pokmon nuzlocke challenges
If you don't know what a Pokemon Nuzlocke challenge is, it's essentially playing through a normal mainline Pokemon game, but with a few added rules to make it more challenging:
- You can only catch the first wild Pokemon you see per route. If you kill it, you've lost your encounter and must wait until the next route to catch another Pokemon
- If you already own the Pokemon though, you can catch the 2nd encounter or 3rd, etc, etc, until you find something you haven't caught
- You must nickname all caught Pokemon (to become more attached)
- When a Pokemon faints, it's dead forever. You must box it and not use it for the rest of the game.
I've been playing through Pokemon Crystal on my newly purchased modded Atomic Purple Gameboy Advance (not a referral link, I just love this thing) and I have added a few more rules to make it more challenging:
- I can only use 2 healing items per battle (not including held items)
- I have to play on "Set" mode, meaning that the game will not prompt me to switch out my Pokemon after defeating another trainer's Pokemon
- I can only use the same amount of Pokemon in gym battles that the gym leader has, so I have to pick my Pokemon carefully
- I can only level my Pokemon to the highest level Pokemon of the next gym leader, so I can't over-level. If the leader's strongest Pokemon is level 25, then that's my level cap.
This has made for an extremely challenging Pokemon Crystal run. I recently defeated Whitney with some extreme planning and some luck. She's one of the hardest gym leaders in any Pokemon game, namely because of her Miltank who uses the move Rollout, which gets more powerful each time it's used consecutively. Also, she only uses 2 Pokemon, so I needed to think carefully about which 2 I was going to bring.
I chose "Leafhead," the Bayleef and "Bruh," the Geodude.
The way I beat her was to set up a Reflect with Leafhead, while her weaker Pokemon Clefairy was out. Then I switched over to Bruh who started using Rollout himself, so that by the time Clefairy was defeated and Miltank came out and started using their Rollout, mine was already powered up and was able to knock it out quickly. It was still a close one and had Leafhead not set up the Reflect, Bruh would have died for sure.
If you haven't given this challenge a try, I definitely recommend it! It's become the definitive way to play Pokemon, since they are super easy games otherwise.
This post was created in memory of "Popsmoke," the Gastly. I hardly even knew you, and you died too soon. I wish you could have realized your full Gengar potential.
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