Megiddo's Ice Monotype Generations Nuzlocke

[Megiddo]

Hi guys,

I’m going to be attempting to complete a game from every generation, right up to Sun and Moon in Nuzlocke form only using Ice types.

What is a Nuzlocke?

A Nuzlocke is player defined a challenge mode designed to make Pokémon games more challenging. Most Nuzlocke challenges have different rules based on how challenging the player wants to make the game. Most Nuzlocke challenges at least have the following rules;

- when your Pokémon feints, you must release it (or box it permanently in a death box).
- you can only catch the first Pokémon you encounter on each route/area.
- you must nickname all Pokémon you catch

These are the basic rules for any Nuzlocke challenge. They can be edited adding more rules but these are essentially what makes the runs fun.

What is a generations Nuzlocke?

A generations run is where your Pokémon that you finish the game with carry over to the next generation. For example if I complete Pokémon Red with Gyarados, Dragonite and Charizard, I would then start Pokémon Gold with Magikarp, Dratini and Charmander all at the lowest level available or in an egg if possible. Why is this fun? It just adds an extra element in falling in love with some of your party members. Taking a Pidgey family from the first route after Pallet Town in Pokemon Red all the way to Pokémon Black is very fun and rewarding

Why Ice type?

I’ve wanted to do an ice type generations run for a while now. Ice has always been on my list of runs to do for fun factor. Ice is a very strong yet fragile type. It has a lot of strengths and hits a lot of different types for super effective damage. However it also has a lot of weaknesses and weaknesses to very common types of Fighting, Fire and Rock. Can you imagine taking on Whitney’s Miltank when it’s throwing out super-effective rollouts? Yeah, it’s going to be rough.

My rules

- once a Pokémon has fainted it will be deemed dead and will be placed into a death box in the PC so I can look upon my failures at the end of each run.

- all pokemon must be nicknamed

- the highest level of my Pokémon cannot exceed that of the next gym leaders ‘ace’ Pokémon. In Heartgold, the first gym leader, Falkner’s Ace is Pidgeotto at level 9. None of my Pokémon may level passed level 9 before facing Falkner (any Pokémon that exceeds this level before the fight must be boxed before fighting the leader. Levelling past this cap during the fight is allowed.)

- I have one attempt to catch each available ice type Pokémon in each generation. Given the low number of ice types available I will be limiting myself to one encounter of each ice type (or earlier family) in each game. If I make it faint during my attempted catching, I have missed my chance and that Pokémon cannot be used.

- only pokemon with ice as a main type or sub type can be used. The only exception to this rule is when a first evolution of an ice type family does not have ice as a sub type. Eg Dewgong is water/ice but Seel is pure water. Seel can still be used. The only other exception to this rule is when Ice type Pokémon can be obtained via in game trade. In which case, I have one attempt to catch the required Pokémon to perform the in game trade. If I faint it, I cannot trade for the ice type. This only has a couple of possibilities, two being in generation 1 and trading for Jynx in Cerulean and Dewgong on Cinnebar Island.

- in later generations, Eevee can be used but must be evolved into Glaceon at first available opportunity. Even if that requires trekking out of the way of the story. Eevee can not be used in generations before Glaceon is available.

- pokemon can be caught and taught HM moves in order to progress. Also, one flying type can be caught and taught fly. This is supposed to be a challenge mode not a walking simulator.

- in order to start in Generation 1, given that no ice types are available for a long time I will be hacking my first Pokémon into the game at level 5. What this Pokémon is will be decided by RNG but will be a first evolution. Eg Seel, Shellder, Jynx, Lapras

- duplicate Pokémon cannot be used in the same party. Eg if I have Dewgong in my party and encounter a wild Seel, I can catch the seal and box it but cannot use it until my current Dewgong faints.

I will be using this thread as a bit of a journal with updates as I journey through. Let me know what you think about my rules and if I should make any adjustments.

Part 1 - Fire Red



About to RNG my starter. If I roll 1-10 I’ll use Jynx, 11-49 I’ll use Seel, 50-89 I’ll use Shellder, 90-100 I’ll use Lapras. I adjusted the weighting as starting with a Lapras will probably be overkill.

AND MY NUMBER IS 73 - Shellder it is!

Run update 1 - Pallet Town to Pewter City

Welcome to my first run update!

It started off fairly well. I got Shellder and nicknamed him Rex. Together, me and Rex were destined for great things. I started off fairly worried when Rex was at level 7 and still only knew withdraw and Tackle, hoping, praying that he would learn Water Gun or similar before I took on Brock. At level 8 he learned Icicle Spear, which, before It got updated around Gen 5 or 6 was a very, very ordinary move. 10 base power with a chance to hit up to 5 times with an average of around 3.4 hits each time its used. With that average, it’s weaker than tackle!

Armed with 2 very week attacking moves Rex and I moved into Viridian Forest after some excessive grinding just below Viridian City. Viridian Forest started off about as normally as can be expected. Until Rex got poisoned, twice. Luckily I had prepared for that and ending up stocking up on Potions and Antidotes. After some running backwards and forwards to the Viridian Pokémon Center to heal up, we ended up making it through to Pewter City, with Rex reaching the ripe old level of 11.

I double check the max level of Onix online_ and find that I can grind to 14 so off we go. In the meantime, Rex reaches level 14 and learns Supersonic. We hit level 14 and go hit up Brock.

The battle was pure carnage for Rex. Poor Geodude had nothing to do to Rex. Rex just maximised his Defense using Withdraw and then hit Geodude with 2 Icicle Spears for the KO. Onix came out and Rex hits him straight off the bat with a 5 hit Icicle Spear. Leaving Onix at about 15% hp. Onix used Rock Tomb, doing about 3hp damage (withdraw OP) and Rex finishes him off with another Icicle Spear.

First badge acquired!

Run update 2!



Brock went down so easily I was really happy with the way Rex handled himself. Next stop is Mount Moon before heading onto Cerulean City and Misty. Before I head off out of Pewter, I load up with a few more potions, antidotes and a couple of escape ropes in case i need them for Mount Moon.

Heading off into Route 3 and my Antidotes come in handy against the very first trainer. His stupid Weedle poisoned Rex, twice. Rex hit level 16 after this battle and I had a quick look at what level Misty's Starmie is before I get to Cerulean. Level 21, so I can't level passed 21 before Misty. I start skipping as many trainers as I can to save xp. If I need it i'll smash some of the hikers up North of Cerulean towards Bill's House. I stop off in the last bit of grass before Mount Moon and catch a Spearow that I'll trade for Farfetch'd in Vermilion when I get there, Farfetch'd will be my Fly and Cut HM slave and won't ever see battle so as to keep with the Ice mono type.

I heal up Rex at the Pokemon Center and enter Mount Moon. Rex still isn't the strongest offensively, he still only knows Tackle, Withdraw, Icicle Spear and now Supersonic, which will come in extremely handy in the future ;) I head
East in Mount Moon and then South a bit and head towards a Rare Candy when I accidentally encounter Super Nerd Jovan. I wasn't too worried, about any encounters in here until he sent out his Magnemite. I'm not sure how much you know about Shellder but his defense is absolutely outstanding! His special defense however is absolutely abysmal! This Magnemite knows a super effective Thundershock that leaves me with 7hp and heart palpatations!

I heal up with a Super Potion and Magnemite goes for Thunder Wave. MISS! Luck is on my side! I hit Magnemite with another Tackle, Icicle Spear is a stronger option only if it gets 4 or 5 hits, not risking it in this battle so I'm just going for the standard Tackle. Magnemite uses Thundershock again and I heal up with another Super Potion. I've only got one left and any crit will kill me. I tackle once more, one more tackle will take out Magnemite. Magnemite uses Thunder Wave and unfortunately it doesn't miss this time so Rex is paralyzed, but luckily, has full hp. Here, I have to make a decision to try and tackle through Paralysis or to heal paralysis and hope he doesn't paralyze with Thundershock. I decide not to heal and leave my life in RNGesus' hands. RNGesus is kind today and Rex manages to land a Tackle through Paralysis and take down Magnemite, not before Magnemite lands a high roll and leaves Rex with 2hp from full health. My god, my butthole is clenched so tight right now.

I breathe a sigh of relief when i realise this guy still has another Pokemon. If it's another Magnemite my run is dead for sure. In my saving grace, Voltorb is sent out. Thankfully, he doesn't learn any Electric moves until 21 so I should be safe, except the 2hp thing. I heal up using my last Super Potion and Voltorb uses Charge, meh, he doesn't know any electric moves anyway. I cure paralysis, just in case, and start Tackling. After a short few Tackles, Voltorb goes down and my relief is immeasurable. I've decided I really hate Super Nerd Jovan. I run up grab another Escape Rope and the Rare Candy and then Escape Rope out to heal and regroup. I head back to Pewter to grab another couple of Potions with what money i do have and then head back to Mt. Moon. The rest of Mt.Moon goes fairly smoothly with only a small hiccup at the end with Koffing poisoning Rex but I was ready for that with an Antidote.

I leave Mt.Moon and head into Cerulean. Rex is at level 18 so i've got a bit of lee-way with xp. I'll hit up Nugget Bridge next to load up on Potions before Misty, which will quite possibly be one of the 2 most difficult fights in the whole run.

Till next time!

Update 3 Cerulean gym. We get a new member!

The first thing we do as we get to Cerulean is head to the Pokémon Center and heal Rex. He’ll likely need it for the next battle, which will be my rival, AssHat at nugget bridge.

Before we head to the bridge, I grab the Rare Candy to add to my stash. I head on over to fight my rival, at this point, I’m not actually sure what to expect from this fight.

First up, AssHat sends out his Pidgeotto, which had absolutely nothing against Rex and his Icicle Spear, which hit 4 times and left Pidgeotto with enough
HP to be taken out the next turn with another 2 hits from Ice Spear.

After Pidgeotto went down, Rattata came out and tried to threaten Rex with Crit Hyper Fangs, which normally would have been scary, but Rex has better Defense than a catholic priest in a court room, so I wasn’t worried. A few tackles later and a potion for safety, Rattata went down and out comes Charmander.

First turn, Charmander uses Ember, which, although was Not Very Effective, still did a surprising amount of damage given Rex’s atrocity of a special Defense stat. It’s at this point I realise that Misty and Starmie are going to be extremely difficult. Perhaps even a virtually impossible fight if Starmie has confusion and can OHKO. But I need to get through this battle first. Due to Rex still not having learned any water type attacks yet all he could do was tackle, but that was good enough to take Charmander down, again, using a Potion for safety. Abra was the last one to come out, which only knows teleport so that was the end of the battle. Not too much difficulty there which was nice. And Rex hits level 19, very close to 20.

I head back down to the Pokemon Center and heal up then head back up to Nugget Bridge for some more training. Rex took all the trainers down without too much fuss, except the double poison he suffered against the jerk with both Nidorans and Poison Point ability :( we reached the end of Nugget Bridge and grabbed the Nugget and Rex hit level 21 and about 2/3 exp bar to 22.

We make our way to the poke mart to stock up before our fight with Misty and I’m fairly sure I’m going to only have one method of winning this fight and it’s not going to be pretty.

After selling literally everything I have, TMs included I load up on as many Super Potions and Potions as I can and head on up to the gym. Thankfully, you can skip all extra trainers in this gym and go straight to the leader. I likely would have overlevelled Misty if I had to fight any of her other trainers so that was lucky.

I initiate the fight with Misty and out comes Staryu. Basically Staryu is the initiation for this fight. Whatever Staryu does, Starmie is going to do twice as hard. I’m not expecting too much trouble from Staryu as it only has Tackle, which won’t do much, harden and Water Pulse which shouldn’t do much either because of resistance.

Rex starts off by confusing Staryu with supersonic but Staryu still manages to get Harden off twice and snap out of confusion on the 3rd turn. Hopefully this isn’t a sign of bad RNG in this fight. Rex misses the supersonic and Staryu uses Harden again, which isn’t exactly ideal. Now Staryu is at +3 Defense which means my Tackles won’t be doing much either. I go for the supersonic again and land the confusion this time, and Staryu hits itself! Fantastic!

Rex hits Staryu with another tackle, which takes it down to half health, and drops even further when it hits itself in confusion the next turn. Rex tackles again, Staryu makes it through confusion and uses Water Pulse. I really wasn’t expecting that due to resistance, but damn! That actually did a good chunk of damage to Rex! This doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence when Starmie comes out. But then, I’ve still got my secret weapons.

Misty ends up using a Super Potion on Staryu and I burn a couple of mine and a regular potion on Rex, keeping him topped up with health before Starmie comes out. My strategy for Staryu was basically just keep him confused and whittle him down with tackle. Misty ended up using 2 potions which means she shouldn’t have any left to use on Starmie.

Eventually Staryu goes down, Rex levels up to 22, learns Auroroa Beam at the expense of Icicle Spear and Starmie makes its appearance. This is where the fight gets tediously boring so I’ll skip to the chase.

Starmie uses Water Pulse and does serious damage. Even with resistance Starmie is chunking Rex from 68 Hp all the way down to 22. My secret weapon in this fight is.... Super Potions. The only strategy I could come up with to beat Starmie was to confuse it and keep using super potions until it either ran out of Water Pulse pp or killed itself through confusion. It’s not my proudest fight, but Rex’s special Defense is that bad that it was literally the only way i could win.

And win we did. After what felt like an eternity, Starmie did run out of Water Pulse PP, which was good timing as I had just run out of Super Potions and was about to start using regular Potions. Starmie stArting using tackle and it was all Rex’s fight from there.

Starmie goes down and we get our 2nd badge!

To celebrate our 2nd badge, we use a couple of dubious measures to get a Poliwhirl and end up trading it for Hynx aka Jynx. The Psychic/ice type and quite literally the only way I’m going to beat LT. Surge in Vermilion gym.

Which we’ll be getting to in the next run update. Stay tuned, the next one will be up sooner than the rest. From this point I’m writing from memory as I skipped ahead a bit and am currently sitting in Saffron City gym heading towards Sabrina so I’ve got a bit to catch you guys up on. Including sad, sad deaths :(



Update 4: Cerulean City - S.S Anne & Vermillion City

Rex gets a well earned rest after the battle with Misty as Hynx takes the lead and we get some training done. The next gym battle is against Surge at level 24 so we’ve got a bit of training to do, luckily, we’ve got a lot of trainers north of Cerulean as well as the SS Anne. Hynx is only level 8 though so we start off murdering some Spearows, Ekans and Sandshrews in the grass just west of Cerulean and then move up to murdering Oddish, Kakuna and Pidgey. The levelling process is fairly smooth with Hynx as she knows Powder Snow and Lovely Kiss so we just put everything to sleep with Lovely Kiss and knock em out with Powder Snow.

It’s not long before Hynx has taken down all the trainers north of Cerulean, we’ve gotten the SS Ticket from Bill and retrieved the Dig TM. I’ve always found it weird how that dude was all like “THEM ROCKETS STOLE MY DIG TM, WHAT YOU GOT IT BACK? It’s ok you can keep it”. Like dude, did you want it back or not?

Anyway, we soldier on with Hynx, Rex still chilling (haha get it? It’s an ice run and I said chilling.... sorry, I’ll stop now) in his Pokeball and Spearow ripe and ready to trade for Farfetch’d in Vermilion.

As we’re making our way through Route 6 just north of Vermilion, Hynx just laughing at everything that gets in the way, we get into a battle with Camper Jeff. Who starts off with a Spearow, who is dead on arrival. Hynx Powder Snows his feathery ass. Useless fact: Spearow was the first shiny I ever caught back in Original gold, I nicknamed it Eggy. Jeff then sends out Raticate and I have a momentary heart attack.

Now before I go into what happens here, I just want to bring attention to my current 2 Pokémon. Jynx and Shellder. I’ve already talked about Shellder’s abysmal Special Defense stats and monsterous Defense stats in previous updates but the important thing here is Jynx’s stats. They’re virtually complete mirror images of Shellder’s. Shellder has great Defense bad special Defense, Jynx has great special Defense and bad Defense. They compliment each other really, really well. Up until this Raticate decides to use Hyper Fang on Hynx. And it crits. Like it actually crits. A STAB (same type attack bonus) crit hyper fang from a Raticate against a low Defense Hynx. Up until this point, I’ve been really lucky with crits. And by lucky I mean I didn’t actually realise Rex is ammune to crits because of his ability, which turns out, was most likely a huge factor in not losing to Misty.

Luckily for my run, and Hynx, I healed Hynx up to full after a fight with a bug catcher’s Butterfree not long before this one. Had Hynx not had full hp, and I’m talking if she had 3hp less than full, my run would be over. Yep, Hynx was left with 3hp.

3 goddam hp.

I promptly switch out and Rex comes out of hibernation and Raticate uses Hyper Fang again. Which does 16 damage, Rex laughs at another Hyper Fang miss and then kills Raticate with Water Pulse, learned from the TM Misty gave us.

The battle finishes and we head straight into the Pokémon Center in Vermilion. Still hardly believing how ridiculously close we came to wiping. If Hynx died we wouldn’t have wiped that battle, Rex would have cleaned it up, but Surge is a completely impossible fight for Rex. Super Effective Shock Waves that cannot miss are all going to one shot Rex so it’s quite literally an impossible fight unless Shock Wave doesn’t get used and Rex doesn’t get paralysed from Thunder Wave, and Rex doesn’t miss at all and yeah, like 99.99999% chance of losing with Rex solo.

We survive though and head on in to the SS Anne, making a quick stop at the Mart to restock on some potions and a couple of other things just in case. We make our way through the ship, picking up a couple of potions, a couple of berries and a Rare Candy for our trouble and we find AssHat again. Urgh, this guy.

AssHat is really not difficult at all now. Hynx takes down his Pidgeotto, Rex comes in and takes out Charmeleon, Hynx comes back in and takes out Kadabra and the rest follow suit. We give the Captain a questionable massage and he gives us the Cut HM. I don’t know about you but a 10 year old kid getting an item for giving a sailor a “massage” just doesn’t seem right to me.

We trudge on out of the ship, it departs and we head on into Diglett’s Cave to grind out the last little bit of Xp on Rex, he hits 24 and Hynx is 22. We head back to the Pokémon Center, heal up, trade our Spearow for Farfetch’d, teach him cut and head into the gym. This gym always brings back bad memories from when I was a kid. I hated the trash cans. I hated them so much I would just leave Vermilion Gym till last. One of the very few times you can actually skip a gym, it only gives you fly access and not actually needed.

This time however, we head in and take out a few trainers with Hynx which bumps him up to 23. After about 10minutes of wandering around opening the first lock and resetting it we hit the jackpot and the door opens. We trek back to Diglett’s Cave and grind Hynx up to 24, close enough to 25 that she’ll level up after Surge’s first Pokémon, there’s strategy involved there ;)

While grinding we encounter a Dugtrio. Now these Dugtrio are absolute pains in the ass. They’re always level 28+, fast and hit like an absolute truck. Oh, and they can have Arena Trap ability meaning you cannot run away. They can single handedly end your runs if you’re not prepared.

We were prepared though. I go into my bag and just toss out a Poke Doll. These handy things first show up in Vermilion Mart. Something I found extremely handy and I’m positive they were put in there purely because Diglett can have Arena Trap. We finish grinding Diglett’s Cave, heal up and head on in to fight Surge.

For what would have been an impossible fight with Rex, Hynx actually makes this fight ridiculously easy. Not only does Hynx have a high special Defense stat, she’s the ONLY Ice type in gen 1 to not be weak to electric.

Voltorb is Surge’s first Pokémon, who uses Screech as his first move. And doesn’t get another chance as Hynx puts Voltorb to sleep and proceeds to take it out with a few Powder Snows and hits level 25 once Voltorb faints.

Here’s where my extra strategy comes into play. The extra stats from level 24-25 are minuscule but Hynx learns a new move at level 25. Ice Punch. One major benefit to this generation is they haven’t gone through the Physical/Special attack split yet, so some moves, like Ice Punch that have been changed to physical moves in future generations are still Special attacks in gen 3 and lower. Meaning Ice Punch is a base power 75 ice type special attack and combined with Hynx’s STAB, it actually turns into one of the strongest possible attacks this early in the game. The others all being normal types EG mega punch, mega kick from move tutors near Mt.Moon and Hyper Fang from Raticate.

Ice Punch one shots Surge’s Pikachu and a double tap on Raichu gives Hynx the W and I slot another badge onto the belt. Hynx, the Most Valuable Pokemon probably for the run so far. Only pipping Rex because Rex wouldn’t have been able to do this gym.

We head on out of the gym and heal up at the Pokémon Center before heading off towards Rock Tunnel. Our next gym is Erika at level 29 so we don’t have a huge amount of wiggle room with our Xp through Rock Tunnel to Celadon City so we’ll try and avoid as much as we can.

So far we’ve got 3 badges, and no deaths. Unfortunately the no deaths thing doesn’t last forever. But we’ll get to that in the next couple of updates.

Next update will come soon!




Update 5: Vermilion City to Pokemon Tower


So far we’ve taken down Brock, Misty and Lt.Surge with Rex and Hynx. But we’ve still got a long, long way to go. Thi run has been going for close to 2 weeks already and I’m a good few badges behind in the write up. I’m going to skip some of the boring bits and just get through to where the action is i.e the gym battles and random difficult encounters.

We’ve finished at Vermilion City and obtained our bicycle so we start making our way towards Rock Tunnel, picking up a couple of escape ropes in case we run into trouble. Now that the levels of trainers are starting to get a bit higher, rock type Pokémon will start throwing out Rock type attacks, which will be super-effective, so that’s something to watch for in the Rock Tunnel, mainly for Hynx as Rex still isn’t Ice type just yet. We work our way through the little maze of rocks, walls and trainers as we journey closer to Rock Tunnel. Eventually we make it there, heal up at the Pokémon Center and enter the cave, using cut to bypass the trainer at the bottom of the map ;).

Due to it being so dark, and not having access to flash, Rock Tunnel could easily turn into a bit of a nightmare if you’re not properly prepared. However we’re pretty well stocked on potions and cures at the moment, with a couple of escape ropes and poke dolls in case things go south really quickly.

We spent a grand total of about 15minutes wandering around the darkness, randomly running into walls and using them to point us in the right direction. There was nearly no trouble with Rock Tunnel at all except for using 1 escape rope to head back and heal after a trainer had 2 Slowpokes, who resist all my attacking moves at the moment and both Rex and Hynx decided they were going to attack themselves instead of the Slowpoke. Losing a Pokémon in Rock Tunnel would be embarrassing. Lucky for us, after we heal up and head back into the cave, the rest of the tunnel goes as smoothly as you can ask for and we finally find the exit and enter Lavender Town.

This is probably the most exciting part of the run apart from the Elite 4. Once you get to Lavender and then Celadon City the whole game virtually opens up. There’s a lot of things to do, between the department store, game corner, saffron city, Pokémon Tower there’s just so much stuff to do.

We quickly heal up at Lavender and Trek on to Celadon, managing your avoid most of the trainers along the way to conserve XP for Erika at the next gym. We enter Celadon, hit the Pokémon Center quickly and then survey our options. The first thing we do is head down to the gym and scope out how many trainers are in there and take out a couple with Hynx while we’re there. After we take a couple down we head back out of the gym and pick up the coin case. Before we head to the game corner I’ve got some purchases to make at the department store.

First stop, floor 4. A Water stone for Rex he’s earned it. Our very first evolution of our generations run. Rex is now a Cloyster!

While we’re at the mart, we teach Hynx Counter, not sure why, it was there and might come in handy, we’re stocked up on potions at the moment so we grab some X items instead, loading up on Defense, speed and special attack X boosters for now. We’ll get more as we get some more money.

After the department store we make our way to the game corner and start some “gambling”. There’s a couple of upgrades i can grab here. One of the majors being TM13 - Ice Beam and the other being Mystic Water, a hold item to boost the power of water attacks.

We run around the game corner, grabbing the free coins available, take out the Rocket Grunt guarding the poster for more money, then buy some more coins and start farming coins. We need about 15,000 coins to get everything we need and have a couple of TMs leftover. I like grabbing a couple of extra TMs so I can delete them and reteach them for specific fights or for extra PP if I get really desperate. Them big brain strats.

I jump on Amazon Prime, load up an episode of The Boys and start farming. Thank god for playing on an emulator and having speed increase! After a while we’re up to 3,500 so we go load up with 3x Mystic Waters. We got 3 so we can give one to each of our water/ice types once we get them and don’t have to swap the items around. Back to the game corner, and I’ve just found out that pressing R automatically restarts the reels with your last lines. FML. I’ve been pressing down to get max lines for like the last 10 years. I max out on coins twice before the episode finishes so we load up on Ice Beam TMs and head on out.

Before heading to the gym, we head over to Celadon Mansion, grab the Tea, give it to the guards to get into Saffron. A quick heal at the Pokémon Center to open the fly route and then we head over a couple of houses for our secret weapon against Erika and head back to Celadon.

Before hitting the gym we go run through the Rocket Hideout in the game corner to max out Hynx and Rex at 29 for Erika. Nothing much happens there, neither Hynx nor Rex have any issues thanks to Ice Beam. We take out Giovanni for the first time, head out for a heal and then head to the gym.

We use Ice Beam with Hynx to destroy a couple of trainers on our way to Erika and start the battle with Erika. This fight was probably the most one sided gym fight so far. Hynx used Ice Beam once and the our secret weapon, Psychic against everything else. Grass/Poison against STAB Psychic from Hynx? Nothing survived. Vileplume was the only one to not get one shot but didn’t provide any issues either. 2nd gym in a row where Rex got to watch from the sidelines.

4th badge acquired!

We duck over to the west of Celadon and pick up the Fly HM and teach it to Farfetch’d, he doesn’t get a nickname because he’s technically not part of the run, and we fly back to Lavender Town and heal. Next up, Pokémon Tower and another battle with AssHat.

Not much to report on the battle with AssHat, we use Hynx to take out Pidgeotto first to force Charmeleon out, we switch to Rex and destroy Charmeleon with Water Pulse. Biggest issue here is Ember did a reasonable chunk to Rex. Nothing worth a potion, just something to consider in future battles. We switch back to Hynx to take out Exeggcute (interesting that he has Exeggcute only available from the Safari Zone which is in Fuchsia, currently blocked by Snorlax... I call hax) and then Gyarados and finally Kadabra. All of who go down quite easily with Psychic. A few extra levels above helps too.

Once AssHat finishes boasting about how many Pokémon he’s caught (like dude I’ve taken all yours out with 2 Pokémon so far) we make our way up through the tower just Psychicing everything. Pokémon Tower is a great spot for EV training your special attackers too with Gastly and Haunter both giving Sp.Attack EVs.

It’s not long before we encounter Marowak, Rex puts it to rest and Hynx destroys the Rockets on the top floor to save Mr Pokémon. All in all, quite easy with Psychic and Ice Beam.

Next up Fuchsia City gym and Silph Co... after this next update we’ll be caught up to where I am now. Remember when I said deaths? Yep, they’re coming [emoji24][emoji24][emoji24]



Update 6: Lavender Town to Fuchsia City Gym




Now that we’ve cleared the Pokémon Tower and received the Poke Flute from Mr. Pokémon (if that even is his real name) the rest of the game opens up to us. And there’s so much we can do. First, we head south of Lavender and wake the Snorlax up and just run from it as there’s really no benefit to fighting it. If it was holding Leftovers I would have used some sort of strategy to get them but nope, only a berry :(

After we get passed Snorlax we cruise on down through route 12, using Rex to take out a plethora of bird keepers and campers. Not much to write about here except I flew back to Lavender to heal up a couple of times just as a precaution. You can never be too careful in a Nuzlocke run.

Eventually we enter Fuchsia, heal at the Pokémon Center and head straight to the safari zone. Twisting and turning through the safari zone we catch a Nidorina to teach it Strength and make our way to the centre house for the hidden prize, and one of the most important items of our whole run, HM03 - Surf, we grab the Gold Teeth to give to the Warden and then head on out.

Rex learns Surf in place of Water Pulse and now his kit is looking much more dangerous. Surf, Ice Beam, Supersonic and Protect. I’ve found Protect very helpful in previous Nuzlockes as it gives you a chance to scout potential attacks that may surprise you. Plus, it gave Rex the added bonus of ignoring Dig while grinding some XP in Diglett’s Cave.

Koga’s Ace is a level 43 Weezing, and the gym immediately following is Sabrina also at level 43 so there’s a bit of juggling of XP and levels required here. I’m going to have to partially clear the Silph Co for XP, beat Koga, finish Silph Co and then beat Sabrina. AssHat shouldn’t be an issue in Silph Co because his Charizard will only be level 40 and Rex now has Surf.

We head into the Silph Co and start clearing. Mainly using Hynx for now as she is going to be the most important member for the next couple of gyms. STAB Psychics against Koga and resistance against Sabrina’s Psychic types will be important. Hynx is making very short work of all these Rocket Grunts considering most of them have some form of Ekans Zubat combination with a few Rattata and Raticates thrown in that Rex deals with, yes I’ve learned from the incident near Vermilion. Hynx dings to level 40 and Rex is sitting at 37 at the moment, which should be plenty to take down Koga with Psychic. We clear everything up to AssHat but leave him till after Koga for strategic reasons.

Back to Fuchsia we go and head to the gym. Running into a trainer with a Drowzee and a Hypno we actually gave me a bit of trouble. After dealing with him, we heal and then make our way to Koga. Starting the battle Koga leads with Koffing, no real dramas here as long as we don’t get poisoned. Thinking strategy here I go for an X Speed, making sure we out speed everything so we can just land Psychic straight up.

Disaster. Absolute carnage in my brain right now as I watch Koffing use Self Destruct.

Goddam Self Destruct and a god damn Crit. Self Destruct and Explosion crits should not be a thing. Koffing uses self destruct and I watch in horror as the words Critical Hit pop up on my screen. Only mere moments after watching Hynx’s HP bar deplete. To zero.

Hynx is dead.

Gone.

I’m shook. Hynx was such an important piece of this puzzle, of my strategy. She single handedly took down Surge and Erika and would have done the same if I used Psychic instead of an X Speed.

I send out Rex and Koga sends out Muk. I’m still a bit shaken and can’t actually believe what just happened. The rest of this fight just got a lot, lot harder. Rex is level 38, Muk is 39 and I know Koga’s Weezing is 43. We’re in trouble.

The only saving grace is this situation is that Rex has crazy Defense and All poison attacks are considered Physical in this generation, so while Muk and Weezing might be throwing out super powered Sludges, Rex SHOULD be able to tank them like a pro. Again, poison could be an issue.

Before we start looking at options for the rest of the battle. I take a quick mental break. I grab a coffee, contemplating just how in the actual crap I am supposed to finish this run now.

Enough of that, I’ve got to focus on finishing this fight before getting too far ahead of myself.

Rex launches into Muk with Surf and it does a bit less than a quarter of Muk’s hp in damage. I was really hoping for more but I guess Muk has pretty decent Sp.Defense. Muk uses Acid Armor which is fine as I don’t have any Physical moves, feel free to use that again a few more times Koga. It’s at this point I wish I grabbed a couple of Guard Specs when I had the chance. I could have used them to avoid poison and wouldn’t have to worry at all about Toxic. Which is exactly what happens next.

Rex uses Surf again and Muk poisons with Toxic. Toxic isn’t too bad as long as you don’t let it get out of hand. I decide to let Toxic run for another turn while hitting Muk with another Surf and Muk uses Minimise.

Great.

Koga has an absolute pain in the ass strategy of using toxic and then increasing evasion to burn turns for toxic, which i guess makes sense for a Ninja if you really think about it.

Next turn we heal our Poison and Muk uses Sludge. It actually chunks Rex fairly decently, meaning I have to use a potion next turn as Muk poisons with Toxic again.

I let toxic run another turn and hit with Surf again, Muk uses Minimise again. Next turn I heal poison and Koga uses a potion. FML I hate Koga. This fight is already annoying because Hynx died let alone the stupid Muk.

Muk is now at full health with +2 evasion, Rex is about 75%, no poison.

I take a minute to assess the situation. Chances are I’m going to miss at some point soon, and Koga will likely use one more potion.

I check my items to see what I’ve got in my bag I can use. 3 antidotes left, which isn’t great, X speed, X Special, X Defend, and a couple of Full Restores.

Ok new strategy, Use X Special, healing poison and hp and try and nuke down Muk and Weezing when they come out. Muk uses toxic again, which this time Rex avoids it like he new it was time for revenge and I start pumping him full of the glorious X special boosts. Muk uses Sludge this time and I load up X special again. Muk uses sludge once more, poisons and I use another x special followed by a full restore. Muk lands toxic and I load up on another 2 x specials in the following 2 turns and then heal poison.

So now we’re at Muk at 100% health +2 evasion and Rex at about 80% HP, poisoned and with +4 Special Attack. I figure I may as well go for the last 2 x items so I heal poison, use another X special, heal hp and use the 6th x special. Rex now has capped Special Attack at +6 and after my last full restore he’s at 100% health and no poison. Time for revenge.

Rex goes for Surf and as expected, missed. Wow. That was an anti climax. Muk poisons again with toxic and I’m starting to wonder exactly how much PP toxic has. It’s seriously never ending. Rex goes for Surf again and again, it misses. Muk uses sludge and at this point I’m second guessing my strategy. I heal up the poison, leaving my with 1 antidote and 1 full heal left to cure poison. Muk uses sludge again, I heal up to full hp, still got 11 hyper potions so that’s not an issue and Muk uses toxic. Again. Surely that’s got to be the last one.

Rex goes for Surf... and....



Lands it! Muk’s hp starts to go down. Slowly but surely it goes down further and further. And Muk faints! Success! 2 down 2 to go!

Out comes Weezing. Odd I thought he’d send that out last. Anyways, now I don’t have to worry about the evasion from Muk. But Weezing will most likely be faster. Which proves true as Weezing goes first and uses Smokescreen.

*sigh* these damn evasion tactics again.

Rex still manages to land surf though and Weezing goes down! We’re one Pokémon away from the Soul Badge. Koga sends out another Koffing and Rex is seriously seeing red at this point. Another Koffing. The brother of the one that killed Hynx.

I give Rex an inspirational speech about how killing this Koffing will make Hynx proud. About now destroying Koga’s last pokemon will bring shame on Koga and his family.

Rex launches a Surf, which Donald Trump would only be able to describe as the worlds best Surf, so good in fact, that other countries don’t have Surf as good as Rex’s.

Koffing dies.

Koga gives us the Soul Badge and the toxic TM which I’m tempted to sell straight away.

We turn off the increased speed we’ve been using on the emulator to show exactly how sad we are as we walk very slowly back to the Pokémon Center. And then to the pc.

Bill’s PC

Deposit.

Hynx.

Hynx is deposited into the box of death.

Rex and I heal up and then exit the Pokémon Center. We go give the warden his teeth, teach nidorino strength and grab the rare candy. It was an extremely sad sigh when we go to teach Nidorino Strength and not seeing Hynx. But unfortunately, them the breaks of a Nuzlocke run.

We’re going to need more party members for the next few fights so I open the map, Rex points to spot and we both nod.

We’re headed to the Seafoam Islands.



Update 7: Fuchsia City - Silph Co



Still reeling from the death of Hynx, Rex and I jump on Farfetch’d and Fly back home to Pallet Town. We stop in to say a quick hello to Mom. She’s still sitting at the table, her back must be killing her by now and her posture must be absolutely atrocious. Anywho, before we head off we spend a bit of time fishing just below Pallet Town where we catch Charlotte! Charlotte is a Shellder that will stay in storage until the very slim chance that Rex doesn’t make it through a fight. Sticking with my rules, I’m allowed one encounter of each Pokémon and seeing as though technically I didn’t actually encounter Rex he doesn’t count as the one encounter for Shellder. Yes I’m pulling at straws but I’m sticking with it. Stupid Koffing and stupid self-destruct.

Rex uses surf and we swim down to Cinnebar Island. We’ve got a couple of options here, we can do some training at the Mansion, catch a Ponyta and trade it for Seel or go to Seafoam Islands and catch a Seel. We decide to head to Seafoam Islands and catch our Seel first. Given I’ve only got a maximum of about 4 or 5 possible Pokémon I can use from now until the Pokémon league I don’t think the extra XP boost from using the traded Seel isn’t really necessary.

We depart Cinnebar and head for Seafoam, taking out a few trainers along the way as well as a few tentacool and a Tentacruel. We arrive to the Seafoam Islands and after a bit of walking around we find our Target, Seel. A couple of Surfs and 2 great balls later, Steve joins our party!

So now we’ve got Rex and Steve in our party, and Charlotte chilling on the bench. While I was tempted to include Articuno in my runs given the low number of Ice types and it’s ability to use Fly I decided against using legendaries so we head out and leave Articuno in solitude.

We Fly to Vermilion, teach Steve Surf and he gets to work in Diglett’s Cave, dispatching the little moles left, right and center. Poor things had no chance. Chucking on another episode of The Boys on Amazon Prime while I grind Steve up, before the end of the first episode, Steve has already evolved into Dewgong!

We boost Steve a little bit more at Cinnebar Mansion and Fuchsia City and head back to Saffron. We’ve got Steve at 40 and Rex is now 42. We climb back up the stairs of the Silph Co and find AssHat. I really should have called him An AssHat so when we fight it would say An AssHat wants to battle! Alas, you cannot fit that many characters in his naming page.

Rex leads out against AssHat’s Pidgeot, not caring at all about the Quick Attack it launches and takes it out with Ice Beam. Charizard comes out and we Rex gets excited and my cursor hovers over Surf. Beautiful, beautiful Surf.

So here we are again. Just trying to casually take out Charizard with Surf when Charizard uses Flamethrower.

Now for somebody that’s been playing Pokémon games for literally over 20 years you’d think I’d be fairly knowledgeable by now about what attacks most Pokémon have and when they learn them etc. I started playing Pokémon on my game body pocket when I was like 7 years old, I’ve sunk 10s of thousands of hours into different varieties of Pokémon games over the years. And yet, I was still surprised when this god damned Charizard killed Rex with a single flamethrower.

That’s right. Rex is dead. Gone. Joining Hynx in the afterlife. I’m just staring blankly at the screen at the writing “Rex fainted”. Just blinking I still can barely believe that just happened. Like, it wasn’t a crit, it was just a normal Flamethrower. I know cloyster doesn’t have great special Defense but shit that took me by absolute surprise.

I really wasn’t expecting that. At all. I mean I feel bad for Rex, he’s been with me from the start but geez, I just got gamed. Even when Flamethrower got used I thought “yeah that’ll hit hard but I’ll just heal” or something along those lines. Yeah it hit hard. Really hard. I’m just stunned. It’s at this point that I really regret not choosing Charmander as my starter. I could have avoided this just by thinking about battling Charizard or Venusaur. Battling Blastoise would have been so much better. I guess this was bound to happen given the mistake of choosing Bulbasaur because it was in the first pokeball at Oak’s lab. It’s been a long time coming but Charizard takes revenge on all the times Rex has taken him out.

Good thing I did catch Charlotte after All. I didn’t expect her to actually see the light of day but as it turns out, she will. I send out Steve and have a quick check of stats. Steve is much more rounded. Reasonable Defense, Special Defense, speed. It’s all just... adequate I guess you’d say. Although one of the big benefits of Steve in this situation is Thick Fat ability. Reduces incoming fire damage. In hindsight I should have used Steve but I wanted to use Rex as he hadn’t seen much action recently.

I used an X Special on Steve, mostly just to scout and see how much damage Flamethrower would do. It doesn’t actually do much thanks to Steve’s bulk and ability. It would probably take 3 maybe 4 hits total to take Steve out with Flamethrower so I use a 2nd x special and then heal to full. Charizard uses another Flamethrower, nice Flamethrower spam AssHat, and Steve takes it out with a single Surf. Alakazam comes out and uses Future Sight, Steve uses Headbutt twice and takes it out. Gyarados and Exeggcute are formalities, neither of them can do anything against Steve, his +2 surf was too strong for Gyarados and Ice Beam destroyed Exeggcute in one. AssHat takes a victim but we get the win.

Fortunately for us, while the loss of Rex leaves a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth, we claim our final member. Quade the Lapras. Quade is going to be one of my most important members now that Hynx is gone.

We head on upstairs and Steve makes short work of Giovanni and we get a useless Master Ball. Silph Co cleared but we’ve taken another hit. I feel like the loss of Rex is a perfect example of why I chose Ice as my type. They’re strong but fragile at the same time. Cloyster is bulky but fragile, if you’re not careful, they can die very easily.

We trudge back to the Pokémon Center at Saffron and deposit Rex into the death box next to Hynx. Hopefully we never have to put anything in there again. We withdraw Charlotte and teach her Surf and get to grinding. Once she learns protect at level 25 we’ll evolve her.

We’ve got a fair bit of grinding to do, we’ve got Quade and Charlotte to grind up before we face Sabrina. At this point our team is

Quade the Lapras
Charlotte the Shellder/Cloyster
Steve the Dewgong

This is all we’ve got left for the rest of the run. We have the chance to replace Steve with a traded Seel if he dies but if we lose Charlotte or Quade that slot is gone for good. It’s going to be extremely difficult from here on out but fortunately for us, the addition of Quade to the team brings us an extremely strong Nuzlocke win condition. Perish Song. The perish song switch combo is extremely Efficient at taking out the last Pokémon of trainers. Couple that with Protect from Charlotte and we’ve got ourselves a pretty reasonable strategy.

As of this point, we’re now up to date with where I am. Still grinding away with Quade and Charlotte, I’ve been focusing on catching up with the updates more so than grinding so now that we’re all caught up I can do a bit more. I’ll try and keep the updates more recent so I’m not writing from memory as I feel my writing suffers a bit.

2 updates, 2 deaths. Fingers crossed we can get through Sabrina without too much trouble. It’s going to be tough without Hynx but we’ll try our best.




Update 8: Saffron Gym



With a renewed vigour and confidence despite losing 2 Pokémon in very quick succession, we took a minute to catch out bearings and assess where we are and what we have left to do.

We’ve only got 3 badges left, a few things over on the islands and the Pokémon league left. As long as we get through this next gym battle with Sabrina we should be able to make it the rest of the way to the Pokémon League without too much drama, considering we have type advantage against the last 2 gyms.

Before we take on Sabrina, I want to make sure we’re as ready for anything as we can be. Level cap here is 43 so we’re going for 43 with Quade, Steve and Charlotte before we head in. Before we start grinding, we spend about 4 hours catching Chanseys and hoping to get a lucky egg. After 4 hours, we managed to get 2 and we set the Chansey’s free. We also grab the item finder from one of Prof Oak’s Aides and grab 2 Leftovers that I never knew were buried underneath The 2 sleeping Snorlax.

Between the 2 lucky Eggs, 2 lots of leftovers and Mystic Water, we’ve got ourselves a good combination of items. Unfortunately we can’t get Nevermeltice to boost our ice attack power until after the Elite 4, which is a shame because it would be extremely helpful for Lance. Anyway, armed with our Lucky Eggs we get to grinding again. We load up the lucky eggs and head to one of the best training locations in any Pokémon game. Pokémon Tower in Lavender Town.

What makes this place so good isn’t the amount of xp but the fact that it’s loaded with Haunter and Gastly which give Special Attack EVs and comes with its own Pokémon healing location. Meaning if you managed to get paralysed by Lick or something, you only need a few short steps to full heal. It’s not the greatest xp, but the lucky eggs help and it’s so mindlessly easy that I can do it without paying attention. Extra shoutout to Cubone which gives Defense EVs which also don’t go to waste.

After a while we’re finished our grinding. Everybody is ready for Sabrina at level 43 so we fly back to Saffron and head to the gym. I already cleared out the trainers for XP so there’s no issues there we just wander around aimlessly until we hit the right panel to get to Sabrina.

I’m going with Quade lead for this battle. Steve has slightly higher special Defense but Quade has about 40hp more so I feel that is going to be more beneficial.

Sabrina leads with Kadabra, I’m pretty sure these things have Calm Mind and I don’t want Kadabra getting too many special attack boosts because it already hits like a truck so we just go straight for a mystic water boosted Surf which does around 75% damage. Sweet.

Kadabra uses Calm Mind and I’m happy because I successfully predicted something for once. Quade goes for a 2nd surf but Sabrina uses a Hyper Potion and brings Kadabra back to full health. Quade’s surf hits and does slightly over 50% damage. Still good as It’s over half. Quade goes for a 2nd surf and Kadabra uses calm mind again, meaning the 2nd surf doesn’t kill and leaves Kadabra at about 20% hp.

I know another potion is going to come so I change up my strategy a little and go for the Ice Beam instead of Surf, hoping to get a lucky freeze and BOOM! Frozen Kadabra! Kadabra stays frozen while Quade takes it down with another 2 ice beams and we’ve got Sabrina’s first Pokémon down without taking any damage.

Sabrina then sends out Mr.Mime. Fun fact, in original Gold, Silver and Crystal, Sabrina has a female MR.MIME! Female.

Anyway, we use Mr.Mime as our fodder for boosting and we start to load up on X Specials. I’m not scared of Mr Mime at all compared to Kadabra and Alakazam. Mr Mime uses Barrier to boost his Defense as though he just wants to prove my point. We load up another 3 X specials to bring us to +4 special Attack and then 2x x speeds just because we can.

By this time, mr mime has used barrier 4 times, future Sight once and something else, maybe calm mind, I wasn’t paying that much attention to Mr Mime to be honest.

Once we get out 2nd x speed away future sight hits and does like, 25ish% damage. Not enough to justify doing anything about it so Quade just launches a Surf and KO’s Mr Mime. Sabrina sends out her 2nd Kadabra and Quade one shots it with Surf. Out comes Sabrina’s last pokemon Alakazam.

Alakazam still outspeeds Quade and uses Calm Mind. Quade launches a Surf and Alakazam is left with what can only be described as a bee’s dick worth of HP. If you think about it, a bee’s dick must be very small hence the reference to Alakazam’s HP.

Alakazam uses Future Sight and Quade takes it out with Surf and we earn our 6th badge.

I have a quick look at my team after the fight with Sabrina. I’m still scarred by the last couple of battles expecting something to have randomly died during the fight. Quade is at 75% hp and Steve and Charlotte are both full
HP. Happy days.

Our next stop is back at Cinnebar Island for our next badge. Blaine is capped at 47 and Giovanni after him at 50 so we have a bit of grinding to do. I’ll make the next update consist of the next 2 gyms and the journey through victory road. Assuming we make it that far of course.



Update 9: Cinnabar and Beyond



We’ve finished our grinding to 47. Quade, Charlotte and Steve are all level capped to face Blaine and according to me trying to use a Calcium and a Carbos on all of them, their special attack And speed EVs are all above the limit for the stat boosters. We’ve trained our team pretty well, virtually speed and special attack capped. In hindsight, some special Defense effort values for Charlotte might have been a good idea to avoid special attack shenanigans but can’t change that now.

For now though, we head to Cinnebar Island, the location of our next gym fight. The doors locked so we have to make our way through the Pokémon Mansion to find the secret key. This doesn’t turn out to be too much trouble, besides the constant Quick Attacks from Raticates just whittling down our HP it was a piece of cake. Leaving with another Rare Candy and a few more healing items under our belt.

After a quick heal we head to the gym, unlock the door and head inside. I’ve always enjoyed this gym thanks to the quiz questions instead of just pure battling. It always felt like it matched the anime so much better as opposed to the standard beat 5 trainers and then the leader, that the majority of gyms follow. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of this, hell, even the trials in Sun and Moon were a nice change of pace, even if that game was insanely slow and drawn out.

Anyway, we breeze through the quiz, except for one question which I accidentally spammed B too quickly and answered wrong, but we end up facing Blaine without losing any HP.

Before I started this run, I highlighted Blaine as a potential threat to my run. The fire type Pokémon he has are extremely quick and hard hitting. Especially after so many issues I had with Rex and his lack of Special Defense I was just dreading the fight. High powered Flamethrowers, Fire Blast, I just thought I wasn’t going to have a good time.

And then I caught Steve. Steve is a water/ice type. Steve has thick fat ability to reduce damage from fire type attacks. Steve is good. Be like Steve.

Blaine leads with his Growlithe with Intimidate lowering Steve’s attack. Lol. Steve uses Rain Dance, further reducing the damage of fire type attacks and boosting water damage and Growlithe uses Take Down, which does 19hp of damage.

Steve launches a surf and as expected, Growlithe dies miserably. Blaine sends out Ponyta, Steve destroys it with a surf. Blaine then sends out Rapidash which outspeeds Steve and uses Fire Spin. The original hit of
Fire Spin does 1hp of damage. 1 single hp. What an absolute beast Steve is. Steve then uses Surf and Rapidash dies too.

Out comes Arcanine, Blaine’s ace. It’s at this point I look at Arcanine’s sprite and think to myself. Shit. He better not have Thunder Fang.

Rain Dance is still up for another turn so I know Surf is going to either kill it or leave it so close to dead a hefty sneeze would finish it off. The only thing to stop Steve would be Thunder Fang and most likely a critical one at that.

I tell Steve to use Surf...

Steve outspeeds and KOs Arcanine with a single surf!

We get the Volcano Badge!

I’m not sure if Steve was supposed to outspeed or not. Maybe Arcanine was going to use Roar which has negative priority. But that doesn’t matter, Steve won. Taking a grand total of 20hp of damage. Quite embarrassing for a 7th gym leader if you ask me.

We leave the gym and Bill shows up. Time for a quick detour to 1,2 and 3 island. We take down a few trainers, find Lostelle and do a bit of training. We stop off at Mount Ember. Me thinking we can do a bit of training with the higher levelled Pokémon there.

We encounter the standard Geodudes, Zubats and Machop before we run into a Machoke. This would have been an absolute disaster if we weren’t grinding levels on Charlotte at the time. Charlotte uses surf but doesn’t get the KO and Machoke uses Revenge. A super-effective STAB fighting type move with 60 base power that gets doubled if the user has already taken damage, which he did with surf. It hit. Hard. But thankfully Charlotte has an absolute ridiculous amount of Defense. Like stupidly high. So high that you’re not really going to be taking it down with physical attacks before Charlotte takes you down. Which, luckily for us, Charlotte won in the 2nd turn.

If that was Steve or Quade, they die from revenge every single time but Charlotte survives. Technically not a close call because Charlotte survived easily but either of my others would have died. Close enough to scare me out of Mount Ember anyway.

We walk back to the boat to take us back to Vermilion. Taking out some more wild pokemon for XP. The goal is level 50 for Virridian Gym and then a couple more levels for the AssHat fight and the trek through victory road afterwards. We pick a few different places to train, Pokémon Tower briefly, Diglett’s Cave and Two Island. By this stage all 3 of our Pokemon are extremely close or already maxed out on Effort Values so now we’re just going for xp. Playing on an emulator, I’ve always found it easier to farm wild Pokémon for XP instead of the VS Seeker because of the increased speed but that’s just personal preference. The vs seeker also gives you money which is extremely helpful.

After a little while we’ve got all 3 Pokémon at level 50 and we’ve cleared our path to Giovanni already so we just get to waltz straight in and take him on.

The fight with Giovanni ended up pretty similar to the fight with Blaine. Very one sided. It was Charlotte this time that destroyed everything.

Leading with Charlotte we pop a couple of X Speed just so we outspeed everything and use an X Special just because we can. Thankfully, none of his Pokémon know Horn Drill even though I’m pretty sure most of them could have learned it by their current levels.

Charlotte tanks all the Earthquakes from Giovanni’s Rhyhorn like an absolute trooper. We potion back to full health and then Charlotte sweeps. Getting first turn against everything except Dugtrio, which does very little damage as well.

Giovanni gives us the Earth badge and we heal up ready to take on AssHat for the 2nd last time.

AssHat was another one sided battle. Using Steve to blitz them all down and switching in to Quade against Alakazam to drop Perish Song to take it down. We didn’t have to use any X Boosts or potions at all in this battle so hopefully that’s a good sign.

At this point, Steve, Quade and Charlotte are all 51, almost 52. We breeze through Victory Road, using are preloaded Nidorino to push the boulders around for us and just Surf/Ice Beaming everything that comes our way. I think the team is really hitting their straps now thanks to the amount of grinding we did in Pokémon Tower and Diglett’s Cave. They’re all hitting like trucks.

We search most of Victory Road, grab as many items as we can and head for the exit to heal up.

We’ve reached the Pokémon League. It’s time to complete our last grind before hitting the Elite 4 with 3 ice type Pokémon. Man, I’m so hyped right now.

I’m contemplating recording the Elite 4 instead of a write up. Let me know if you’d rather see a video, a write up, or both.

The end of generation 1 is so close now I can taste it!




Update 10: The Elite 4



Video available here: [Only registered and activated users can see links]

We’re ready to face the Eite 4. Steve, Quade and Charlotte are all at level 60. I’m stocked up on items in case I need them and I’ve deposited Farfetch’d and Nidorino.

It’s down to ice types and strategy now.

We load up our save, we’re already healed up and ready to go in to face Lorelai.

We start our first match against Lorelai and first up is Dewgong. I lead with Steve, my own Dewgong and start my strategy. My plan here is to use Rain Dance and then swap to Quade to take everything down with Thunder. Steve uses Rain Dance and the Lorelai uses Surf, doing very little damage.

We swap Steve for Quade and Lorelai uses Hail. Which is nothing to worry about as all our 3 Pokémon are immune to the damage but that gets rid of our rain boosted thunder plan. A quick think and we come up with another plan. Instead of Rain boosted Thunder, we decide to go with the sole X Accuracy in our pack to boost the accuracy of Thunder. We use an X Accuracy and Dewgong uses Safeguard. Next turn we bump our special attack up with an X Special and we should be plenty strong enough to take everything down already with 100 accuracy Thunder.

Quade uses Thunder, Dewgong goes down. Out comes Cloyster, Quade takes it down with Thunder. Slowbro comes out, Quade destroys it with a single Thunder as well. Jynx comes out. Thanks for rubbing that in my face Lorelai. RIP Hynx :( Quade goes for Surf, but it doesn’t quite kill as Jynx uses ice punch. Ice punch does so little damage that Quade heals to full with Leftovers at the end of the turn and then KO’s Jynx with Surf the very next turn. Out comes Lapras, Lorelai’s last Pokemon and Quade uses Thunder again. Surprisingly, Lapras survives with about 5HP and uses Confuse Ray to confuse Quade.

Considering Quade is at 100% I decide to try and just attack through confusion and use Perish Song because I know Lorelai is going to use a potion, which she does.

So now we’ve got 3 turns before we win this fight by default. We decide to switch to Charlotte and eat up turns with Protect. Which turns out to be a masterful switch as Lapras uses Body Slam to do a total of 18 damage, but paralyses Charlotte. We go for the protect, which gets through paralysis (we almost accidentally used Explosion which would have been a disaster) and we protect ourselves against Confuse Ray. Last turn before Lapras faints and we switch to Steve just because I don’t want to be surprised by a random Electric attack to KO Charlotte. Lapras uses Surf, Steve resists it and Lapras goes down from Perish Song. 1st E4 Member down.

Next up is Bruno. We heal the paralysis from Charlotte and lead with her for this fight due to her massive Defense and start the fight. Thankfully, Bruno leads with Onix which gives us some breathing room before the fighting types come out. We’re going to use Onix as fodder for boosting Charlotte for a sweep. We start with a few X Speeds but Bruno counters with Rock Tomb, which is Super Effective and also lowers Charlotte’s speed, bringing it back to normal. We try a couple more times to get a speed boost but Onix sticks with Rock Tomb, dropping our speed but only doing 19Hp damage. Now is a good chance to note how important Charlotte’s ability is to block crits.

We swap from X Speed to X Defend now to further boost Charlotte’s Defense. I think she’s going to need the Defense boosts to survive Hitmonlee and Machamp. We get a couple of X Defend away when Onix swaps to Earthquake which is great because it won’t drop our Speed. We use another X Speed and Onix uses EQ again, no speed drop, sweet. We use another X Speed and Onix uses Rock Tomb. But it misses! +2 speed now, awesome. We start using X Special and get ready to sweep. But Onix has other plans.

Onix uses Roar. And out comes Steve. All those X Boosts are now pointless. I decide just to take Onix out and remove the threat of Roar. Steve uses Surf and OHKO’s it.

Hitmonchan comes out and I contemplate whether I should risk taking it out with Steve or if I should just switch to Charlotte. I end up deciding to switch to Charlotte and Hitmonchan uses Sky Uppercut. I send Charlotte in but she’s only got 78hp. Fingers crossed the Sky Uppercut doesn’t do too much.

Sky uppercut lands and it does 64hp of damage. Leaving Charlotte with a whopping 14hp. That did a lot more than I’d hoped. We heal up and Hitmonchan uses Mach Punch which would have killed Charlotte if we’d tried to take it out. We pump an X Special on Charlotte, there’s no chance of Hitmonchan one shotting because we’re immune to crits. Hitmonchan uses Rock Tomb to Lower our speed and we go for an X Defend as Hitmonchan uses Sky Uppercut again to chunk us for a good amount. I go to use another potion but decide to use another X Defend instead. We’re immune to crits and X defend will further reduce the damage so there’s still no threat of death here.

Hitmonchan uses Sky Uppercut again and it does 30 damage. We’ve reduced it down to less than half of its original damage of 64. We heal up and Hitmonchan uses sky uppercut twice more as we decide to finally start attacking. 2 sky uppercuts take us down to just under half and 1 surf takes hitmonchan down to red bar. But no one shot. Bruno heals and we use an X Speed to recover from the Rock Tomb drop and then use Surf. Charlotte outspeeds now but still no one shot as Hitmonchan survives with what has to be just 1 or 2 hp. I’m tempted to heal up but decide to just use Surf again as I’m predicting another potion. Bruno doesn’t heal and Charlotte kills Hitmonchan. Bruno sends out Hitmonlee. A very powerful dangerous Pokémon that could easily end our run.

I’m predicting High Jump Kick so we go for a protect, hoping to to get some free damage from the crash but Hitmonlee uses Brick Break instead. Next turn we hyper potion and then hit with Surf, to scope out how bulky Hitmonlee is. Surf does roughly the same as Hitmonchan so 2 Surf will easily KO it. Hitmonlee uses Brick Break twice but only does about 22hp each time and we take it out.

Machamp comes out and we heal just for safety. Machamp starts off with Scary Face, which is good for us. No damage. We go for Ice Beam which does about 75% as Machamp uses Cross Chop. Which does a good chunk of about 40hp damage. Still, not enough to worry us.

Machamp uses Cross Chop again but MISSS! We go for another Ice Beam and Machamp goes down. Bruno’s last Onix comes out, does very little with Earthquake and then dies to a single surf. Bruno’s down.

2 down, 2 to go.

Before we face Agatha, we heal up and swap Quade to lead. We start first turn with an X Special as Gengar uses toxic. Great, more toxic shenanigans. We decide against healing for now and use another X Special and an X speed while Gengar uses double team, twice. I’m over here getting Flashbacks to Koga. I use another X Speed and again, Gengar uses double team to take himself to +3 evasion.

We go for a full restore next turn to get rid of the poison and take us back to full hp. These things are way overpowered against poison users. Again, Gengar uses Double Team, +4 evasion now. I’m not a big fan of taking on Gengar with any more evasion so I start heading for Surf. Miss. Balls.

Gengar uses Confuse Ray and now im definitely getting Koga flashbacks and I’m not enjoying it one bit. We go for Surf trying to get through confusion but it doesn’t work. Quade hurts himself and Gengar uses toxic again. Again, we try to surf through confusion but it fails again, we take damage from confusion and poison AND Gengar uses Double team again.

We use another Full Restore to fill our hp and remove poison and confusion, Gengar finishes his evasion stacking and uses Double Team to take himself to +6 evasion. Quade is at full hp and no status so I really need to start trying to take this Gengar down. Luckily, the X Speed we used first up gives us enough Speed to go first and Quade uses Surf...

It hits! Gengar dies!

From there, Quade goes on a rampage, One Shotting all the rest of Agatha’s Pokémon before they even get a chance to move. Agatha down!

3 down, 1 to go.

We head up to Lance, don’t even need to heal as Quade still has full hp. We lead with Quade again and use Thunder against Gyarados, which hits first turn and OHKOs Gyarados. Aerodactyl comes out and uses Ancient Power, does some decent damage and gets the full stat boosts. Not good.

Quade uses Ice Beam, which is x4 super effectiveness so even with the ancient power boosts, it still kills Aerodactyl, it did crit so maybe that helped but it was a super powered Ice Beam so probably wouldn’t have mattered. Lance then sends out Dragonair, it gets one shot from ice beam, 2nd Dragonair, same thing and finally, Dragonite comes out. Which always gave me grief back in the day. But this time, Quade takes it down with a single Ice Beam and we’ve beaten Lance.

We’ve beaten the Elite 4! We’ve just got AssHat to go. Note: there’s also a little Easter egg in the AssHat fight coming up. Shoutout if you find it!

Before we start the fight with AssHat we heal up and swap Charlotte to lead. We started our game with a Shellder, we’re going to finish it with a Cloyster.

Pidgeot comes out first and Charlotte OHKOs with a first turn Ice Beam. Pidgeot must have been going to use Whirlwind with negative priority. AssHat sends out Rhydon, Charlotte KOs it with a single Surf. Exeggutor is next, but also dies to a single Ice Beam. The EV training at Pokémon Tower really coming into play now.

Alakazam is next and we use Protect with Charlotte to scout out what he’s going to do. Charlotte Protects against Psychic. I have no intention of losing Charlotte now so we swap to Quade as Alakazam uses Reflect. Alakazam uses Psychic to do a good chunk of damage and Quade uses Ice Beam and lands a freeze!

The freeze actually does nothing though as Alakazam defrosts the very next turn and uses Psychic again. Leaving Quade at 100hp, enough to take out Alakazam with another Ice Beam.

AssHat sends out Gyarados but Quade knows exactly what to do and takes it down with a perfectly executed Thunder after we do a quick heal.

AssHat sends out his last Pokemon. Charizard. The bastard the killed Rex. And it’s time for my revenge to come full circle.

We swap Quade out and send out Steve as Charizard goes for Fire Blast which does a whole 43 damage, reduced to 32 after Steve recovers with Leftovers.

Steve uses Rain Dance to further reduce the power of Fire Blast and boost his water damage after Charizard goes for another fire blast.

We’re sitting with Steve at 127/191hp, rain is up and Charizard is at full health. It’s time.

Charizard decides Fire Blast isn’t cutting it and goes for Aerial Ace which leaves Steve at 88. Steve uses Surf and does about 80% damage to Charizard. Steve recovers with leftovers and Charizard recovers with a Sitrus Berry.

Charizard uses Aerial Ace again, taking Steve down to 60hp. And Steve uses Surf...

And Charizard dies.

We are victorious!

AssHat has lost his mantle as Pokémon League Champion and we steal it from him using just 3 ice type Pokémon!

And with that the first leg of our generations run is complete! We can now move to generation 2 where we get access to another couple of ice type Pokémon!

Let’s do a quick recap of our first leg.

Deaths: 2 - Hynx and Rex. Hynx to a crit Self Destruct against Koga and Rex to a Flamethrower from AssHat’s Charizard in the Silph co.

Pokémon used: Rex - Cloyster, Hynx - Jynx, Quade - Lapras, Steve - Dewgong and Charlotte - Cloyster.

Easiest gyms: Celadon, Cinnabar and Viridian were the easiest by far.

Hardest Gyms: Cerulean Misty and Fuchsia Koga. Saffron Sabrina would have been more difficult if I didn’t use X Boosts and Vermilion Surge would have been impossible if i didn’t have Hynx.

Saddest death: Hynx to the crit.

Biggest heart attack: the Raticate before Vermilion.

Happiest moment: Rex finally beating Misty.

MVP: Very hard to pick just one. Charlotte was MVP against Bruno, Quade against Lorelai and Lance and Steve made Charizard a walk in the park. If we can only pick one, it’s got to be Quade, Thunder and Perish Song just brought so much to the table. Landing consecutive Thunders against Lance and AssHat’s Gyarados’ were clutch.

Quade definitely deserves the MVP, taking our team from the brink of defeat after losing 2 members in quick succession.

Next up, Heart Gold and Generation 2. We get to start with Quade, Steve and Charlotte!

I hope you all enjoyed the first leg! I’m planning on doing more and will continue to update this thread for as long as I can!

[Megiddo]

WOO!!! Generation 2! We’re playing Heart Gold for our 2nd Generation. Starting with Lapras (Quade), Shellder (Charlotte) and Seel (Steve) as they all made it through the Elite 4 in Generation 1. Our goal here is Johto Champion and also, beating Red.

Let’s go!



Generation 2: New Beginnings

Annoyingly, my first write up of generation 2 got deleted from my notes on my phone when I updated it last night. Stupid Apple.

Anyway, I’ve started Generation 2!

We took a few days off after becoming Kanto
champion but now we’re back into the swing of things and ready to become Johto champion as well.

We start of our 2nd leg by picking up Totodile from the weird old guy next door. I imagine Elm would smell like wet socks and squashed eggs. We pick Totodile for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it means AssHat will take Chikorita, adding another challenge to the run early on with Bayleef throwing out Razor Leafs at Azalea Town and eventually we’ll face Meganium which is fairly bulky and could pose a threat. Secondly, by chucking Totodile in to daycare at Goldenrod and evolving it to Croconaw we end up with a HM slave that can learn Strength, Rock Smash, Whirlpool and Cut. Solid.

Once we pick up Totodile we leg it from New Bark Town (now abbreviated to NBT because I’m lazy) to Mr Pokémon’s house just passed Cherrygrove City to pick up the odd egg and score a free Pokédex from the musky old Professor Oak. Another fun fact, all the Professors in the main Pokémon series are named after some sort of tree/shrub/bush.

Totodile cleans out the newest AssHat and we get accused of stealing a Chikorita for some reason, clearly the Totodile following me means I stole a Chikorita.

Professor Elm wants me, at the ripe of age of 10, to go on a journey over an entire country, by myself, to collect some little monsters for his “research”. It’s definitely not got anything to do with the fact my mom is at home by herself.

We tell mom we’re leaving home to go on an adventure with the animal the man from next door gave us and she asks if I want to send her some money from my prize winnings. Sure. I’m 10 but I’ll send you an allowance.

We get a few poke balls to start us off and we leave NBT. Our first encounter just outside of NBT is none other than a level 5 Lapras! Sweet! That’s exactly what we needed! We catch it with one of the 3 Master Balls that suspiciously found their way into my bag and we name it Quade II. As if they game was modified to give me the encounters I wanted our 2nd and 3rd encounters were Seel and Shellder! What luck! Our crew from the 1st leg of our run is now back together.

Quade II, Steve II and Charlotte II are now ready for action.

We head back to Cherrygrove, deposit Totodile into the PC and head off towards Violet City and our first Gym battle. A quick search on the Google says Falkner’s Ace is level 13 so we can be level 13 for him. Hopefully by then we’ll have some ice attacks to wipe him out.

Between Cherrygrove and Violet City we let Quade loose on the Bug Catchers. Quade has Sing and Water Gun which decimates the little bugs and we send mom her first allowance. We pick some apricorns and head into Violet city.

Before we face the gym we need to clear Sprout Tower. Sprout Tower poses one of our first threats of the run. Bellsprouts with super effective Vine Whip against all our Pokémon. Luckily for us, Steve has Headbutt. A little bit of grinding just outside Violet City near the Ruins of Alph and Steve one shots the entire Sprout Tower except the last Elder whose Bellsprout and Hoothoot take 2 hits.

So far so good.

We head back out and heal up and get to grinding. We grind Steve and Charlotte both up to 13 and Steve learns Icy Wind. Sweet. We’re sorted for Falkner. We start levelling Quade and at level 11 Quade learns what is probably going to be one of our go to moves for the rest of this generation. Ice Shard. Ice Shard only has a base power of 40 but the big thing about Ice Shard is that it is a priority move similar to Quick Attack.

With Quade at level 11 with Ice Shard and Steve at 13 with Icy Wind I’m pretty confident we can handle Falkner so we go for it.

Quade starts off with an Ice Shard against Faulkner’s Pidgey. Pidgey dies. One shot. Falkner sends out Pidgeotto and we play strategy and go for the Sing after Pidgeotto deals a massive 7hp of damage with Tackle. Quade lands the Sing, puts Pidgeotto to sleep and then KO’s it with 2 Ice Shards while Pidgeotto stays asleep.

Well.

That was easy.

Obligatory video of the destruction
[Only registered and activated users can see links]

We leave the gym and pick up the egg from Prof Elm’s assistant.

Next target: Buggsy and her Scyther.



Leg 2: Azalea and the Mad Cow


Greetings ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to Megiddo’s Ice Type Nuzlocke!

It’s been a long time since the last run update as I stopped playing Neopets, stopped visiting this forum and just haven’t really touched my Heart Gold game for a while either. But now I’m back, not sure for how long but hopefully I can get this generation done and start on Gen 3 soon.

Anyways, on to the run!

I’m going to skip straight to Whitney! Nothing much of interest happened between the last update and now. Quade took down Bugsy with very little effort. Ice Shard absolutely destroyed her Scyther and Metapod/Kakuna are just there to make up numbers. We caught. Rattata to teach it Cut and head on to Goldenrod City.

Once we get to Goldenrod the game really opens up. There’s a lot of things to do here but my priority Is the game corner and the Ice Beam TM for 10,000 coins and maybe a Thunderbolt TM for Quade if I can be bothered. For anybody that hasn’t played Voltorb flip before, it sucks. It’s not like the old slot machines that you could farm without looking. You actually need to pay attention to voltorb flip. Thankfully there’s an online calculator to help figure out which spots are most likely to have voltorbs and whatnot.

I played Voltorb flip for about 4 hours straight and ended up with 3 Ice Beam TM’s 1 Thunderbolt and 1 Metronome.

I don’t ever want to play that game again. Except I’ll probably have to for future catches.

Once we’re done with the game corner we grab our bicycle and head North for some training and some items. We grab the Quick Claw in the National Park, ignoring the bug catching contest for now. It’s not really worth the effort. Once you get the National Dex after the Elite 4 the bug catching contest offers a lot more variety in rewards. Such as Elemental Stones. A Water Stone would be awesome to evolve Charlotte into Cloyster but we’ll have to
Make do for now.

We head back to Goldenrod and make our way to the gym, grabbing the Spearow from the guard on our way through so we can teach it Fly later. A quick heal at the Pokémon center and we head towards the gym. And quite possibly the first loss of our run. I am deathly scared of this upcoming Miltank.

RNGesus be with us.

First step is to clear out the trainers. We head on in and clear them all out. Not too many issues at all. Charlotte has a fairly hefty Defense stat so we lead off with her, only swapping over to Quade when Charlotte get down to under 20hp.

With all the trainers taken care of, we make a quick return to the Pokémon center to heal and make our back to fight the evil Queen and her mad cow.

Our team is as ready as it is going to get.

Charlotte - Shellder - level 18
Shell Armor
Quick Claw
Tackle/Protect/Supersonic/Ice Beam

Quade - Lapras - level 19
Shell Armor
Metronome
Water Pulse/Sing/Thunderbolt/Ice Beam

Steve - Seel - level 19
Hydration
Chilan Berry
Headbutt/Encore/Ice Shard/Ice Beam


A quick reminder, one of my rules is that I can only level as high as the next Gym Leader’s Ace pokemon. Which in this game, is level 19 for Whitney. I can’t quite remember Miltank’s stats and whatnot for this game but there’s a good chance it has the Thick Fat ability. Meaning it takes reduced damage from Ice attacks. Hopefully I’m wrong because that will make life a lot harder.

My plan at the moment is to use Steve to take down Clefairy far enough for me to swap to Charlotte for the KO. I’ll then use Charlotte to take down Miltank because Protect can interrupt the Rollout stacking.

And with that, we begin.

We lead off with Steve and launch a Headbutt, secretly hoping for a flinch. But it doesn’t happen unfortunately. Clefairy hits with Doubleslap which doesn’t do much. We launch another Headbutt and Clefairy is at about 15% hp. Cleafairy uses Doubleslap again. And hits 5 times. Typical Whitney shenanigans starting again.

Steve is on 29/59 hp, and Clefairy is probably one hit from dead but I’m not entirely sure if she uses potions. Hopefully not so I’m going to go for the switch to Charlotte in preparation for Miltank. Worst case scenario, Whitney heals, best case Scenario Double slap misses.

We swap to Charlotte and Clefairy uses Encore, which fails. Pog. Free switch for the win. We’re going to be slower here but Charlotte has Quick Claw, hopefully I can get an ice Beam away before Clefairy moves.

We click Ice Beam and...

Clefairy is down! Quick Claw comes into effect and Clefairy goes down straight off.

Out comes the cow. THE cow. We all know the one. The infamous cow that’s been genetically engineered to be your worst nightmare. I have no idea how many times I lost fights to this absolute abomination of an animal as a kid. I have mental scars, as you can probably tell but my rambling.

I’m scared, my butthole is clenched shut but Charlotte is staring this cow down. It’s on.

First up we go for a Supersonic, hoping for a confuse. Miltank uses Stomp which does 13 damage leaving Charlotte at 31/44 and unfortunately supersonic misses. Not a great start.

2nd turn, Miltank uses stomp again and does 15 damage, leaving Charlotte at 16hp and yet again, Supersonic misses.

I have a few options here. Heal with a potion, swap to Quade or risk it and go for an attack. A quick risk assessment and i go for the Super Potion. Safety first. Miltank uses Stomp again and Charlotte is at 31/44hp.

With Supersonic missing 2/2 I figure the next one can’t miss, so i go supersonic again. Miltank uses Stomp Charlotte is at 16hp and again Suspersonic misses.

I’m at the point where my butthole is not clenched anymore and I’m just accepting the fact that I am most likely going to lose a team member here.

I’m going to try as hard as I can to not let that happen though. We’re going to change tactics.

We switch out to Quade and Miltank uses Stomp again. Which doesn’t really do much to Quade, leaving him at 61/79hp.

Rollout is definitely coming next. I’ve got probably 2 turns before the Super Effective rollout gets too powerful for any of my pokemon to handle.

2 turns to land a Sing with Quade.

We click on Sing but Miltank goes first. Surprisingly fast for this chunky milk drinking death machine. Surprisingly, Miltank uses Stomp and not rollout, Quade is at 43/79 and unsurprisingly, Sing misses.

We’re at 4/4 misses between Supersonic and Sing. With an Accuracy of 55 the probability of either attacks hitting just once is 95%. So we’re well and truly into Mad Cow shenanigans.

We go for another Sing, because probabilities. I know the chances of attacks landing are independent events, meaning I have the same chance of landing sing as last turn but probability also tells me that I am now more likely to land one than not.

Miltank uses Stomp again, Quade is at 27/79.

Quade Flinches.

Really?

I’m at the point of just shaking my head now. The RNG of this fight has not been kind. At all.

I’ve got one more shot at hitting a Sing before I have to heal. I’m still surprised she hasn’t used Rollout yet, especially against Quade.

We click Sing for the 3rd time and Miltank uses Attract.

Quade is immobilised by love.

We’re going to have to redo some strategy again. Nothing is working at all here. We’ve had 6 turns pass and i have not done a single point of damage to this Miltank.

Time to get desperate.

I swap back to Charlotte. Praying to RNGesus to be kind for once and not give Miltank a high damage roll and round up to 16 hp damage.

It pays off and Charlotte is left at 1/44hp after a Stomp. I heal up and Miltank starts Rollout. Sweet. It only does 5hp of damage.

Now is my time to strike with Charlotte. I have a safety net with Protect if the damage is going to kill. As long as I can stay above 16hp I can’t be 1 shot.

I’m sick of Supersonic and Sing misses but part of me still wants to see how bad my RNG is. So I go Supersonic again.

Miltank uses Rollout again and does 9 damage leaving Charlotte and 30/44. Meaning I’ll only be able to take 1 more before I need to protect.

Charlotte uses Supersonic...

And it lands! Finally! Miltank is confused! Hopefully it’s my turn for some RNG shenanigans.

Time to start the Ice Beamathon.

Miltank uses Rollout and leaves Charlotte with 13hp, ice beam hits and does probably around 15% of Miltank’s hp. I’m not sure what I was expecting but I was hoping for a little more.

We protect the next turn to stop Rollout. Fun fact, using an attack move against an enemy protect skips the confusion check.

Next turn I heal up and Miltank uses stomp. I’m not sure what happened or if I just missed the words but there’s no confusion any more.

I got fucked by RNG yet again. A 2 turn confusion with no self hits after missing 4/5. Nice.

Luckily for me, both Charlotte and Quade are immune to crits. Otherwise this would probably be over already. A couple of turns of healing (I’ve only got regular potions left) and Quade is at 8/44 with Miltank just a bee’s dick under 50%. The only real options here are to heal or swap to Quade. The problem here is that Miltank also has Milk Drink. The closer she gets to fainting, the more likely she is to heal. If we both heal at the same time, I’m the one who is worse off.

I use a potion and Miltank uses Stomp. Back down to 13/44. My potions are essentially healing me for 5hp after Stomp. This is a big problem. We need Miltank to use Rollout or we’re going to lose as we run out of potions.

We potion again and Miltank uses Stomp. We’re at 18/44 and guaranteed to survive the next attack. Ice Beam it is.

Freeze please.

Quick Claw gets in first with Ice Beam and Miltank uses Milk Drink. AI shenanigans there showing that the AI doesn’t select a move until the start of its turn. If it preselected a move it would have been either Stomp or Rollout because it’s hp wasn’t low enough to warrant the use of Milk Drink before the turn started, but after Ice Beam it was and due to Quick claw making Charlotte go first. Yeah, more RNG bullshit for Whitney.

We go for Ice Beam and Whitney goes for Stomp again. Charlotte is at 5/44, Ice Beam crits and Miltank is at about 40% again. Too low for Miltank to heal so there’s a guaranteed attack coming.

Just to mix it up a bit, we swap out to Steve. He has 29hp and is not weak to Rollout so he should be able to tank 1 Stomp. We’re hoping to see Attract, Milk Drink or Rollout here. Stomp would be bad because it can Crit against Steve.

We finally get some favourable RNG as Stomp misses so we essentially got a free switch which gives me time to assess my options. Charlotte is at 5hp, Steve is at 29hp as Quade is at 27hp.

Miltank is at roughly 40% and most likely going to use Stomp next turn. I think Quade is my best choice here as he is my hardest hitter. If I drop a potion on him now and switch to him next turn, hopefully he is strong enough to take Miltank down.

We drop the potion on Quade and Miltank uses Stomp. Thankfully no crit and Steve is left with 10hp. I have to switch here so we switch to Quade.

This is essentially our final chance at winning. If Quade dies, Steve will die as a sacrifice to heal Charlotte who will then be flying solo with terrible damage and not many potions. Essentially a wipe and an end to our run as we have no Pokémon we can get from our box to keep going.

Attacks with Quade are my only option now.

We have to go for an Ice Beam and hope for the best.

Ice Beam. Click.

The following is the exact words that showed up on my screen.

Miltank used Attract.

Quade fell in love!

Quade is in love with the foe’s Miltank!

Quade used Ice Beam!

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

The foe’s Miltank fainted!

Holy shit.

It’s over.

It’s actually over with no deaths. Im actually shocked, surprised and relieved all the same time.

I definitely need a break after that fight. It was just as intense as a I expected. RNG played a huge role in a couple of ways. Firstly the obvious misses with Sing and Supersonic, the flinches with Stomp, the virtually complete non use of Rollout and finally ending with some favourable RNG, Quade attacking through Attract.

It’s going to be a while before the next update. And will most likely also be a big update as there’s a lot of stuff we can do once we leave Goldenrod.

Thanks for reading and good to be back!

Until next time!



Leg 3: A man and his shell



Fresh from our victory over Shitney... I mean Whitney, we continue on our journey of icy glory we make our way to Ecruteak to pick up one of the most important items of our run. HM03 - Surf.

After a quick battle with Sudowoodo and an annoyingly long doubles battle we make it to Ecruteak, defeat the Rocket Grunt, claim our HM and teach it to everybody. Replacing a couple of outdated moves.

Before we head to the Burned Tower and the Ecruteak Gym, we head over to Olivine to do some training at the Lighthouse. Morty’s ace Pokémon is level 25 so we’ve got a few levels to get before then.

We blitz through the Lighthouse with Quade. His move set as now ridiculous. Thunderbolt, Ice Beam, Surf and Rain Dance. I’m contemplating heading back to Goldenrod and grabbing the Thunder TM for the insane Rain Dance/Thunder combo but I’m not sure if 2 move slots are worth it. Although it does add Synergy with Steve and his hydration ability. I’ll have to assess and work it out later. Might be a good option down the track.

Anyways, we knock over the lighthouse and bail. Nothing else to do here until we finish at Cianwood. We grab the Good Rod and make our way back to Ecruteak, clearing out the rest of the trainers on our way for more XP.

We arrive back at Ecruteak with Quade level capped at 25, Steve at 21 and Charlotte on 20. Next up is the Burned Tower to force Morty to take his Ghostly ass back to the gym. But not before a battle against J03.

I haven’t had any issues with my rival yet, even though I gave him the Chikorita line to potentially add some extra threat. So far, he’s been a cake walk and because Bayleef knows the Physical based Razor Leaf I go with Charlotte to get her some free XP.

Pretty simple fight really. Gastly comes out, Charlotte KOs with Surf, Bayleef comes out, Bayleef uses Magical Leaf, Charlotte faints.

Wait.

Charlotte. Fainted.

Fuck.

I did not expect that Magical Leaf at all. I wasn’t at all prepared for Bayleef to have a special grass move. Charlotte is dead.

I’m shook.

How could I be so careless. We got through Shitney with issues but made it through with no deaths just to lose one now? I can’t believe it. Charlotte is gone. Fuck you J03. You’re now on my shit list.

I send out Quade, he launches an Ice Beam and one shots Bayleef and the following Zubat to end it.

We release the dogs and make our slow walk back to the Pokémon Center to release Charlotte. Charlotte is our 2nd Shellder evolution line death. We lost Rex, our gen 1 starter to a Charizard Flamethrower and now Charlotte to a magical leaf. Both special attacks, both first attacks. I really should use protect more often on those sort of opponents. I probably shouldn’t have given him the Quick Claw. Every time I give somebody a Quick Claw in a Nuzlocke run they end up dying.

We’re down to 2 pokemon now that Charlotte is gone, Quade and Steve.

A quick read back through my previous posts and I find that I first caught my Charlotte just after beating Koga in Fire Red. She made it from there, all the way through the Elite 4 to be reincarnated as Charlotte 2 in Heart Gold.

It’s annoying that I’ve lost Charlotte. Fortunately for me I still have my single Shellder encounter for this game up my sleeve. So we head back to New Bark Town to do some fishing before Morty.

New Bark Town has a 3% chance to fish up a Shellder so we’re going to be here a while. I’m going to cross my fingers, toes, eyes and whatever else I can and hope that the Shellder we encounter has Skill Link.

After only about 10 encounters we actually manage to find a Shellder. Male, level 20. Level 20 is actually only 1 level lower than Charlotte was, so power wise, they’ll be pretty close. A little bit of training, maybe some EV training if I can be bothered and they’ll be on similar power levels. Or, if I get lucky and he has Skill Link ability, the new Shellder might be even stronger.

Steve uses Headbutt on the Shellder which doesn’t do much, so I just start throwing Repeat balls that we picked up at the Goldenrod Mart. It only takes 3 balls and we add Leon to our team!

We do a quick check of Leon’s starts to see what we’re working with. Hasty nature, pretty good for a Nuzlocke run. And RNG smiles on us today, we pick up Leon with Skill Link! That does it, Leon is going to be getting some Attack and HP EV training. EV trained, STAB boosted Guaranteed 5 hits Icicle Spear incoming add Spike Cannon to that for coverage and a STAB surf and you’ve got yourself one hell of a Pokémon. I’m excited.

Unfortunately the best places to EV train attack and HP you can’t access until you can Surf. So we’re going to head back to Ecruteak and take on Morty before we start training Leon. Fingers crossed between Quade and Steve at level 25, we won’t need Leon so he can stay untouched with no EVs so I can max him out.

Unfortunately we do a bit of over training on our way back to Ecruteak and end up with both Quade and Steve at level 25. I’m going to have to play strategically to keep Quade and Steve both under level 26 and Leon to stay with zero EVs. Worst case scenario Leon ends up with a few extra EVs that we don’t want. Not the worst thing to happen and will only mean a lower Attack/HP stat by 1-2 points.

A quick heal at the Pokémon Center and we’re ready for our next gym.

Morty, here we come.

By the time we clear out the trainers of the Gym Steve is level 27 so unfortunately he’ll have to be boxed for now as he’s over the allowed level. If I wipe, I’ll continue with him but for now, he’s out. In order to keep Leon untouched for EV training we’re going to have to sweep with Quade which could be tricky if Morty goes for Curse early. But we’ll try.

We’re pretty well stocked on potions and even a couple of X items that I bought with the last bit of cash I had. Our plan is to kill the Gastly first before he can use Curse and hopefully use a couple of X Special and X speed on Gengar because he doesn’t have Curse. Gengar might hit too hard but we’ll have to wait and see.

We’ve given Quade the Quick Claw for this fight. Hopefully it’s not the kiss of death like it was for Charlotte.

At the start of the battle I’m actually torn between 2 different moves. Just a straight up Ice Beam or Rain Dance for more powerful Surf without requiring X boosts.

I decide to go for the Rain Dance first, it will give me 5 turns of Rain boosted Surf so fingers crossed I’ll be able to get very close to winning before rain finishes.

No quick claw activation but doesn’t matter with Rain Dance. Gastly uses Lick. Quade is paralysed. Great. RNG is already against me. FYI I had a higher chance of landing Supersonic against Shitney’s Miltank than Gastly had to land Paralysis with Lick, but I missed 4 and Morty gets first turn Paralysis. Rigged.

2nd turn and I’m actually predicting a Curse. I’m tempted to risk a Surf through Paralysis but given how bad my RNG has been lately I decide curing that is my best option.

I drop the paralyse heal and here I actually missed what Gastly did. I didn’t take any damage and Gastly is still at full health so whatever it was must have missed or failed. Maybe Spite but it didn’t work because I didn’t use any moves that turn. Anyway, 3rd turn, rain is up, no curse, no paralysis. Time to attack.

Gastly goes first, uses Lick but doesn’t get the paralyse. Quade uses Surf, Gastly goes down and Gengar comes out. At this stage, Quade is at 89/101hp and I’m pretty sure this Gengar doesn’t have Curse. Rain still has 2 more turns and there’s no way Gengar can kill me with one hit. Quade is immune to crits. The worst thing that can happen here is Gengar gets a Sp. Defense drop with Shadow Ball. Now is my chance to do some set up.

I decide to use an X Special and Gengar uses Sucker Punch. What a win. No damage taken. This is the last turn of rain and I’m in a good spot. I decide to use 1 last X Special to wait out the rain, I’ll use Rain Dance next turn and then hopefully, start sweeping.

I use another X Special and Gengar goes for another Sucker Punch. Another win! I realise now that I didn’t actually buy any X Speed, only Special. Time to set up rain and attack then.

Gengar outspeeds, obviously, and unfortunately puts Quade to sleep with Hypnosis. Definitely not ideal. Again, I’m expecting this to be a looooong sleep so I play it safe and use an awaken next turn while Gengar uses Shadow Ball. Ouch.

Gengar does about 38 damage but luckily doesn’t get the stat drop. Any stat drop there would have probably resulted in a wipe.

I don’t have time to set up Rain now, I’ve got to get this Gengar down before it lands a Defense drop.

We go for a surf but Gengar lands the Hypnosis again. So far, Morty is 2/2 Hypnosis and 1/2 paralyse from Lick.

I use my last Chesto Berry and Gengar uses Shadow Ball again. It low rolls and leaves Quade at 18/101. Still no Defense drop. Quade is low on HP so it’s almost guaranteed to be another Shadow Ball here so I’ll have to heal.

We drop the potion and Gengar uses shadow ball. Doing 32 damage. Time to try and attack again. We go for surf but don’t get lucky with the Quick Claw so Gengar goes first and uses Shadow Ball AND lands the Special Defense drop. We REALLY need Quade to KO here or we’re up shit creek without a paddle or a canoe.

Quade uses Surf and Gengar goes down!

Sweet. 2 down 2 to go.

The first haunter comes out. Quade is at 36hp. We go for the surf, still no Quick Claw activation so Haunter goes first and uses Curse.

Quade uses Surf and Haunter goes down.

Quade is damaged by Curse and he is left with 10hp when the last Haunter comes out.

My options here are to Heal and hope for no hypnosis and try to KO next turn. Or do a quick switch-a-roo to Leon clear the Curse, heal Quade and send Quade out again.

I think healing is the best option. If I switch to Leon and Haunter uses Mean Look, I’ll more than likely lose Leon before I even get to use him.

I heal Quade to full and Haunter uses Night Shade. Not ideal but could be worse. Quade is already down to 56/105 now after Curse damage (he gained a level after Gengar). We didn’t quite take half hp damage and Night Shade is guaranteed to be 23 damage. Assuming nothing else happens I should be able to take Haunter down this turn with Surf.

Haunter uses Mean Look!
Quade used Surf!

Haunter fainted! 4th badge acquired!

Even though I swept with Quade that was actually incredibly close to a complete wipe. We’ve got a fair bit of the game open to us now that we can use surf so we’re going to go back and pick up a few bits and pieces which will be in the next update.

Until then!

Also, R.I.P Charlotte. You will be missed.

Leg 4: A man, an Ape and a Frog walk into a bar...


Now that we’ve beaten Morty and unlocked Surf we can do a lot of stuff! There’s a heap of places to go back and revisit as well as do the EV training I was planning on doing with Leon. The plan is to KO Goldeen/Seaking in Mt. Mortar for Attack EVs and Slowpokes in Slowpoke Well for HP EVs. That will take a while but will be well worth it in the end.

First up, we head back to Cherrygrove to grab the Mystic Water. This bad boy is going to get a good workout in the next couple of gyms. First up, I want to EV train Leon so we can start getting him in on some battle action.

Ignoring all the boring bits, we grabbed the Mystic Water, Shell Bell, a couple of PP ups, Rare Candies and a few other bits and pieces. I EV trained Leon as much as I could be bothered. Fighting water types with Leon’s low starts is rather tiresome.

Apart from picking up items, we delivered the secret potion to Olivine to open up the Safari Zone area. So We’ll head back there to one of the better training areas available to us at the moment, the grass just below the safari zone entrance. It has Fearow, Taurus, Giraffarig, Gloom and probably a couple of other low chance pokemon but I didn’t see anything else. I stayed here to train up until I felt I was ready for Chuck.

After a bit of running around, and narrowly avoiding a doubles battle that I really, really don’t want to do (it’s a Magmar + Electabuzz fight, Electabuzz knows Thunderbolt) we find out way down to the bottom of the cliff and start surfing around. It’s not long before we find Seel! Our first Seel encounter for the game so we are able to catch it.

Welcome to the team Duke! Well, technically he’s not on the team unless disaster strikes with Steve. In which case Duke will come out of the box and take the reigns. Duke also means we now have a safety net. If we wipe somewhere, we can withdraw Duke and keep on truckin.

We drop Duke into the box, heal up and head to the gym. Steve makes short work of the two trainers we have to fight, another quick heal at the Pokémon Center to max our PP and we’re ready to fight Chuck.

This time. We have a secret weapon.

We start the battle with Chuck. No rain strats this time, I got rid of Rain Dance for something else. We’ll use it later. First up is Primeape, level 29.

We send out Quade because he’s our strongest both offensively and defensively at the moment considering Steve and Leon are both still first evolution. Quade is holding Mystic Water for extra fun.

We go for the Surf, Primeape outspeeds and uses Double Team. Immediately I get ready for some another BS miss RNGfest. Quade launches Surf and... gets the KO! Love myself a good one shot!

We’re down to Poliwrath. Chuck only has 2 Pokémon. So it’s time to fire off our Secret Weapon.

We click our win button. Perish Song.

Enemy Poliwrath is tightening its focus.

Oh fuck. I’ve made a blunder here. A big blunder.

Quade used Perish Song. All Pokémon will faint in 3 turns.

Poliswrath used Focus Punch!

Quade’s HP bar starts to move. I’m watching it like a hawk, heart literally pounding in my chest. There’s a very good chance this is going to cost me Quade.

Quade, the Lapras we picked up back in Saffron City Silph Co in Fire Red. Carried us so far right up to Chuck. Single handedly won us a lot of fights.

Hp bar still going down. I’m praying so hard right now. Please live Quade, I need you.

Quade fainted.

I throw my head back in despair. I can’t believe I didn’t scout the moves again. I expected Quade to be able to survive a fighting attack, which I’d then just swap out to Leon for protect strats and wait out the Perish Song.

No time to grieve now, we’ve got a badge to win.

We send out Leon and go for protect. Poliwrath uses Body Slame and doesn’t work due to Protect. Next up we go for Icicle Spear, Poliwrath tightens focus, Leon hits him with Icicle Spear and makes him flinch. Pog. Icicle Spear does virtually zero damage but that doesn’t matter. Last turn, we protecc. Poliwrath goes for another Body Slam, misses, then dies to Perish Song. Ahh Perish Song. Quade gave his life for us to get this badge.

Quade’s final act was to guarantee us this badge. What an absolute mad lad Quade was. It’s sad to see him go this way but it’s fitting that he still got us the badge. Without Perish Song, this was actually going to be an extremely difficult fight. Losing Quade isn’t the end of our Lapras line though. Fortunately, we can still catch another Lapras. We’ll just have to change our date to Friday and we can get another one in Union Cave.

We trudge out of the gym, grab the Fly HM and head to the Pokémon Center.

Megiddo booted up the PC. Quade is released. Was I good boi? Asks Quade as he is released.

No.

You were the bestest of bois.

Bye Quade. May Arceus have mercy on your soul.

We teach Fly to Kenya, fly back to Azalea town, save our game and go change the day to Friday in my phone settings (I’m using an emulator on my phone. Increased speed is so good) and jump back into the game.

We’re going to get ourselves another Lapras. We’re going to go through the rest of this run with no fatalities.

Time to get serious.

R.I.P Quade. The Fire Red MVP.

42796




Leg 5: Where’d I leave my Specs this time?



With our new badge pinned to wherever it is they’re stored in this generation, we jump on our 2kg/4.4lbs birb to fly us to Mahogany Town. A quick trip to the Lake of Rage is in order and I can’t believe I completely forgot about this up until now.

Choice Specs.

This item is absolutely amazing, especially in Nuzlocke runs. It lets you brute force things so much more reliably. X Special + Choice Specs should probably be a banned combo. But screw it, I’ve lost too much already. We’ve only got 1 Pokémon left from our starting Trio.

Speaking of Steve, he’s now level 34 and a Dewgong. We spent a bit of time grinding around the Safari Zone area I mentioned in the last update. Steve evolved into Dewgong and our little trip to Mahogany Town has another reason to it.

Fisherman Tully.

I’ve had this guy on the Pokegear phone list as soon as I could get him. Why? He’s the one that gives you Water Stones and while I was grinding for Steve and Leon, he rang. He found a Water Stone.

So now we have Steve the Dewgong and Leon the Cloyster (with Skill Link, I’m so happy about that). Oh and to add even more to the story, today’s Friday. Lapras appears in Union Cave on Fridays. So that’s our next stop.

We manage to snag our Lapras and name her Queen. We used the Q name as a memoir for Quade and also to let everybody know that the Queen is here to hand out lollipops and ass kickings. And she’s all out of lollipops.

Something I didn’t mention earlier, like back when I was EV training Leon, was that I actually caught a Drowzee. Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “hey! This doesn’t taste anything like mango” and also “hey! You’re not allowed to catch Drowzee it’s not an ice type!”

You are correct. I caught the Drowzee to trade for the Machop. I needed the Machop to get the item I needed the item to double my EVs from battle. Macho Brace my friends. It halves the amount of battles it takes to EV train. An absolute godsend.

What did you do with the Machop I hear you ask. I put him in the Daycare. I want to see how far his levels go while I finish the game.

Anyway, to cut a long story short. We EV trained Queen. To be an offensive powerhouse. She’s EV trained in speed and special attack.

Remember when I mentioned the Choice Specs earlier? Turns out, Choice Specs, EV trained Queen, Stab Surf will OHKO every single one of Jasmine’s Pokémon.

Yep we got our 6th badge in 3 turns total.

Queen is already taking names and right now, she’s taking even more. I’m currently in battle with Pryce. The Mahogany gym leader.

Pryce’s first Pokémon, Seel, got one shot by a Magnet boosted Thunderbolt from Queen. Pryce sent out Piloswine, Queen uses Surf and Piloswine lives by the tiniest bee’s dick of HP. But dies next turn anyway. Final Pokémon, Dewgong. Who takes 3x Thunderbolts to kill because Pryce used a hyper potion to recover. Another nice sweep for Queen. 2/2 with no deaths since the last death.

We’re starting to hit the part of the game where you can quite easily lose one of these fragile Ice types against a huge range of Pokémon by just misplaying once. So we’ve got to be really smart about our choices from here on out.

Our next few updates will be a bit shorter. I’ll skip over the majority of the Team Rocket Radio Tower event unless something really interesting happens. Fingers crossed it doesn’t and it’s a breeze.

But until then!

Stay safe!




Leg 6: Lance Vance and his last Dance




G’day legends welcome back to another run update! Gonna be a short one because I’ve got a video! It goes for just over 10minutes (I didn’t do it that long for monetising I promise!) so I’ll do a tl;dw (too long didn’t watch) quick recap.

Anyways, a quick glance over what has happened over the last little bit since our last update.

We smashed out the Radio Tower with one near death experience to an exploding Weezing. Luckily we were using a freshly evolved Leon so he took it like a champ. Apart from that nothing much has happened.

We caught a Swinub, named him Frank, a and a Jynx, named her Katie so our team is pretty much finished for the rest of the game bar a Sneasel later.

We got Claire’s badge. Piece of cake. The write up for that one is below if you wanna read that too, it’s completely optional. It’s a completely one sided battle dominated by Queen and Frank.

Claire’s gym

So we walk into Clair’s gym. The first trainer has 2x Dratini and a Seadra. All got one shot by Choice Specs Ice Beam from Queen. 2nd trainer, 1 Dratini 1 Dragonair, both got OHKO from Queen and her Ice Beam. The EV training we gave Queen is really starting to shine now. A large percentage of enemy Pokémon are being 1 shot by Queen. 3rd trainer, Horsea and Seadra, both OHKO by Thundebolt. 4th trainer, 1 Seadra the same level as Queen. One shot also. 5th trainer has a lone Dragonair and yep you guessed it, one shot by Ice Beam. A couple of platform flips and we arrive at Clair with Queen at 148/148hp and 10/16 Ice Beam PP thanks to the PP ups we loaded up into it shortly before.

My confidence is sky high so we’re going to jump straight into the battle. No healing, no prep work, just straight in...

First up, Gyarados. Thunderbolt OHKOs it. Out comes Dragonair but we’re locked in to
thunderbolt which is not very effective so we swap to Frank predicting a Thunder wave. We predict correctly and Dragonair Attempts Thunder wave but it doesn’t effect Frank the Tank. Frank launches an Ice Shard and OHKOs Dragonair. So far so good.

Clair sends out Kingdra. Here’s the ace. Kingdra is very difficult to KO effectively. Most likely has surf and/or hydro pump and I have no intentions of taking one of those to the face so we switch and out comes Steve. Kingdra goes for the Hydro Pump but misses. Another correct play on my part, regardless of the miss, swapping out was definitely the correct play.

Kingdra uses Dragon Pulse which does a good chunk at 40ish hp of damage and Steve uses return, taking off roughly 25%. Another Dragon Pulse leaves Steve at 37/129, return leaves Kingdra in the orange bar but it uses its held Sitrus Berry to recover and its now at about the same it was before this last attack.

Steve won’t survive another round of attacks so we switch. To Queen. Kingdra uses Dragon Pulse again and it takes a decent chunk at 48hp. Queen outspeeds, lands an Ice Beam leaving Kingdra in the red bar. Another Dragon pulse leaves Queen at 54hp. That was a high roll but Queen will survive another one and I know Clair will heal so another Ice Beam it is. Again we predict perfectly and Clair uses a potion to heal Kindra to full as another Ice Beam fires off to drop Kingdra under half. Another Ice Beam and Kingdra is down!

Last Pokémon and it’s a Dragonair. Queen is locked to Ice Beam because of Choice Specs but that’s all we need. Queen uses Ice Beam and Dragonair goes down with one hit.

Queen is easily MVP. Special mention to Frank for taking the Thunder Wave and getting a kill to enable Queen to finish the battle off in style.

One thing I forgot to add earlier was that while we were doing our training and searching for items before fighting Claire, we went into the Dark Cave just below Blackthorn. Just fumbling around looking for items and whatnot, taking down Zubats, Geodudes and Gravelers for xp. Found a bit of water so we decide to surf around it to see if any items are on the other side. Our Repel runs out, I forget to add another one so we get a random encounter.

This guy… lol

image removed - it was a shiny Magikarp lol


Other than that, we made our way all the way to the Pokémon League, through Victory Road. Finished all our training while watching The Falcon and The Winter Soldier and we’re ready to go. Everybody is level 48. I went with level 48 because that’s the highest level of Karen’s Ace, Houndoom. And while she’s not the last member, i felt level 50 on everybody (Lance’s 3rd Dragonite level) it would have been too high as some members would have been over 50 by the time I got to Lance.

Anyway, the team is pretty solid.

Frank - Mamoswine
Queen - Lapras
Katie - Jynx
Steve II - Dewgong
Leon - Cloyster

Steve is the only surviving member from our previous game now, he’s about to have a crack at his 2nd Elite 4. Some may argue against having Mamoswing as officially he didn’t exist in Generation 2, my answer to that is, fuck it, Mamoswine is cool. Same reason I’ll be using Weaville over Sneasel later on. Assuming I make it that far.

I’m expecting the Elite 4 here to be a mixed bag of results. I’m not at all scared of Will or
Koga. Bruno and Karen are the scary ones. Any of Bruno’s fighting types will be able to one shot any of my Pokémon if I’m not careful. I got insanely lucky with my Jynx capture. Katie has Hidden Power - Flying which will hopefully get me through Bruno. Side note: the guy/girl who designed Jynx’s learned moves in this generation needs to be shot. Jynx doesn’t learn a single psychic type moves from level ups. No psychic, nothing. Heck I’d even settle for a Psybeam but no. Jynx does not learn a single Psychic type move. Theoretically you could breed Jynx to get Smoochum, who learns Psychic at level 35, evolve to Jynx and then Jynx has Psychic but shit, just give Jynx Psychic.

Rant over. On to the Elite 4.


Video -
[Only registered and activated users can see links]



Will

Piece of cake. Here’s the run down Katie > X Special > full heal (confusion) > ice beam > ice beam > ice beam > learns perish song > shadow ball > shadow ball > win

Like I said. Piece of cake. We’ve now got Queen and Katie both with Perish Song. Probably overkill but we’ll probably get rid of Perish Song for Psychic when we get the TM for it later.

Koga

Another easy fight. Which I accidentally started with the wrong Pokémon.

Switch Katie to Frank > Earthquake > Earthquake > X Attack > Earthquake > Avalanche > Earthquake > Ice Shard x2

Win. Frank the tank strikes again.

Bruno

X Special > X Special > Hidden Power > Ice Beam > Hidden Power > Hidden Power > Hidden Power.

Win. Wow. I seriously expected Bruno to be a lot harder. I guess most fighting types do have fairly low special Defense. Praise be to RNGesus for giving Katie Hidden Power Flying.

Karen

Karen was a bit harder. I needed a couple of Pokémon swaps and item swaps before fighting her to get the right set up. If you watch the video you’ll see the very first attack I launch with Katie I move the cursor around in the attack screen a few times. That was me making some very quick, most likely incorrect, calculations.

Anyway, we go ice beam first, does a huge chunk at over 50%, I’m from begins setting up Double Team, 2nd ice beam kills it and out comes houndoom. We swap to Queen who takes a Crunch and Kills it next turn with Surf. Out comes Vileplume. We have to switch because Queen is still holding Choice Specs so she’s locked in to Surf. We swap to Katie, the only Pokémon we have not weak to grass. Vileplume uses Stun Spore so now Katie is paralysed. We risk it and go for the Ice Beam. Nailed it. Plume is dead. Gengar comes out, misses the Focus Blast and Katie KO’s with Shadow Ball. Murrow comes out, and launches a faint attack at Katie. Her hp bar goes down down down down. To 1. 1 fucking HP. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe how insanely close that was. Literally 1/138hp. Christ that was close.

And to make matters worse, for some strange reason I used Shadow Ball instead of Ice Beam so Murkrow still had over 50% hp left.

We swap out to Steve, who takes a couple of hits from Pluck, one of which was a crit, and KO’s with Ice Beam.

Geez, I can’t believe how close that was.1 freaking hp.

Lance

Ahhhh Lance. The guy who goes on a massive rant at the Lake of Rage about how forcing Pokémon to evolve is wrong. All the while owning 3 Dragonites all well under the required level for Dragonair to evolve. Lance is a bit of a hypocrite if you ask me. Maybe he caught them as Dragonites, maybe they were forced to evolve due to the time they spent at the Lake of Rage, maybe Lance is just a douchenozzle. We’ll never know.

One thing I do know, Lance was easy.

Queen with 2 X Specials under her belt went on a rampage.

Thunderbolt on Gyarados
Ice Beam on Aerodactyl (Aerodactyl missed Rock Slide)
Ice Beam on Dragonite 1
Ice Beam on Dragonite 2
Ice beam on Dragonite 3
Surf on Charizard

We are now the Johto champions!

MVP?

Hard to say. Definitely Queen for the breeze through Lance. Maybe Katie for getting us through a dangerous Bruno?

Definitely not poor Leon who didn’t even see action. Leon’s actually a bit underwhelming, even with skill link. Steve didn’t get much action either unfortunately. Frank was handy for Koga. He was also going to be a good backup against Lance with Ice Shard if things got a bit dodgey with his Dragonites or Aerodactyl.

Anywho, Lance is down, we emerge victorious and the best part of all, it was deathless.

After losing a couple of members in quick succession it’s a real feelsgoodman type of moment.

I don’t think I’ll do any more run updates until we get to Red. I don’t foresee any real issues with any of the Kanto gym leaders with the exception of maybe Blue. But we’ll see.

I hope everybody has enjoyed my runs so far. I’ll definitely continue on to generation 3. Although I’m not entirely sure whether I want to play Emerald or Omega Ruby as my 3rd Generation. Omega Ruby would be fun as I’ve only played it though once, but Emerald would let me play on Emulator with increased speed, making grinding a lot less of a hassle.

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Let’s beat the kanto gym leaders first.

Stay safe!

Megiddo





Leg 7: Roses are Red



So, its been quite a while since my last update. Somewhere along the line I've gone through and beaten all the Kanto gyms and ended up with a full squad ready to tackle Red and finish the Generation. That's the good news. The bad news is I can't find Leon, my Cloyster. This means that at some stage, he died. I'd love to write out a glorious memoir for him but I don't remember how he died at all. All that I do remember is that he had the Skill Link ability and was still fairly disappointing. The second good news however is that at some stage we replaced Leon with Stanley the Sneasel, who is now known as Stanley the Weaville.

Heading into the Red fight here is how the team looks...

Stanley - Weavile - Choice Band
Ice Punch
Night Slash
Poison Jab
Swords Dance

Frank - Mamoswine - Expert Belt
Earthquake
Rock Climb
Stealth Rock
Ice Shard

Steve II - Dewgong - Mystic Water
Return
Aqua Jet
Ice Beam
Waterfall

Katie - Jynx - Choice Specs
Blizzard
Grass Knot
Shadow Ball
Psychic

Queen - Lapras - Leftovers
Surf
Ice Beam
Thunderbolt
Perish Song

Kenya - Spearow - lvl 20
Fly

Everybody is level 82... Let's get this party started!

[Megiddo]

Run update 2 now in! Pewter City - Cerulean City!

[Erik.]

Oh this is fun to read!!! Go Rex! Is he still the only Pok�mon you have or did I misunderstand?

[Megiddo]

Oh this is fun to read!!! Go Rex! Is he still the only Pok�mon you have or did I misunderstand?

So far he�s my only one! I�ll be doing the write up on my fight against Misty shortly and I�ll explain some stuff on acquiring my next Team member!

Edit: update 3 is live!

[Extraterrestrial]

Ahh I love reading Nuzlockes! Ice is a great choice. Go Rex go!!

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

[Lucid Acid Dream]

Closter has a 13.67% chance of a Critical hit. Little know fact if one of the up to five of Icicle Spear critic all other hits after will crit too. Meaning 1/5 times it will crit out of the 30 PP

[Synth Salazzle]

Oh man I can't wait until update 4. I'm loving this run, ice types need more love!

[Megiddo]

Update 4 is live!

[My name is Yoshikage Kira]

Ahhh glad that Hynx made it through the Raticate situation!


Loving reading this, can't wait for the next part

[Megiddo]

Update 5 is out! Almost caught up to where I am at the moment. I have been doing the write up from memory, so apologies for them not being as detailed as the previous updates. Once we get to current events they�ll be more detailed again.

Hope you�re enjoying it so far! Thanks for the kind words and support!

[Megiddo]

Update 6 is live! Warning: long update this one.

[Megiddo]

Update 7 is out! Getting a bit of lag when I update the first post. Might have to start putting updates in 2nd post.

[My name is Yoshikage Kira]

F's in chat for Hynx and Rex

[Erik.]

Aww man, RIP Hynx and Rex :( that sucks

[Megiddo]

Update 8 is available! Added to 2nd post to avoid lag while editing.

F for Hynx and Rex

[My name is Yoshikage Kira]

Yay for no casualties during Sabrina's gym

[Only registered and activated users can see links]

[Abyss]

F Hynx and Rex
Jynx is surprisingly good and competent (I have a lot of respect for its battle prowess), so losing her sucks. ;-;

[Megiddo]

F Hynx and Rex
Jynx is surprisingly good and competent (I have a lot of respect for its battle prowess), so losing her sucks. ;-;

Yeah I had big plans for Hynx. It sucked majorly to lose her to a self-destruct. The crit on top was just the icing on the cake. If I make it through this generation hopefully I can pick up another one in Gen 2 for revenge.

[Abyss]

Yes! Gen 2 revenge would be awesome. Johto has a bit more for ice types too.

[Megiddo]

Yes! Gen 2 revenge would be awesome. Johto has a bit more for ice types too.

Only a few more. Sneasel, Swinub/Piloswine and Delibird but they all bring different secondary types which is the main draw card. Fingers crossed I can get through [emoji1696][emoji1696][emoji1696]

[Megiddo]

Update 9 is out! We�re closing in on the end of Leg 1!

[My name is Yoshikage Kira]

I would love to see a video of the elite 4~

[Megiddo]

Update 10 is out! The Elite 4!

[My name is Yoshikage Kira]

NGL my butthole clenched a bit when Charlotte got down to 20 hp. It must of been nerve wracking having explosion as one of her moves too.
38064
legit my face every time the cursor went over explosion

Watching Quade sweep Lance made me giggle, very satisfying to watch. Was the name the easter egg?

This was fun to follow, looking forward to following any others you may do in the future :)
Thank you for recording the elite 4, best thing to wake up and watch

[Megiddo]

NGL my butthole clenched a bit when Charlotte got down to 20 hp. It must of been nerve wracking having explosion as one of her moves too.
38064
legit my face every time the cursor went over explosion

Watching Quade sweep Lance made me giggle, very satisfying to watch. Was the name the easter egg?

This was fun to follow, looking forward to following any others you may do in the future :)
Thank you for recording the elite 4, best thing to wake up and watch

Having explosion as a move is definintely a double edged sword. It's fantastic to have as an "Oh Shit" button but the risk of accidentally using it is pretty bad. Even more so when you're running at 8x speed and the cursor moves so quick. The Lance sweep was super, super satisfying. I was pleasantly surprised that Quade was able to do a full sweep without any boosts but I guess that just shows how good of a grinding spot Diglett's Cave and Pokemon Tower are when you end up with a fully EV trained Lapras throwing around 4x Effective Ice Beams.

I've already started my Heart Gold save so there'll definitely be some more updates in the future. I might even do a video for each Gym Leader, not sure yet.

Thanks for reading and following! It's been great fun to have a spot where I can record my progress!

[Megiddo]

Generation 2 has begun! First update in 2nd post!

[Brickhaus]

Megiddo Planning to continue this eventually? If so, I'm looking forward to the next update! :)

[Mario2302]

Megiddo Planning to continue this eventually? If so, I'm looking forward to the next update! :)

just read up on the beginning of gen 2 and i do agree :) wanna see another update too :o

[Megiddo]

Hi everybody! I’m back and have updated my 2nd post with the next part of the run.

I’m still alive, just been away doing other things and finally got round to continuing on.

Hopefully you guys will still enjoy these updates.

[My name is Yoshikage Kira]

Stoked to see you continue the run!

God that fuckin cow gives soo much anxiety lol You write it out perfectly
Can't wait to read more :D

[Megiddo]

Another update! It’s a long one!

[Mario2302]

Hi everybody! I’m back and have updated my 2nd post with the next part of the run.

I’m still alive, just been away doing other things and finally got round to continuing on.

Hopefully you guys will still enjoy these updates.

i'd love more updates for sure so keep em coming :)

- - - Updated - - -


Another update! It’s a long one!

your spoiler tag on that last one isn't working ;)

[Megiddo]

i'd love more updates for sure so keep em coming :)

- - - Updated - - -



your spoiler tag on that last one isn't working ;)

Thanks, completely forgot to close the spoiler off in my haste to finish that update. Mostly because I was still playing and needed to be able to write stuff down as it happened.

[My name is Yoshikage Kira]

Pour one out for Charlotte

[Only registered and activated users can see links]


RIP :(

[Megiddo]

Next update is out! Another fairly lengthy one. Any preferences for shorter updates or longer ones?

Thanks to J03 for restoring the post. I screwed something up and lost the entire progress of my 2nd run. J03 saved me :)

[Mario2302]

Slight preference for shorter ones so I can sneak them in easily during my working hours

[Megiddo]

Next update is live! I’ll start trying to trim them down a bit from now on or even break them up into smaller parts so you can read parts at a time.

Next update will be Leg 5 and inside that will be leg 5.1, 5.2 etc until I get the last badge.

[Mario2302]

Wooohoo Queen for the sweeping victories!!

[Megiddo]

Next update will be coming tonight and will most likely include a video.

[Megiddo]

Next update is available! Finally got around to getting it edited into the first post. I’m using the Tapatalk app so let me know if there’s any format issues.

[Mario2302]

Next update is available! Finally got around to getting it edited into the first post. I’m using the Tapatalk app so let me know if there’s any format issues.

formatting looks good to me ;)

[Megiddo]

Good day everybody long time no see!

I'm about to continue my series!

[Mario2302]

Good day everybody long time no see!

I'm about to continue my series!

Already looking forward to it, i've missed reading up on your adventures.

[Synth Salazzle]

It's so weird I was just wondering "I wonder what ever happened to that ice type mono challenge person's challenges" and here we are with updates :D

[Megiddo]

It's so weird I was just wondering "I wonder what ever happened to that ice type mono challenge person's challenges" and here we are with updates :D

[emoji23][emoji23] and just like a bad smell, I have returned.