Challenge Super Mystery Dungeon 100%: No Vitamins, Revives, or Wondermail Codes [COMPLETED]

[Its_A_Random]

Hello everyone, it's been a while since my last Challenge Run, but since playing through Rescue Team RTDX, I've had the urge to go play Super Mystery Dungeon again, and this time I wanted to make things a little interesting, so I decided to do a self imposed challenge run. Here are the restrictions:

Restrictions:
-No Permanent Stat Boosts (Codification: No Vitamins, Drinks, Life Seeds, or using Sitrus Berries at full HP)
-No using Emeras on Pokémon mid-dungeon (Temporary Stat Boosts) or using Oran Berries/Energy Seeds at Full HP (Essentially softcapping Max HP at over 100 HP)
-No Revives (No Reviver Seeds, Tine Reviver Seeds, Revive All Orbs, or equipping Ally Reviver)
-No Wondermail Codes
-No Getting Rescued

As for what I am going for, I am going to attempt to 100% this game with these restrictions, which consists of the following:
-Complete the Connection Orb (779 Connections)
-Complete the Treasure Sidequest (Golden Items, Never Hungries, Ancient Treasures, and the Eight Treasures)
-Visit every dungeon
-Unlock Black / White Kyurem Formes

Sounds like a lot of pain ahead. Shall we begin? Also despite being a story-heavy game, I am going to leave spoilers unmarked, so do be warned (I won't spoil in the title though). The commentary is going to focus on the gameplay anyway, but like before, I am going to do text updates as my 3DS is not capture card modded, nor do I have the means to take high quality image footage (RIP Miiverse).

UPDATE #1 - START - POLIWRATH RIVER

Starter + Partner Selection

I am going to start by explaining my choice of MC and Partner before lookign at some of the alternative choices I could have made. So the MC for this run is going to be Chikorita, and my partner of choice is going to be Tepig. Chikorita MC is because it's a little more fun. I also had Chikorita MC when I played casually four years ago so I have familiarity with it.

Chikorita is chosen as since we don't have stat boosts and we don't have revivers, we cannot just rely on brute force to get through what we need to get through. Chikorita gets solid defensive options in Reflect and Light Screen, and also gets access to Synthesis early, which can be very useful in a pinch. Later on we can also get Aromatherapy, which albeit situational, has its uses. Offensively, we pretty much only have Razor Leaf until the postgame, which isn't too bad due to its range. Postgame however, Meganium gets access to Petal Blizzard and Petal Dance for free, which will really help out in having a decent STAB AoE option as well as a multi-hit move whose downsides can be mitigated with the right Looplets/Emera. YThe main concern here is the postgame, but with the right gear and wands, it shouldn't be too bad.

As for Tepig, Tepig is actually a really good Pokémon for the main story whilst also getting some useful tech in the postgame. For early on, Tepig gets Flamethrower, which is a rather excellent move to start with, and later on, we can do Defence Curl + Rollout shenanigans, which gives Chikorita a really good offensive partner to complement its defensive nature. Postgame Emboar is not the best Fire-type starter, but still gets Heat Wave by tutoring and some other neat stuff.

There were some alternative options I could have picked. The first one that really stands out is Pikachu partner, which would be useful for the second half of the main story with paralysis cheese from Thunder Wave, and also has Discharge for the postgame, but doesn't have access to a four-tile range attack (Fake Out being the best it gets) which can matter a lot in the main story as it gives a little less safety in that regard. We can make up for that anyway, especially if we get the right emera.
Another alternative is Charmander, who really shines in the postgame as Charizard with access to Heat Wave and the really broken Tailwind, and Flame Burst is an acceptable alternative to Flamethrower, but the main problem with Charmander is that it ends up being quite bad until Charizard, and if we really need a Charizard, we can get the Team ACT one early on, which is an acceptable substitute.
Another one that springs to mind is Totodile, as Totodile can be an excellent melee option that translates well into the postgame with Agility and Blizzard, but relies too much on melee in the main story without the ability to use multi-hit moves, and we don't have Wondermail either, which would really help Totodile. Definitely a plausible alternative.
The last plausible alternative is Chespin, as it is really broken in the main story with Pin Missile and Rollout, making it a really capable offensive option, but on the other hand, it means doubling up on Grass-types (and Chikorita's defensive options are rather desirable), and Chespin does not get too many good options in the postgame, with its only AoE move having friendly fire, and Pin Missile being as shaky as it is accuracy wise (and not being able to jack up our speed to high levels does not help).

So with that out of the way, we are going with Chikorita and Tepig. Maybe not the most optimal lineup, but serviceable enough.

Open Pass, Lush Forest, Foreboding Forest

The first two dungeons are basically tutorial dungeons where we have Nuzleaf to help us out so there is no real danger of dying here. After those two, we hit our first real dungeon in Foreboding Forest. Chikorita does not too badly here and I manage to save the Blast Seed here. There's also a lot of hoarding wands for later as well as hoarding some other useful items (non-revivers of course). I also pick up a Petrify Orb here, which will come in useful for a later boss fight. We get through without too many issues.

Drilbur Coal Mine [Gabite]

First dungeon with access to Tepig here, who will immediately come into use as a second source of damage. The dungeon mostly consists of getting levels into both Chiorita and Tepig, and getting some items for later. I also make sure to have a Blast Seed for the first boss. We also get Ember for Tepig as a backup for Flamethrower.

So the first boss of the game is Gabite with around 150 HP, Gabite also has ready access to Dragon Rage which is enough to two shot our characters at this point. I do begin with a Petrify Wand, but Tepig was a little eager to get on with their adventure and ends the petrify right away and allowed Gabite to Dragon Range Chikorita... So I had to Stayaway Gabite and use an Oran Berry for safety. Gabite auto-recovered at that point and Gabite eventually fell to two Razor Leaves and a Blast Seed.

School Forest + Glittering Mountain

Two tutorial dungeons here, which gives a chance to get more items as well as gain levels. We also finally get access to tactics here so we set everyone to Let's Go Together as it is useful at this point in the game. It also has the benefit of getting Goomy into the action as Bubble proves to be useful for School Forest. For Glittering Mountain, nothing out of the ordinary happens. Just the Looplet/Emera introductions and Espurr being useful with Psybeam.

Nectar Meadow [2x Beedrill + 3x Combee]

Prior to this dungeon, I got a Wakeful Looplet from the shop which will definitely be useful for the earlygame sleep spam. Anyway, we get Tepig back here for this dungeon, and we finally gain access to alliances, which will generally be the go-to for dealing with enemies for a good portion of the game. We also get a few useful Emera along the way, including Dizzying Stare for Chikorita, Type Bulldozer for both (though less necessary for Tepig), and a Super Critical for Tepig.

For the boss fight, everything is within KO range of a single alliance, but five vs. two can be pretty disastrous for Chikorita, so we begin with a Petrify Orb. The two Beedrill eventually break out, but we get enough time to take out a Combee before they come. We get good luck with the Beedrill as they mostly wasted time on Focus Energy and Double Team with one missed Fury Attack. Had to use a Blast Seed on one Beedrill however as the numerous Double Teams made it not worth trying to gamble on an alliance. But we got through with no major issues otherwise.

Poliwrath River [3x Poliwrath + 1x Poliwag]

First things first, we give the Weather Looplet we get from Roselia to Tepig. This is pretty important for the boss fight at the end of this dungeon as it allows Tepig to not care about the rain the boss can summon. The dungeon itself went fairly smoothly, we only got one Razor Wind from Heliolisk, which itself was avoidable since I was basically in a corridor. We also got a Lullaby for Chikorita and Dizzying Stare for Tepig. No Type Bulldozer unfortunately, but we did also get Toughness for Chikorita, which is a very important emera for this run as getting KOed is basically a reset (yay being able to save scum in this game unlike RTDX). We did have to use an Oran Berry early on for Tepig though.

As for the boss, I took it extra safe (though there was not much water spam in this fight). Each enemy has less than 100 HP, but the fight in general is anti-Blast Seed due to Damp and Rain Dance. I make use of Totter Orbs to screw with the bosses (albeit temporarily). I also make use of a Pounce Wand for the first time in this fight. These wands are going to be really useful throughout from getting out of danger to getting out of situations where the bosses can surround me. Other than that, it was a matter of picking off each enemy from a distance, using a Stayaway to keep the enemies separated (or when one uses Protect) and making use of Razor Leaf + Flamethrower alliances to finish off a boss when necessary. In the end Tepig only took damage from one Round. Took it safer than necessary, but in this sort of run, it's not a bad thing at all.

---

Anyway that's it for now, up next is the beginning of Connection Orb stuff (Yay Salamence...). I'll go until the end of the first act at the very least (leaving Serene Village)

TEAM

Chikorita
Lv: 13
-Ancient Power
-Tackle
-Razor Leaf
-Synthesis

Tepig
Lv: 11
-Heavy Slam
-Flamethrower
-Tackle
-Ember

 

[R_N]

I never 100%ed this game, out of curiosity what makes Black/White Kyurem so notable they get a designated bullet point?

 

[Its_A_Random]

I never 100%ed this game, out of curiosity what makes Black/White Kyurem so notable they get a designated bullet point?

The Black/White Kyurem formes are the only thing not covered by any of the other three requirements:

For the connection orb: They are not on the orb, they are merely an upgrade to Kyurem, not covered here
For the Treasures: You do not gain any treasures for unlocking them, not covered here
For the dungeons: You are technically only required to enter the dungeons for it to count towards the 100% dungeons requirement, the game does not care if you escape orb out, die, give up, or complete the dungeon, not covered here

Hence, the Kyurem Formes are given their own bullet point as they are the only completion thing that is not covered by any other requirement.

 

[King Feraligatr]

This is certainly different in comparison to some other challenge runs here. Good luck.

 

[Its_A_Random]

Alright, have a second update here. In general, I am going to make updates fairly dense in content, i.e. favour less, but more meatier updates as opposed to a bit here and a bit there, especially as this is going to be a fairly long run given it's 100%.

Restrictions:
-No Permanent Stat Boosts (Codification: No Vitamins, Drinks, Life Seeds, or using Sitrus Berries at full HP)
-No using Emeras on Pokémon mid-dungeon (Temporary Stat Boosts) or using Oran Berries/Energy Seeds at Full HP (Essentially softcapping Max HP at over 100 HP)
-No Revives (No Reviver Seeds, Tine Reviver Seeds, Revive All Orbs, or equipping Ally Reviver)
-No Wondermail Codes
-No Getting Rescued

UPDATE #2 - MISSION DAY #1 - GENTLE SLOPE CAVE

Mission Days 1-2

Here we are introduced to the Connection Orb sidequest, which is one of the major requirements for 100%. This requires me to connect with all 779 different connections and covers a lot of other things such as all bar one boss (Black/White Kyurem) and Grandmaster Rank. Essentially the biggest requirement of 100%.

Anyway, we begin the first of 23 mission days during the main story with the Sylveon rescue tutorial. This is technically the only mission you are required to do to beat the game. The floor you get Sylveon in Foreboding Forest is random and for this playthrough, we get 4F of Foreboding Forest. So we go to Foreboding and rescue the Sylveon, giving the first connection.

For Mission Day 2, we are scripted to do the Vulpix mission, but fortunately we could get a few free connects including Victini and Pidgeotto. So we bring Victini along for the Vulpix mission, allowing us to preserve Sylveon for the next day, which helps considering the cooldown mechanics. We get an Attract TM for free following this mission, which will be important for the next mission day.

Salamence

Okay so Salamence gets its own special section here as it is the first really rough boss in this run. Casually this is the fight where you are meant to fire Blast Seeds at it and tank hits with Reviver Seeds. But we do not have access to revivers in this run, so KO means we lose a party member! And everything Salamence can do to us is a one-shot, so we need to cheese this fight hard. Fortunately, we have three Blast Seeds heading into Salamence day so we don't need to deal too much extra damage.

For this, we bring in Sylveon and we set its movepool to Disarming Voice / Helping Hand / Attract / Filler. Attract helps increase the chances Salamence will fail to act, and Helping Hand will help reduce the alliances we need before heading into Blast Seed mode.

So the main strategy for Salamence is as follows: First we petrify the Salamence with a wand, then we boost to max offences on Chikorita/Tepig and the Axew client with Helping Hand. After this, we then confuse the Salamence with a wand and as it approaches, hit it with an alliance involving Attract. Once Attract hits, we use a couple more full damage alliances before consuming our Blast Seeds, hoping it dies.

First time around did not go so well as I messed up the strat, Axew then Tepig died, and then Salamence got 1/512 odds (hit through confusion > move the correct direction > hit through confusion, all 1/8 chances given the scenario) to give me the first death of the run. Luckily in Super we can treat it as a game-over and reload from a save.

Second attempt went a little more smoothly, though Tepig died after the second alliance, and the three Blast Seeds was enough to win. Shoutouts to Axew for dealing decent damage with Dual Chop. And our reward for this is a drastically overlevelled Pokémon that should smash whatever mission we bring it to, right?

Mission Days 4-8

For Mission Day 4 we go to Uprise with our freshly minted Salamence with Dragon Breath / Flamethrower / Dragon Tail / Fly. There are a couple of missions there that we go and deal with... Until a Drifloon Minimises twice and dodges every alliance, taking out a Pokémon and evolving into a Drifblim and subsequently destroy the entire team. Oops. Use wands folks!

... Let's try that again. For Mission Day 4 we go to Uprise with our freshly minted Salamence with Dragon Breath / Flamethrower / Dragon Tail / Fly. There are a couple of missions there that we go and deal with... without any issues this time. This time we treat the Drifloon with the respect it deserves, and unleashing Salamence's true power. Power that we will not experience for another few days.

For Mission Day 5, we go back to Uprise Range for some new missions, including Pachirisu's mission and Rotom's "Tea Party". We bring Victini along this time around. Anyway, we eventually reach Rotom's secret base and we get our first Monster House (Secret Base missions will always either be free recruits or Monster Houses where the goal is to reach the stairs). We put Victini in the lead and leave it for dead as we don't have a Petrify Orb (such good teammates aren't we), get Pachirisu's gift, and get our first Travelling Pokémon in Chansey.

For Mission Day 6, we do the Petilil mission in Odd Field, where we have to escort it to Dragonite. We bring Rotom here, who starts with two good AoE attacks in Uproar and Discharge, and also has Thunder Wave in case we want paralysis shenanigans. The mission was pretty short only needing to go to the second floor.

Mission Day 7 and we go and help Emolga find his best friend Dunsparce with a Dragonite in tow. We optimise Dragonite's moveset and deal reunite the two as well as another mission, a traveller, and a fainted Munchlax.

For Mission Day 8, we head to Stone Field to deal with three missions (including Whiscash) and pray for a Leafeon traveller (Important for opening up a lot of missions later). We bring Rotom along and get the three missions done, but no Leafeon traveller. With the help of Whiscash however, we do get access to Alakazam, Charizard, and Tyranitar. The real gain here is Charizard, who starts with Heat Wave, Flame Burst, and Air Slash (Heat Wave in particular being really good to have), and during the postgame, we can get Tailwind, which will be important once we get to that point. Essentially, Charizard is going to be a top priority to bring to missions for quite a while.

Ancient Barrow [Giratina + 4x Litwick]

Now it's time for Ancient Barrow. We get Goomy, Deerling, and Espurr for this dungeon, though we can only use one for the purposes of alliances. For this purpose, we pick Goomy to be our third as Goomy gets Bubble and Dragon Breath, which means less Elixirs used on it in the long term (if we are fighting a lot) relative to Espurr, and Deerling has no ranged attack. As for the dungeon itself, the enemies are not too bad, and with four Pokémon having access to a 4 tile ranged move, things don't take too much effort to deal with. I also get a couple of Lullabies and Toughness Emera and hit Lv16 for the boss. Straight after the mid-point I use a Progress Device for safety as I kinda do not want to go through all the cutscenes again if I were to die.

Anyway, the main boss here is the anti-Petrify Orb boss as "Giratina" gets Safeguard and has auto-cure status. Nevertheless, similar strategies to previous bosses here by splitting the enemies apart and Pounce Wanding as appropriate. Allies here deal all the damage and I did not need to use alliances as the allies took out the boss and its adds by itself without too many problems.

Mission Days 9-10

For Mission Day 9, you get to pick which of the school friends you bring with you. I bring Goomy along for a trip to Stone Field with Charizard. No missions here, but the more important thing is getting Leafeon for opening up recruits later, who does show up as a traveller on 4F this time around. Nothing else of note here.

For Mission Day 10, we decide to go with Bayleef to Nectar Meadow to unlock a door heading to Leafy Highlands. Salamence was available for this day, so we got to have some more fun with it.

Revelation Mountain 1

Now for Revelation Mountain 1, we have Nuzleaf along as a guest to help us deal with the encounters as they can get a little rough here. Nothing major to note here though my floor luck in general was bad (stairs often in last room checked). On the other hand, we ended up getting enough experience to learn Reflect on Chikorita, which gives us a fair bit of safety for physical threats.

Mission Days 11-12

Now we have the final two mission days of the first act. For Mission Day 11, we do Cherrim's mission in Peewee Meadow, where Dragonite comes along for the ride, as well as greet a Duskull Traveler.

For Mission Day 12, we head back to Odd Field to prioritise Pansear's mission. We bring Rotom along and we deal with the two missions there. The Pansear mission is actually a boss fight, but we get good paralysis luck from Discharge and the fight was easy.

Sheer Mountain Range

And now we begin the second act of the game with the longest mainline story dungeon of the game. Sheer Mountain Range is 13 Floors of what are generally called "Gates Floors" (the first time we deal with these floors), as they tend to look like the average floor in Gates to Infinity after a point. For those that have never played Gates to Infinity before, the best way to describe them (as Google Images isn't giving good examples) is basically spaghetti-like corridors with small rooms that have no real coherent pattern. Not dissing on Gates here (at least there's no hunger mechanic in that game), but the floors here are very reminiscent of them.

Anyway, we give Tepig the Sp. Attack Looplet here now as we don't have a need for a third Pokémon for a little while, and Tepig will appreciate it for Flamethrower and Ember usage. Some enemies here can be a pain (Drifloon) and the length does not help, but we get through without too many issues. Reflect really helps out here.

Gentle Slope Cave

Gentle Slope Cave is short compared to Sheer Mountain Range, but the enemies here can be rougher, Surskit can be annoying, Onix can do some real damage and boost its physical stats, and some other nuisances. I give Chikorita an Attack Looplet I had found in Ancient Barrow and while there were a few rough moments that did result in some Oran Berry usage, we get through without a major death.

---

And that takes us to Lively Town, where we will be stopping for now. Most likely going to aim to go until the start of Revelation Mountain 2 to cover the rest of the mission days for the main stories.

Connections: 47/779
Treasures: 0/25
Deaths: 2

STARTER/PARTNER

Chikorita
Lv: 18
-Ancient Power
-Reflect
-Razor Leaf
-Synthesis

Tepig
Lv: 16
-Heavy Slam
-Flamethrower
-Defence Curl
-Ember

 

[R_N]

I always liked how hard & fast recruits came in this game. And what an ecclectic variety

 

[Its_A_Random]

Okay this update is going to be quite a big one, with a lot of rough dungeons with things worth talking about. A lot to process, but a lot of interesting things.

Restrictions:
-No Permanent Stat Boosts (Codification: No Vitamins, Drinks, Life Seeds, or using Sitrus Berries at full HP)
-No using Emeras on Pokémon mid-dungeon (Temporary Stat Boosts) or using Oran Berries/Energy Seeds at Full HP (Essentially softcapping Max HP at over 100 HP)
-No Revives (No Reviver Seeds, Tiny Reviver Seeds, Revive All Orbs, or equipping Ally Reviver)
-No Wondermail Codes
-No Getting Rescued

UPDATE #3 - JIRACHI FIGHT - MISSION DAY #23

Jirachi

First thing to do in Lively Town is to do the Jirachi fight in the Expedition Building. You are not required to win this fight as the fight ends if either MC, partner, or Jirachi gets taken out. Jirachi can two shot either party member, but Chikorita and Tepig alliances can take out Jirachi in two hits with perfect luck. We got one miss, but Jirachi used Confusion on both party members once, so we pulled through even though Tepig got confused after the second alliance.

Mission Days 13-16

Next up is four consecutive mission days before the next story dungeon. The first of these days, I bring Charizard to Odd Field to pay a visit to Corphish and his fellow guild members. After this day, we get introduced to the ranking system where every mission day will give us Expedition Points which we can use to eventually rank up, and this is mandatory as part of the Connection Orb sidequest, as rank ups allow us to unlock new Pokémon and new dungeons and the like.

We start with Rookie Rank and have three more mission days to deal with. The first mission day is another visit to Stone Field to check out Smeargle's secret base with Salamence, not very eventful. The following day is a visit to Cave of Training where we bring along Dragonite. This day has a couple of challenge fights against a group of Mankey and a group of Machop. Dragonite comes in useful for these fights with access to Agility, which introduces the idea behind Agility in these fights.

So basically, what you do is assuming control of the agility user, you begin with agility, you then move towards an enemy one step, and then you use two alliances involving Agility, and then another alliance, essentially allowing you to get three alliances off in one turn before the enemies get to act. This is highly useful on some bosses later on, but for these two challenges, you can only reach a lackey. At least you can take out one lackey, but with Dragonite's power, the two fights were rolled over without difficulties.

For the final mission day before the next dungeon, we take Rotom. Two missions here, a simple gift find for Quagsire, and then an escort mission with Wynaut to punish a Primeape. We bring Rotom with Thunder Wave in tow, and this brings along another strat that can be used to trivialise these miniboss fights: Paralysis Alliances. Essentially the goal here is to approach the enemy, and use an alliance involving a paralysis move. This buys you two free turns to spam full damage alliances before using another paralysis alliance. In short, you stunlock the enemy provided you hit the paralysis move. We miss one paralysis and had to deal with a Diggersby mid-fight, but we rolled the Primeape without issues.

We unfortunately did not get any traveling Pokémon nor any fainted Pokémon, but the last mission was enough to get our first rank-up to Normal Rank, which provides some free recruits and other unimportant stuff.

Mystical Forest

Here we finally gain access to Lapras and travel to the Air Continent for the first time with Archen in tow. We find and buy a Persim Looplet, which is going to be useful pretty soon and later on due to the confusion immunity. Anyway, Mystical Forest isn't too rough a dungeon, and with Archen in tow, you can deal with most enemies with alliances without many problems. Another good thing about this place is that there are a lot of wands on the ground, which means refilling stacks of wands for the next part of the game. Other than that, the dungeon delve was fairly uneventful.

Mission Day 17 - Cape of Wonders

After Mystical Forest, you gain the ability to buy Lapras Liner passes to gain access to the other three major continents (Grass, Mist, and Sand). With a lot of saving alongside some uneeded items, we manage to scrape together the 5,700 Poké to buy all three passes. At this point, the game starts to really open up and you gain access to a lot of new connections, dungeons, and missions. So we go around the new continents and get the connections we need and missions. For this day, we are going to Cape of Wonders, where we have four missions: Find Magikarp for Feebas, Escort Lanturn to Seel, a Rhydon challenge, and punishing a Barboach for Sharpedo.

Up to this point, the dungeons had been relatively easy, but Cape of Wonders is a step up with more difficult enemies, making this the second difficult mission day of the run. For this we decide to bring a Sun-based team. Chikorita comes along, we bring Cherrim along with Sunny Day/Morning Sun/Petal Dance/Magical Leaf, Petilil with Chlorophyll and a moveset of Stun Spore/Sleep Powder/Giga Drain/Magical Leaf. As for items, Chikorita keeps the Attack Looplet, Cherrim gets the Persim Looplet, and Petilil gets the Sp. Attack Looplet.

In terms of enemies, there are a few rough enemies here. Omastar are very dangerous and can just destroy something with Spike Cannon or Rollout or even Hydro Pump. Swanna can deal a fair amount of damage and will generally live at least one alliance. Crawdaunt can one shot with Night Slash. Shiftry can live alliances and deal nasty damage. Wynaut are not too dangerous, but can be annoying. As for the others, Slowkings can also be really annoying, Parasect is realatively free as Grass-types are immune to Spore (though Fury Cutter can be annoying), and Quagsire are harmless.

As for the day itself, we needed a few resets, four in total. The first happened after Chikorita got whacked with a Spike Cannon from Omastar on the first floor. The second attempt went pretty well, except Lanturn got sniped by a Shiftry Razor Leaf late on the third floor. The third attempt was over as soon as it began when Cherrim died to an Omastar attack. Finally, the fourth one came when a mid-alliance miss saw Chikorita get taken out by a Crawdaunt Night Slash. And those were instant resets as I could not afford anyone dying.

We did get a successful attempt on the fifth try though, we rescued the Karp, and we completed the escort. Then came the two challenge fights. For the Rhydon fight there were three Rhydon and the main objective was to set up the sun, lure a Rhydon out, and paralysis lock it with Stun Spore and making the most of the type advantage. Took two Rhydon to win the mission. Finally for the Barboach, we again applied the paralysis lock, though we had to rely on Magical Leaf with Cherrim due to Barboach's location. No travelers or fainted Pokémon though. A little rough going, but we gained enough rescue points to rank-up to Bronze Rank in one mission day. This rank-up gives us access to our first legendary dungeon of the run with Pledge Hill, home to Cobalion. Guess what we are going to do for our next mission day?

Mision Day 18 - Pledge Hill [Cobalion]

Yes, Pledge Hill time. For this day, we decide to bring a full Fire-type squad of Charizard, Chandelure, and Tepig. Charizard is Charizard, Chandelure will become apparent for the boss, and Tepig can pitch in with its moves. Anyway, the dungeon itself is easier than Cape of Wonders and most of the enemies are weak to Fire. The annoying ones are Dunsparce for not being weak to Fire and potential Rollout, and Vanillish for being fairly tanky and having Icy Wind and Uproar. We get a few useful emera on the way up including Barrage for Tepig since it needs it, and the fights were not too bad.

As for Cobalion itself, it's time to introduce yet another cheese strat, or rather move: Memento. What Memento does in this game and other PMD games is this. It sharply reduces the Attack and Special Attack of all enemies in the room, but it reduces the user's HP to 1. It also teleports the use elsewhere on the floor, which is also pretty broken for bosses as it takes it out of harm's way. And after a few Memento usages, you can reduce bosses to dealing just 1 DMG. Yeah, quite broken.

As for the fight itself, Cobalion set up Metal Burst turn one, which is unfortunate as we cannot attack it while Cobalion is close as it will destroy everyone. So the option was to stall it out with some wands while using Memento. Eventually the Metal Burst wears off and we spam alliances while Cobalion deals nothing back and eventually it falls. For victory, we get a Water Looplet, the first Treasure of the run. Normally treasures are not introduced until the postgame, but they do not stop you from just getting the Water Looplet and maybe some others before beating the main story. As for the Water Looplet, it is the game's Pierce Band, which allows thrown items to travel endlessly. This can be abused casually with Vitamins and Drinks and the like to boost more than one character at once, but that will not be happening this run.

Fire Island Volcano [Magmortar + 4x Magmar, Entei]

And now it's time for story to happen again with the trip to Fire Island Volcano. For this dungeon, Buizel tags along with us and his typing is a boon with all the Fire-types present. Nothing is too dangerous in this dungeon, though Pansear and Darumaka can burn your consumables with Incinerate. During the dungeon itself, we got a Toughness for Chikorita and Tepig, and at the mid-point, we take out some Blast Seeds and use a Progress Device we got during the dungeon after the mid-point for safety.

The first boss fight of the dungeon is a Magmortar and four Magmar. We begin with a Petrify Orb to make sure we can deal with each enemy three on one, and begin by taking out the Magmortar. It and the Magmar we deal with afterwards took two alliances to kill despite Buizel being around. Forunately we can recover after each enemy is taken out, and we win the fight.

Immediately after is the first fight against Entei. We are not required to win the fight, but we do. Two Blast Seeds is all it takes, but Entei loved spamming Ember to an annoying degree and Chikorita lost its Toughness. Entei two is an easier fight thanks to the drastically increased bulk from Chikorita and Tepig temp-evolving for plot reasons. For this, we spam Razor Leaf/Flamethrower alliances. Whenever Entei roars Meganium, we Pounce Wand back, and alliance-stopping Fire Spins are dealt with by playing defensively until Entei stops it by using Roar. Nothing too rough.

Mission Days 19-22

After Fire Island Volcano, we get four more mission days. For the first, we head to the Sand Continent for the Valley of Strong Winds. Here we do just one mission for heading to the end of the dungeon to sate a Flygon's curiosity. Flygon can be quite worth it anyway thanks to its plethora of Room-wide attacks. This dungeon isn't too bad outside of Klang, which need to be wanded away due to how bulky they are and how much damage they can deal. The Magneton can also pose a threat but can be dealt with if we get to them first. For the journey we bring Dragonite along for its attacks and Agility if necessary. There were a few rough moments along the way, but we got through to the end of the dungeon without problems. We had to use some Petrify Orbs unfortunately to get out of jail (yay Summon Traps).

The next mission day sees us head to Sunny Spot Hill in Grassy Continent. Here we have four missions to deal with. The first is a challenge fight against Blastoise, Octillery, and Golem. The second mission is to find an item from Kirlia. The third is to punish a Pyroar-F for a Pangoro, and finally, to escort everyone's favourite alarm clock from Explorers (Loudred) to a Bidoof deep in the dungeon. For this delve, I bring along the Lanturn I picked up earlier and set its moveset to Spark/Bubble Beam/Thunder Wave/Stockpile (Stockpile being for safety). The first objective is to do the Blastoise Mission. For this we only need to deal with Blastoise so we Petrify Orb the fight and approach Blastoise and begin the stunlock on Blastoise... well until...

"Loudred used Uproar!" Uproar is a room-wide attack. You can guess what happened next. So second attempt, we get to the fight again, and after using the Petrify Orb, we go and use a Petrify Wand on Loudred, because that is the best way it could help. The fight was easy after that. The other fight was against Pyroar-F and Pyroar can be quite scary as it can use Hyper Beam. This attack is ranged, has an impact radius, often tends to come from nowhere, and has a really high-pitched sound. And at our levels, it's a one shot. So we Petrify it and then apply the paralysis stunlock to stop it from nuking everyone. Easy. As for the monsters itself, there are definitely some scary ones out there, from Vigoroths with Uproar and Fury Swipes and Simisage can be rather annoying. On the other hand, Gengar gives over 100 EXP per kill, rather large at this point of the game. Anyway, other than that, we get through the day after the earlier mishap. Was a bit rough though.

Next mission day, we go back to Sunny Spot Hill with Lanturn, but this time we have one simple mission in escorting Chatot to Guildmaster Wigglytuff. It was a 3F mission, but we want to do it anyway as it opens up Lopunny's mission, which in turn opens up a few more missions. The other thing to note is that we manage to hit Silver Rank at this point, which gives a few more recruits and unlocks Heart Lake (Mesprit's Dungeon) and Triangle Temple (The Regi's Dungeon).

Finally, we do Lopunny's mission in Electric Wasteland. Lopunny's mission is an escort to open up a locked door deep in the dungeon, and alongside that, we have Houndoom's mission, which is to visit its secret base. For this, we bring Guildmaster Wigglytuff along, who is actually really powerful. Wiggly comes at Lv57 and can one shot enemies in the dungeon with Play Rough and Hyper Voice. Houndoom's base was first, and it was a Monster House. We have a Petrify Orb to spare so we use it and take out the members one by one for free experience. Other than, that, we get no travellers or fainted Pokémon en route to the Locked Door, and Tepig finally learned Rollout. Dondon, Pocolin, Donpocolin.

Showdown Mountain

After those four mission days, it's time to go back to story here with Showdown Mountain. We get paired with Mawile with Bunnelby as a guest and it went... pretty well. Made one step on 3F and got one shot out of nowhere by an Earthquake. Turns out MC death counts as a game over in story dungeons. Vibrava are mean.

With that first story dungeon death out of the way, we go back in and made sure to Reflect when we spawned in a room with an enemy for safety. As for dagerous enemies other than Vibrava, the only other real one is Heracross as it can potentially multi-hit spam, which will translate to instant death. But we get through alright on the second try. Mawile is a very good partner with Iron Head alliances. Bunnelby did not get to do much though.

Mission Day 23 - Heart Lake

With Showdown Mountain out of the way, we get one final mission day before we are forced to wrap up the story. It's easy to just pick an easy mission to get yourself ready for the final act, but we decide to do something a little bit crazy and tackle Heart Lake. Why? The main reason is to get levels onto Chikorita and Tepig for the rest of the story (where every level is going to help since we can just die), and Heart Lake can give a ton of experience.

So Heart Lake is probably the first dungeon people take on that quite long. 29 Floors, the first 28 being "Gates Floors" to an extreme, rough enemies that can give a lot of experience, and the only dungeon in the game to play the beautiful theme that is Infinite Dungeon 2. This dungeon is also generally the first dungeon where players can start seeing some of the more broken emera this game has to offer, including Better Odds (Every other attack crits and deals ridiculous damage), Sun's Blessing (Auto-Drought), Awakening (Mega Evolution or the really broken Awakened Status), and a variety of other really good emera. Most people tend to leave this until a ways into the postgame for a good reason.

In terms of Pokémon to watch out for, we have: Cinccino multi-hit spam and destroy you, Braixen (who has a gimmick unique to it and Delphox where they are pre-equipped with wands) can troll with wands and do other mean stuff. Ursaring are tanky and can steal items with Covet (good luck getting them back on these floors). Wartortle can change weather and abuse it. Persian can Fake Out and can Fury Swipes. Vigoroth does the same things I mentioned earlier. Carracosta can soak up a lot of hits and know Rollout. There are others, but these are the main ones to watch out for.

As for who we bring, we do have a few options to use. We bring Tyranitar and use Earthquake/Rock Slide/Dark Pulse/Thunder Fang, and give it Attack Looplet. We bring Flygon for the first time with a Special Attack Looplet and use Dragon Breath/Bug Buzz/Earth Power/Uproar. We also bring Charizard with a Weather Looplet at first (Negate Sandstorm damage, Sandstorm is not that great for us, but helps Tyranitar live specially-based attacks much easier), but after two attempts with it, Charizard was not cutting it, so we use Salamence instead. Speaking of those two attempts, the first attempt I made an error and put Earthquake as an alliance move which took Charizard out (oops), and the second attempt, I ended up being reduced to solo Flygon fairly early and got to about 15F before falling to a Braixen troll. With Salamence, we had two more attempts where we lost a Pokémon (Flygon) too early and some other trolling so we reset those.

The fifth attempt however, we manage to get Tyranitar/Flygon/Salamence to survive the early floors and get a long way in. Playing very carefully and making the most out of alliances, we got into a precarious situation on 23F when a Purugly used Roar on Tyranitar after an alliance. This resulted in a situation where I needed to try and get the group back together, but a Cincinno and Floatzel were approaching. Luckily I had a Rollcall Orb, but that put Flygon straight into a Tail Slap. Oops. We carry on anyway, and eventually:

We got to meet up with Mesprit!

Natural Oran Berry recovery from restoring from critical HP explains the >100 HP for Tyranitar and Salamence

So for that, we unlock two new dungeons in Lake of Enlightenment (Uxie's Dungeon) and Path of Fallen Leaves (A super difficult Never Hungries Dungeon that we are putting off for a while). Chikorita and Tepig gained a few levels getting them to Lv27 and Lv24 respectively, making them "overlevelled" for the rest of the main story... though that does not mean much in this game.

---

And with that, we will now be forced to wrap up the main story (nine dungeons worth and change), so that will be the focus of the next update. And we begin that with Revelation Mountain 2, one really rough story dungeon.

Connections: 155/779
Treasures: 1/25
Deaths: 12

STARTER/PARTNER

Chikorita
Lv: 27
-Ancient Power
-Reflect
-Razor Leaf
-Synthesis

Tepig
Lv: 24
-Rollout
-Flamethrower
-Defence Curl
-Ember

 

[R_N]

Huh I dont think I ever did the Cobalion dungeon in my run. Actually I dont think I did any of the legends? I am kind of tempted to pull my copy out but man it's been a long time

 

[Its_A_Random]

Disclaimer: This post has some unmarked story spoilers (in terms of boss fights and some dungeon names) so if you do not wish to be spoiled in that regard, I suggest completing the game and then coming back. You have been warned.

















Anyway, it is time for the update that completes the main story section of the run.

Restrictions:
-No Permanent Stat Boosts (Codification: No Vitamins, Drinks, Life Seeds, or using Sitrus Berries at full HP)
-No using Emeras on Pokémon mid-dungeon (Temporary Stat Boosts) or using Oran Berries/Energy Seeds at Full HP (Essentially softcapping Max HP at over 100 HP)
-No Revives (No Reviver Seeds, Tiny Reviver Seeds, Revive All Orbs, or equipping Ally Reviver)
-No Wondermail Codes
-No Getting Rescued

UPDATE #4 - REVELATION MOUNTAIN 2 - ANY% CLEAR

Revelation Mountain 2

With no shops to come for another five dungeons, we do some prep work at Kecleon's and get some apples from Cofagrigus just in case before heading into this doozy of a dungeon.

Revelation Mountain 2 is one of the roughest dungeons in the main story and the fact that I am higher levelled than most beat the final boss means nothing here. We get Archen to help and Nuzleaf as a guest, but the dungeon is full of Flying-types and Bug-types of varying levels of threat, all looking to eat Chikorita for lunch. By far the most dangerous threats of the dungeon are Noctowl and Drifblim. Drifblim know Ominous Wind and combined with Unburden, can launch two room-wide nukes at once, making no mention of the chance of stat boosts. Noctowl on the other hand, have access to Sky Attack, which has a charge up turn, but then launches an attack that deals damage to every target up to 10 tiles directly in front. Which is a one shot without Reflect.

As for the climb, it begins with a Warp Trap. Nuzleaf and Tepig went the right direction towards me, but Archen ended up picking a fight with a Swoobat which did not go well due to confusion and he died. We continue to climb up, making use of Rollout in alliances now that Tepig has it (and because there are a lot of Pokémon weak to Rock). Then Floor 6 came along and we confused a Noctowl who proceeded to wake up a Drifblim with Growl. A couple of winds later and Tepig was dead. Soon after, Nuzleaf fell and it was all up to me, a Chikorita, to uncover the secrets of the mountain alone. At this point, I made use of Ancient Power at times for damage and started making use of Pounce Wands for movement. We also had the Big Ears Emera to be able to watch enemy movement, which proved to be very useful. A wand here, a wand there, we somehow manage to mke it to the top without dying and our reward for surviving the mostly solo climb was a trip to hell. Act Two done.

Abyssal Badlands

Act Three of the game begins the Voidlands, a four dungeon trek which begins with the dungeon known as Hell Wastelands in the Japanese version. Here we just have Chikorita and Tepig in a dungeon that can be surprisingly rough. Ferroseed know Pin Missile, Sandshrew know Magnitude, Steelix and Electrode can be bulky, Bronzor can troll, and while Claydol are generally asleep, they know Hyper Beam.

The start to the journey proved to be fairly rough as we had to deal with a lot of things early on as well as falling into critical HP a couple of times, but eventually we find out groove, eventually clearing the dungeon after barely surviving a Pin Missile.

Cave of the Deep

Cave of the Deep is a little shorter and the enemies are a little easier, but there are a few threats still. Munna have a room-wide recovery move, Porygon2 know Agility, Elgyem can attack from a distance and use Heal Block, and Ditto can pose as an item and confuse everyone else with Transform. We gain Mawile and Dedenne here, but we pick Mawile as our choice for alliances. The run through the cave was not too bad though we did end up getting two Ditto along the way, but there was not anything worthy of note here.

Calm Craggy Area [4x Void Shadow]

Place with the best new dungeon music in the game IMO. here we get three more society members back in the form of Bunnelby, Archen, and Buizel. Bunnelby is not that useful here, but Archen can basically one shot anything with Acrobatics and Buizel knows Hydro Pump. We stick to using Mawile here for alliances. there's not too many in the way of dangerous enemies, but the Sigilyoh can pose a threat and the Golem are kinda sturdy and annoying. The delve was a little rougher and we did have a moment where we survived an attack with 1 HP. We eventually get through and pick up some decent emera, but the big find here is the Ban Seed. What Ban Seed does is that it bans the last move the consumer used for the rest of the adventure, and this will come on handy for a certain boss later on.

As for the boss fight here against the Void Shadows, we lose access to Buizel and Bunnelby, but it does not stop the fight from being a pushover. The shadows die to an alliance and also die to a single Acrobatics, so we just brute force it and clear without any issues and without wand usage.

Reverse Mountain [Mega Tyranitar + 2x Mega Gengar + 2x Void Shadow]

Time for the dungeon where you are greeted with endless messages of "Sawk used Rock Smash!" For Reversal Mountain, we are shoehorned into Mawile as our third, while Raikou, Entei, and Suicune join us as guests. They pretty much destroy anything they touch, though we are still going to fight with alliances and what have you. Access to Mawile and the legendary beasts mean that enemies in the mountain are not much of an issue, the most dangerous is Aegislash due to its gimmick of being really bulky and then being a glass cannon. We get some decent emera on the way up and I use the Progress Device on 7F for safety.

For the boss, the main goal is to Pounce Wand upright and then take each target out as a group. Unfortunately however, Raikou got confused and eventually started spamming Thunderbolt in my vicinity and eventually one hit and I was one shot. I had the Progress Device active so I eventually returned to the boss fight, but one thing I ended up noticing was that the RNG was playing out the same way with each floor assuming my actions were the same. This also translated to the boss battle where the pattern saw a Mega Gengar get hit by two beasts, dodge Raikou, then confuse with Confuse Ray. Because of the knowledge of the RNG, I knew if I made the same movements, I would get knocked out on turn 4, so instead I use a Stayaway Wand on Raikou to take him out of the fight, and rely on Mawile/Entei/Suicune instead. What this ended up doing was see a Void Shadow that would have died survive a little longer until I eliminated it with Razor Leaf, one Mega Gengar would die a little later, but now the other Mega Gengar started to head towards Raikou. Eventually with the allies help, we took out the remaining Void Shadow and Mega Tyranitar, meanwhile Raikou eventually snapped out and 1v1ed the Mega Gengar.

Beheeyem

Now we are out of hell and back to the real world, we get our next boss soon enough with a sole Beheeyem. This fight is not a required win and it's just you and Espurr, but I ended up getting really bad confusion luck (two confusions) and eventually bit the bullet here. You don't lose any items at least.

Submerged Cave

At this point, it was time for the last shop and last preparations before the endgame. Here we replace Ember with Flame Charge on Tepig and do some last shopping before the four dungeon trek towards the final boss. For this dungeon, we get a guest in the form of Beheeyem. It can be fairly useful with Psybeam, but can only take a couple of hits at best. In terms of the enemies in the dungeon, it is a rough one. In terms of dangerous threats, we have Seadra with the potential for Hydro Pumps, Octillery have a bunch of ranged moves and cannot be warped away if they have Suction Cups. Everything else is annoying, but these are the main ones.

This dungeon did not go super well for me as I lost Beheeyem early and then Tepig the next floor, forcing me to solo the rest of the dungeon. Luckily I had Wand Expert and a bunch of Wands, so I basically just wanded my way through the dungeon and got through despite some hairy moments.

Prehistoric Ruins

After Submerged Cave comes Prehistoric Ruins, which is primarily comprised of Fighting- and Flying-types. Everything can be dangerous here, Hitmonchan know Agility, Hitmontop know Triple Kick, Hariyama are bulky, Pangoro are bulky and know Arm Thrust, Braviary are generally asleep but are very dangerous if woken up. Beheeyem is still around for this dungeon.

Like Submerged Cave I had a really rough start and was reduced to solo Chikorita again early on, but without Wand Expert, I needed to be more conservative with wands and started fighting enemies. Unfortunately I made a mistake trying to fight a Pangoro on 8F and died after a Razor Leaf miss. The second attempt went much better and keeping all members alive, I managed to breeze through.

Road to Primeval Forest [Yveltal + Nuzleaf + 2x Beheeyem]

For this dungeon, we are joined by Ampharos, Jirachi, Espurr, and Celebi and we can pick one for joining alliances. For this case, we pick Ampharos as his Electro Ball will come in handy for the boss fight. The enemies in the dungeon itself do not really pose much ofa threat given the firepower we have (also Espurr and Celebi have ranged attacks to spam which helps). The emera we get aren't very notable but we did get a Power Boost X + Y and Alliance Expert for Chikorita. We use a Progress Device at the end of 9F to make any resets quicker (which is probably not the best idea, but whatever) and we go into the boss.

Now for the boss that tends to claim many casual playthroughs, this one is a doozy. Yveltal is notorious for Oblivion Wing which we can tank a hit from since we are evolved for the fight, meanwhile Nuzleaf and the Beheeyem all have access to ranged attacks. Yveltal can also Snarl and Roost off some damage. Since we Progress Deviced before the fight, the fight mostly became a case of trial and error until we found the right string of RNG that would give us a win. This took four attempts.

The first attempt I tried Petrify Orb to bait Oblivion Wing and throwing the Ban Seed I picked up in Craggy, but Yveltal dodged it. The second try, I used Reflect first, then Ban Seeded with success and then Pounce Wanded close to Yveltal, but I ended up getting confused and things went downhill. The third try, I Pounce Wanded close and then allianced Nuzleaf using Synthesis/Flame Charge/Electro Ball, but I ended up dying afterwards. Finally, I started with Pounce Wand again, but allianced Beheeyem instead with Synthesis/Rollout/Electro Ball and the RNG started to look favourable enough that we could take out one Beheeyem, then Nuzleaf, and the Jirachi took out the other Beheeyem soon after. Unfortunately Emboar was confused, but we could manage. Eventually Jirachi and Ampharos died, and the Ban Seeded Oblivion Wing only hit Emboar, but soon after Emboar snapped out and Yveltal was taken out by an Energy Ball

Tree of Life

I'm going to merge the two Tree of Life sections into one here. Anyway, we only have MC + Partner, but we have the evolved forms. We don't gain experience in either dungeon so the priority is just hitting the stairs. Tree of Life: Roots with the levels we have and evolved benefits ended up being a bit of a pushover and cleared without issue. The only real "threat" was Maractus with Pin Missile, but Reflect allows us to not worry too much about it. We also ended up getting a couple of Toughness Emera just incase things went bad.

Next was Tree of Life: Trunk and we started to prepare for the final boss. We get out a fair few Oran Berries and Elixirs as well as seven Guiding Wands and a Progress Device+ (which ensures I don't lose items/money if I die). The enemies here are more annoying than in roots, Gardevoir, Duosion, and Seismitoad in particular, but nothing dangerous because of the much higher health from being evolved. We don't find much in the way of useful emera before the end of the dungeon and use the Progress Device+ near the final stairs. This is in case I die in the second phase of the final boss as any damage dealt in that phase is maintained.

Dark Matter

Now for the final boss. Dark Matter 1 has ~1200 HP and you fight it with your evolved forms. The attacks you see the most from him is a mowing physical that hits both targets, an aiming special attack that hits 1 target, and a move that inflicts one target with a random status condition. Reflect is really important here as Dark Matter loves to mow around a lot. As for alliances, I use Razor Leaf (or Synthesis if health is a little low) with Meganium while Emboar alternates Defence Curl and Rollout. Defence Curl allows Emboar to takes less and less from mowing attacks and also makes Rollout deal much more damage, a five hit buffed Rollout deals a significant chunk. For items, we use Attack Looplets on both characters. During the fight itself my Rollout luck was a little less than stellar and we needed one Oran for Emboar, but we got a lot of mows which is what Reflect is for, and the one animosity it used only inflicted Poison on Meganium, which isn't a problem.

After Phase 1 and some cutscenes, we get Dark Matter 2. First, we lose our evolved forms and emera, which means we have much less health. However, this second phase is quite loopable. Dark Matter 2 has four separate health bars of ~400, ~400, ~400, and ~300 respectively and will always begin by preparing its charge attack. The game telepraphs which tiles are getting hit so it's easy to dodge, and after each health bar it always pushes you back. So the easy fight is to get up to Dark Matter quickly and alliance pray for a multi-hit Rollout to push it into the next phase. The other good thing is if I die here, its health stays where I left off so this fight is eventually winnable (This also applies to the final bosses in Gates to Infinity and Rescue Team DX).

So for the second fight itself. We set up Reflect immediately (very important as we get two shot by mows!) go in and start attacking. Eventually we push it to the first health get after the charge attack (and Chikorita getting poisoned again) and then phase 2 was pretty easy as we got a favourable pattern. Rollout luck was okay at the very least, and get to the next health gate before the attack hits. Phase 3 is where things began to get a little hairy, as we got an unfavourable hit radius and Dark Matter did the attack before we did any real damage. We needed a couple of Oran Berries to get through this phase and Tepig also got hit by Yawn and Paralysis. But soon after Tepig woke up we got to the last hp gate and got a favourable radius. We Pounce Wand in (Pounce Wands are good for this fight!) and get a five hit Defence Curl boosted Rollout to sink the final boss.

---

And with that, the main story section of the run is done, but now we have the epilogue which will have a couple of scary Chikorita solo sections coming up. At least our wand count at this point is fine, but we can never be certain. From now on I am probably going to update at each rank up.

Connections: 155/779
Treasures: 1/25
Deaths: 18

STARTER/PARTNER

Chikorita
Lv: 28
-Ancient Power
-Reflect
-Razor Leaf
-Synthesis

Tepig
Lv: 26
-Rollout
-Flamethrower
-Defence Curl
-Flame Charge

 

[R_N]

The other good thing is if I die here, its health stays where I left off so this fight is eventually winnable (This also applies to the final bosses in Gates to Infinity and Rescue Team DX).

what?!
I had no idea about this...I definitely remember panicking about having to go through all of that again when I played. Makes me hopeful for an eventual Explorers DX because Primal Dialga is The Worst

 

[King Feraligatr]

what?!
I had no idea about this...I definitely remember panicking about having to go through all of that again when I played. Makes me hopeful for an eventual Explorers DX because Primal Dialga is The Worst

I had no idea Super and RTDX did this.....still not a fan of this in all cases.

Anyways, nice job, Random! Will see how you suffer postgame. >: D

 

[Ironmage]

It does make sense to provide some method of escaping since it's very possible to enter a plot-important dungeon and then lose the items that allowed you to stand a chance. That said, it's never actually been the final boss itself that's caught me when the plot cuts off access to other ways to get items (partially because Rayquaza is only one dungeon away from the ability to restock, and dialga is only two off). I defnitely would have appreciated a way to not be stuck on Palkia and Yveltal for 10+ levels.

 

[Its_A_Random]

Of course, the main caveat is that you would have to select "Give Up" instead of "Resume from Save Data" if you die to the second half of the final boss fight to get the health maintain, which is why I used the Progress Device+ to ensure I don't lose my items if I die (particularly my wands which are helpful getting to the final boss in the first place). Of course given the way RNG seems to work you could just resume from save and trial and error your way through, but given the amount of cutscenes you have to go through, I feel it's more efficient to just go back up and beat what's left of the boss.

It's probably the only time where I would prefer giving up (with Progress Device+) if I die compared to everywhere else where I can just reload the save as I save before entering a dungeon (not to mention dying and giving up advances a mission day during the main story which can have implications).

The maintain also makes sense when you consider during the second half that the boss is visually degrading throughout the fight as you deal more damage.

 

[Its_A_Random]

Alright, first postgame update. This update has some epilogue spoilers, should be the last update with any sort of story spoilers.























Restrictions:
-No Permanent Stat Boosts (Codification: No Vitamins, Drinks, Life Seeds, or using Sitrus Berries at full HP)
-No using Emeras on Pokémon mid-dungeon (Temporary Stat Boosts) or using Oran Berries/Energy Seeds at Full HP (Essentially softcapping Max HP at over 100 HP)
-No Revives (No Reviver Seeds, Tiny Reviver Seeds, Revive All Orbs, or equipping Ally Reviver)
-No Wondermail Codes
-No Getting Rescued

UPDATE #5 - EPILOGUE START - PLATINUM RANK

Mission Day 24

So we are finally back in the game and we do not have access to Tepig for a little while so we are going to stick to regular missions until we get it back. First mission day we do after going around the continents for missions and connections (including the Cleffa that likes shooting) is at Cape of Wonders. We have a whopping six missions to do here including a rescue, two secret bases, escorting Gligar to an item, an item delivery for a Swellow, and one of the more interesting mission types. I bring Rotom and Lanturn with me.

The first mission was a simple 2F mission which was easy to deal with, then we have Corsola's Secret Base on 3F, which is a free recruit. After Gligar retrieves his item on 4F, we get quite the unique mission on 5F. So Inkay wants us to get a Popular Ribbon back from a Basculin, but there is also another expedition team on the same mission, and the goal is to get the ribbon before the other team does. In practice, we Petrify Orb everyone and Paralysis Alliance spam until the Basculin is down for the count and take the ribbon back. Easy. On 6F we get Dragalge's secret base which is a Monster House. We Petrify Orb it, but things get a little dicey as I hit a Confuse Trap and Warp Trap in succession. Because I was confused, using the Rollcall Orb would warp all enemies near me as well... which would be death, so the Rotom and Lanturn unpetrified the entire house with a room-wide attack and were left for dead. I really need to get some Pure Seeds for these missions, or keep someone at the stairs. So it was solo Chikorita for the rest of the way, we get our first traveler since leaving Serene Village on 7F in Wailmer, and we complete the delivery on 8F. Easy.

Sand Dune of Spirits

This dungeon and the next are generally very rough because of the fact that you only have your starter, but given the amount of times I had to use solo Chikorita already, even though the dungeon is rough (lots of Fire-types), I am used to these solo delves by this point. I start using Guiding Wands here to make the delve less painful. In terms of enemies, everything bar Darmanitan and Volcarona are two shot by Razor Leaf, though Volcarona is generally always asleep unless provoked so yeah. Liberal use of wands helps here as Chikorita gets two shot by most things, and Razor Leaf really helps as well due to its range. Eventually we get through the ten floors without dying and get whereabouts for our next destination in Mystery Jungle.

Mystery Jungle

Mystery Jungle is generally worse than Sand Dune of Spirits and is full of Poison-types. Most things get two shot after some Emera boosts, but the big thing I do to make this delve easier is to use Hoopa. So the thing with Hoopa is that you can pick up a Djinn's Bottle in Sahra Town and it will stay in your inventory until Hoopa dies or you complete an adventure (victory or otherwise). In the dungeon, you can use the Bottle to summon Hoopa for the rest of the floor. You can also ask Hoopa to use its rings which will either summon a legendary or turn into its Unbound Form (which if I recall correctly is bad), but we do not care about that. All we care about with Hoopa is that it has Hyperspace Hole which has the same range as Razor Leaf, it never misses, and takes out everything in the dungeon in 1-2 hits. And we want to keep it following us (as its AI will make it wander if it gets a bit too far from us or go after foes). One downside of Hoopa is that it has Ally Switch which is really trolly and can put you in direct range of an attack, but we can tank a hit or two.

In short, we abuse Djinn's Bottle and get good enough Emera (Including Barrage and Power Boost X+Y) that we end up clearing the dungeon without any real difficulties. It helps that Hoopa managed to not die throughout the delve.

Mission Days 25-27

So for the next three mission days, the last of the epilogue, we are forced to use Chikorita and Mew, and Mew's starting set is not the best. So I get some TM's from Cofagrigus' shop and teach Mew Thunderbolt, Ice Beam, and Shadow Ball, which will suffice.

To begin with, we go to the Forest of Fairies to deal with five missions with Charizard in tow. We have a Secret Base, an escort mission to an item, and a few more item finding missions to deal with. Our escort was Cranidos, who is fairly useful. The dungeon itself is uneventful as we are pretty strong at this point. The secret base was Snover's monster house, but learning from before, I assume another character after using Petrify Orb to get Chikorita reunited without a Warp Trap ruining the day. We also free a fainted Pokémon, our first since Serene Village. After these set of missions, we reach Gold Rank, which gives a few more connects and unlocks the Mewtwo Fight (which we'll save until we find another Ban Seed) and Genesect's dungeon.

For the second mission day, we head to Yellow Sand Labyrinth. We have three missions to deal with here on the last three floors of the dungeon: An escort mission to bring Herdier to Exploud, a challenge fight with Golurk, and seeing what's beyond the end of the dungeon for Metagross. For this dungeon we bring Petilil for Grass STAB and Stun Spore. We had an early death/reset here after a careless mistake saw Chikorita one shot on 3F by Fraxure (although it isn't a game over, I want it for Golurk's fight). Second time through I almost lost Chikorita to a Skorupi Pin Missile but Toughness saved me. We also got our first random Monster House of the run on 4F which we dealt with by Petrifying an enemy at the room entrance. We also had a Fainted Anorith to rescue on 2F, and as for the Golurk fight, it was a case of Petrify Orb -> Paralysis stunlock w/ alliances. We finish the dungeon without other issues.

Finally we head back to Sunny Spot Hill with Rotom in tow. We only have one mission to escort Grovyle to Shiny Celebi on 3F (unlocked as a result of Heart Lake from earlier), but doing this mission unlocks Dusknoir's mission which then leads into some Ghost/Dark-type connects (who can be used to cheese Mewtwo). The mission itself was easy, but we get a couple of travelling Pokémon aftwerwards (Surskit, Unown QM) that made the trip worth it. Dusknoir's mission which I unlock afterwards is making me go back to Sunny Spot Hill again What is it with plot important characters in Explorers and wanting me to do their missions in Sunny Spot Hill... But we'll come back to that later, because...

Purifying Cave

... It's time for the final story dungeon of the game. For this dungeon we are required to use Chikorita, but for the only time in the game, we can bring some other recruits with me. For this, I pick Chandelure (and teach it Shadow Ball by TM) and Wigglytuff. The 15 floor romp is not without some annoying enemies, however. Salamence and Metagross exist. Aerodactyl know Agility and sometimes have Pressure. Noivern can be dangerous. Reuniclus can be annoying to take down as they use screens. But the most annoying enemy of the dungeon is Vanilluxe, who have some really annoying moves and possess a fair bit of bulk.

As for my run through the dungeon itself, it was a pretty comfortable romp. A few early confusion mishaps from a Meowstic Psybeam but we got Confusion Guard soon enough and the enemies could mostly be taken out by one alliance. We had two Vanilluxe along the way, but we took out the first before it did anything stupid and the second was stayawayed. We had one Salamence and Metagross who were dealt with using wands. Other than that we did not have much else go wrong and we get to the end of the dungeon without a death.

For our reward, we finally get Tepig back and we are done with the story section of the game. From there we are introduced to the Treasure Item sidequest (of which we have one already) and we unlock some of the postgame stuff including Move Tutors, Evolution, some new dungeons, and an expansion to Cofagrigus' shop. We also gain the connections of the Expedition Society and we can now move into the postgame proper.

Moving Forward - Getting Chikorita to Lv32

So from here on in, I'm not going to talk too much about regular missions unless it's important to talk about and mostly going to focus updates on treasure and legendary dungeons where the main meat of the postgame lies. We already got a taste earlier with Cobalion and Heart Lake but at this point, the game is completely non-linear and we are able to do anything in whatever order we want. In terms of new dungeons we unlock that are of note, we gain access to World Tree and Giant Stone Meadow, which are both Golden Item dungeons. Given access to the tutors, we also waste no time in getting the money to teach Charizard Tailwind. Pretty pricey at 8,000 Poké, but it will come in handy not too far from now.

But our first priority before doing all this interesting stuff is getting Chikorita to Lv32. At this level, we will get to the level we need to be able to evolve straight into Meganium, and doing this adds Petal Blizzard and Petal Dance to our repitoire of moves that we can use, both excellent STAB moves in different ways. At this point, Chikorita is about one and a half levels away from our goal (and half a level from adding Light Screen to our list). So we choose to mission grind. It takes about four missions to get there. We do missions in Small Sand Dunes, Abundant Pass, Hall of Magic, and Berry Forest. Of particular note, Small Sand Dunes had a Pyroar-M challenge with a twist; all of my party members are in different rooms, forcing them to solo a Pyroar while me and the leader are in opposite ends. In practice you just petrify the adds and alliance the leader. Abundant Pass had a gang fight where we had to take out four members, which was a matter of Petrify Orb and then take each out one by one. I could not paralysis stunlock the Hitmonlee in that challenge, but Reflect proved its worth. Berry Forest I had three out of four traveling Pokémon spawn in the same room as me and I had to deal witb Perish Song trolls for the first time (got a bit lucky though). And then there was Hall of Magic.

Floor 2 of Hall of Magic was an Aerodactyl challenge with the Aerodactyl in different rooms. We got to a scenario where two Aerodactyl were close to each other and then came a DOUBLE HYPER BEAM. Chikorita somehow dodged one and survived but when the challenge was done, Chikorita was all on its own, so I chose to roll with it. A secret base monster house and a find item mission later and we ended up getting a few more travelers and fainteds... and Yanma. So Yanma is a little different in that it seems like a traveller but it wants to fight, feeling "pumped up". And once you hit it, it starts to run towards the stairs at double speed. It was interesting with solo Chikorita, but with Confuse Wands and Ancient Power stat boosting, we manage to stop it from going anywhere near the stairs.

Anyway, after the set of missions in Berry Forest, we upgrade to Platinum Rank. This unlocks Manaphy's dungeon and Articuno's dungeon, gives recruits and Gold Bars, and also opens up Entei's mission in Fire Island Volcano. "Groooooar." We also get Lv32 so Chikorita is going to grow up next update, where we should start doing some of the more notable dungeons.

---

Connections: 281/779
Treasures: 1/25
Dungeons Explored: 37.2%
Deaths: 19

STARTER/PARTNER + OTHERS USED THIS UPDATE

Chikorita
Lv: 32
-Ancient Power
-Reflect
-Razor Leaf
-Synthesis

Tepig
Lv: 27
-Rollout
-Flamethrower
-Defence Curl
-Heat Crash

Chandelure
Lv: 44
-Flame Burst
-Memento
-Confuse Ray
-Shadow Ball

Charizard
Lv: 41
-Air Slash
-Tailwind
-Heat Wave
-Flame Burst

Lanturn
Lv: 36
-Thunder Wave
-Signal Beam
-Discharge
-Bubble Beam

Mew
Lv: 41
-Psychic
-Thunderbolt
-Ice Beam
-Shadow Ball

Petilil
Lv: 37
-Energy Ball
-Stun Spore
-Magical Leaf
-Giga Drain

Rotom
Lv: 32
-Ominous Wind
-Thunder Wave
-Shock Wave
-Discharge

Wigglytuff
Lv: 59
-Hyper Voice
-Double Slap
-Disarming Voice
-Play Rough

 

[R_N]

Out of curiosity has anyone ever bothered evolving anyone other than their starters. I'm pretty sure you can, nothing stops you and they have the mechanic in place so they may as well but this game really doesnt give a reason to unless you reaally really want to go into a dungeon with 3 dragonites i guess

 

[King Feraligatr]

Out of curiosity has anyone ever bothered evolving anyone other than their starters. I'm pretty sure you can, nothing stops you and they have the mechanic in place so they may as well but this game really doesnt give a reason to unless you reaally really want to go into a dungeon with 3 dragonites i guess

I played through the game twice (though never 100%ted the game....Not even close) and have never evolved anything but my starters in it. In a game that limits you to about only one of each Pokemon, I guess I don't see as worth it to "lose" those Mons forever (in that save).

 

[Its_A_Random]

To be honest, from a practical sense there is not many scenarios where it would be worth running multiple instances of the same Pokémon. I guess having multiple instances of say, Flygon, for more room wide nuking fun could be justified in some instances (especially since there is a cooldown mechanic), but generally it's not worth it, especially since you don't get any stat boosts from evolving in this game.

Which means that the only Pokémon that are even worth evolving from a practical sense are your starters, since you always have them and from a completionist standpoint you do not permanently lose an instance of a Pokémon. And even then, the only point of evolution (outside of aesthetics) is access to new moves. Some Pokémon benefit from this (Charmander, Bulbasaur, Chikorita, Riolu for example benefit from going all the way), while for some others it is either only worth evolving once to the middle stage or not at all (eg. Mudkip has no practical incentive to evolve past Marshtomp unless you really want Hydro Cannon, and Pikachu does not really gain anything from evolving to Raichu).

 

[Its_A_Random]

Alright, time to take on some of the non-regular postgame content for some legendaries and treasures.

Restrictions:
-No Permanent Stat Boosts (Codification: No Vitamins, Drinks, Life Seeds, or using Sitrus Berries at full HP)
-No using Emeras on Pokémon mid-dungeon (Temporary Stat Boosts) or using Oran Berries/Energy Seeds at Full HP (Essentially softcapping Max HP at over 100 HP)
-No Revives (No Reviver Seeds, Tiny Reviver Seeds, Revive All Orbs, or equipping Ally Reviver)
-No Wondermail Codes
-No Getting Rescued

UPDATE #6 - DIAMOND RANK

Seafloor Ruins [Manaphy + Phione]

So the first thing we do after getting Platinum is to evolve our Pokémon, we go straight to Meganium for Chikorita and evolve Tepig into Pignite for Arm Thrust, a good multi-hit move. We also get enough connections to recruit Cofagrigus, whose recruit gives us access to improved versions of normal looplets in his shop. We buy two Attack Looplets, two Sp. Attack Looplets, a Persim Looplet, and a Resilient Looplet. We then prepare for a legendary dungeon in the form of Seafloor Ruins. This dungeon is not too hard and is full of Water-types with predominately specially-based coverage, and the goal is to just meet up with Manaphy on 17F. For this dungeon, I bring Meganium with Petal Blizzard/Razor Leaf/Light Screen/Synthesis, I bring Ampharos along with Discharge learned, and I bring Dragonite along.

The enemies themselves are not too bad, they have a bit of HP to them but their attacks are not dangerous (especially after Light Screen). Some Pokémon can Confuse, Starmie has annoyance potential, and Qwilfish has Hydro Pump, but with two Lv50+ Pokémon at my disposal, we never felt really threatened throughout the delve. It was also a good place to gain some early move experience onto Petal Blizzard since that is a move I will be wanting to use quite a bit throughout the rest of the run. At the end of the dungeon, we meet up with Manaphy and Phione, getting their recruits and a Walrein on the side. We also gain access to our second treasure of the run with a Blue Looplet. This looplet increases the max HP of its holder by 50, which is quite a big deal given how little HP we generally have and will be used for safety later on. We also unlock Gyarados' mission to visit his secret base in Seafloor Ruins, meaning we will have to make another visit soon...

Fire Island Volcano Revisit [Heatran, Entei]

So the next port of call for us is to revisit Fire Island Volcano. Unfortunately Flygon was not available for this mission day which is a shame as I would have liked to have Earth Power, so we bring Marowak instead alongside Meganium and Pignite. Marowak is actually pretty good and its main selling point is access to Bonemerang. This move has the same properties as Hydro Pump (hits any enemy up to 10 tiles away in the line of sight), but also hits twice, making it an excellent move as those who used Cubone in Rescue Team DX can attest to. The enemies in the dungeon itself are pretty much the same with a couple of rough opponents (mostly Pyroar), but it's basically the same power level as before and we are stronger than we were.

On 7F we find Heatran who operates the same way as the Yanma I talked about last update. Unfortunately Petal Blizzard and Bonemerang missed it and allowed Heatran to one shot Pignite with Earth Power (Pignite does seem to like dying a lot of late...), but we get it into flee mode and Surround Wand it once it reached a corridor to box it in and end the chase. After the connection, we progress to 10F to meet up with Entei. Entei proceeds to take advantage of the game's weird sense of humour and rewards us with a Wildfire Looplet, a Treasure that boosts the holder's Physical Attack by 30 points. We also get Magmar and Magmortar's connects and unlock Isle of Light, which is Raikou's dungeon.

Triangle Temple [Regirock, Regice, Registeel, Regigigas]

Alright, we unlocked this dungeon before Showdown Mountain in the story and now we are ready to take advantage of our new gear to tackle this beast of a dungeon. It's only 12 floors, but it has four boss fights in it at 3F, 6F, 9F, and 12F. In a shoutout to Aegis Cave from Explorers, the random Pokémon on the floors inbetween are all Unown. We bring a lot of Elixirs and a few Oran Berries and we bring the following team:

Meganium @ Persim Looplet* [Lv33]: Petal Blizzard / Light Screen / Reflect / Petal Dance
Pignite @ Wildfire Looplet [Lv28]: Rollout / Arm Thrust / Flamethrower / Heat Crash
Charizard @ Blue Looplet [Lv41]: Air Slash / Tailwind / Heat Wave / Flame Burst

In terms of reasoning: Meganium is always available being MC, and having Dual Screens is very important given how frail we are. Petal Blizzard is for Unowns and Petal Dance is for the bosses. Persim Looplet means it cannot be confused and as such, cannot hit teammates with Petal Blizzard. Pignite is partner, and is our main damage dealer with Arm Thrust. Not the most reliable or hardest hitting but nevertheless is well-suited. Finally Charizard is mostly for Tailwind (which is REALLY good for bosses), but also helps clear mobs and Air Slash flinches can save turns. Blue Looplet is for survivability. We could rely on other cheesy strats but paralysis/stunlock spam, while okay, is not as effective since bosses auto heal from statuses every second turn and generally mean more alliances over the long term, making hunger an issue. Finally Chandelure for Memento is only worth it for Regigigas, but it does not work on the preceding bosses and Chandelure's damage output is less than a good Arm Thrust.

So we start off by getting Type Bulldozer for Meganium which helps it out for Registeel's fight, but our first boss is Regirock. So the way we handle this fight, we start by assuming control of Charizard and using Tailwind. This allows us to move to an adjacent square of Regirock and then do two alliances involving Tailwind to set up our Dual Screens and deal some initial damage and then go all in on the offensive. Regirock as around 750ish HP so it does not take long for it to go down, but it does pick on Charizard a bit so the screens and Blue Looplet really helped out. Regice and Registeel go down in a similar fashion, but Registeel primed an Explosion before dying so I had to use a Stayaway to get all characters out of range and subsequently sniping it from a distance.

Before we get into Regigigas, we manage to find a Toughness Emera which we put onto Pignite since we do not want our main source of damage to just die. So Regigigas itself has twice the health of the other regis, has better bulk, and hits much harder, so hard that the Toughness we put on Pignite saved it from getting one shot by Crush Grip through screens. Regigigas also likes to spam Dizzy Punch, but we got enough Confusion Guards to stop it from trolling us. We also get out of the way of any Revenge it uses with our boosted speed. It does however take a lot of resources (for one, we ended up running out of Oran Berries). We needed to recast Tailwind stacks twice and we did run into PP issues from being rather underpowered for this fight, but with a little more persistence and good luck, the trio of underpowered starters down Regigigas without any casualties (For reference, Petal Dance was only dealing ~20 per hit, Arm Thrust was a little over 30 on average per hit, Charizard was dealing between 40 and 50 damage). We do not get any treasures for winning, but we do unlock Jewel Road, which is Diancie's dungeon.

Jewel Road [Diancie]

So we decide to go there next. I bring Flygon with the two starter Pokémon, only to immediately find out that the dungeon is in no way shape or form friendly to Meganium as it gets instantly one shot by a Charizard Heat Wave (No Blue Looplet on). Yeah let's reset, as Pignite and Flygon alone do not have the firepower to deal with the power level of this dungeon without excessive wand spam. So I decide to replace Meganium with Entei with the Wildfire Looplet. Entei in this game is actually really good. Comes at Lv55, and you can immediately teach it Sacred Fire, which is essentially Heat Wave on crack and being physical, it gets boosted by Wildfire Looplet. It also gets some decent special stuff, but Sacred Fire is generally where it is at.

So we go in again and Entei immediately earns its keep by being able to deal over 100 DMG to anything in the 13 floors this dungeon has. There are a few rough Pokémon here such as the aforementioned Charizard, such as Camerupt having room-wide attacks, Rhyperior have Rock Wrecker, Mandibuzz are fairly bulky, and some other things. The goal of this dungeon is to meet up with Diancie on the 13th floor and with Entei and Flygon (and a little help from Pignite), we have the firepower needed to blast through the dungeon. I also find Better Odds and Additional Action for Entei which proved instrumental in Entei taking out an entire monster house on 8F by itself through straight up Sacred Fire spam. At the end we meet up with Diancie and get its connect. This opens up Fossil Excavation, which houses a pretty good Golden Item. But first things first...

Mysterious Geoglyph [Genesect]

... We decide to do this dungeon. We bring along Charizard and Pignite, but we also bring along Heatran who has access to Heat Wave and Earth Power, two good room-wide moves. Anyways, this dungeon is relatively short at just eight floors long, but every single enemy we come across here is a Genesect holding a random drive. They have ~200 HP meaning we need at least two attacks to take one down and they can use things such as Screech/Metal Sound (bad) and have a ranged attack in Techno Blast. They yield 125 experience per kill which is nice at this point of the game.

So the dungeon did get off to a little bit of a rough start on 2F with Pignite dying early (again), so it came down to Charizard and Entei Heat Waving their way through the dungeon and the swarm of Genesect. Eventually we get to 8F, which is different to the first seven. Basically it's an inwards spiral to the stairs and it's a single room floor. Which means that we can take out the Genesect as soon as they spawn with Heat Wave spam. After a while, five Genesect will respawn so we have to do the process a few times, but we minimise it to three waves (after a warp trap sent me back to the start of the floor) by abusing Charizard's Tailwind. Upon hitting the final stairs, we get Genesect's connect and the Sand Looplet, a treasure that boosts the power of moves used (similar to Fierce Band in Rescue Team DX).

Fossil Excavation [Golden Banana]

So yeah, we are going to be doing this dungeon now. So Fossil Excavation is a Golden Item dungeon that houses the Golden Banana. The dungeon itself is littered to the gills with Rock-types and Ground-types throughout its fifteen floors. So a really good dungeon for Meganium to come along. Alongside, we bring a Walrein and a Clawitzer as we don't have too much in the way of others in availability. But nevertheless given the power level of Jewel Road, this is around the same power level, which did catch me by surprise as Meganium got one shot by Rock Blast early in an attempt. So for this dungeon, we use Reflect/Synthesis/Petal Blizzard/Razor Leaf for Meganium with the Sand Looplet, and give Walrein the Blue Looplet.

In terms of main threats in the dungeon, the Rhyhorn line all know Rock Blast (deadly), Hippowdon present a long term threat in Sand Stream, Dugtrio knows Earth Power, there's also some Magnitude in there somewhere. The second attempt I lose Clawitzer early on, but roll with it as I still have Meganium and Reflect. With Walrein it mostly spams Blizzard and Aurora Beam but for alliances we use Ice Ball (Ice-type Rollout). As always with the relatively higher power levels, we take things conservatively and use wands as needed, and eventually we get to the end of the dungeon with just Meganium and Walrein. For our reward we get the Golden Banana, which allows us to gain five levels on consumption. We also finally picked up a Ban Seed along the way which really helps for a future boss fight.

As an aside, I don't really consider these level boosters to be a "permanent" stat boost per se as all it really does is that it accelerates your level to something that you are going to inevitably get anyway, which I do not feel breaks the spirit of the challenge. But to keep things interesting and varied, I will simply just use the one banana (and the one Golden Seed when I get it) and not re-buy them from Cofagrigus unless it becomes evident that I need to level grind for whatever reason (which I should not need to because Super, plus they are pricey at 35 bars a pop). The only major benefit levelling really gives outside of stats and moves is that the cooldown mechanics for Pokémon you connect with are based on the level of your main character and their level in that the bigger your level relative to their level, the more often they are "available".

Moving Forward - Road to Diamond Rank

So at this point I could do more legendary and treasure stuff, but there is also some prep work that I need to do for the later stuff, so I decide to do some mission grinding to get to the next rank. All the things I did above only contributed ~2300 points and I still needed 1300 to go. First thing I do is go to Sunny Spot Hill with Ampharos to pay Dusknoir (and Team Skull's Koffing) a visit. Here I used the Water Looplet exploit to give Meganium and Pignite five levels which gives Meganium and Pignite Lv41 and Lv36 respectively (meaning Pignite can now evolve). The only noteworthy thing here is that for one floor I spawned in Koffing's secret base, but the bases (both Monster Houses) were easily dealt with using Petal Blizzard (backed by Barrage). The notable consequence is that Dusknoir's mission enables Sableye's mission which involves punishing a Spiritomb.

From here I evolve Pignite to Emboar as even though the only real notable thing I could give it from evolving is Blast Burn, but why not. After that, we go and visit Gyarados' Monster House Secret Base in Seafloor Ruins, meet up with Hydreigon in Leafy Highlands, and then do some missions in Longfield Cave, Uprise Range, and Serpentine Mountain Trail to get the Diamond Rank. I also use the opportunity in the Water Continent missions to begin preparing a Smeargle for later on, getting it to Sketch Mind Reader and Perish Song (now we have a floor cleaner on demand). Still a couple of moves I want to give it, and there is a little more prepwork I need to do, but that can wait until next update. With Diamond Rank, we get a couple more recruits, some Gold Bars, and access to Kyurem's and Giratina's dungeons. Next time.

---

Connections: 351/779 [45.06%]
Treasures: 5/25 [20.0%]
Dungeons Explored: 44.0%
Deaths: 21

STARTER/PARTNER + OTHERS USED THIS UPDATE

Meganium
Lv: 41
-Petal Blizzard
-Reflect
-Razor Leaf
-Synthesis

Emboar
Lv: 36
-Rollout
-Flamethrower
-Arm Thrust
-Heat Crash

Ampharos
Lv: 55
-Electro Ball
-Dragon Pulse
-Fire Punch
-Discharge

Charizard
Lv: 44
-Air Slash
-Tailwind
-Heat Wave
-Flame Burst

Clawitzer
Lv: 41
-Water Pulse
-Heal Pulse
-Dark Pulse
-Aura Sphere

Entei
Lv: 56
-Sacred Fire
-Eruption
-Extrasensory
-Flamethrower

Flygon
Lv: 49
-Bug Buzz
-Dragon Breath
-Uproar
-Earth Power

Heatran
Lv: 51
-Heat Wave
-Iron Head
-Earth Power
-Magma Storm

Marowak
Lv: 38
-Growl
-Bonemerang
-Bone Club
-Headbutt

Rotom
Lv: 38
-Ominous Wind
-Thunder Wave
-Shock Wave
-Discharge

Smeargle
Lv: 50
-Perish Song
-Mind Reader

Walrein
Lv: 46
-Blizzard
-Rollout
-Ice Ball
-Aurora Beam

 

[Its_A_Random]

Next update up.

Restrictions:
-No Permanent Stat Boosts (Codification: No Vitamins, Drinks, Life Seeds, or using Sitrus Berries at full HP)
-No using Emeras on Pokémon mid-dungeon (Temporary Stat Boosts) or using Oran Berries/Energy Seeds at Full HP (Essentially softcapping Max HP at over 100 HP)
-No Revives (No Reviver Seeds, Tiny Reviver Seeds, Revive All Orbs, or equipping Ally Reviver)
-No Wondermail Codes
-No Getting Rescued

UPDATE #7 - ACE RANK

Preparations

We unlocked the next set of dungeons, but we are not quite ready yet, so we do a couple more mission days in Mystical Forest and Midnight Sun Gorge. I get Smeargle access to Sheer Cold, its third move and complete the respective missions. I did lose Meganium a little early in Midnight Sun Gorge to a random Sheer Cold, but did not let that bother me. I also get the gold needed to teach Emboar Heat Wave from Hawlucha's. Eventually availabilities lined up and we were ready to continue.

Blue Point [Articuno]

For this day, we bring in a triple fire strat with Emboar, Charizard, and Heatran. Emboar the Sand Looplet, Charizard the Blue Looplet, Heatran the Sp. Attack Looplet. The dungeon comprises of Ice-types and Flying-types and has a lot of hail to worry about due to Abomasnow carrying Snow Warning. Things can hit hard here so I had to be careful, especially after being forced to reset due to losing Emboar early. We eventually reached the end of the dungeon on the second attempt, but it was somewhat of a struggle.

Anyway for Articuno, we managed to pick up a Sunny Orb early in the dungeon so we use it to our advantage here to bring out the sun. We then do our Tailwind shenanigans with Rollout and Magma Storm spam and Articuno falls pretty quickly, being overpowered by the raw power of our attacks. For completing this, we unlock Red Point, which is Moltres' dungeon.

Isle of Light [Raikou]

Now to meet up with the second of the legendary beasts. Isle of Light is a 15 floor dungeon comprising of some Petal Blizzard spammers in Venusaur and Meganium, as well as Bayleef, Nidoking, Donphan, Espeon, and Mothim. The first two are the most dangerous to be honest. For our team, we roll with Entei, Flygon, and Smeargle. I did not really need to bring Smeargle here as Perish Song cheese is complete overkill, but I did want to give it Sacred Fire so it can help out with damage when I need it until much later when I want to replace it with something else (Since Entei has bad availability at this present time, I did want to take this opportunity).

As for why Perish Song is complete overkill, it's because Entei and Flygon alone can overpower this dungeon. Wildfire Looplet Sacred Fire alone two shots everything in this dungeon without emera, and with Flygon backing it up holding the Sand Looplet, the dungeon was rolled over without difficulty (still needed a couple of Orans for recovery). All Perish Song does really is make it so I don't have to use as many elixirs during this delve since we only get 12 Sacred Fires (at initial rank). Eventually we meet up with Raikou and get its connect. For our reward, we get the Radiance Looplet (Which boosts the holder's Defence by 40) and we unlock Clear Lake, Suicune's dungeon.

Clear Lake [Suicune]

For this dungeon, we take our Raikou and give it a moveset of Roar / Reflect / Thunderbolt / Discharge and slap a Blue Looplet on it to give it some decent attacks and survivability. We pair it with Heatran and Flygon and roll on in. This is rougher than the previous but doable. We have Delibird (whose main gimmick is teleporting all over the place and using Present), Sceptile, Zangoose, Floatzel, Weavile, Magnezone, Dusknoir, Hydreigon (who can hurt), Chesnaught (Pin Missile sucks which is why we use Reflect), and Aurorus. There's also some hail every now and then.

To the delve itself and we do lose Heatran early on to some Hydreigon bullying, but we do not let that stop us. We got some useful defensive emera for Raikou in Absorption and Wand Expert, as well as Power Boost X + Y. We did not really have the firepower as before, but eventually we make it to the end of the dungeon, grabbing Suicune and the Tempest Looplet, which boosts the holder's Sp. Attack by 30.

Red Point [Moltres]

We used Entei for Raikou's dungeon, we used Raikou for Suicune's dungeon, and now we are going to use Suicune for Moltres' dungeon. Armed with a Blue Looplet and possessing a moveset of Tailwind / Rain Dance / Bubble Beam / Hydro Pump, we bring along Ampharos and Rotom wielding the Sand and Tempest Looplets respectively. Only a 10 floor dungeon full of fire-types, but with our new looplet, we have the means to get through the pre-Moltres floors without too many issues.

Onto Moltres itself, and we begin with Rain Dance and then go into Tailwind spam before going on the offensive to take out Moltres, the usual. However this time, we got good paralysis luck from the Discharge spamming Ampharos and Rotom did and eventually, the Moltres was taken out without even getting a turn to do anything. For our troubles, we unlock Yellow Point, Zapdos' dungeon.

Yellow Point [Zapdos]

Before we talk about the dungeon itself and the dive, it is worth noting that prior to doing Red Point, I had connected with an Abra (a talk connect) which happened to be my 389th connect. Now I'm not too sure whether it was the Abra or it was the fact that I had 389 connects (which is basically 50% total), but at this point, every single Pokémon (not already connected) that was connectable by just talking (save Kecleon et al) with them became available to connect. So at this point, I take the opportunity to get ALL of the talk connects out the the way, including all the Serene Village connects, the rest of the starters that had not been connected, Hawlucha, the lot. This pushes me well past the 450 connects mark and opens up quite a few missions we can do later.

25 minutes of connect spam and Meganium backflips later (how can it do that?!), we finally decide to deal with the last of the Gen I bird trio. For this dungeon, we bring Flygon with the Tempest Looplet, Heatran with the Sand Looplet, and Marowak with the Wildfire Looplet, and we take a Quick Orb to make up for the lack of Tailwind. Now this dungeon is a little more varied with a Roselia and Leavanny mixed in with the Electric-types to keep you on your toes (Roselia knows Petal Blizzard, Leavanny has Bug Bite so keep a Decoy Seed or two handy). We do the usual dungeon management stuff, blah blah blah, and then we hit 10F for the Zapdos fight.

We begin with a Quick Orb to get an alliance off before Zapdos attacks and we take full advantage of Alliances nullifying type immunities to get off Earth Powers and Bone Rushes to take out the Zapdos (four in total). Marowak nearly died but was saved by Clutch Performer. For the Zapdos connect, we unlock Sea Shrine, which is Lugia's dungeon, but it can wait a little bit.

Lake of Enlightenment [Uxie]

So four updates ago before saving the world from some unmarked spoilers in Update #4, I did Heart Lake and somehow made it to the end. Now we are going to do one of the two dungeons it unlocked, which is Uxie's dungeon. Heart Lake had 29 floors of Gates floors, this has 30 floors of them. It is also filled with Water-types and Psychic-types, alongside Zoroark, Cacturne, Kricketune, and Mothim. They are all naturally dangerous due to the power level. For this dungeon, I bring Meganium with the Wildfire Looplet and its three good offensive moves + Light Screen, Rotom with the Blue Looplet, and Lanturn with the Tempest Looplet. Could have brought Zapdos in retrospect, but ehhh... Otherwise this was the best I could do given availabilities.

So yeah at the start of the dungeon, I was a little reliant on alliances to get by, but bit by bit, we proceeded to get broken emera after broken emera, and by the later parts of the dungeon, Meganium had eight notches on its looplet and had emera such as Type Bulldozer, Barrage, Confusion Guard, Lullaby, Better Odds, and an emera I had never seen before called "Go for Broke!". This emera makes you more powerful in terms of stats but prevents you from being revived if you die... which is not a downside considering this is a run where I cannot use any sort of revivers. So Meganium was basically a wrecking ball. Nothing could possibly go wrong, right? Nah, the game tried to throw a Monster House in a stairs room at me in an effort to make something go wrong, but Meganium with a little help from Rotom and Lanturn destroyed the house with little effort. And after some more careful movement, we reach the end without problems. We connect with Uxie and unlock two more dungeons, the Spring of Resolve (Azelf's dungeon), and Aurora's Edge (A Never Hungries dungeon).

One More Mission

At this point we were only 460 points away from Ace Rank so we decide to do a normal mission day. We pick Forest of Fairies to do Sableye's mission, which also ended up including Garbodor's and Ponyta's mission, helping a fainted Bagon, and beating up a pumped up Lampent. We had Charizard available so it, Meganium, and Rotom cleared the missions comfortably. At this point, we hit Ace Rank, which gives us connects with Ditto and Exeggutor, and unlocks Distress Mountain (Darkrai's dungeon) and Dragon Gate (Rayquaza's dungeon), the latter of which I hope I find a strat that is not "spamming Memento". We'll see when I get there.

---

Connections: 474/779 [60.8%]
Treasures: 7/25 [28.0%]
Dungeons Explored: 50.0%
Deaths: 22

STARTER/PARTNER + OTHERS USED THIS UPDATE

Meganium
Lv: 46
-Petal Blizzard
-Light Screen
-Razor Leaf
-Petal Dance

Emboar
Lv: 41
-Rollout
-Flamethrower
-Arm Thrust
-Heat Wave

Ampharos
Lv: 57
-Electro Ball
-Dragon Pulse
-Fire Punch
-Discharge

Charizard
Lv: 47
-Air Slash
-Tailwind
-Heat Wave
-Flame Burst

Entei
Lv: 57
-Sacred Fire
-Eruption
-Extrasensory
-Flamethrower

Flygon
Lv: 52
-Bug Buzz
-Dragon Breath
-Uproar
-Earth Power

Heatran
Lv: 52
-Heat Wave
-Iron Head
-Earth Power
-Magma Storm

Lanturn
Lv: 45
-Thunder Wave
-Signal Beam
-Discharge
-Bubble Beam

Marowak
Lv: 44
-Bone Rush
-Bonemerang
-Bone Club
-Headbutt

Raikou
Lv: 56
-Discharge
-Reflect
-Roar
-Thunderbolt

Rotom
Lv: 44
-Ominous Wind
-Thunder Wave
-Shock Wave
-Discharge

Smeargle
Lv: 58
-Perish Song
-Mind Reader
-Sheer Cold
-Sacred Fire

Suicune
Lv: 56
-Rain Dance
-Hydro Pump
-Tailwind
-Bubble Beam

 

[Its_A_Random]

Another Update.

Restrictions:
-No Permanent Stat Boosts (Codification: No Vitamins, Drinks, Life Seeds, or using Sitrus Berries at full HP)
-No using Emeras on Pokémon mid-dungeon (Temporary Stat Boosts) or using Oran Berries/Energy Seeds at Full HP (Essentially softcapping Max HP at over 100 HP)
-No Revives (No Reviver Seeds, Tiny Reviver Seeds, Revive All Orbs, or equipping Ally Reviver)
-No Wondermail Codes
-No Getting Rescued

UPDATE #8 - ULTRA RANK

Altar of Ice [Kyurem]

We begin by heading to the Altar of Ice with Moltres, Entei, and Heatran available. For Moltres, we give it a moveset similar to Charizard's, with Agility / Flamethrower / Heat Wave / Hurricane. We give Moltres the Blue Looplet, Entei with Wildfire, and Heatran with Tempest. Anyway, the dungeon itself is not too bad with a lot of Ice-types, but in terms of danger, Ninetales generally don't care about our Fire-type attacks, Tyranitar, Snover, and Abomasnow bring out unfavourable weather while Tyranitar is very bulky. Braixen can troll with its wands, and there are other inconveniences. Anyway, main strat for getting to the end is basically Sacred Fire and Heat Wave spam, we have enough power to get through the 18F where Kyurem resides.

Anyway onto Kyurem itself and... it ended up being quite the wall. So the first idea I had for this fight was to brute force it with Agility/Tailwind + Fire spam, however, the big snag here is Glaciate. It hits the entire room, it two shots every party member, and its other attacks (Dragon Breath and Slash) also two shot. And given this, on top of speed mechanics not working in your favour, trying to brute force the fight without revivers is a rough ordeal, and wands do not help either. So I wiped to Kyurem three times experimenting each time before I decided that a change of strategy was in order.

Glaciate is too strong and I was not about to resort to Memento or try something else instead, so I went to dual screen strats, which means we replace Heatran with Meganium, give Meganium the Blue Looplet and hand the Tempest Looplet to Moltres. We also put Meganium in slot 3 to make encounters on the walk back more efficient as Moltres will act before (and deal more damage than) Meganium. For Meganium, we give it Screens, Synthesis, and Petal Blizzard for encounters. Anyway we eventually get to the bottom of the dungeon and take on Kyurem again. This time, we abuse Agility to set up screens and then start attacking. Glaciate this time around is much more manageable and by using Synthesis in alliances so I can save Orans for Entei and Moltres. Eventually after a lot of whittling down and an Elixir or two, we finally sink the beast. Having decent emera on Entei and only getting a single Glaciate helped. For winning, we get a giant, Lv70 dragon with a powerful room-wide nuke for when we feel like using it. No new dungeons for now, however.

World Tree [Golden Apple]

Before we did World Tree, we chose to do a mission day at the Cape of Wonders, which had five missions, including helping a Drifloon out. Remember that now because Drifloon is actually good in the PMD games as those who have wiped to it and its evolution in the games can attest to. I also brought Kyurem along for fun.

After the mission day, we head to the World Tree, a dungeon we unlocked at the end of the Epilogue. This is an 18-floor Golden Item dungeon full of Normal-types and Fairy-types so we bring along Meganium, and bring Heatran and Moltres along for the ride. Meganium is given an offensive based moveset. Anyway, the dungeon at this point in the game with our strength levels is not very difficult, some enemies could deal some noticeable damage, but nothing major. At the end of the dungeon, we get our second Golden Item in the form of a Golden Apple. This item is basically an upgraded Perfect Apple, so something to use on Destiny Tower or a Never Hungries dungeon I guess.

Giant Stone Meadow [40x Golden Fossil]

Continuing with the Golden Item dungeons, we tackle the other Golden Item dungeon that was unlocked after the Epilogue in Giant Stone Meadow, which is only 15 floors long. We bring Megaanium / Lanturn / Suicune along for the ride without looking at the matchups and that was not the best idea as there were a fair few Grass-types and Poison-types. The worst ones here are Skiddo and Gogoat who can completely wall Meganium thanks to Sap Sipper unless I use alliances. So I had to take the run through the dungeon pretty carefully, though on 12F a Gogoat picked up a Deflect Looplet. It proceeded to pass a Petal Dance alliance attack onto Lanturn and Lanturn got taken out. Oops.

But we did not let that stop us and eventually we made it to the end. For our troubles, we get a stack of 40 Golden Fossils which are meant to be the strongest in the Gravelerock line, except rocks in general are very bad in Super Mystery dungeon. Geo Pebbles deal a fixed 10 damage, Gravelerocks deal a fixed 20 damage. So how much do Golden Fossils deal? 30. So basically useless unless you are doing a level reset where you are allowed to take items in. But I digress.

Spring of Resolve [Azelf]

Just like World Tree, we did a mission day before this doing a day of missions at Flagstone Cave, which had seven missions and a couple of extras (including a fainted and a pumped up runner). Anyway, Spring of Resolve consists of 28 Gates Floors where the final floor is where we meet up with Azelf. The dungeon consists mostly of Grass-types and Fairy-types with the occasional Water-type like Marill. Anyway this is probably the easier of the three Lake trio dungeons as the floor layouts in this dungeon (reminiscent of Forest of Shadows from Gates) feel smoother and quicker than those of the other two and while the enemies can still have up to 200 health, there are some that have less and the exp gains are not as big here. Plus we have a lot of experience under the belt.

So for this dungeon, we bring Entei with the Wildfire Looplet, Heatran with the Tempest Looplet, and Drifloon with nothing equipped. And despite Drifloon being itemless and being in its mid 30's level wise, it can definitely chip in with Ominous Wind and Shadow Ball which we gain shortly into the dungeon via level-up. This mostly comes down to Unburden, which gives you double attack when you are not holding an item, which is very good. But yeah, with Entei doing Entei things and Heatran doing Heatran things, on top of the emera we pick up (Barrage for Entei and Heatran for instance), we eventually get to the end of the dungeon without major difficulties, one Oran used at most. At the end, we meet up with and connect with Azelf and unlock Stone Tree Mountain and Rough Tunnel, which are the other two Never Hungries dungeons, meaning we could do all of them whenever we want to.

Zero Isle [Giratina]

Before Zero Isle, we do a mission day at Mystery Jungle which had four missions and a fainted. Anyway, Zero Isle is a 13 floor dungeon where the end has a boss fight with Giratina-Origin. The dungeon itself consists mostly of Fire-types. Anyway, of what is available we bring along Kyurem with the Tempest Looplet, Zapdos with the Sand Looplet and Thunder Wave / Agility / Disharge / Drill Peck, and Meganium with a dual screens set. The walk down was a bit annoying considering Kyurem is a gigantic Pokémon and our stairs luck was not too good. We also got two monster houses on the way down, but we simply used a Petrify Orb and moved on. We also got two Encourage Seeds on the way down, seeds that for a time, guarantees the Pokémon will hit with its attacks and those attacks will be critical hits.

Anyway, Giratina-Origin has the potential to be scary with things like Shadow Force, but we got some ridiculous luck. An Ice Beam freeze gave me time to Encourage Seed Kyurem and Zapdos, Agility shenanigans and Paralysis shenanigans on top of Glaciate's speed reduction, and Giratina was taken out without using a single attack, essentially making Meganium redundant. Winning gives us Giratina and gives us the Grass Looplet, which is the game's analogue to Goggle Specs, an item that allows you to see hidden traps. Very good item.

And with Giratina down, we get the points needed to hit Ultra Rank. We gain some connections, and unlock two dungeons. One is Isle of Storms which houses the Kami Trio, and the other is Temple Ruins which *checks notes* is a 40-floor level reset dungeon that you can bring items into. Unfortunately, level resets in general are not worth anything in this game, though we will be required to do a level reset dungeon later on for a connection (Staraptor's mission, which is always about getting to the end of Thorny Shadow Path, a dungeon we have not unlocked yet).

---

Connections: 525/779 [67.4%]
Treasures: 10/25 [40.0%]
Dungeons Explored: 55.0%
Deaths: 25

STARTER/PARTNER + OTHERS USED THIS UPDATE

Meganium
Lv: 49
-Petal Blizzard
-Light Screen
-Reflect
-Synthesis

Emboar
Lv: 44
-Rollout
-Flamethrower
-Arm Thrust
-Heat Wave

Drifloon
Lv: 39
-Constrict
-Ominous Wind
-Shadow Ball
-Gust

Entei
Lv: 59
-Sacred Fire
-Eruption
-Extrasensory
-Flamethrower

Heatran
Lv: 54
-Heat Wave
-Iron Head
-Earth Power
-Magma Storm

Kyurem
Lv: 70
-Glaciate
-Dragon Breath
-Dragon Pulse
-Ice Beam

Lanturn
Lv: 49
-Thunder Wave
-Signal Beam
-Discharge
-Bubble Beam

Moltres
Lv: 52
-Heat Wave
-Hurricane
-Agility
-Flamethrower

Suicune
Lv: 57
-Rain Dance
-Hydro Pump
-Tailwind
-Bubble Beam

Zapdos
Lv: 52
-Discharge
-Agility
-Thunder Wave
-Drill Peck

 

[Its_A_Random]

Have another meaty update.

Restrictions:
-No Permanent Stat Boosts (Codification: No Vitamins, Drinks, Life Seeds, or using Sitrus Berries at full HP)
-No using Emeras on Pokémon mid-dungeon (Temporary Stat Boosts) or using Oran Berries/Energy Seeds at Full HP (Essentially softcapping Max HP at over 100 HP)
-No Revives (No Reviver Seeds, Tiny Reviver Seeds, Revive All Orbs, or equipping Ally Reviver)
-No Wondermail Codes
-No Getting Rescued

UPDATE #9 - HYPER RANK

Island of Storms [Tornadus, Thundurus, Landorus]

We begin by not doing Island of Storms due to bad availabilities, but we do a mission day at Valley of Strong Winds for three missions and a fainted. After that is out of the way, we actually do Island of Storms. This is a 15 floor dungeon, though whether or not we actually need to go all the way is random. So basically, the three members of the Kami Trio will appear on separate floors to each other, but what floor each member actually appears on is random. Of course, when you do come to a floor with a member on it, the game warns you beforehand that "Rescuing is not available on the next floor". When you get there, the members act exactly like Heatran in that they run for the stairs the moment they take damage. For this dungeon, we bring Articuno with Grass Looplet for Agility, Raikou with Tempest for damage, and I bring Smeargle along because Perish Song shenanigans are very helpful for this dungeon.

As for the random Pokémon themselves, they have around 200 HP like usual and give ~200 Exp per kill. They are more bulky than hard, but by far the worst enemies in the dungeon are Ledyba. So as those of you who have played Rescue Team DX might be aware of, Ledyba always spawn in a group of four asleep. Wake one up, you wake them all up. They have really annoying moves such as dual screens, Safeguard, multi-hit moves, and Silver Wind which give them the potential to become murder machines, especially when they are together (as those who have done Purity Forest multiple times know all to well). So the most reliable options to deal with them are either praying you can deal enough damage, using a Warp Wand to split them all apart, or just use Mind Reader + Perish Song Smeargle and clear the floor of them and other enemies, which is my main tactic for this dungeon.

But to the Kami Trio themselves, who we are here for. Our first member is Tornadus, who shows up on 3F, we pin it down and take it out nowhere near the stairs. The trio are rather bulky so it takes several hits to down. Next is Landorus spawning on 9F, which we basically Ice Beam + Sacred Fire to death after pinning it. Finally Thundurus on 11F, we just make it run and let Perish Song do its magic due to PP issues, noting that Thundurus has to be running away before Perish Song can actually take it out. There's no rewards for winning outside of the Kami trio, but with Thundurus, we now have all of the Bird Trio, Beast Trio, Regi Trio, Lake Trio, the Four Swords, and the Kami Trio.

As a side note: I could have just done Mind Reader + Sheer Cold with Smeargle and it would have been faster, I simply had not thought about it at the time. Also worth noting that I also did some testing with Mind Reader + Sheer Cold on actual bosses and no it does not work. For the better at least.

Sea Shrine [Lugia]

Next up, we decide to pick up where we left off from the chain of dungeons starting from Articuno to do Sea Shrine. This dungeon has 15 floors consisting of mostly Water-types and the odd Gible, but the big thing differentiating this dungeon from Seafloor Ruins and most other dungeons is that this is the first dungeon we are doing that has the visibility mechanic. It's essentially the same as other PMD's in the series but to refresh, basically in for instance, a corridor, you could only see anything within a two tile radius (for this dungeon, some dungeons have just one) and that in a room you can only see Pokémon in the same room. Essentially if you can see it, you can hit it with a room wide attack. Two tile visibility is not too bad, but for dungeons with just one tile visibility, this can actually matter a lot as it gives me the potential to just walk into attacks and die (has Purity Forest flashbacks).

For this dungeon, we bring Zapdos with the Tempest Looplet, Meganium with the Blue Looplet, and Drifloon holding nothing. There are some enemies to watch out for here. Chinchou and Lanturn know Discharge, and Wailord are a thing and they know Water Spout which can hurt if you have not damaged them. Plus with the visibility limits, Wailord can just show up out of nowhere in the middle of a corridor and potentially scare you because of how big they are and Water Spout. Eventually we get to 15F with some decent emera and at the bottom is a boss fight with Lugia.

So remember what I talked about last update with Giratina getting haxxed? Turns out Thunder Wave is actually broken for bosses as they don't get a free turn after auto-recovering from paralysis. Using Thunder Wave and using Drifloon to fish for Sp. Defence drops and Ominous Wind boosts and the like, we slowly whittle down Lugia before it falls over (after having to restock on PP) without getting an action off. There are so many ways to break these fights. Anyway our reward is Prism Bridge, which is Ho-Oh's dungeon.

Prism Bridge [Ho-Oh]

So Ho-Oh's "dungeon" is one of the few boss dungeons that cuts the dungeon out and takes you immediately to the boss fight. On one hand, it means we just get to do the boss. On the other, we do not have any Emera for these fights. Anyway, we use Zapdos and Drifloon again, but this time Zapdos gets the Sand Looplet and the Tempest Looplet is passed to Giratina, who we bring along for damage. The strat is mostly the same as Lugia in terms of stunlocking with Thunder Wave and getting debuffs to rack up the damage via alliances, but Thunder Wave can certainly miss. And that's what happened on my first attempt as I missed a few too many Thunder Waves and Ho-Oh nuked the entire field with a sun-boosted Sacred Fire. The second try was a lot better and we won without any actions from Ho-Oh. Winning here unlocks a Golden Item dungeon in Ghost Island.

Ghost Island [40x Golden Spike]

So the main thing with Ghost Island apart from using Calm Craggy Area music (the best of the Super dungeon tracks IMO) is that the dungeon is haunted with lots of Ghost-types everywhere, 22 floors of them. Fortunately for us the enemies have around 100-130 HP which is better than the 200's we have seen elsewhere. The other thing to note is that Shedinja is in this dungeon, and just like in Rescue Team DX, the enemies will tend to prioritise killing Shedinja. Shedinja tend to die in a single hit and if an NFE takes one out, it evolves! The other thing to note is that the dungeon has two-tile visibility in corridors after 10F. For this dungeon, we use Entei, Heatran, and Drifloon with the former two holding the Wildfire and Tempest Looplets respectively.

Despite the enemies being not too hard to take out at this point in the game, they can be deceptively threatening, with Spite being around, Curse dealing some rough short term damage, but the big threat (mostly due to composition) is Jellicent who can bring out the rain and also know Water Spout, which can deal some mighty damage at full health. And that is exactly what happened halfway through the dungeon to Entei, getting one shot and making me lose my access to Sacred Fire (on 12F). Nevertheless we continue as Heatran at that point had good emera on it (Barrage!) and eventually we get to the end with the two left. Our reward here is a stack of 40 Golden Spikes, which are upgraded Iron Thorns. These items are actually really good as they have really high power and in the context of no vitamins, is a good use of Gold Bars, costing just three bars for a stack of 40. We will be making use of these throughout the rest of the run.

Distress Mountain [Darkrai]

Before we did this, we did a mission day in Mysterious Plains, which was about three mission's worth. After the day, availabilities finally lined up and we were ready to roll with Distress Mountain. This dungeon is 22 floors long with mostly Grass-types and Poison-types (plus Goodra), and at the end is a boss fight with Darkrai who has a moveset of Dark Void / Nightmare / Ominous Wind / Feint Attack. So I wanted a pretty specific team.

First in the team is Tornadus. We want Tornadus for Uproar (to negate sleep shenanigans) and we want Tailwind. We specifically opt to use the Therian Forme over Incarnate as the goal of Tailwind in boss fights is to maximise alliance turns, and Prankster costs an alliance turn in that regard. We flesh out its moveset with Hammer Arm (The speed drop meaning more alliances) and Hurricane, and give it the Tempest Looplet. To flesh out the team, we use Entei simply for mob dealings and secondary damage (Wildfire of course), and we bring Hawlucha along. Hawlucha is itemless with Unburden and we give it a moveset of Hone Claws / High Jump Kick / Drain Punch (via Tutor) / Wing Attack. Hawlucha is going to be the main damage dealer for the boss fight.

The walk through Distress Mountain isnt atypical to most other walks dealing with 200 HP enemies and the like, but in particular we make use of the Golden Spikes that we got earlier. Although catching and throwing back is a risk, it does not really happen and eventually we make it to the end of the dungeon for the boss fight. Hawlucha had to eat a couple of Orans, however. So to the boss fight itself. Start with Tailwind like normal, approach and ensure Hawlucha uses Hone Claws for the double boost. Then alliance Tailwind + Eruption + Hone Claws, and then swap out Hone Claws for High Jump Kick, and then finally use an Uproar alliance to stop Darkrai from spamming sleep. At this point it is reduced to Feint Attack (fine) and Ominous Wind (fine if no boost), and we contiue. Darkrai Feint Attacks Entei which is fine and then we use Hammer Arm to guarantee two alliances on the next turn. Ominous Wind comes out but no boost (and Hawlucha dodged). We did need to Oran though so we did that after a Tailwind alliance and then Darkrai starts picking on Hawlucha. This is where Drain Punch comes in handy as it allows Hawlucha to heal off any damage it takes and after a little more Hawlucha focus firing, Darkrai is downed. Victory gives us the Air Looplet, which stops mega evolved Pokémon from going berserk. Unfortunately Mega Evolution is too situational to be of any use so we won't be using this.

Island of Isolation [Mewtwo]

And now into another boss dungeon that needs a specific setup. This dungeon is just a straight up boss fight against Mewtwo, where the fight goes for two phases. The first phase is against Mewtwo, and then in the second phase, it Mega Evolves into either Mega Mewtwo X or Mega Mewtwo Y. Its moveset is Recover / Barrier / Aura Sphere / Psystrike, and Recover is a +921 HP for it, so we bring a Ban Seed in. For this fight, we bring Meganium with the Blue Looplet and Light Screen / Synthesis to use as a punching bag. We also bring Sableye and Spiritomb, who completely wall this fight (though get hit for 5 DMG with a regular attack), but they suffer from not being able to deal much damage even with Wildfire and Tempest Looplets, so we needed to set them up with specific movesets. Sableye gets Hone Claws / Shadow Claw / Foul Play / Fury Swipes, and Spiritomb gets Nasty Plot / Hypnosis / Shadow Ball / Ominous Wind (By the way, we got a reusable Shadow Ball TM from an earlier rank up). The strategy is straightforward, soak hits and set up our Ghosts and go to town. I experimented with sleep for this fight, but sleep sucks, Paralysis is way better for stunlocking.

Anyway the first phase is the harder of the phases mostly due to Pressure. Mewtwo can take a ton of hits and PP stall you, and you are forced to see Recover once before Ban Seeding. Heal Block is an alternative, but only really works with Paralysis. But we do the thing, we set up screens and set up with lots of alliances. Belly is a concern for the fight so we opt to just let the AI do its thing instead of exhausting with Hunger. Spiritomb is the better damage dealer here as Mewtwo knows Barrier and we can fish for drops. Meganium can heal off most damage it takes (After Blue Looplet) which is even better. After a while, we see the Recover and get first try Ban Seed (had a second in case), and eventually Mewtwo is downed.

At this point it mega evolves and we get Mega Mewtwo Y, which is the more favourable of the two possibilities as it means it has no STAB on Aura Sphere. It also loses Pressure, which is good. We apply the same strategy as the first round (its attacks are about as damageing as Mewtwo's...) and eventually we beat Mega Mewtwo Y. Our reward for this fight is the Mist Looplet, which occasionally allows you to use a move without consuming PP, and unlock Meteorite Crater, Deoxy's dungeon.

Meteorite Crater [Deoxys]

Now for Meteorite Crater. This is an eight floor dungeon where the goal is to just hit the end. It operates the same way as Genesect's dungeon where the enemies are all Deoxys. Deoxys-Normal is Deoxys-Normal, Deoxys-Attack is frail, but can deal extreme damage, Deoxys-Defence exists to soak up a ton of PP, and Deoxys-Speed has really high speed, which means it dodges a ton of attacks. Everything has Pressure as well, but compared to Meteor Cave in Rescue Team DX, this dungeon is pretty easy. We use Entei / Heatran / Drifloon again and just blow through the dungeon. 8F is pretty unique as a one room floor shaped like the head of Deoxys-Normal, which is a nice detail. At the end it's just a Deoxys connect with nothing else.

Dragon Gate [Dialga, Palkia, Rayquaza]

So I said I was going to come up with a strategy for this dungeon that was not going to come down to Memento spam and I did find a way thanks to the developments of this update. So Dragon Gate is one tough postgame dungeon. The dungeon consists of 20 floors of Normal-types, Fairy-types, and some annoyances like Klang and Klinklang, Magby, and others. After that is three consecutive floors of bosses, with Dialga, Palkia, and finally Rayquaza (who fights in its mega evolved form), all three have well over 2,000 HP.

So in terms of trying to take these three down without Memento, the best strategy is to stop them from acting altogether and the best way to do that is to spam Paralysis. So we take Zapdos in as it is going to be our main paralysis source and our resident speed booster. As for what else we need to bring, we need to bring a damage dealer in and our best source is going to be Kyurem. Glaciate is really helpful, Dragon Breath has a nice paralysis chance, and alongside its good attacks and type advantages. Lastly, to really help out with our damage on the bosses, we want to debuff the bosses Special Defence as much as possible and Shadow Ball is not the most reliable means to do so. So we resort to a move called Metal Sound, which is a pretty reliable way of dropping that stat quickly. For this job, we pick Aegislash as it is relatively sturdy despite its low level and can pitch in with Shadow Ball to help bosses crumble quicker. In terms of items, we give the Grass Looplet to Zapdos, Tempest Looplet to Kyurem, and Blue Looplet to Aegislash.

Anyway, we hit the dungeon itself and I decide it's a good idea to control Kyurem... except it's not. So this was the first game where you can control Pokémon that take up multiple tiles and the AI for following big targets is not as refined here as Rescue Team DX, so even with Follow Me, going down corridors is painful as it makes them very likely to split way from you, especially at forks in the road. And this lead to an early reset / death on the second floor when Aegislash got sniped by a Discharge. Bad idea, so we decide to control Zapdos instead and mostly use Wands to deal with enemies as we need to have enough Elixirs to get through the final boss rush. On our way up, we find some good emera, including Better Odds and Dizzying Stare for Zapdos and Kyurem, and Petrify Power for Kyurem which can petrify anything that gets hit. Useful.

So now to the bosses, the first is Dialga complete with "Fight to the Finish", the second is Palkia stuck with the normal legend battle theme (poor Palkia), and the last is Mega Rayquaza with its special theme. We know the general strat to these fights which is Agility spam, debuff, stunlock, deal lots of damage with Kyurem, win, refill PP, repeat. Of course if the enemy gets a free turn they can do some really danegrous things that can destroy us, particularly Dialga with Roar of Time and Metal Burst (which in short means we lose). The main issue here is Pressure draining PP fast so we want to be quick in beating the first two. Dialga behaves accuracy-wise but gets an action whilst paralysed to walk. No big deal, eventually it goes down before we need to do a second wave of Agility spam. Palkia goes down in a similar way, and Rayquaza is a little different as it does dodge paralysis once, but Kyurem's Petrify Power meant it did not do anything meaningful. We do need a second set of Agility spam to finish off Rayquaza however. To illustrate the importance of Metal Sound here, Kyurem was going from the 100's in damage to up to 350 at times so the debuffs definitely helped here.

For winning we get plenty of reward. We connect with the three dragons, we get a Sky Looplet (Which only has one notch, but it protects the holder from all debuffs), and we unlock Cresselia's dungeon, Lake of Mysterious Light (and unlocking the Mystery Continent).

Road to Hyper Rank - Refilling on Supplies

So after all that, we are pretty slow on supplies, in particular, being very low on apples and elixirs, so we take on mission days until the next rank up. We only need two mission days to do this. One in Waterfall Basin Grotto (3 Missions, 1 Traveler), and one in Spiral Vortex (4 Missions, 5 Travelers). After those two days, we rank up to Hyper Rank. We connect with Wailord, get some items, and unlock two dungeons. Sky Ruins is home to the Reshiram + Zekrom fight (also known as the fight where Memento is insanely useful due to the ridiculousness of it), and Sacred Ruins, a 40 Floor Level reset dungeon that is basically the game's equivalent of Purity Forest and Zero Isle South. Bonus content after the run maybe? We'll see.

---

Connections: 582/779 [67.4%]
Treasures: 14/25 [56.0%]
Dungeons Explored: 64.4%
Deaths: 27

STARTER/PARTNER + OTHERS USED THIS UPDATE

Meganium
Lv: 52
-Petal Blizzard
-Razor Leaf
-Petal Dance
-Synthesis

Emboar
Lv: 47
-Rollout
-Flamethrower
-Arm Thrust
-Heat Wave

Aegislash
Lv: 38
-Shadow Ball
-King's Shield
-Metal Sound
-Iron Head

Articuno
Lv: 54
-Ice Beam
-Roost
-Hurricane
-Agility

Drifloon
Lv: 45
-Constrict
-Ominous Wind
-Shadow Ball
-Gust

Entei
Lv: 60
-Sacred Fire
-Eruption
-Extrasensory
-Flamethrower

Giratina
Lv: 70
-Dragon Breath
-Earth Power
-Ominous Wind
-Shadow Force

Hawlucha
Lv: 50
-High Jump Kick
-Drain Punch
-Hone Claws
-Wing Attack

Heatran
Lv: 55
-Heat Wave
-Iron Head
-Earth Power
-Magma Storm

Kyurem
Lv: 71
-Glaciate
-Dragon Breath
-Dragon Pulse
-Ice Beam

Raikou
Lv: 59
-Discharge
-Reflect
-Roar
-Thunderbolt

Sableye
Lv: 49
-Shadow Claw
-Hone Claws
-Foul Play
-Fury Swipes

Smeargle
Lv: 69
-Perish Song
-Mind Reader
-Sheer Cold
-Sacred Fire

Spiritomb
Lv: 39
-Nasty Plot
-Ominous Wind
-Shadow Ball
-Hypnosis

Tornadus
Lv: 42
-Uproar
-Hurricane
-Tailwind
-Hammer Arm

Zapdos
Lv: 54
-Discharge
-Agility
-Thunder Wave
-Drill Peck

 

[R_N]

Jesus the Dragon dungeon sounds like a huge spike in difficulty and I'm surprised this is the dungeon that unlocks Cresselia.

 

[Its_A_Random]

Next Update. Getting closer now!

Restrictions:
-No Permanent Stat Boosts (Codification: No Vitamins, Drinks, Life Seeds, or using Sitrus Berries at full HP)
-No using Emeras on Pokémon mid-dungeon (Temporary Stat Boosts) or using Oran Berries/Energy Seeds at Full HP (Essentially softcapping Max HP at over 100 HP)
-No Revives (No Reviver Seeds, Tiny Reviver Seeds, Revive All Orbs, or equipping Ally Reviver)
-No Wondermail Codes
-No Getting Rescued

UPDATE #10 - MASTER RANK

Lake of Mysterious Light [Cresselia]

To begin the update, we tackle Cresselia's dungeon, the Lake of Mysterious Light. This is a 27 floor dungeon comprising of a multilude of types, but compared to Dragon Gate, the power level is noticeably weaker here (Experience Payouts tend to be a good indicator of a dungeon's power level in the postgame). We bring Meganium, Heatran, and Smeargle (with Wildfire, Tempest, and Blue Looplets respectively) and do Perish cleanup strats, in other words, minimise encounters by starting each floor with a sure shot Perish Song. Eventually we reach Cresselia without many issues, and connect with her. This unlocks Guidance Ruins (also on the Mystery Continent), which is the last of the Golden Item dungeons.

Sky Ruins [Reshiram + Zekrom]

So welcome to the roughest boss fight in the entirety of the postgame, a fight so bad that casually you use a ton of Reviver Seeds on this fight unless you do Memento + Tailwind/Agility strats (even the 100% Speedrun for this game resorts to this). And that is what we are doing here. So to elaborate, most postgame boss fights will pit you against a single boss. Here you have to take on two full bosses at once and they have really rough movesets that deal extreme damage. So we are just going to skip the hassle and just bring Memento along. We also bring Tornadus-Therian for Tailwind shenanigans, and Giratina (who was in Origin Forme for today) as the main DPS, and Chandelure for Memento spam.

So controlling Tornadus, we go Tailwind, head UP RIGHT(*) and then started spamming Tailwind / Earth Power / Memento alliances for a little bit. Eventually Chandelure died but by that point, the bosses were only dealing one damage. So after a lot of Hammer Arm abuse to get more turns in, a lot of Earth Powers, and some Elixirs later, the two dragons fall to their knees thanks to the power of cheese. For winning, we unlock Altar of Ice: Depths (as we had also done Altar of Ice), which is the dungeon where we can unlock Black and White Kyurem.

(*) I tried up left but with Giratina in the way I had to swap locations, and this uses up your ENTIRE turn and as a result I got completely wiped even after one Memento. That was a thing.

Altar of Ice: Depths [Black / White Kyurem]

Well then, it is time to fulfill one of the 100% requirements in Super Mystery Dungeon. Basically, all we need to do is get down to the end of this dungeon and beat Black or White Kyurem, whichever one the game gives you. The dungeon itself is basically Altar of Ice with a few extras, a higher power level, and a bit longer 24 Floors. For this dungeon, I bring Zapdos with the Grass Looplet for Tailwind + Paralysis, Entei with the Wildfire Looplet for mob clearing, and Hawlucha for boss DPS. This is good enough for the boss, but the real challenge is getting to the boss in the first place... which... Just let me give you this:

#1: Early Hydro Pump Snipe
#2: Early Blizzard Snipe
#3: Hawlucha throws Golden Spike at recently spawned Zweilous, Zweilous catches it and one shots Hawlucha in return with the same spike
#4: Early Blizzard Snipe
#5: Try to KO Snover in Petrified Monster House instead of Warp Wanding, proceeds to use Mist, unpetrifying the house
#6: Forgot to adjust Entei's AI trying to navigate petrified Monster House
#7: Early Blizzard Snipe
#8: Play dumb against a Panpour that can two shot with Scald
#9: Early Blizzard Snipe
#10: Blizzard Snipe one floor before the boss

I did try to remedy this as I went, giving Hawlucha the Blue Looplet for survivability on the way to the boss after the second, removed the Golden Spikes after the third, and then added a Ban Seed and started leading with Entei instead of Zapdos after the 10th, but yeah that is a little bit embarrassing.

We get to the boss on the 11th try, and we get to fight Black Kyurem, who despite being infused with Zekrom, did not gain paralysis immunity. So we do the strat, we hit the two Thunder Waves we need to hit to stop it from acting (making sure to use Eruption with Entei in alliances to stop burn), and then sink with mostly due to the work of Hawlucha dealing about 130 per High Jump Kick (x2) after four Hone Claws boosts. For that, we unlock the Kyurem Formes. What this means is that Kyurem can randomly be either in its Vanilla Forme, Black Forme, or White Forme, and it can have Glaciate, Feeeze Shock, or Ice Burn depending on the forme. Generally Glaciate is better in this game but yeah. One requirement down.

Guidance Ruins [Golden Seed]

So we need to wait around a bit for Smeargle to become available so we do the following Mission Days:

Seafloor Ruins (1 Mission, 1 Fainted)
Hall of Magic (2 Missions, 1 Fainted)
Poliwrath River (1 Mission)

Then Smeargle finally became available. The joys of being so overlevelled relative to the starter. But we bring it along with Zapdos and Entei to the Guidance Ruins. Guidance Ruins is a large dungeon at 40 floors and a reasonable power level. A few AoE spammers are around so we need to be pretty careful. At this point we also say goodbye to Sacred Fire and hello to Agility on Smeargle. While this removes its attacking option, it will allow Smeargle to be able to lead better for dungeons like Never Hungries where I can use Agility to move quickly or get Sure Shot up safely for a Sheer Cold or something.

But to the main walk, the main thing we do in this dungeon is spam Perish Song at the beginning of each floor to clear up enemies and then deal with any spawns with good old Sacred Fire and Discharge. We did have a couple of tight spots to manoeuvre through, but eventually we hit the end and get the Golden Seed. In this game, it boosts the consumer's level by 3. As with the Banana, we will use the one and not re-buy for interests, just so we can increase the chances of Smeargle being available but some miniscule amount. We also have all the Golden Items and that gives us the Golden Crown, a held item that does nothing but give a crown marker over your head.

Thorny Shadow Path [Staraptor]

... And back to Mission grinding. We do two more missions before this one:

Sandy Cave (3 Missions, 2 Travelers)
Elegant Gorge (2 Missions, 1 Fainted)

Among those, we use Water Looplet Golden Seed to boost Meganium and Emboar's levels by 3 (after Emboar reached Lv50), and the Elegant Gorge missions include the Locked Door that unlocks this dungeon and Staraptor's mission.

So the reason this is being brought up in its own section is that this is the only level reset dungeon we are required to complete. It is 15 floors long, and the restrictions are that your level is reduced to Lv5 on entry, and you can only bring one Pokémon in. Items and money are fair game so this dungeon is mostly free. There are several options you can do for this, but I choose to bring Wailord along to this with the Blue Looplet. Wailord has fast growth, is a giant Pokémon with its advantages such as being able to hit more things at once with single targets, and can start with Heavy Slam, which is good enough for this dungeon. In terms of main threats, Ledyba exist, but the real threats are Eelektrik and Dragonite, who are very overlevelled for where they show up and can deal a ton of damage. Those are the main things to worry about, but eventually we got to the end. We got some helpful emera along the way to make things better, but we are done with the mandatory level reset dungeon.

The whale did make it

Road to Master Rank

We don't get Smeargle for the rest of the update, which is just two Missions (worth noting at this point there are going to be more mission days as the meaty postgame content dies down):

Thirsty Desert (2 Missions, 1 Pumped Up)
Super Apple Woods (2 Missions)

And after that, we hit Master Rank. This gives us connections with Carracosta, Xatu, and Celebi and other goodies. We also unlock two dungeons, Ocean Tempest (Kyogre's dungeon), and Magma Chamber (Groudon's dungeon). Two things to look forward to next update.

---

Connections: 614/779 [78.8%]
Treasures: 15/25 [60.0%]
Dungeons Explored: 72.0%
Black / White Kyurem: 100%
Deaths: 38

STARTER/PARTNER + OTHERS USED THIS UPDATE

Meganium
Lv: 58
-Petal Blizzard
-Razor Leaf
-Petal Dance
-Synthesis

Emboar
Lv: 53
-Rollout
-Flamethrower
-Arm Thrust
-Heat Wave

Chandelure
Lv: 56
-Flame Burst
-Memento
-Confuse Ray
-Shadow Ball

Entei
Lv: 62
-Sacred Fire
-Eruption
-Extrasensory
-Flamethrower

Giratina
Lv: 71
-Dragon Breath
-Earth Power
-Ominous Wind
-Shadow Force

Hawlucha
Lv: 54
-High Jump Kick
-Drain Punch
-Hone Claws
-Wing Attack

Heatran
Lv: 57
-Heat Wave
-Iron Head
-Earth Power
-Magma Storm

Smeargle
Lv: 75
-Perish Song
-Mind Reader
-Sheer Cold
-Agility

Tornadus
Lv: 45
-Uproar
-Hurricane
-Tailwind
-Hammer Arm

Wailord
Lv: 46
-Growl
-Rollout
-Heavy Slam
-Water Gun

Zapdos
Lv: 55
-Discharge
-Agility
-Thunder Wave
-Drill Peck

 

[R_N]

Guessing next update will be a ton of mission grinding as yo useek out most of hte remaining normal pokemon

 

[Its_A_Random]

Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon: Never Hungries Edition.

Restrictions:
-No Permanent Stat Boosts (Codification: No Vitamins, Drinks, Life Seeds, or using Sitrus Berries at full HP)
-No using Emeras on Pokémon mid-dungeon (Temporary Stat Boosts) or using Oran Berries/Energy Seeds at Full HP (Essentially softcapping Max HP at over 100 HP)
-No Revives (No Reviver Seeds, Tiny Reviver Seeds, Revive All Orbs, or equipping Ally Reviver)
-No Wondermail Codes
-No Getting Rescued

UPDATE #11 - GRAND MASTER RANK

Stone Tree Mountain [Satiated Looplet]

We begin this update by doing our first Never Hungries Dungeon, so it is time to properly talk about these dungeons. So these dungeons are a set of four dungeons (Rough Tunnel, Path of Fallen Leaves, Aurora's Edge, Stone Tree Mountain) that are some of the roughest this game has to offer. These dungeons consist of 40+ Floors full of enemies at a power level second only to Destiny Tower with most enemies hitting the 250 HP mark and offering around 300 exp per kill. To make things more annoying, the floors in these dungeons are all Gates Floors, which to refresh, are large floors with spaghetti-like corridors without much in the way of cohesion or pattern, making navigation quite the task. At the end of each dungeon is a Never Hungries treasure, each of which has to do with making the holders... uhhh... never hungry.

It goes without saying that with no Reviver Seeds to rely on and no vitamins to give ourselves ridiculous offences, we have to take these dungeons as cautiously as possible; one lapse in concentration and that's many minutes down the drain. And this is where Smeargle comes into the equation. With sure shot Perish Song, we can clear the floors of enemies on demand. With sure shot Sheer Cold, we can one shot whenever we need to clear an enemy, which is generally a little more cost effective than using a wand. Finally, Agility makes things much safer for us as we can get into corridors when we need to and allows us to safely set up our Sheer Cold hits when needed. Needless to say, Smeargle is going to be integral to getting through these long dungeons as safe as possible.

Now to Stone Tree Mountain itself. This dungeon is the longest of the four at 44 floors, with a layout similar to Cape of Wonders in a different coat of paint. The reason we do this dungeon first is because it has the most useful of the Never Hungries treasures in the Satiated Looplet, which is the game's Tight Belt equivalent (the holder will not lose Belly while walking). In terms of monster composition, pretty much every enemy is dangerous, but in particular, anything with a room wide attack (Charizard, Raichu, Electabuzz, Mareep, Flaaffy, Electrike, Whiscash, Mothim, Pachirisu, Gastrodon, Eelektrik), and of course, Ledyba. So in terms of our team, Smeargle going to be our prime leader with the Blue Looplet, while Entei and Moltres come along with the Wildfire and Tempest Looplets equipped, so they can chip in with some damage to maybe KO things themselves.

So yeah, the walk through the dungeon is mostly what you expect it to be with what I explained a couple of paragraphs above. As for Monster Houses which we find a couple, the main strategy we use is to Agility and then use the push mechanic to get deep into the corridor and then Perish Song shenanigans. Eventually we get to the end of the dungeon with a couple of close calls along the way and pick up the Satiated Looplet. For posterity, I did have two early deaths to unexpected room-wide attacks one shotting party members.

Friendly Meadow [Latias + Latios]

So from a rough dungeon to a really easy dungeon. Once we hit Master Rank, Latias gives you a mission on the Connection Orb to meet up with her and Latios on the 12th floor of this dungeon. This dungeon was accessible as soon as you unlock the Grassy Continent so the enemies here are basically pushovers. We bring Meganium, Emboar, and Heatran along and rip through the dungeon. We also had another mission to deal with, but it was Ferroseed's Locked Door mission which means we cannot complete both missions at once; Ferroseed will have to wait another day. Completing this dungeon gives us Latias and Latios for free, and gives us the Red Looplet, a treasure that raises the holder's Defence and Special Defence by 20 points. Not too bad.

Ocean Tempest [Kyogre]

And now we come to the first of the two dungeons we unlocked with the new rank. Ocean's Tempest is a 26 Floor dungeon full of Water-types, some fossils, and some oddities like Dragonite, Eelektrik, Eelektross, Malamar, and Beheeyem. The main thing to watch out here for is Muddy Water / Discharge, and random Hydro Pumps. At the end of this dungeon is a boss fight so we also have to prepare for this. For this dungeon we bring Zapdos (Tempest) along for Thunder Wave and Agility, and we bring Meganium (Wildfire) and Hawlucha along as damage dealers. Of note, on the final mission day before we got Master Rank, we managed to finally get ourselves access to an Acrobatics TM from a Kecleon Shop (which we had been looking out for for two whole ranks). We teach this to Hawlucha and we are ready to roll out.

So the walk down is not too bad though you can die to dumb mistakes, which happened to me twice. Anyway, the main strategy here was to lead with Meganium, make liberal use of Razor Leaf and Petal Blizzard, and exercise careful dungeon management. Eventually we make it to the boss and it's Primal Kyogre (with GtI Final Boss music), which means super heavy rain and no Fire-type attacks for me. The strat here is pretty simple, boost speed, stunlock with paralysis, set up Hone Claws boosts, and go to town with Razor Leaf and Acrobatics spam (Acrobatics in particular was hitting for ~125x2 Damage per turn). We hit our two Thunder Waves and Primal Kyogre goes down. Our victory gives us Kyogre and the Sea Looplet, which is the game's X-Ray Specs equivalent. VERY useful item.

Magma Chamber [Groudon]

With Kyogre out of the way, it's time to tackle the harder of the two new dungeons in Magma Chamber. The thing with this dungeon is that it consists of mostly Ground-types and Fire-types and Groudon is not a free fight in the slightest since we cannot rely on paralocking like before. For this day, we decide to bring Moltres as our speed boosting source, we bring along Hawlucha again for its boss-killing prowess, and fortunately for us, Kyurem is available in its vanilla forme, which means access to Glaciate, a lovely move to have. As far as items are concerned, Moltres gets the Sea Looplet (for a good reason) alongside the Red Looplet for the boss fight, Kyurem gets the Tempest Looplet, and Hawlucha loans the Blue Looplet until we can get to the bottom.

This in general is a good dungeon for Sea Looplet as every floor from 5F onwards has reduced visibility (27 in total), which means we know what is coming so we can deal with it accordingly. Slumber Wands are helpful here as we don't have much regular enemy firepower otherwise. In terms of dangerous threats, Flame Burst is annoying in general, multi-hit attacks from Nincada, Golem, etc can ruin your chances of success on the spot, but the real big threat is Volcarona who possesses a room-wide attack on top of being highly levelled. Also worth noting that Drilbur and Excadrill always spawn in the same room and never leave until one is KOed. Similar behaviours are exhibited elsewhere (e.g. Cubchoo and Beartic in Altar of Ice: Depths), but these are not too hard to deal with.

Still, mistakes were made and I did die four times. On my fifth attempt, I managed to find an incredibly rare, but powerful emera known as the Stair Locator, which reveals the stairs location. Very handy and helped me get to the boss. The boss here is Primal Groudon and we do our usual speed boosting setting up with Glaciate to slow Primal Groudon down. Unfortunately Dragon Breath failed to paralyse Primal Groudon and we had to eat an Eruption, but we had dealt so much damage that nobody died. I also do a cool little exploit after Groudon's attack to move adjacently and then use an alliance to get more attacks off and also reapply speed down. As it turns out though, Hawlucha and Kyurem dealt so much damage that it was taken out before it could attack again.

So with Primal Groudon down, that means a few things. First, we get Groudon and the Earth Looplet, which is the Trapper Scarf equivalent (Holder will not activate traps). Secondly, it means that we have gotten all of the Eight Treasures, and with that: The Treasure Crown. Finally, Primal Groudon was the last major boss left in the run, which means every main postgame dungeon we have left to do are all "simple" walks. There are still some bosses left, but they are all outlaws/challenges in regular missions, and at this point, they do not really pose a major threat and can be beaten with simple room-wide attack spam. But as for legendary bosses, that is it.

Kinda fitting that the last boss we beat is a Pokémon that kinda signifies endings in a way.

Rough Tunnel [Huge Meal Looplet]

Of course after all that, Smeargle is not available so we need to do a couple of mission days:

Sand Dune of Spirits (2 Missions)
Midnight Sun Gorge (2 Missions)

So now for Rough Tunnel, and this is probably the easiest of the Never Hungries dungeons. Only 41F, there's some Discharge and Petal Blizzard present, but compared to the other three, Rough Tunnel is not as bad. Again we use Smeargle here, but this time we have the Sea Looplet so we know what's going on and where things are in the grand scheme of things. We also bring Entei and Heatran with the Wildfire and Tempest Looplets respectively. Another thing to note is that for Never Hungries dungeons in general I bring a few Emera-Up Orbs to make up for the low notch count on things like Sea Looplet.

As with Stone Tree Mountain, our main strategy is to rely on Perish Song and Sheer Cold, with Entei and Heatran sometimes combining to take something out. Along the way we do pick up Wand Expert, which allows us to speed these long floors up with Guiding Wands (and we get good wand preservation luck). There was a little hiccup in the 30's when I stepped on a Grimy Trap turning most of my Perfect Apples into Grimy Food, but we did have a Satiated Looplet in case we needed to use it (we did not). But in the end, I was not really troubled by Rough Tunnel.

For winning, we get the Huge Meal Looplet which prevents the holder's belly from draining in an alliance. Pretty much only really useful for Mewtwo, but we already dealt with that earlier, so it is basically useless at this point.

Aurora's Edge [Big Belly Looplet]

With only Never Hungries dungeons to do at the present time, we take the time to wait for Smeargle to become available again by doing more mission days:

Berry Forest (3 Missions)
Mystical Forest (2 Missions, 1 Traveler)
Small Sand Dunes (2 Missions, 1 Traveler, 1 Fainted)
Forest of Bounty (2 Missions, 1 Traveler)

But now we come to one of the rougher Never Hungries dungeons in Aurora's Edge. 43 Gates floors, there's quite a bit of Soundproof here and some Pokémon carry Aromatherapy/Heal Bell to deal with Perish Song (Miltank). On top of this, we have Ditto who can do its Transform + Confusion shenanigans, and finally, Delphox and Gothita. We know about Delphox's wands already, but these two have a move called Magic Room. This move, and I cannot stress this enough, is very dangerous casually, and can make Monster Houses quite fatal if you are not prepared for it. So casually, you would want to bring Revive All Orbs to this place just in case it happens (since if you die under Magic Room, no Reviver Seed is going to save you). Of course, we don't get such luxuries in this playthrough, but it is definitely worth talking about from a casual perspective.

Anyway, we bring the same team as we did for Rough Tunnel with the same setup... and take an early death to a misclick on a 3F monster house (clicked Mind Reader instead of Agility and paid the price). It happens. But we went at it again and things were not as bad until the mid 20's when I hit a Grudge Trap. Like usual, I hit Agility and resolve to get away as fast as possible, which works out, but then Entei decided to use Eruption when adjacent to the enemies instead of following me (I pretty much always have Pokémon on the "Follow Me" tactic for these dungeons), and got itself taken out. Luckily we only really need Smeargle to stay alive, so eventually we got to the end with just Smeargle and Heatran. Also worth noting late in the piece that I stepped on my first Apple Trap for this run. So Apple Traps basically turn a random item into a Big Apple and this can be very bad if it turns an important item into one. The way I deal with this is to carry a few Decoy Seeds, which get top priority for things like Bug Bite, Covet, Sticky Traps, and Apple traps. I also got Stairs Locator two floors from the end.

Anyway, the reward for this dungeon is the Big Belly Looplet, which is the game's Stamina Band equivalent (halves consumption rate from walking and in alliances). Kinda outclassed by Satiated Looplet, however.

Path of Fallen Leaves [Well-Fed Looplet]

As usual, we do more mission days to wait out the cooldown time for Smeargle. This time:

Odd Field (2 Missions)
Stone Field (2 Missions)
Peewee Meadow (2 Missions)
Berry Forest (2 Missions)
Forest of Fairies (2 Missions)

And now for Path of Fallen Leaves,the last of the Never Hungries dungeons, and the one that we unlocked way back before we finished the main plot. 42 Gates Floors, and probably the roughest of the four in my opinion. So this dungeon has Magic Room in the form of Klefki (who also has Heal Block!), two Aromatherapy users in Vilepume (who can also use Petal Blizzard!) and Slurpuff, two Sturdy Pokémon to counter Sheer Cold in Bastiodon and Probopass, some more AoE users, and you have one hell of a dungeon, complete with a beautiful, autumn forest backdrop. It is also worth noting that this was the ONE dungeon I died to when I first played this game casually four years ago, and it was to a Magic Room Monster House with no Revive All Orbs.

Anyway, for this dungeon, we use Smeargle/Heatran/Moltres with the Sea, Tempest, and Earth Looplets respectively. I did not have to worry about traps however as I found the Trap Proof emera a couple of floors in. We do the same strats as usual, but we get some pretty awful stairs luck in general, and Sturdy does come into play here (though I did not gt punished with death). There was also one very precarious situation on 28F with only one way into a room that Vileplume and several others would not leave... that was a fun experience.

Nevertheless, we somehow manage to make it to the end despite a few mistakes and bad stairs luck. For this, we get the Well-Fed Looplet, which doubles the amount of belly you recover when consuming an item. Not really worth it when we can just get Perfect Apples on demand from Cofagrigus and have tons of Gold Bars. It is also the last of the Never Hungries treasures so we get the Food Fighter's Crown for our troubles. Like I said before, the crowns are functionally useless but add a marker above the holder's head.

Road to Grand Master Rank

Despite all of that, we are still a ways away from Grandmaster Rank, so it is time to begin the slog that is, doing lots of missions for recruits since that is all we can do at this point while waiting for the rank up. So the mission days we do are:

Forest of Bounty (2 Missions, 1 Traveler)
Golden Suite (1 Mission)
Snowy Cave (1 Mission)
Hall of Magic (1 Mission, 1 Pumped Up)
Holey Meadow (1 Mission)
Yellow Sand Labyrinth (2 Missions, 2 Travelers, 1 Pumped Up)

And after that productive mission day at Yellow Sand Labyrinth (where Gliscor was one of the travelers!), we finally hit Grand Master Rank, the highest expedition rank. For this, we unlock Buried Ruins (Yveltal's dungeon) and Apex Mountain (Zygarde's dungeon), as well as connections with Nuzleaf and Beheeyem. At this point in the game, we have not not much left to do. We just need to do the two new dungeons, wrap up all the mission days, get to 778 connects, get the rest of the dungeons visited, and then the true final dungeon in this game. We are officially on the home stretch of this run!

---

Connections: 683/779 [87.7%]
Treasures: 22/25 [88.0%]
Dungeons Explored: 81.3%
Black / White Kyurem: 100%
Deaths: 47

STARTER/PARTNER + OTHERS USED THIS UPDATE

Meganium
Lv: 63
-Petal Blizzard
-Razor Leaf
-Petal Dance
-Synthesis

Emboar
Lv: 58
-Rollout
-Flamethrower
-Arm Thrust
-Heat Wave

Entei
Lv: 65
-Sacred Fire
-Eruption
-Extrasensory
-Flamethrower

Hawlucha
Lv: 59
-High Jump Kick
-Drain Punch
-Hone Claws
-Acrobatics

Heatran
Lv: 60
-Heat Wave
-Iron Head
-Earth Power
-Magma Storm

Kyurem
Lv: 74
-Glaciate/Freeze Shock/Ice Burn
-Dragon Breath
-Dragon Pulse
-Ice Beam

Moltres
Lv: 59
-Heat Wave
-Hurricane
-Agility
-Flamethrower

Smeargle
Lv: 84
-Perish Song
-Mind Reader
-Sheer Cold
-Agility

Zapdos
Lv: 59
-Discharge
-Agility
-Thunder Wave
-Drill Peck