pokemon comes with for every fight. We are trying to solve the game, and that means that every player should be able to use the strategies I am using to beat the game, so we need to take luck out of the picture entirely.
- I cannot use two mons from the same evolution family, with certain exceptions:
- If a pokemon is part of a split evo line, I can use all evo lines as long as I dont use the prevo at any point. For example, using Bellossom does not disqualify Vileplume from being used, but using Gloom or Oddish disqualifies both.
- For all fights, I can bring a magikarp in the back that will not be boxed afterwards, but cant do any damage to the enemy team (mostly for funky setups later in the game, and because 1p1c's run had this rule).
- I will play on Elite Difficulty (the hardest difficulty).
- I will try to use the fewest amount of pokemon possible. My goal is for every fight to be done with one mon.
- For back to back battles, one pokemon can fight all trainers
- I will be showing every single fight in a youtube video for this run. In addition, I will go over every fight and my workflow for them.
- I will be playing the game mode without EVs. This is just to make my life easier.
- I will be trying to find the worst mon to beat every fight, mostly because it makes sense to save the better pokemon for harder fights later in the game.
- I will be doing minimum battles. Now, this comes with a slight caveat: I will do the minimum number of battles required for me to beat the game under the challenge rules. If I have to do an optional fight in order to pick up a mega stone I need to beat a non-optional fight, I will do that optional fight. But I am going to be avoiding most trainers that I can avoid on routes, unless there is a benefit to not doing so that I deem beneficial for the run.
Title screen, turning off EVs.
Yadda yadda
Elite Difficulty. Im keeping Level Caps on Easy, again, just to make my life easier. The original challenge was done in regular difficulty, so I dont even know if this is possible to do in Elite with hard level caps, so lets keep it a little bit simple for now.
Lets gooo
Our first choice in the game, being the starter. I go for Sinnoh because an offensive powerhouse like the Infernape line will be good to have early incase of an emergency. Or so I thought. Monferno was completely useless this update, spoiler alert.
I am not counting the zigzagoon fight as part of this challenge, btw. Come on. Be so fr. Be so so so fr.
And NOW the game can really begin.
These are all the pokemon that can be found on Route 101. I just DexNav'd the "Get New" to get them all in bulk, which is what Ill be doing for every location.
Oldale Town Encounters.
And, our final encounter pool before the first fight of the game, Route 103.
With that, lets get into the first fight.
Brendan has two pokemon: Mudkip and Goomy. The real threat here was the Goomy. The stupid blob is too bulky for most of the pokemon we have access to at this point. There are some pokemon that might be able to help, namely Mightyena and Linoone, but those pokemon are far too valuable to throw away so early in the game. After about twenty minutes of looking through my options and doing calcs, I find what I am looking for:
There is no luck to worry about in this fight, since every move is 100% accurate and Water Pulse is never gonna be clicked vs Bellsprout, so confusion is not an issue. The mudkip, in all my testing, never clicks Rock Throw until it has enough Bulk Ups for it to be a OHKO, but even if it did, we only need two turns of setup, one for sunny day and one for growth, and Rock Throw unboosted is a 3HKO. Looking at the fight now, instead of Life Orb, I should have put Sitrus instead, since two max roll Rock Throws would leave me with too little HP to take two turns of LO recoil.
With the rival fight done, we have a new encounter pool to add to our box.
Theres a lot of stinkers here (if I ever find a use for the Brambleghast line I will be extremely surprised), but sprinkled in are some phenomenal mons: Lotad and Seedot can both evolve into their final evos right away, and Rookidee and ralts are obviously gonna be great lategame. But standing between us and the lategame is the very first trainer on the route, the monstrous Youngster Calvin.
Now, youngster Calvin is a monster in this game, being for my money the hardest fight pre-roxanne for a nuzlocke. Most of that comes down to how fuckin obnoxious Seel is with Fur Coat. Most of the good options you have at this point in the game are physical, and you really want priority because Poochyena is fast as hell for this point in the game and can demolish you with Crunch while being deceptively bulky with Eviolite. Focus Sashing isnt realistic either, as Shedinja all but guarantees a Final Gambit, which can be hilariously dangerous if you planned some fancy setup with focus sash to live a key hit. However, this time, the answer doesnt take me too long, and its a mon we've just picked up, too...
Behold, the face of death. The setup here is surprisingly intuitive: you set up curses until youre at max attack, then aqua jet everything. Rollout in this game is an physical rock type Echoed Voice clone, and it is there for Seel. I originally had Rock Slide, but Rollout was obviously better once I saw we had access to it. The major points of hax in this battle are Play Rough attack drops from Tinkatink and Iron Head Flinches from Tinkatink, alongside frostbite from Seel Ice Beam potentially. For the Iron Head Flinches, it doesnt matter at all, genuinely, because after a single Curse (which you are guaranteed to get off since Tink is hard coded to get rocks up first turn if it doesnt see a kill), each Iron Head is doing 1hp cumulative damage lmao. Play Rough Attack drops are rough, since you have to spend an extra turn Cursing for each one you get, and I mean theoretically theres nothing stopping tink from just running you out of curses by attack dropping you turn after turn after turn, but at 10% a turn and 16 Curse PP, I think thats probably beyond the realm of possibility. Ice Beam frostbite is a little scarier, but since we dont have special moves its not too much of an issue, and by the time Seel comes out our HP is kinda meaningless, so it doesnt really matter if frostbite cancels out leftovers. All in all, Im not 100% happy with this, since there is some like extreme bs hax that can happen to make you lose the fight, so lets call this a soft solve.
Linoone is just a great, great mon for the early game. In a nuzlocke of this game, id say its easily the second best early game encounter you can get after Ledian. And it proves that reliability here, cuz I knew I could spend an hour trying to crack the puzzle with the shit pokemon you get this early on, or I could skip it entirely with the beast that is Agility Linoone. There is 0 hax in this battle. Confusion in this game is changed to just add 1/4 recoil to every move you use, so water pulse confusion doesnt even fuck w the gameplan much. Yanma is guaranteed not to Detect twice in a row if it has atleast a 2HKO. Vibrava is guaranteed to SR turn 1 unless it sees a kill. So the setup of Agility Turn 1 into return > return + QA > Return is the simplest thing in the world to pull off. It sucks to have to say goodbye to Linoone this early, but atleast we make it past the *checks notes* second trainer of this run. Oh lord, this is gonna be a long one, isnt it?
This fight is a little breather between tough battles. The most dangerous thing here is the Tailow, with Bravado hitting like a truck after a determination boost, and base 85 speed being a lil too high to beat without committing seriously good pokemon at this stage. Luckily, theres no Wacan Berry this time, so we can abuse Spark.
One Inch Punch is a 90BP Punch move that cant miss btw. We need Electric Gem because without it, Spark is annoyingly a 98% OHKO on Tailow, even with Expert Belt. I could have gone Life Orb, but at this point I was really committed to not taking a single hitpoint of damage this fight, so I went with Electric Gem for the style points. The flow of the battle is simple: Fake Out + Mach Punch always kills Ziggy, and a single One Inch Punch kills Meowth, who we outspeed, so we can save our electric gem to Spark the Tailow. If all goes according to plan, Allen wont be able to get off a single move, barring Fake Out from Meowth. Even if Meowth Fake Outs, and even if Fake Out crits, it will never put Pawmo under 50% HP, meaningly Meowth will never trigger Opportunist. This fight is just straight up solved, theres 0 luck involved here.
For Rick, Yanma comes out before Kricketune, so theres 0 way to lose, even if Krick goes for Water Pulse and gets the confusion, he will be on 1HP due to sash after you Return him, so theres no chance of any hax stealing your win here.
I thankfully remember to turn off Auto-Run so I can sneak around the optional Lass, then head into Allen, who, as mentioned before, is a 100% solved fight.
With our first three fights done, we are free to go onto to Petalburg city for a brief respite.
These are our Petalburg encounters. Most of this stuff is good, but not good for a while yet. Importantly, we get Ninetales straight away, as Vulpix can evolve as soon as you get it.
The Marts in this game have been replaced by Adoption Centres, where you can buy special Redux Regional forms of regular pokemon. You get 5BP per trainer win, and since we will be kinda ignoring most trainers we can for this game, we will probably not be able to use all of these, but Ill touch on the important ones. I buy a Fighting type Pansage and a Dark type Pansear for later, but looking back, I probably should have saved my BP here.
There is also this. This Pokeball gives you a random starter from any generation.
We roll Sprigatito, which Im fine with.
With all that out of the way, we can move on to Route 104.
This is a beautiful pool of encounters. You have some trash here in Wooloo, but otherwise, really solid route. Azurill is kinda disappointing because Huge Power is gated behind level 24, which means you dont have it pre-roxxanne, but itll be great once we pass that. Tailow and Furrett are solid mons, and even shit like Applin has a power spike lategame. The real gem here is Ledian, however. Ledian is able to solo so, so many fights before the third gym, so really, its a get out of jail free card for us if we absolutely cannot figure out a fight. But we will get to that later.
There is only one mandatory trainer on the lower half of Route 104, and we have a choice of which one to take!
We can either go with the Fisherman, who has a rain team of five mons, or the Lady, who has four pokemon. While the Lady seems to be the obvious choice, her four mons are actually WAYY tougher than the Fisherman's five. Still, I struggled hard to find a 100% reliable route for either trainer.
Ledian can do the Fisherman pretty reliably, but I dont want to waste him if I can find another route, and Ledian DOES risk some shit. Ninetales just barely cant do the Fisherman solo, having to choose between getting a one shot on Trubbish and being able to get past his Chinchou. I try some funky setups with Shiftree, but run into a similar problem, having to choose between beating two mons and being unable to figure out a way to do both. With a heavy heart, I load up Ledian, but while Im going through the box to grab it, my eye falls on the savior of this fight, who is able to pretty reliably fuck over this Fisherman...
It turns out early game normal types are kinda really good for this challenge. Secret Power is a physical hidden power in this game btw. Also, Hidden Power and Secret Power are both 80BP. This fight is another straightforward no luck one. The summary screen shows no item, but thats because I take the screenshots on a different runthrough of the route than the recorded one, and Furret was holding a Pecha Berry incase of Poison Touch proc on Trubbish, which happened in the screenshot runthrough. Apart from that, there is no possible luck in this battle, we simply outspeed and OHKO every mon without any need for setup. Headbutt, Secret Power and Dig all get boosted by Field Explorer, and this 50% boost pushes all those moves over the edge to get an OHKO on every mon this fight.
We can either go with the Fisherman, who has a rain team of five mons, or the Lady, who has four pokemon. While the Lady seems to be the obvious choice, her four mons are actually WAYY tougher than the Fisherman's five. Still, I struggled hard to find a 100% reliable route for either trainer.
It turns out early game normal types are kinda really good for this challenge. Secret Power is a physical hidden power in this game btw. Also, Hidden Power and Secret Power are both 80BP. This fight is another straightforward no luck one. The summary screen shows no item, but thats because I take the screenshots on a different runthrough of the route than the recorded one, and Furret was holding a Pecha Berry incase of Poison Touch proc on Trubbish, which happened in the screenshot runthrough. Apart from that, there is no possible luck in this battle, we simply outspeed and OHKO every mon without any need for setup. Headbutt, Secret Power and Dig all get boosted by Field Explorer, and this 50% boost pushes all those moves over the edge to get an OHKO on every mon this fight.
